VILLA CETINALE: MEMOIR OF A HOUSE IN T.

Located just outside Siena, Italy, Villa Cetinale stands amid vineyards, silver olive groves, and wooded hills that have remained largely untouched since the late seventeenth century, when Cardinal Flavio Chigi, a nephew of Pope Alexander VII, expanded what was a modest farmhouse into the villa we see today. Cetinale was acquired from the Chigi dynasty in 1978, by the charismatic Lord Antony Lambton, the author’s father, who cultivated the villa’s reputation as one of the most beautiful and glamourous homes in Italy, laying out new gardens and hosting fashionable figures from England (Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, Mick Jagger, Rupert Everett, Tony Blair, and Kate Moss).