The first mention of the
Domain of Spante goes back to
1295
when it appears in the Chronicles of Orvieto as a tributary of
the Commune of Orvieto.
The word
‘spante' has no particular meaning in
Italian (
in etrusco);
it is so special that no other place in Italy bears the same
name. Spante, rather, is a word with a precise meaning in the
two languages of Etruscan and Umbrian and means
‘altar'
or
‘dish for the offerings to the Divinity'; the
surrounding countryside, hilly and still today covered in
boundless oak woods reveals its probable origin as a
Sacred
Forest,
‘Lucus' ‘shining' -
‘Nemos' for the Romans.
The earliest origins of the
Faina family, who own
Spante, can be traced as far back as the first half of the 15
th century when their forefather, Antonio, a shopkeeper, moved
to Montegabbione.
In 1752, Giandomenico, son of Filippo, bought the Estate of
Spante where there was a Villa and 353 hectares of land. In
1776 he chose Angelo, his second child, from among his
children, to take care of the property and to continue the
line. Angelo added to the estate and kept it all together in
spite of the mistakes made by his brothers. He also kept a
record of everything that happened in a manuscript:
‘The
History of Spante', still treasured by his descendants in
the family archives.
If I call to mind once more the swallows of Spante' it does
not seem possible that I lived with them, in love and harmony,
all through a torrid month of July. That time and those places
come back to my mind like the memory of a dream: with the same
lightness of touch, and bathed in the same unreal luminosity.
Indeed I no longer know how I came to find myself there, in
the Villa of Spante. I could almost say that I was transported
there by enchantment, without either uproar or din….I see
once more the solitary little palace, dark against the
encircling hills, sense again the indescribable calm of the
silence that surrounded it..
From my window I used to see the changing skies; first they
turned a strange, almost livid grey, then milky, shot through
with silvery shivers, then red in the east. And I would say to
myself 'This is the real dawn; this is the real sky : real and
dark:…and so close I can reach out and touch it…Meanwhile,
the swallows that lived in the eaves had awoken. The shadows
of their flight were already weaving light, invisible webs in
the air.
In front of the house, which on one side forms a corner with
spotless farmhouse dwellings, there is a vast, rectangular
lawn; the two box hedges bordering it to the south and the
west, have the cut, the squaring off, the compactness of low
walls; but they are green, dark and shiny.
The house is all built of undressed stone which is a
beautiful, honest grey, sprinkled with red and brown…seven
cypresses stand on guard, silhouetted against the light of day
and the shadow of night, setting their great seals on the
place.
This garden, for the most part, contains only pomegranate
trees alternating with rose beds. I have seen many rose
gardens, but none like this one.
The roses bloom late, it is true, but in recompense they
continue to bloom here when elsewhere they have ceased, and
they continue to do so well into the autumn. But it is the
purple rose bush especially, which takes up, large and shrubby
as it is, a whole bed to the west, which never tires of
blooming. One morning in winter – it was Christmas Eve and
in the valley of Spante winter is harsh - that was the rose
that we saw, and it seemed a miracle, staining the snow with
red. All about us was white and hard from the snow that had
fallen the previous day, but the rose bush bore three open
blossoms.
