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[Regions of Italy] 
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The year was 1520. On a frozen March afternoon, a handsome carriage clattered through the bare Tuscan woods, past a tiny stone hovel half-hidden behind a thicket. The coachman whipped up the horses in a feverish attempt to get his master home to the villa before sundown. It was never wise for a nobleman to be caught in the woods after nightfall. Since 1495, when Lorenzo the Magnificent's weak son Piero de' Medici had been forced to hand his duchy over to King Charles VIII of France, the region had been plunged into a realm of chaos. Florence had boiled with the righteous frenzy of Savonarola, railed at the Spanish Borgia Pope Alexander VI, writhed under the tyrannical French heel. Criminals, dissidents and fugitives escaped into the relative obscurity of the countryside, often taking refuge in the one-room huts the peasants shared with their cow. Such was the dwelling that lay on the edge of the nobleman's property, a good three miles from his splendid Renaissance villa.
The peasant who lived in that hut was one of dozens who worked for the nobleman, tending the vineyard and wheat fields and olive groves. An unskilled laborer, he was not allowed near the estate's prized cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. He had never set foot in the villa, never seen the formal Italian gardens that surrounded it. He and his wife, who wove yarn and milked cows for the estate, worked from dawn to dusk, slept on straw mats on the floor, and shared their food with the cow. Two of their seven children lived to reach adulthood. The girl married and moved far away to the other side of the estate; the boy took a wife and stayed on in his father's hut.
As often happens, the boy was more fortunate than his father. In 1527, a republican uprising wrested Florence from the Medici family, inciting the wrath of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and of the boy's master, who was a faithful Medici ally. War was declared. Weapons and armor were needed; the estate's overworked smithy demanded more helpers. The boy became an apprentice, and in the prosperous decades of Medicean glory that followed, he learned the craft well enough to become a master blacksmith. Eventually the nobleman's son let the peasant's son buy his father's hut; the smithy added two more rooms and built a shed for the descendants of the old cow.
Three generations of blacksmiths succeeded the first, each one embellishing the modest house with more or less artistic flair. One added a loft; his son built an outer stairway to reach it; his son roofed the landing to make a loggia, adding a wrought-iron balustrade which gained some local renown. No one remembered the days when a peasant family had shivered on the cold stone floor beside the milk-cow's flanks.
Prosperity never lasts forever. In time, the estate declined and most of the skilled workers moved to the towns, where they could be their own masters. The blacksmith's great-grandson took his family to Lucca, having sold his rather extravagant country home to a local merchant who had made his fortune selling Tuscan ceramics in Rome. In 1737, the last Medici died and Tuscany fell to the Hapsburg-Lorraine family. At a handsome profit, the merchant sold his home to a German soldier who spent most of his life fighting for Queen Maria Theresa. In 1801, Napoleon acquired Tuscany, renamed it the Kingdom of Etruria and gave it to Louis of Bourbon-Parma. The German soldier's son fled and his two-story stone house with adjoining barn passed to a local baron, who gave it to his second son.
Now the house underwent its most drastic metamorphosis. A second addition appeared on the far side of the barn. The stone floors were replaced with terra cotta, the outside stairway was removed. Where once the cow had grazed, the baronessa created a formal garden, with sculpted box, gravel paths and stone statues. She died while supervising the installation of a small artificial lake, which glimmers in the far corner of the garden today, welcoming visitors into a world created by generations of human ingenuity, laughter, sweat and tears. A world which today plays host to countless visitors, some of whom may pause to hear the stones and beams and gardens tell their tales of the many lives of the Tuscan farmhouse.
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