Le tenute della Valdichiana tra oblio e abbandono

Since the end of the 1700s, due to the changed economic conjunctures and the progressive overcoming of the sharecropping system, many stately homes in the Tuscan countryside have been transformed from hunting and leisure places to centers of agricultural production. These farmhauses are the result of a rational planning and present complex installations. They are generally articulated around a building, equipped with services and residences for the workers, facilities for the production and harvest processing. Today, if not already turned into farmhouses or prestigious relais, most of these estates are in a state of abandonment and oblivion which will progressively compromise the buildings themselves and the releted landscape contexts. This paper, through the analysis of some famous cases of Valdichiana (such as La Fratta, Real Fattoria di Bettolle, Font'a Ronco, L' Amorosa), proposes a reflection on the need for a wide-ranging requalification program, able to act on the single organisms but also on the system, restoring utility and dignity to these structures, memory of a particular moment in the economic and social, as well as architectural, Valdichiana histor