ITALY, TUSCANY, PISA, CRESPINA
Manor house with 13 hectares of land, chapel.
On 3 floors plus basements, the villa is in 3 parts – the central part of about 2,500 sqm, and the two lateral wings of around 1,000 sqm combined, for a total floor area of about 3,500 sqm.
The park has has trees, a garden, a courtyard and a chapel.
The history of the complex is based on sources dating back to 1561. Extensions and modifications were made to the original structure over the following centuries: the entrance hall, the entrance hall and the vaulted living room on the first floor have a seventeenth-century appearance, the decorations on the noble floor date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the facades were redesigned in the last century.
The rear façade facing south is characterized by a central U-shaped staircase in pietra serena with an iron parapet to access the hall.
From the portal on the ground floor, characterized by a through hall that connects the two gardens directly, you enter the double-volume entrance hall with vaulted ceilings, a two-flight staircase in pietra serena; on this there are two internal windows with stone balconies that allow a view of the entrance from the side sitting rooms.
The noble floor is articulated around the large central hall, decorated in the 19th century with geometric panels and arabesques and covered with a coffered ceiling; to the west, with access to the hanging terrace, there are two Volterra-style vaulted rooms, one completely frescoed with marine views, the other decorated with stucco and squares.
An oratory is annexed to the villa, dedicated to San Francesco d’Assisi, which the authoritative scholar Giovanni Mariti supposes to have been built to a design by Michelangelo Buonarroti towards the end of the sixteenth century, having had the original drawings available during a visit to the villa which took place in 1788. It is certain that the oratory, with a rectangular plan with a semicircular apse, already existed in 1619.
The last intervention carried out in chronological order concerned the arrangement of the surrounding park, rich in species of tall trees. Today the villa can be reached via a tree-lined avenue planted in 1940 which replaced the spectacular original access with a double brick staircase with the entrance to the carriages still located today to the rear.
The manor house is divided into three different buildings, of which the central one is mainly for residential use, with a total gross area of 2,500 square meters, of which 900 on the ground floor for ancillary and/or rural use, while the two side buildings are mainly for rural and accessory use and have a total gross area of approx. 1000 sqm.
The house needs restoration.
