Maiano’s farm

Maiano’s farm

The Maiano farm is a place where nature, culture, and history come together in perfect harmony, a place for those who love to immerse themselves in a bucolic dimension, and experience educational and relaxing moments in harmony with the surrounding landscape.

The appearance of the farm you see today comes from a series of interventions that began in 1844 by Sir John Temple Leader, an eclectic and wealthy Englishman, and then continued in 1917 when Teodoro Stori and his wife Elisabetta Corsini, member of the noble Florentine family of Princes Corsini, acquired it.

The farm, which covers more than 300 hectares of land mainly planted with olive trees, houses within it a lush botanical garden, an extensive organic farm equipped for tours and educational workshops, and the so-called Romantic Park, built between 1870 and 1890 and also called the Queen’s Park because it was inaugurated by Queen Victoria of England in April 1893. The park offers a pleasant romantic atmosphere, thanks to the neo-Gothic style tower built between 1870 and 1890 but which remained in a state of neglect for a long time, before its restoration by the current owners in 2015, and the Laghetto delle Colonne, dating back to the same years and whose origin is linked to the presence of the former Cava delle Colonne.

The former Cava delle Colonne was the most important quarry of pietra serena in the area, and its name comes from the characteristics of the layers of extractable stone in single blocks of considerable size, which were useful for making columns. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the quarry was used for the last time to rebuild the castle of Vincigliata by Temple Leader, who at the end of the work transformed it, precisely, into a pond, letting the water of the Mensola flow into it. From this transformation comes the name Laghetto delle Colonne.