Italy is well known for its fruits and you can enjoy tasty and fragrant fresh fruit at the boutique country hotel, Villa le Barone in Tuscany.
Fruits are chosen according to the seasons: spring fruits like strawberries or cherries, summer fruits like apricots, peaches, plums or melons, autumn fruits like figs, apples, pears, grape. These are the fruits of the season, that you will find on the dinner and breakfast buffets, as well as in the fruit salad. Fresh fruits are also used for our homemade pies or to prepare our own jams… And some of these fruits, such as plums, apricots , figs and grapes are produced on our property.
Many painters of the Italian Renaissance have also celebrated fruits in still life. Close to Villa le Barone, you can visit the still life museum of the Poggio a Caiano Medici Villa. This museum is unique in its kind and brings together approximately 200 paintings collected by several generations of the Medici family in the 15th and 16th centuries and in particular paintings by Bartolomeo Bimbi and Giovanna Garzoni… Everyone knows the famous painting ” the fruit basket ” by Renaissance painter Caravaggio.
The art historian of the early 20th century, Bernard Berenson, a specialist in Italian Renaissance, says ” honey and amber, purple and green, brown, pink, separate and mixed in a single music: variegated grapes, swollen apples, figs ready to split open, some leaves still fresh and straight, others already languishing and wilted, but all precise in their specific contours, carved like jewelry. Elegance of each branch, of each rod, of each rib”.
You will find at boutique country hotel Villa le Barone wonderful fresh fruits that you can paint or photograph – as many of our guests do – but, even if you don’t paint or photograph, you will be able to savor tasty and perfumed fresh fruit, different according to the season!