• Castelnuovo Berardenga

    Landscape Museum

The Landscape Museum in Castelnuovo Berardenga has been located since 1999 in a late-19th-century building previously used as the public slaughterhouse until a few decades ago.   Created in the heart of one of the most typically Sienese and Italian landscapes on the southernmost edge of the Chianti region close to the Crete Senesi, the museum is truly one of a kind.

Its approach to communication has been entirely renovated, and was inaugurated on 3 October 2020.  The exhibits, accessible to various kinds of audiences, present a series of interactive multimedial applications derived from objects used daily—a window, a table, a kitchen cupboard, a pair of binoculars—that accompany the visitor in discovering up-close the economic and anthropic aspects of the countryside, the history of agricultural land and of the share-cropping system, the struggles of farm workers, the changes in methods of cultivating crops, raising livestock, and producing food, all of which have influenced the shape of the territory and affected styles of consumption.

What’s more, the Landscape Museum is equipped with mobile devices to explore the relationship between countryside, art, architecture and literature, and it presents an olfactory station, an educational section, and a space where it is possible to taste local wines as a way of experiencing this part of the world in greater depth.  The visit concludes with a consultaton area dedicated to the Archive of Memory, which gathers together documentation of the history and development of the Chianti countryside, and provides ample room on the first floor for temporary exhibits.

The Sienese countryside in the cinema: there are many films that were set or shot in the Sienese countryside, and these films provide the opportunity to analyze the reasons that led this area to be shown so often on the silver screen.


Landscape Museum
Via Chianti, 61
53019 Castelnuovo Berardenga
Tel. 0577 351337
email: museo@comune.castelnuovo.si.it

OPENING HOURS

Monday: closed
Tuesday- Thursday: 10-13
Friday – Saturday: 10-13 | 16-19
Sunday: 10-13

**

TICKETS

free admission

reservation is recommended ( +39  0577 351337 or via email museo@comune.castelnuovo.si.it)


The city takes its name from the Countship of the Berardenghi family and from Castelnuovo, founded by the Republic of Siena after a resolution dated 26 July 1366, as a strategic lookout point bordering on Florence and Arezzo.  Its position made it an important location of political placement, useful in monitoring the forces of the area’s nobility, forever at the centre of territoral claims.  During that era, the upper part of the hill came to be girded by a defensive wall, which was never completed, under the supervision of  Mino Dei di Siena (1373-1374). In close proximity, Montaperti was the theatre of a famous Sienese victory over Florence (4 September 1260), described even in the writing of Dante. Not to be missed in the small but lovely historic town centre is a walk through the garden of Villa Chigi Saracini, designed by the genius Agostino Fantastici and later, in the early 1900s, renovated under the orders of Count Guido Chigi Saracini, founder of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana of Siena. In the neoclassical Church of Sts. Giusto and Clemente in the centre of town, there is a noteworthy painting of the Madonna with Child by the 15th-century Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo.