The restored borgo: a short, opinionated history

The word borgo has, over twenty years, been stretched to cover almost any cluster of stone buildings with a swimming pool. It is worth being clearer.

A borgo, properly, is a small fortified or semi-fortified hamlet — typically agricultural, typically built between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, typically organised around a single courtyard or a short main street. It might have housed thirty or forty families: the steward, the farmhands, the blacksmith, the priest. By the second half of the twentieth century, almost all of them had emptied.

The good restorations of the last three decades — and there are not many — have done two things at once. They have kept the original plan: the proportions of the rooms, the relationship of the buildings to each other, the way the courtyard works as the social heart. And they have made the buildings quietly, deeply liveable: heated stone floors, plumbing that works in August, kitchens that a chef can actually cook in.

What you should look for, if you are renting one: a single architect or restorer's hand across the whole property. Bedrooms that feel like the rooms they were, not hotel rooms inserted into stone shells. A courtyard that is used. A pool that is sited where the original cisterns or threshing floors were, not bulldozed into the best view.

There are, by our count, perhaps fifteen restored borghi in Tuscany that meet this standard for a private rental of the whole property. We work with three.