On March 26 we signed the final papers officially becoming the anxious, proud new owners of the villa – Il Molinaccio. Our first guests arrive on April 25, and we have so much to do to get ready, the least of which is learning how to run a vacation rental! Fortunately, the previous owners are…
Castle Meleto is about a 5-min drive from the villa and the closest castle to us. Although it started out as a monastery, then as a summer home for the Firidolfi branch of the Ricasoli family as well as part of the defense for Florence against Siena, it is now a winery. During our tour…
The first major upgrade was undertaken earlier in April. We replaced the pellet stove with a heat pump. The pellet stove worked well, but in order to keep it running, we had to add 4 to 5 bags of pellets each day. While this might work fine for homeowners, interrupting our guests on their vacation…
My mother, who came out in early April, and I went to buy flowers for the various urns and flower boxes. This is the first time planting flowers in Tuscany so we aren’t really sure what will work well or not. We will have to count on the advice from the gardening center folks. We…
The villa came with 2.4 ha (5.9 acres) of land. That’s a lot of land! The first thing we did was order 30 olive trees – along with 5 pollinator trees – in hopes of producing our own olive oil sometime in the future. We also bought two cherry trees, two fig trees, two peach…