Tenuta de Castelfalfi: Will the Tuscan Village Go the Way of Shangri-La?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 06.05.07 | 10:41 AM ET
The besieged faux Shangri-La, that is. German tour operator TUI has purchased the Tuscan village of Tenuta de Castelfalfi—four square miles of land with a golf course and “scores of elegantly crumbling villas,” according to the Guardian—for €250 million. TUI plans to turn the village into an Italian retreat for up to 3,200 German tourists by 2009. The Guardian’s Kate Connolly writes that it’s a move that would “make the Tuscany-loving author EM Forster turn in his grave.”
As for the living residents of Tenuta de Castelfalfi, they’ve got a different perspective. Those villas, after all, can crumble elegantly only for so long.
Connolly writes:
TUI’s dramatic move, described as its biggest ever development, has met with little opposition from the five remaining Castelfalfians.
“I’ll wait to see how it will be,” 74-year-old resident and retired hunting watchman Camillo Carli told the German newspaper Die Welt. “I’m old so it doesn’t really affect me—it’s more something that will impact on the young.”
His son-in-law, Andrea Mechacci, said he saw the sale as a big chance. “If it remains as it is, then the village is dead,” he said. Any life German tourists brought with them would be welcome, he added.
(Via Upgrade: Travel Better.)
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
