Reschio: a 1,000-year-old Italian castle reopens as a dreamy retreat

In Umbria, the past can feel very close. As recently as the 1960s, roads to some of its glorious hilltowns were little more than dirt tracks, as they had been for centuries, some villages lacked piped water, some houses did not have electricity. An Umbrian friend, a man now well into his eighties, is fond of saying he has passed from the Middle Ages to modernity in his lifetime.

The Middle Ages of course were Umbria’s big era. By the time the Renaissance rolled around, things were taking a downward turn. Subsumed in the 14th century by the Papal States — always a bit of dead hand in terms of development — they found the political and cultural action was tilting towards Tuscany. So it was hardly a surprise when I turned up at Reschio, a castle in the northern reaches of Umbria, to find that the place went back to the good old days, somewhere around the year 900. Enthroned on its hilltop, Reschio has slumbered here in a landscape of meadows and woodlands and old farmhouses for a thousand years. Until this year when, after dormant centuries, the ancient castle has been spectacularly reborn. This is how it happened.

Once upon a time, in the 1980s, Count Antonio Bolza and his family spent their summer holidays in Italy, drawn there perhaps by ancestral memory. The Bolzas were originally from Lombardy but had gone to Vienna as financiers to the Habsburgs in the 1680s. Ennobled, the family prospered until the second world war, when Antonio’s father fought in a Hungarian cavalry unit riding against Soviet tanks, a clash not just of armies but of eras. It was an idea that kept coming back to me at the castle at Reschio, this juxtaposition of centuries.

After the war, the Bolzas found themselves behind the Iron Curtain. Hungary’s new communist government stripped them of everything and they fled to Austria as refugees. Back in Vienna, three centuries after the family arrived there from Italy, Antonio’s father initially mixed cement on building sites to support his family. When Antonio came of age he went to work with the food critic Egon Ronay, a fellow Hungarian, in London and eventually in publishing in Germany. He married, and the couple had five children.

Which brings us to the summer holidays. “The whole family loved coming to Italy,” Antonio said. “The culture, the people, the friendliness, the chaos. It was always a joy.” One day a series of chance encounters led them to a house in Umbria with a bell tower and an adjoining chapel. Antonio, now 77, remembers his first encounter with the place. “It was the aroma of thyme, crushed beneath the wheels of the car,” Antonio sighed. “It always brings me back to that moment, when I first saw the old house at San Martino. The smell of crushed thyme marked the change in our lives.”

Antonio bought the house, and family holidays now decamped to this remote corner of Umbria. But like many country house owners, Antonio valued privacy. And so every summer, he went to knock on the door of the old castle of Reschio that presided over the surrounding estate, to ask if he could buy a little more land around the house at San Martino. The answer was always a curt “no”, as the castle gates clanged shut.

But then suddenly, in 1991, the castle owners paused and invited him in. They were not interested in selling a few acres of land, they said, but if he wished, he could buy the entire estate: the ancient castle, some 900 hectares of Umbria, along with innumerable old farmhouses. Three years later, after some understandably complex negotiations, Antonio found himself the lord of a medieval estate with lands as far as he could see. The question was — what to do with it all.

Henry James called Umbria “the most beautiful garden in all the world”. It is green, it is rural, it is idyllic and for centuries it has lived unfairly in the shadow of Tuscany, its larger and more boisterous neighbour. Tuscans may proudly tell you they are Tuscans. But Umbrians are a more discreet people, and prefer more local loyalties, as they do in many parts of Italy. They identify with their own hilltowns — Spoleto, Assisi, Gubbio, Perugia, Foligno, Orvieto or Todi, the latter famously described by Richard Levine, the US architect and professor at the University of Kentucky, as the model “sustainable city” because of its ability to reinvent itself over the years.

In the great days of the Middle Ages, Umbrian towns constantly fell out with one another — Foligno with Todi, Gubbio with Spoleto, Perugia with everyone. When the Perugians couldn’t find anyone to fall out with, they fought among themselves. People still speak of the infamous “red wedding” in 1500 when tensions reached such a peak that a hundred prospective in-laws were slaughtered and their heads impaled on spikes outside the Palazzo dei Priori. To pass the time between war and tricky weddings, Perugians invented a street game where teams, with heavy padding, threw stones at one another. The side with the fewest fatalities won.

By the time I climbed the switchback road to the castello, past the rows of sentinel cypresses, it was already dark. Torches lit the colossal gateway

I avoided Perugia, and instead headed into the hills of northern Umbria, hopping from village to village. At Preggio, all honey-coloured stone and green wooden shutters, I stood in the empty piazza by the church and felt the centuries fall away. The piazza was a wide balcony overlooking the surrounding countryside. A chorus of birdsong rose from the landscape. The stillness and the sense of peace was so palpable that I felt I could gather it up in my hands.

You can see these same views in the backgrounds of Umbria’s most famous painter, Perugino. The foreground may be saints and martyrs, nativities or annunciations, but I always feel the real subject are those dream-like landscapes, glimpsed over someone’s shoulder, five centuries ago — sweet Umbria, the green valleys, the wooded hills, an old farmhouse, a horseman on a road somewhere.

I ended up in Gubbio, which friends had insisted was one of the finest towns in Italy, and the poster city for the medieval. Assisi is a donkey ride away and St Francis was a frequent visitor. Saint, mystic and enthusiastic bird watcher, Francis managed, on one visit, to make peace with a marauding wolf who was doing his best to eat his way through the population. The citizens of Gubbio built the church of San Francesco by way of thanks.

