TENUTA SANTA MARIA · MDCCXXXV

The Novare valley —where the estate still stands today, in località Novare— holds a memory older than the buildings themselves. The eighteenth-century residence rises on the site of an earlier sixteenth-century cellar —and, before that, of a far more ancient settlement: first of the Arusnates, the pre-Roman people who inhabited these valleys and gave their name to the ancient pagus of Valpolicella, then Roman. Already in that age the valley’s seven perennial springs fed the aqueduct that carried water to Verona, and these ancient waterways speak of a farming vocation that predates the modern age by millennia.

The first documented records of the Bertani family in Valpolicella date to 1567. The original cellar belongs to the same century, as do the earliest maps of the brolo: 22 hectares enclosed by a wall 3.5 kilometres long and four metres high, conceived with striking modernity —on the model of the Burgundian clos— to protect the finest parcels of the valley.

In 1735 the great architectural project took shape, transforming the property into a complete organism: not a residence with a cellar attached, but a monumental wine-growing estate, designed to give order to production and dignity to agricultural life. It is the date the estate still carries in its name: Tenuta Santa Maria 1735.

The architecture gracefully interprets the Palladian idea of the Venetian villa: master’s quarters and working farm, representation and labour, contemplation and production, all drawn within a single design.

The eighteenth-century project is linked to the Veronese architect Adriano Cristofali, called to complete and interpret a plan first entrusted to Lodovico Perini. The central body, the side wings, the chapel consecrated to San Gaetano, the farm buildings and the entrances to the cellars compose a scene of neoclassical balance.

The façade rises through two architectural orders —Tuscan on the ground floor, Ionic above— and the tympanum carries mythological figures. Crowning the scene are the statues of the Olympian gods attributed to the Veronese sculptor Lorenzo Muttoni: Zeus, father of the gods, at the centre; at his sides Dionysus —Bacchus, god of wine, recognisable by his barrel— and Hermes, messenger of Olympus; in the front garden, Hercules and Apollo. Above the side entrances stand instead figures in the rural dress of the period: gods above the residence, the countryside above the working doors. One façade, the estate’s whole programme.

Wine is not made beside beauty here: it is part of it. The whole complex reads almost as a neoclassical temple devoted to wine, with the winery at its heart: an architectural, historical and symbolic presence. Every space has a function; every function becomes style.

Inside, art becomes narrative. The great Hall of the Muses rises through all three storeys of the residence and turns architecture into theatre: illusionistic perspectives, painted architecture, Muses, allegorical figures, satyrs, seasons, deities and the symbols of the farming year.

The decorative cycle of the two horizontal bands is attributed to the quadratura painter Prospero Pesci, of the school of Filippo Maccari; the central ceiling fresco to Giuseppe Valliani, known as il Pistoiese. At the centre appears Flora, encircled by the four seasons; Zephyr crosses the air and Apollo can be glimpsed on his chariot. Above the upper-floor doors, four satyrs —the retinue of Bacchus— watch over the harvest, as tradition has it: the cycle’s most direct reference to wine, anticipating in fresco the verse Pindemonte would dedicate to these hills. The original Venetian terrazzo floor and the wooden balcony painted as faux marble complete the illusion.

The theme of the seasons is no accident: it is agricultural time made painting. Budding, ripening, harvest, rest, waiting. Before it ever reaches the glass, the wine is already written on these walls — as cycle, as discipline, as promise.

Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the estate became a place of thought, poetry and conversation. Ippolito Pindemonte —poet, playwright, translator of the The Odyssey and nephew of the scholar Scipione Maffei— stayed here at length, turning these rooms into one of the most celebrated literary salons of the Veneto: a place of European conversation, of reading and music, of gardens, travel and verse.

His classicism was a language the estate already spoke: the Olympian statues, the Muses and Apollo of the frescoes, the invocations of Bacchus and the Naiads belong to the same ancient world Pindemonte inhabited as a translator of Homer. Here the classical ideal of retreat to the countryside —the otium of the ancients, the rural life sung by Virgil and Horace— took built form: a residence in which to think, translate, converse, and watch over the vines.

In Pindemonte, classical order and the new romantic sensibility lived side by side —the estate preserves both: in the formal Italian garden in front of the residence and the English landscape park behind it. Two visions of nature, united by the same sense of proportion.

