Castello di Laterina, Valdarno, Tuscany
A family from Laterina, four homes inside the castle walls, and the idea that a place is best told from the inside.
Benincasa Apartments was born in 2018 from an idea with the Castello di Laterina at its centre, and from the perhaps slightly stubborn belief that this village still had something to tell people arriving from elsewhere. Around that idea, Tuscany: its traditions, its flavours, its beauty, and above all its people.
We have always been a family from Laterina. Some of us see the castle walls every morning, others moved away over the years. Even so, those who left follow the project just as closely as those who stayed, because Laterina goes on being Home even when it is no longer a residential address.
Over these years people have come through here from all over the world and from every background. Couples on honeymoon, couples running away together, families, solo travellers, people looking for the Tuscany of the guidebooks and people simply curious to see what a small village looks like when its inhabitants still live to the natural rhythm of the countryside. Not one of them has ever been a Customer to us, with each we have tried to offer what you feel when you come back to your own home. When someone says at the moment of leaving that they are sorry to go, that is the greatest reward this work can give.
Laterina is not a place that imposes itself. It has no leaning tower, no postcard square. It has low walls to walk along in the evening, a thirteenth-century gate with the castle's emblem carved into the stone, and a quiet that at first, to people arriving from cities, feels almost like too much. Then two days pass and nobody wants to leave it any more.
Benincasa da Laterina was a thirteenth-century jurist, a judge in Siena, a man of the law to the very end. He sentenced relatives of the brigand Ghino di Tacco, and years later Ghino tracked him down in Rome and killed him in revenge. Dante places him in Purgatorio, canto six, among those who defended the law and met a violent death for it. The Supreme Poet remembers him in a single line: «the Aretine who met his death at the fierce hands of Ghino di Tacco». Seven centuries later we borrowed that name to christen our project. This is where the story of Benincasa Apartments begins.
Rita, Riccardo, Federico, Irene e Geremia
