A fortress located on 65 acres in the Tuscan town of Reggello, halfway between Florence and Arezzo, Sammezzano Castle is a sight to behold for anyone who has dreams of owning a villa in the Italian countryside and spending their days sipping wine against a rolling vineyard backdrop. For around £14.6 million, you can live like a king or queen here.
Built by a Spaniard in 1605, this 58,400 square foot Moorish-inspired building was restored by an Italian politician in the 19th century. Today, it is regarded as one of the nation’s most notable examples of Orientalist architecture, featuring thousands of ceramic tile mosaics, sculptural bas reliefs, and intricately carved domes and arches.
With 365 rooms and imaginative names like the Peacock Room and the Hall of Mirrors, it’s no surprise that the property, which is for sale for about £14,581,478., has amassed a following of silent Instagram users.
The gardens are equally impressive, combining exotic plants with the greatest collection of old-growth sequoia trees in Italy—imported from California—and paying respect to the canon of Moorish architecture with ceramic garden statues and pools. Enormous verdant gardens offer sweeping vistas of the clock tower façade of the castle.
Despite having a distinguished past—it was originally held by a Medici, is said to have sheltered Charlemagne on his journeys from Rome, and was a hotel from the 1970s until the 1990s—the building has been empty for the past 20 years as it awaits a buyer.
A local movement to turn the historic site into a public museum never got off the ground, and plans to develop it into a luxury hotel in the early 2000s fell through. Hopefully, a knight in shining armor will intervene to save it from being abandoned and grant the castle the happily ever after that it so richly deserves.
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