Barone Ricasoli, Castello di Brolio, Gaiole in Chianti (SI)
Barone Ricasoli, Castello di Brolio, Gaiole in Chianti (SI)
President of Barone Ricasoli Agricola. Barone Ricasoli is the oldest winery in Italy; the name is linked to wine since year 1141, when Castello di Brolio became part of the Ricasoli estates.
I love images, photographs and the stories they tell. That is why the only one of the many social networks that caught my attention was Instagram with its immediacy and ease in communicating beauty, amongst other things. And this is where I found and appreciated Caffè Italia.
I was born in the Chianti region and grew up in Florence, where the concepts of well-made and proportions were certainly not a matter of chance. In Florence, unless you’re blind, you live and breathe the art, surrounded by it at all times, generation after generation. Even the simplest artisan in Florence’s working class district of Sanfrediano is creative, even if he’s never studied anything. The landscape of the Chianti – that too was shaped by the hand – and eye – of man. Over the course of the centuries, a territory almost inaccessible with its stony ground and dense woods, became the measure of man and in harmony with nature, thanks to the many that were looking specifically for that beauty I find so fascinating. There is no way you can remain indifferent to all this, at least I certainly can’t.
When analog photography was all the rage, I was a professional photographer for several years and then, when the time came to take over the family winery, I dropped everything. Only recently have I once more turned to photography. With the difference that I now no longer use a camera, but a cell phone. It’s so easy to use the digital device; it is almost as if it were an extension of my hand, or even better, of my eye and I’ve begun once more to be aware of frame and composition. I’ve started to play around, still as fascinated as before by beauty, imagining the countless stories behind the pictures that follow each other in social media, almost without a break, and make me smile.