According to tradition, conversations between Pindemonte and Ugo Foscolo at the estate helped inspire Dei Sepolcri, which Foscolo later dedicated to him—linking the estate to one of the major works of Italian literature.

To these wines, Pindemonte dedicated verses that the estate still treasures: “Son cari a Bacco questi colli” — “These hills are dear to Bacchus.” This homage, rooted in Virgil’s Georgics, is the origin of the name given to the heart of the property, the Brolo dei Poeti, and to the park still known as the Poets’ Park.

That cultural dimension lives on in the private and corporate events the estate hosts today: wine meets the written word, music, reading, and the European art of conversation.

Behind the residence opens a romantic English-style park, conceived not as geometry to be mastered but as landscape to be lived in: shade, paths, water, exotic trees, secluded corners, sudden vistas and light architectural follies compose an intimate, almost literary scene.

The park was suggested by Pindemonte himself, who brought to the estate the free, sentimental taste of the English garden. His ideas converse with his own Dissertation on English Gardens, in which the poet cites Francis Bacon and his vision of the garden as pure pleasure and refreshment of the spirit.

The ornamental lake —shaped after Lake Garda and fed by the estate’s own springs— the small island with its centuries-old bald cypresses from Florida, the cedars of Lebanon, the wooden bridge, the Northern-European coffee house and the chalet recalling Pindemonte’s years in France give the park the character of a green drawing room. By day a place to read and walk; by evening a place to talk, to play music, to let time slow.

In this landscape nature is neither wild nor tamed. It is orchestrated. Like a great wine.

The working winery, which preserves its original sixteenth-century structure, follows a logic that remains current today: a gravity-flow design that accompanies grapes and wine from top to bottom, reducing mechanical intervention and respecting the fruit.

The top floor, opened by tall windows, houses the drying lofts: seven rooms devoted to the natural appassimento of the grapes on bamboo racks called arelle, for around three months, ventilated only by the valley’s own air. It is one of Valpolicella’s most defining rituals, now at the centre of Italy’s national candidacy of “the rite of resting Valpolicella grapes” for UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

On the ground floor the wines are made, with separate micro-vinifications for every parcel and variety: steel tanks for temperature- and oxygen-controlled fermentation, and historic concrete vats for the final assemblage before bottling.

Below lie the monumental cellars, where time becomes matter again: silence, wood, depth, patience. The oldest barrel hall, now a museum space, keeps casks more than two hundred years old —up to 20,000 litres— together with the historic distillery and the old tools of the cellar. The actual vinifications and ageing rely instead on younger Slavonian oak casks, with maturations of up to 14 years for the estate’s cru.

The family’s memory is preserved in original documents spanning five centuries: sixteenth-century tax records attesting the Bertani family’s winegrowing as early as 1567; the earliest maps of the walled vineyard, held in the State Archive of Venice; the nineteenth-century agronomic report of the Verona Academy of Sciences and Agriculture; and the 1883 photographs by the noted photographer Lotze, showing the brolo and its rows already trained to Guyot.

Some of these records accompany the visitor route, including the original 1883 photographs displayed on the winery’s grand staircase.

The estate’s wines come exclusively from its own vineyards and answer to a precise idea: elegance, freshness and depth —never opulence. A slightly earlier harvest preserves the grapes’ natural acidity; appassimento, carried out entirely naturally on bamboo racks —today unique in Valpolicella— builds complexity without sliding into over-ripeness; parcel-by-parcel micro-vinifications and long maturations in large Slavonian oak casks let the vineyard speak, not the wood.

The result is an unmistakable style —the family’s signature: dry wines of great structure and a natural gift for ageing, which stay taut, precise and gastronomic, threaded with the mineral tension of limestone soils. An Amarone that can be a wine of meditation without ever leaving the table: where others pursue power, this house pursues balance and measure.

A tour of the estate is a journey through Valpolicella at its most graceful and secluded: the eighteenth-century architecture, the Hall of the Muses, the romantic park suggested by Pindemonte, the Brolo dei Poeti, the drying lofts, the winemaking spaces and the monumental cellars devoted to long ageing.

Each season shows a different face: the September harvest, the drying lofts filled with resting grapes in autumn, the winter silence of the barrel halls, the walled vineyard and the park in spring light. The estate is open all year round, closing only on major holidays.

A guided tasting closes the tour like a return to the source: landscape becomes wine, history becomes taste, memory becomes experience.