IL REFUGIO
Historical estate/residence in the heart of the city of Siena
IL REFUGIO
Il Refugio is a historical estate/residence in the heart of the city of Siena. Today, Il Refugio welcomes its guests inside the old boarding school that has been converted into a cosy historical home that has definitely maintained the charm and splendour of its past. All 42 rooms are furnished with care and great attention to detail. The typical antique furniture and majestic wall paintings strongly recall the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life in Siena. Our Refugio Estate provides a comfortable, homely setting, ideal for scholars, researchers, students, teachers of all levels, art and culture experts with particular interest in the history of our city. In the spacious lounges the guests are free to enjoy the extraordinary historical and artistic luxuriance of the surrounding structure and treat themselves to a moment of absolute relaxation. There is a museum on the ground floor, a gallery on the first floor and finally a library on the third floor, where you can take a deep historical dive in the original volumes upon a simple request at the reception desk.
THE GARDENS
There are wild chestnut trees, firs, walnut and plum trees, laurel trees, a Japanese maple, a rose garden and a reed grove to surround with their foliage, all 5 white marble basins – placed for decorative reasons in the first place as it was a common practice back in the nineteenth-century to furnish the green areas of the most important house mansions with the conservatory garden, a hidden corner of paradise right in the core of the city. In the centre, the garden is terraced and offers a breath-taking view of the old city walls, Porta Pispini and the garden of the Nobile Contrada del Nicchio.
Here, in the nineteenth century, the girls attending the boarding school dedicated themselves to the gardening in a pedagogical function: taking care of the plants allowed them to fully embrace the methods and the acquisition of the manual skills that up until then they could learn about only from the numerous maps with depictions of the plant species in the chemistry and botanical books only in a very theoretical way.
THE GARDENS
There are wild chestnut trees, firs, walnut and plum trees, laurel trees, a Japanese maple, a rose garden and a reed grove to surround with their foliage, all 5 white marble basins – placed for decorative reasons in the first place as it was a common practice back in the nineteenth-century to furnish the green areas of the most important house mansions with the conservatory garden, a hidden corner of paradise right in the core of the city. In the centre, the garden is terraced and offers a breath-taking view of the old city walls, Porta Pispini and the garden of the Nobile Contrada del Nicchio.
Here, in the nineteenth century, the girls attending the boarding school dedicated themselves to the gardening in a pedagogical function: taking care of the plants allowed them to fully embrace the methods and the acquisition of the manual skills that up until then they could learn about only from the numerous maps with depictions of the plant species in the chemistry and botanical books only in a very theoretical way.
THE CHURCH
The church of San Raimondo at the Refugio Estate is today one of the most exclusive places in the city representing an extraordinary testimony of the Roman Baroque and its undeniable influence at the Sienese figurative culture.
It was founded in the early 1600s at the behest of Aurelio Chigi who sponsored the entire iconographic cycle. The whole pictorial decoration consists of three large altarpieces, accompanied by a series of smaller canvases. The iconographic cycle develops around the stories of San Galgano, Santa Caterina and San Raimondo di Pennafort. The rich heritage of the church also includes a remarkable series of sacred furniture, among which undoubtedly stands out a wooden pulpit designed by Agostino Fantastici, and a large collection of sculptures, reliquaries, precious elements of the liturgical kit, ex voto, missals, frontals, sacred vestments, with many pieces dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also including some more ancient objects.