From the lower town I climbed into the city’s medieval heart. Away from the cafés, the shops, the cars and the loud teenagers, the old lanes were silent and empty, not so much streets as passageways in some sprawling medieval mansion with archways, vaulted roofs and occasional glimpses of sky. I felt at any moment I might stumble upon a mad aunt in a pointy hat or the family’s treasured daughter in a clinch with an inappropriate suit of armour. When I stepped into the stern-faced duomo at the top of the town, I found myself alone with the dead. They were gathered along the north wall, a row of august bishops entombed in glass-fronted sarcophagi, their shrunken heads protruding like dolls from elaborate robes. The most recent, probably a bit of a johnny-come-lately, had died in 1240.

At day’s end I drove to Reschio along the valley of the Niccone River where fields of wheat and tobacco were parcelled between woodlands of chestnut and turkey oak. The roadside grasses were dusted with poppies and the meadows were thick with wild flowers. By the time I climbed the switchback road to the walls of the castello, past the rows of sentinel cypresses, it was already dark. Torches lit the colossal gateway.

When Antonio became owner of the Reschio estate, in 1994, the castle deeds were as complex as a le Carré thriller. The first lord of Reschio had been granted the rights by Charlemagne. Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th century Holy Roman Emperor, also turns up in the records, bequeathing ownership to a Perugian connection. There was the Montemelini family who spent most of their time killing one another and the Bishop of Todi who gave the castle to his nephew, who was most probably his son. In the late 17th century, Reschio was purchased by Bichi Ruspoli family, and for the next two-and-a-half centuries the estate enjoyed a period of stability under their ownership.

But by the 1990s, Reschio was no longer a viable economic concern. It had become a kind of Mary Celeste of estates, adrift and tenantless. Everyone had moved away, to Milan, to Rome, to America. All across the hillsides — Antonio would eventually increase the lands to 1,500 hectares — some 50 farmhouses stood in various states of decay or ruin; all bar two were empty. But it was these houses, tumbling into the undergrowth, that would rescue both the estate and the castle.

In the 1990s Umbria was well on the way to becoming the new Tuscany, the next great territory for that perennial dream of northern Europeans — a house abroad, the Mediterranean idyll of sun, wine, and summer affairs, of terraces dappled with shade and views over vineyards and olives groves. When Antonio’s son, Benedikt, arrived home after seven years in London studying architecture and design, he found the new family estate a dream project. With his wife, Nencia Corsini, he set about restoring old houses, many of them in total ruin.

Restoration may be too modest a term. Working closely with the prospective owners, the Bolzas are creating some of the finest bespoke houses in Italy, gorgeous re-imaginings of traditional country architecture, with designer furniture, curated art work and high-spec facilities, enclosed within elegant gardens and vineyards. Clients own their own houses but Reschio supplies the services and the staff — gardeners, cooks, maids, maintenance workers, security. The estate is essentially a gated community though one so spacious you would have trouble spotting the house of your nearest neighbour.

But Reschio is more than its luxury houses. Benedikt has mapped the estate’s vegetation — two-thirds of the land is wooded — and is now involved in rewilding and woodland management. Game keepers control the population of wild boar and deer, bringing the surplus to the chefs of the estate’s two restaurants. Nencia oversees the organic gardens that supply the kitchens while a forager searches out the ancient ingredients in the woods and the meadows. Finally there is Antonio’s great passion — a stud of the finest Andalusian dressage horses stabled in equine luxury.

And now finally it is the turn of the castle. For many years Benedikt and his young family lived a bohemian life in its ramshackle medieval rooms. But four years ago, they moved out to start the transformation of the old castle into a stylish hotel. It opened in May, after the inevitable Covid-19 delays, with 36 rooms.

Reschio sidesteps any hint of castle kitsch. No suits of armour here, no medieval banners, no red velvet drapes or heraldic dinnerware. Benedikt and Nencia happily spent years rummaging in obscure auction houses and antique markets to bring together an accumulation of superb furnishings and objets. As well as eclectic artwork, quirky antiques, claw-footed “conversational” bath tubs, and whimsical brocante pieces, there are Benedikt’s own creations. He is a furniture and lighting designer of the first order. Vanity screens, glorious side tables with patinated brass cladding, mirror-topped coffee tables, four poster beds, chaise longues, Etruscan window seats, wheeled recliners, tall brass and steel fire grates, as well as endless variations on his glorious Poggibonsi lamps are all made with local materials and constructed by carpenters, blacksmiths and upholsterers in the estate’s own workshops.

The reborn castle is a place of endless diversion. There are ramparts to retreat to, terraces to dine on, views to gaze at, fireplaces to sit by, deep bathtubs to sink into, and a glorious spa to be pampered in. There is also the most stylish pool I have ever swum in — a curving blue ellipsis between maritime pines served by a discreet pool bar in an old watchtower.

Reschio’s triumph is that it has a happy sense of generations. It is the feeling of different eras delightfully jumbled together as they would be in any home, in any family, the connection of different atmospheres, the way different lives rub up against one another, the juxtaposition of centuries. The palm court, overflowing with greenery among ancient bulwarks, seems to hover between the Belle Époque and the Jazz Age. The boot room, with its blazing fires where the nursery woman arranges cut flowers and birds nests on a top shelf, has an English country house feel while the library with its subdued lighting could be a rather dangerous nook in the home of your most seductive friend.

In the courtyard of the castle, the shadows of the maritime pines tick tock round the flower beds and the lush lawns through the day like clock hands. On the terraces and ramparts of Reschio, you can feel the temporal short circuits. Round a corner and centuries suddenly melt away. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner said. “It’s not even past.”

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