Quite a few northern Italian families, from the Medicis to the Agnellis, have influenced the course of European history, but when a piece of prime Tuscan real estate that was cherished for three hundred years by the Buonarroti family lands on the market, it's fair to expect that it will be something special. By 1548, Michelangelo Buonarroti had raged as the protean figure in the High Renaissance for forty years. With the Pieta and with David, he had, literally and figuratively, carved his place into the cultural pantheon of the known world, to say nothing of his soaring talent as a painter in giving us the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was rich, famous, old, and still sought for work by pope after pope. And not least, he had kept the fires of his young-man's anger blazing hot.
His Very Own Chunk of Paradise: Michelangelo's olive mill, foreground left, behind it the tower and... [+]
Specifically, in 1548, the irascible super-curmudgeon had just lost a lucrative toll-ford concession on the Po River – granted him by the Church – which, with a change in popes, was snatched from him. Yes, even Michelangelo had his detractors. Or: especially Michelangelo had his detractors. People got jealous and vindictive in the 16th century just as they get jealous and vindictive in the 21st. On August 10th, 1548, Michelangelo wrote to his nephew Leonardo: If you can find me a big purchase in a possession 10 or 15 miles from Florence...I would rather do it down there than anywhere else...I need some earning that cannot be taken from me like the Porto. And don't talk it around.
What Michelangelo's Nephew Leonardo Found: The 1000-year-old 11th-century castle-keep's tower to the... [+]
Michelangelo's – and the Buonarrotis' – home turf is Tuscany, and Tuscany, as we know, is filled with glorious hillside farms. What Leonardo found for his uncle was a splendid villa built around an 11th-century tower, and with it, an oil mill for the olives in the groves around the house. Perfect. Money in agriculture. In 1549, Michelangelo snapped it up. He was 74 and was about to enter the last great architectural challenge of his staggering life – the building of St. Peter's basilica.
Difficult As It Is To Imagine Michelangelo Kicking Back On Vacation: The cozy barrel-vaulted ground... [+]
At 7.5 million Euros, or about $8 million as listed by Handsome Properties International in Charleston, S.C., La Torre di Michelangelo, the Tower of Michelangelo, as the house and its 6-acre estate is locally called, can be had. Situated down a long gravel drive just outside the village of Castellina in Chianti, the eight-bedroom, seven-bath, 12,000-square-foot main house, and its converted Renaissance oil mill guest house of about 1000 square feet, overlook their own olive groves and a beautiful cypress-lined valley stretching to the east.
Michelangelo Ate Here: The barrel-vaulted kitchen on the thousand-year-old tower's ground floor,... [+]
The provenance of the house is ur-Tuscan, which is to say, it didn't change hands very often. The Buonarottis – starting with Michelangelo's nephew and heir Leonardo, who found it – kept it in the family until 1867.
"There have only been three owners since the Buonarrotis," says Annie Madren Young, a Handsome Properties International consultant. "The most recent owners, the sellers, began a renovation twenty years ago, which lasted for ten years. It's been a very loving renovation. They were able to save seventy percent of the original terra cotta floors."
Michelangelo's Reason For Buying The Joint: The olive oil economy. Pictured, the rear stair to the... [+]
Just to be clear, those would be Renaissance-era terra cotta floors, not tiles from
For $8 million, give or take, this heavyweight agrarian chunk of the Italian Renaissance is the real -- and quite an amazing -- deal. Not that this subtracts one iota from the extreme beauty or the extreme historical value of the Buonarroti estate, but, interestingly, there is no swimming pool, a minor, Johnny-come-lately amenity that over the last couple of decades has become a mode on many Tuscan leisure properties.
Maybe He Slept Here, Maybe He Slept In Some Other Room: At 12,000 square feet, the villa offers many... [+]
A pool is an easy fix at these exalted property levels, but at the moment its absence adds to the classicism and authenticity of the estate. What we can definitively say is that, unlike many 21st-century summer residents of Tuscany, Michelangelo didn't do laps.
Rather, to the very last day of his 89 years, he hammered out history-changing art.
