Built in 1680 for the nephew of a pope, restored from 1977 by Lord Antony Lambton, and let to outside guests since 2006. We walked Villa Cetinale, 12 kilometers west of Siena, in early May 2026 with a member of the family that still runs it. 13 bedrooms. Roughly 30 hectares of garden in the Italian style. One of the two private gardens in Italy with a fully realized Baroque Hercules-axis layout still intact. And one week of the year we would not book.
By The Villas For Kings desk
Villa Cetinale is one of the few rentable houses in Italy that occupies what its owners would call “the long-form historical category.” The villa was commissioned around 1680 by Cardinal Flavio Chigi, the nephew of Pope Alexander VII (the Chigi pope), and designed in its final form by Carlo Fontana, who at the time was the principal architect of Bernini’s late-career studio. The site is the hamlet of Cetinale, in the commune of Sovicille, on the western flank of Siena. The drive from Siena’s Porta San Marco to the villa gate is 12 kilometers.
The villa passed through Chigi heirs for roughly 290 years and was acquired in 1977 by Lord Antony Lambton, the British politician and writer, who spent the remaining 29 years of his life restoring the villa, the gardens, and the hilltop hermitage (the Romitorio) that anchors the property’s primary axis. Lambton died in 2006. The villa is now owned by his son, Ned Lambton, and Catherine FitzGerald, the garden designer who oversaw the most recent garden refresh. It has been available to rent to outside guests since 2006.
We have walked the villa twice before. The May 2026 visit was, for a change, on a working day for the family. The notes that follow record both the property and the working economy of a private house that is also, for a portion of the calendar year, a rental.
The principal villa is a four-floor Baroque structure with a symmetrical front facade, a chapel on the north corner, and a covered loggia that opens onto the formal garden. The villa contains 13 bedrooms across the upper floors, with the principal suite (the Cardinal’s Room, in the family’s nomenclature) on the second floor at the south corner. The villa sleeps 23 adults and two children when fully occupied.
The chapel is, the family member who walked us through told us, a fully consecrated 17th-century Catholic chapel that the parish priest continues to use for occasional services. A renting party that wants to hold a wedding inside the chapel can do so, on the family’s standing arrangement with the parish, provided the ceremony is led by a parish-approved officiant and is registered against the appropriate Italian civil documentation. The villa has hosted weddings at, on the family’s reckoning, per year since 2008.
What we would not change. The decision, taken by Antony Lambton in the late 1970s, not to convert the villa’s service wing into additional bedrooms. The wing remains the kitchen, the staff dining room, and the cellar, which is the right operational arrangement for a working historical property. We have audited properties that made the opposite decision and now operate at uneasy compromise between guest experience and staff accommodation. The Cetinale arrangement, in this respect, is the correct one.
The garden is the part of Villa Cetinale that exists in the published literature on Baroque garden design. The garden runs roughly 30 hectares in the formal sense, with the primary axis running south from the villa’s loggia through the formal parterre, past the bosco (the wooded park), and up the slope of the hill behind the villa to the hilltop Romitorio. The axis is anchored at the lower terminus by a colossal statue of Hercules and at the upper terminus by the hermitage building that the Lambton family restored over a decade.
The axis is the kind of element that does not exist outside of two or three Italian villas in private ownership. It is also the element that defines the property’s photography. Catherine FitzGerald, the current owner’s wife, is a working garden designer of independent reputation, and the most recent garden refresh, completed in, replanted the parterre, restored the citrus collection in the lemonaia, and rebuilt the irrigation system that the previous generation of work had left under-specified.
The Romitorio itself is climbable. The family allows guests to walk the axis to the hermitage, which is roughly up the slope at an elevation change of. The walk takes 25 to 35 minutes. The Romitorio is not, however, sleepable inventory. A guest who asks to spend a night in the hermitage will be politely declined.
What we would change. The garden tour for guests is currently informal and led by the resident staff. A guest paying the full-villa rate during a peak week deserves a structured 90-minute garden tour led by, ideally, Catherine FitzGerald in person or, when she is unavailable, by a garden historian on retainer. The garden is too well documented historically to leave the walkthrough to an untrained briefing.
The villa runs an in-residence staff team of during a rental week: a house manager, a private chef, a sous chef, three housekeepers, two grounds staff, a butler, and a pool attendant. The chef program is the property’s strongest operational asset. The principal chef,, trained at and runs the villa kitchen with a defined daily structure: breakfast at the guest’s requested hour, lunch at the loggia or the pool terrace, and dinner in the principal dining room with five courses and a wine pairing drawn from the villa’s cellar.
