Chianti Wine Tour and Machiavelli’s Villa from Florence

Most wine tours take you to a winery. This one takes you to a 15th-century villa where Niccolò Machiavelli once lived, owned since the 18th century by one of Florence’s most ancient noble families, set in the heart of the Chianti Classico hills. Then to lunch at one of our exclusive small-production wineries. It is, as days go, a particularly good one.

Who Was Machiavelli and Why Does His Villa Matter?

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of the most influential political thinkers in history. Born in Florence in 1469, he served the Florentine Republic as a senior diplomat and political advisor for fourteen years, travelling to the courts of France, Germany, and the Papal States on behalf of the city. When the Medici returned to power in 1512, he was dismissed, briefly imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, and then exiled to the Tuscan countryside.

It was during that forced exile that he wrote The Prince, the work that made him famous and gave the word “Machiavellian” to every language on earth. He finished it in 1513, probably in the hills south of Florence, surrounded by the vines and olive groves he was reduced to farming after the loss of everything he had worked for.

He described his evenings in exile in a letter to a friend: how he would change out of his dirty farm clothes at dusk, put on his court robes, and sit down to spend the evening hours reading the ancient writers and thinking about politics. A man of extraordinary intelligence, forced to tend chickens in the Chianti hills, writing a masterpiece in his spare time.

The villa associated with this period of his life sits in the countryside outside Florence, in the Chianti Classico zone. It dates to the 15th century and has been in the hands of the Marchesi Bartolini Baldelli, one of Tuscany’s most distinguished noble families, since the 18th century. The estate is still a working winery, still producing Chianti Classico from the same vineyards that surrounded the villa when Machiavelli walked its grounds five centuries ago.