Colfiorito Farm is situated a few kilometres from Rome, in the Municipality of Castel Madama, at the exact place where a Roman villa stood two thousand years ago. The place was in fact well known to the ancient Romans, who have left numerous relics here such as the Claudian aqueduct and the villa of the poet Horace.
The farm nestles in the area of the Tiburtine Mountains. It begins just past Tivoli and opens out onto the Empolitana Valley. This is an ancient landscape, which remains uncontaminated by the proximity of Rome. Here the people have always devoted themselves to the cultivation of olives and vines, and to pastoral farming.
Colfiorito Farm presently represents a modern agricultural complex where this age-old tradition lives on.
The farmhouses, that are no longer used for business, have been partly restored to offer visitors a tranquil environment, as evoked in the verses inscribed on the stone set in the atrium of the proprietor’s farmstead, which sums up the philosophy of hospitality, traditional to this place:
In centuries past, the ancient hamlet of Cofiorito Farm formed part of a vast rural property of which the main section, at its heart, specialising in the cultivation of olives and vines, split off to be farmed separately. It extends for more than thirty hectares following the hill slope covered by vines and by 5,000 olive trees, the twisted forms of which display the passage of time.
Besides the main hamlet, there are other buildings on the farm, once lived in by peasants working the land. The ancient oil-mill of the day, now only of historical value, still retains its old grindstone and other reminders of times past. The farm is so extensive that is possible to spend whole days relaxing here.
