2007.01.11: January 11, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - Colombia: Journalism: New York Times: Maureen Orth writes: Shopping for a Villa in Tuscany
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2007.01.11: January 11, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - Colombia: Journalism: New York Times: Maureen Orth writes: Shopping for a Villa in Tuscany
Maureen Orth writes: Shopping for a Villa in Tuscany
Mr. Phillips could afford to buy and renovate the borgo after decades as a public interest lawyer, during which he earned cuts of the considerable money that he helped recover for the California and federal governments from contractors accused of corruption. But he wondered whether he and his wife, Linda Douglass, then a correspondent for ABC News, really had a use for so many houses in the Italian countryside — even given their large extended family and network of friends. He decided that the borgo should double as a gathering place for “people associated with charitable and educational issues.” Its beauty and history could help inspire creative thought and dialogue, he hoped; it would be nice, he joked, “to have the Mideast peace talks here.” (He would charge for these gatherings, he said, but was not interested in making a profit; he has also considered renting the borgo out to select business groups to help finance the plan.) Journalist Maureen Orth served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia in the 1960's.
Maureen Orth writes: Shopping for a Villa in Tuscany
Shopping for a Villa, He Wound Up With a Village
By MAUREEN ORTH
Published: January 11, 2007
[Excerpt]
JOHN PHILLIPS spent more than two years looking for a villa in Italy before he saw Borgo Finocchieto near this town in Tuscany. He had always imagined having a place in Italy — his original family name was Filippi, and he had fallen hard for the country in 1969, after a lonely tour of Eastern Europe. What he had never imagined, until that day in the fall of 2000, was that that place would be a village.
A tiny medieval farming town, Borgo Finocchieto (the name means village of fennel fields) was little more than ruins and piles of dirt when he first came here. He had been sent by a friend proposing a joint purchase: Mr. Phillips, a Washington lawyer, would buy the main house and the friend and two others would buy the rest. The borgo’s five acres and five dilapidated structures were part of an estate once owned by the Borghese family, and overlooked a valley of hills and vineyards. Mr. Phillips said he was instantly struck by the view, uninterrupted and virtually unchanged for 1,000 years, and by the silence: the site was the quietest he had visited in Italy.
The borgo, which appears on a map from 1318, is about 40 miles south of Siena, close to the ancient Florence-Rome road used by Chaucer and Michelangelo. It was farmed by peasants and sharecroppers. As late as the 1960s, 21 families shared the borgo’s large U-shaped manor house, living on the second floor without indoor plumbing and keeping their livestock sheltered beneath them on the ground level. When Mr. Phillips saw it, the village’s onetime chapel had become a barn, and an ugly tractor shed blighted the view of the countryside.
Mr. Phillips decided the borgo should be brought back to life as a single entity, and in 2001 he bought it himself in what he called “a moment of irrational exuberance.”
Mr. Phillips, now 64, could afford to buy and renovate the borgo after decades as a public interest lawyer, during which he earned cuts of the considerable money that he helped recover for the California and federal governments from contractors accused of corruption. But he wondered whether he and his wife, Linda Douglass, then a correspondent for ABC News, really had a use for so many houses in the Italian countryside — even given their large extended family and network of friends. He decided that the borgo should double as a gathering place for “people associated with charitable and educational issues.” Its beauty and history could help inspire creative thought and dialogue, he hoped; it would be nice, he joked, “to have the Mideast peace talks here.” (He would charge for these gatherings, he said, but was not interested in making a profit; he has also considered renting the borgo out to select business groups to help finance the plan.)
Read the rest of the story here.
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Headlines: January, 2007; RPCV Maureen Orth (Colombia); Figures; Peace Corps Colombia; Directory of Colombia RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Colombia RPCVs; Journalism
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Story Source: New York Times
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