Our story

The origins

The documented history begins in the early fifteenth century, when the villa was called Camporella — after the place where it had been built — and belonged to the leather merchant Piero di Ambrogio Ambrogi.

Michelozzi

In the second half of the fifteenth century the estate passed to the celebrated architect Niccolò di Michelozzo Michelozzi, who gave the villa its painted and decorative character: the sixteenth-century courtyard and the third-floor loggia, with its wide view over the Florentine plain.

Changing hands

In 1553 the villa was sold to Antonio Torrigiani, who owned other villas nearby; in 1659 it was bought by Benedetto Dragomanni.

Prince Borghese

In 1825 the villa became the property of Prince Camillo Borghese, who had it restored in honour of his wife Paolina Bonaparte, younger sister of the French emperor Napoleon.

Fantastic Garden

The story reaches our own day when a young professor decided to buy the villa — for its charm, for its spaces, and for how close it stands to the historic villas of the Ginori family, who founded the famous porcelain manufacture here in the eighteenth century, and of the Gerini, in whose residence the myth of Pinocchio took shape, the novel by Carlo Lorenzini, known as Collodi.

Today the villa is Fantastic Garden: a place full of cultural and natural detail, where you sleep, eat, swim and get married, and where every event is meant to leave a memory.