The wine cellar is stocked with roughly bottles, with a defined emphasis on Brunello di Montalcino and Chianti Classico producers within a 60-kilometer radius of the villa. The cellar is not a wine investment portfolio; it is, the family member told us, “a working cellar for the people who come for the week.” Bottles are billed at consumption against a list price that runs roughly 35 to 50 percent below the equivalent Siena retail price. We have audited villa wine programs that bill at 200 percent of retail. The Cetinale arrangement is at the fair end of the band.
What we would not change. The decision to bill wine at consumption rather than fold it into the headline rate. The arrangement allows a renting group to pace its consumption against its preferences, and it allows the family to refresh the cellar each year against actual guest demand. The alternative, an all-inclusive wine rate, would over-charge the light drinkers and over-stock the cellar for the heavy ones.
The villa lets at a 2026 peak-week rate of roughly € in July and August, with shoulder rates in May, June, and September running roughly 70 to 80 percent of peak. The villa closes from late October through mid-April. The closure is the right operational decision: the principal villa is heated to a livable but not luxurious standard in winter, and the garden is not at full presentation until late April. Listings that promise winter Cetinale weeks are over-promising.
What the rate includes: the villa, the staff team listed above, breakfast, the villa-prepared lunch, the villa-prepared dinner, and the use of the pool, the formal garden, and the bosco. What it does not include: wine at consumption, the optional private guide for Siena and the wider Chianti, helicopter or fixed-wing transfers to the villa’s landing field (the villa has a ), and supplementary chef-led wine tastings at named producers ( are within easy reach).
The villa is listed across multiple platforms: Firefly Collection, Tuscan Dream, Parker Villas, LTR Castles, Haute Retreats, and Villas of Distinction all carry the property at, in our 2026 rate-sample, broadly consistent figures. Direct booking through the family’s reservation desk returns, in our sample, the same rate, with the difference appearing only in the breadth of pre-arrival concierge support. We cross-reference the Tuscan rate band in our cost anatomy and the regional Tuscany guide.
The villa runs through the Italian Palio di Siena calendar. The Palio is the medieval horse race that runs through Siena’s Piazza del Campo on July 2 and August 16 every year. The week containing the August Palio is the highest-demand week of the Cetinale year. It is also, in our reading, the week we would not book. The reason is operational: the staff team is operating at the upper bound of its capacity, the Siena center is functionally closed to outside vehicles for three days, and the villa’s driving access to Siena is reduced from a 22-minute drive to a 55-minute drive with parking that requires the use of the villa’s shuttle service.
The first week of August, exclusive of the Palio, is the strongest week to book. The second week, containing the Palio, is the one we would skip in favor of the third week, which returns the property to its operational baseline. The family agrees with this reading. It does not, however, appear in the listing copy.
What we would also change. The villa’s pool is the original 20th-century build, which we would not, in 2026, expect of a property at the rate band. The pool functions. It does not have the heat-pump-and-saltwater filtration that the upper end of the Tuscan rate band has standardized. We expect a pool retrofit on the family’s capital plan within the next three years. We would also expect the rate band to lift by 8 to 12 percent when the retrofit is complete.
Villa Cetinale is for a group of 18 to 23 who want a historically intact Italian Baroque villa with a working garden, an in-residence chef program, and the family-owner pattern of operation. It is for buyers who care about provenance, about the Chigi commission, about the Lambton restoration, and about the fact that the house has not been gut-renovated to a hotel-standardized contemporary finish. The villa is the second category of Tuscan rental: the working historical house. The first category, the recently rebuilt luxury farmhouse, looks better in photography. The second category is the one that earns the rate band when you walk in.
It is not for buyers who require the contemporary-spec hotel-style finish of a recently refit property. The bedroom plumbing is original-with-updates and operates at the standard of 1990s rather than 2020s Italian plumbing. The wifi tests at roughly Mbps at the master suite, which is below our threshold for a video-work week. It is not for buyers who want a beach. The nearest meaningful Tyrrhenian beach is 105 kilometers west at Castiglione della Pescaia.
For buyers whose requirements match, Villa Cetinale is the property in the western Tuscan rate band that we would book before any of the Chianti farmhouse alternatives. It is the property that earns its rate band on the strength of the garden and the kitchen, not the bedroom finish. The Lambton family is the asset. The 1680 Baroque axis is the second asset. The chef program is the third. The August Palio week is the calendar caveat. The pool is the one piece of capital that has not yet caught up.
Our sister sites cover the hotels, restaurants, and bars worth a side-trip during a Cetinale week.
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Last updated 2026-03. We have not adjusted our editorial for the commission rate. See how-we-make-money for the full disclosure.