Ugo Contini Bonacossi

• … and they used to rinse clothes in the Ombrone
• After September 8th 1943
• Between the twenties and thirties
• Corrado Capecchi, military internee
  • A medal (at last) for Corrado
  • The joke of the military internees
• Five places of Romanesque Carmignano
• Friar Bocci, at the beginning of the twentieth century
• From archaeologists to farmers
• Gino Balena
• Gino di Fico
• Historical shops in Carmignano
• In the name of Jesus and Saint Peter, may the sty go away
• Liberation day
• Matteucci, the ‘forgotten’ bishop
• Soldier in Greece
• Stories from a school notebook
• Stories of donkeys and jockeys
• Stories of mayors and town councils in Carmignano
• Stories of our home
• Stories of war and displaced persons
• The Battistina and other scary stories
• The colours of the rioni
• The Golden Roster
• The last sharecropper in Carmignano
• The siege in memory of the Princess
• The tree of liberty in Carmignano
• Ugo Contini Bonacossi
• Vittorio’s bicycles
• When the river Arno was fordable ..
• When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone
• The colours of Carmignano, a small guide for tourists
  • Ancient churches and abbeys. Montalbano, a crossroads for pilgrims.
    • San Giusto al Pinone
    • San Jacopo in Capezzana
    • San Leonardo in Artimino
    • San Lorenzo in Montalbiolo
    • San Martino in Campo
    • San Michele amarcord
      • San Michele, the theater takes to the streets
• Itineraries for just a few days or more
  • Walking through history and nature
  • A Sunday devoted to the discovery of Artimino
  • A few words about the hamlets of Carmignano
  • The Fontina and Castagnati Lake
• Guides to download

Everybody knows him for the wonderful wines of Capezzana and the Carmignano DOCG, of whose rebirth he was in the sixties a bit like the father and one of the architects, until the release from Chianti and the return to the glories and the celebrities of the eighteenth century. But this is a different story, just mentioned. What Ugo Contini Bonacossi recounts in his autobiography “Discovering the Past”, published in 2010 by “il Fiore” in Florence ,are the years of youth, the war on the Yugoslav front, Florence after September 8 and above all the other great passion of the Count: water: water to stop,   water to channel to irrigate fields and feed aqueducts.

A portrait new for many and a tale of an almost ninety-year-old boy.
Delicious to read, to learn more about one of the families of Carmignano best known in the world: today for its wines and yesterday for the collections of Alessandro Contini and Victoria Erminia, Ugo’s grandparents, antique dealers, second in Europe only to Duveen who had created one of the most important art collections of the old continent, partly donated to the Uffizi.
The water is a bit like the common thread of many pages of the book: a very special autobiography and not only because the years of youth and war occupy a very large space, one hundred pages out of a hundred thirty. It is also particular also for the overlapped memory of today to the diaries written then, which add freshness and intensity.
The water then. As a boy Ugo Contini built “dikes”. He enjoyed doing this in South Tyrol, where his family spent the summers when they weren’t in Forte dei Marmi. He continued to do so more recently. And that passion that lasted twenty years then turned into a cutting-edge activity, first thanks to” Il Castoro “and then to the “Nuova Castoro”, a company that Ugo founded and directed together with Lapo Mazzei.
They planned lakes in the hills. The first one was realized ​​on Montalbano (where his family had moved). And the second one came to life in the Medici hills: the Castagnati lake that is below the village of Carmignano and whose water still comes through a pipe up to the Poggetto. In Tuscany Ugo also designed and built the dam of Chianciano Terme. Then, again thanks to the “Nuova Castoro”, the lakes created became hundreds and ​​around the world: in Italy and Greece, in an Africa soon after independence, empty of tourists and extraordinarily charming, and in South America. A chosen group of friends worked in the company.
They confidently spoke one or two foreign languages. In the Italy of the
fifties and sixties they were almost a rarity, and even if Count Ugo spends a little time in the countries in which they operated they didn’t just perform a technical task. They also had a diplomatic role and were also ambassadors of Italian culture. Which is what the count is continuing to do with wine. (wf)