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< When I was taken to visit the area before the purchase, I saw, together with an almost dilapidated farmhouse, also a miserable piece of land on the top of a hill at 630 meters above sea level where a dozen sheep grazed with difficulty. It was a plateau bordered by wild elms and ivy shrubs grown on dry stone walls about 2 meters thick and of ancient construction.

Here and there pieces of tiles, rims of jars, loom weights, handles and fragments of ancient domestic pottery surfaced.

My attention increased when on the eastern end of the land the seller of the land (a poor Sicilian widow who came to live in Chianti with the war), lifting up some wooden planks showed me the opening of a chasm whose bottom.

Looking out over this mouth he said: it is the well that hides the golden bells at the bottom.

Perhaps also for this reason, in a few days I bought Casalvento.>

These are the words of Professor Giovanni Dòmini when he recalled the purchase of a poor farm in the years in which peasant civilization was being urbanized. It was 1950 and an unstoppable economic and social transformation was already taking shape. But in those years the value of that farm lay more in its past than in its present: the city of Salingolpe had once existed on that hill.

It was nothing more than a castellare, an oppidum founded by the Etruscans, which, with a span of 2000 years, would have reached the fifteenth century AD. when it was demolished and rebuilt further down where Castellina in Chianti is today.

In the circle of walls, shepherds, farmers and industrious craftsmen found protection and a supply of water; a fresh and very sweet water that dripped drop by drop in a deep well …