From watchtower of the Florentine Republic to the castle you can book today.
A castle is not only its walls. It is the families who lived there, the wars it watched from a distance, and the slow softening of a fortress into a home.
The first document naming the castle dates to 1252. It was built as one of the watchtowers of the Florentine Republic, raised to defend the countryside along the line where Florence and Siena faced each other.
The keep still stands as it was conceived: thick walls, few openings, a view that reaches far. Everything around it — gardens, loggias, halls — came later, when there was no longer any need to watch the horizon.
Over the centuries the castle passed to noble Florentine families and softened into a country residence: first the Canigiani, then the Miniati di Dino, who in the seventeenth century turned the stronghold into a stately home.
From them came the Goretti Miniati, and finally the Lapi of Florence — descendants of the great Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi di ser Brunellesco Lapi, whose name the castle carries today.
One family has guarded this place since 1623. That is why the welcome here does not feel staged.
The fortified walls and the centuries-old gardens. The chapel with its neo-Gothic murals. The halls with their original furnishings, the ancestral portraits, the family trees painted on the walls of the Armoury. Nothing has been rebuilt to look old: it simply never stopped being lived in.
Castello Lapi is a member of ADSI, the Italian Historic Houses Association.
Start planning your event and book a private tour — by phone or email.