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︎︎︎ Lamberto Frescobaldi for Financial Times 

“The Frescobaldis first settled in what is now the bohemian Santo Spirito quarter of Florence in the 12th century, buying up plots of land, building a church and a bridge over the Arno, to create what amounted to a personal fiefdom. At that time, the family home was in Piazza Frescobaldi, where you can still see the crevices through which they would pour boiling oil on to rival Florentine factions, with whom they were usually at war.
Today the dynasty, which has been producing wines in Tuscany for 700 years, occupies a 16th-century palazzo overlooking a sun-filled hidden interior garden. Marchese Lamberto Frescobaldi is “a 30th-generation winemaker”, he informs me. The Marchesi Frescobaldi group, of which he is president, produces 11 million bottles a year on its six Tuscan estates. The company employs 500 people and had a turnover of €95 million in 2015.

The apartment, which Frescobaldi shares with his wife Eleanora, strikes a contemporary note. A white chandelier decorates a bright orange kitchen with a green floor. A 1960s Pop Art lamp sits alongside a sculpture apparently made from cardboard boxes. Abstract and conceptual art line the walls, alongside ancestral portraits and original chestnut marble fireplaces. Tall and lean, in a Barbour-green suit and pale blue shirt, Frescobaldi, 53, has a patrician face, with an arched nose, echoed in the portraits, as la Marchesa Eleanora observes.“

from the article by Hannah Roberts on The Financial Times, August 17 2016