“The considerable appeal of this countryside is given by its varied cultivation [….], by the richness of the products of the olive trees, the mulberry trees, the forests and, markedly, by the excellent quality of the vines that are cultivated here”.

With these words in 1833 Emanuele Repetti described the territory of Cerreto Guidi, where the noble Alessandri family owned as many as thirteen farms that all linked up with the main Petriolo farm.
Over four centuries, the Alessandri family made of Petriolo a beautiful property, rich in villas, gardens, vegetable patches, woods and brick factories such as the one belonging to the Golpaja farm which in the 16th century baked the bricks with which the Villa Medicea of Cerreto Guidi was built. The Petriolo complex bears witness to this great past as it is still possible to see traces of the ancient residence of Messer Alessandro which is mentioned in various documents dating back from as early as 1574.
In subsequent centuries the history of Petriolo developed in two ways, as a production centre and as the owner’s place of leisure, up to the years between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, when the entire complex was restructured and embellished according to the taste of the time.
In the stones of the buildings that make up the Petriolo complex one can therefore read the changes and transformations which have marked the history of the hills surrounding the Florentine plain: a slow and harmonious process which has made them the protagonists of a landscape that is unique in the world