“And during the war itself was inhabited by refugees. “By the time of the second world war, this was virtually a ruin,” recalls Giberto. Timber beams and supports are covered in rich botanical and scroll motifs © Lea Anouchinsky A sharp right at the humble Osteria al Castelletto takes you through an unassuming iron gate and up a steep, mossy drive that winds through juniper and chestnut trees to the outer wall of the house. First glimpse, a series of tall cream arches and red shutters, winking out from thick forest on an eastern hillside. When she passed away in 2017, the house came into Giberto and Bianca’s hands and they have spent the past two years engaged in a thoughtful rehabilitation.ĭriving north along the ruler-straight two-lane road running from Treviso towards the massifs of the Dolomites, the Castelletto is visible – just – as you approach Pedeguarda. His home was Castelletto di Pedeguarda, an eight-bedroom fortified villa on 40 hectares that had been in his mother’s family for generations. He spent summers, Christmases and Easters – and five blissful years as a child – running free in the woods and vineyards of Pedeguarda di Follina, just a few kilometres east of Valdobbiadene. The castle sits in 40 hectares of prime prosecco country © Lea Anouchinskyīut until he was a teenager himself, Arrivabene was a diehard prosecco-country boy. The palazzo has been the Arrivabene family seat since the early 19th century portraits of Giberto’s ancestors, restored to perfection, still line the public spaces of the piano nobile, and he and Bianca and some of their five teenage-to-twentysomething children make their base in an artfully cluttered, eminently chic mansard apartment on its top floor. Arrivabene’s name may be familiar to some habitués of Venice: he and his wife Bianca di Savoia Aosta, deputy chairman of Christie’s Italy, live at Palazzo Papadopoli, on the Grand Canal, better known to the paying public as Aman Venice. Official recognition of his childhood home as one of the world’s loveliest places is just confirmation of something he’s always known. To the Venetian glass artist Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga, though, these kudos are old news. Its Unesco designation as a Cultural Landscape makes the terrain one of those rare intersections of man and nature whose results are entirely felicitous. ![]() The landscape here is DOCG (the highest classification for Italian wines), too, a careful parcelling of agriculture and woodland that has resulted in a sylvan symmetry not reproduced anywhere else in Europe. Here and there are villages, a few dozen lichened cotto roofs clustered around brick bell towers that have sounded their peals since long before Italy itself existed, and when this was the hinterland of a maritime republic whose might and wealth steered the mapping of the world. The vines, source of the DOCG bubbly by which most people know of this region, are planted with a unique methodology, running neatly in parallel terraces that cling to the shape of the slopes. ![]() It’s a storybook denouement for a storybook landscape, one characterised by folds of steep hills (known locally as ciglioni, or “hog backs”) carpeted in alternating quilt-patches of farmland, dense chestnut forests and lush vineyards. Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga with (from left) his wife Bianca, their daughters Vera and Malfada and dogs Bricola the Dachshund and Dushka the Labrador at Castelletto di Pedeguarda © Lea Anouchinsky The nomination process and campaign lasted more than a decade and was championed in large part by locals – not just municipal officials, but winemakers and farmers, men and women tethered to this corner of the Veneto by their hearts and souls, as well as by their livelihoods. In July 2018, Unesco declared the Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, in Italy’s Veneto region, a World Heritage Site.
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