Castelnuovo Berardenga

The name of the district comes from the counts of the Berardenga, and it sits on the wrong man: the family descended from Winigi, a Salian Frank who came into Italy as legate of Louis the Pious and then governor of Siena and of Roselle, but through a writing error the county took its name from one of his sons, Berardo — a name the descendants went on repeating, and which ended up on the land. The castle, on the other hand, is younger and has a precise date: the Republic of Siena resolved to build it on the twenty-sixth of July 1366, as a watch-post on the frontier towards Florence and Arezzo. The upper part of the hill was walled, the place was given a community statute, and thirteen small comuni of the neighbourhood were attached to its district. In 1382 John Hawkwood came with a Florentine army and failed to take it; the Florentines besieged it twice more at the end of the fourteen hundreds.

After those sieges Siena built a new ring of walls, and the books say it had seven towers, of which only one survives. A grand-ducal drawing of the castle, of about 1560, found again in 2018 in the national library of Florence, says otherwise: the towers were always six, and the one still standing, set on the axis of the old gate, was built from scratch between the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Which is to say that the last medieval tower of Castelnuovo is neither the last nor medieval. In the ground there is something far older: the fossil teeth of Chlamydoselachus lawleyi, a shark with a sinuous shape like an eel, left by the Pliocene sea that came up as far as here. Around the village stand the villas the Sienese aristocracy built themselves in the country, and since 1932 the comune has been in the Chianti zone: it is the southernmost of the Classico.