This story, published to coincide with the first Palio di Siena of summer 2025, is excerpted from the third issue of the London-based interiors magazine Scenery—available now at scenery-ltd.com.
The rules of the Palio di Siena are as mystifying as they are ancient. The breakneck, 90-second bareback race has taken place every summer in the Tuscan city’s Piazza del Campo since the 15th century. Held twice a year, it is contested by ten of the city’s seventeen contrade, or districts, each one fighting not for individual glory, but for the honor of its neighborhood. Riders are expected to endure violent jostling mid-race—elbowing, whipping, even attempts to unseat opponents—all of it sanctioned by centuries of unwritten codes. Many of the bitterest rivalries have lasted for generations.
For the 27-year-old horse racer Selvaggia Pianetti Lotteringhi della Stufa—who grew up not far from Siena, at Castello del Calcione, the medieval castle in southern Tuscany where her family has lived since the 1400s—riding has been a lifelong obsession. “My mother rode while she was pregnant with me,” she says. “So I’ve been bouncing on the back of a horse since I was in the womb.” She grew up showing and jumping, but the regimented world of traditional equestrian sport never appealed—the risk and thrill of the Palio were more enticing. “I thought, my god, that would be a lot of fun to try,” she admits. “But I had no idea what I was getting into.”
Independence, after all, is in her name—Selvaggia translates to “wild” in Italian. In 2020, she walked away from a career in law—she had studied at King’s College in London—to return to her family home, yet forge a path completely her own.
Dominating an over 800-hectare property that forms the border between Siena and Arezzo, Castello del Calcione’s foundations were laid in the 10th-century when it functioned as a military outpost. It later became the center of an agricultural empire, which only officially ended in the 1960s. On approach, the unadorned stone facade is punctuated by over two dozen windows spread over three levels, with two towering, crenellated turrets bookending on either side.
Inside, the seemingly endless procession of rooms are filled with the accumulated treasures of one of Tuscany’s oldest and most noble families. There are portraits of great-great-great-grandparents, and uncles and aunts a dozen times removed, with the same softly arched brows and pale blue eyes Selvaggia also possesses. In the castle’s entrance hall, a wall-sized ceramic medallion sculpted by Renaissance master Luca della Robbia bears the family’s crest.
Back then, in 2020, Calcione was at a crossroads. “When my grandfather died in 2014, my family wasn’t sure what to do with this place,” she explains, clutching a cup of herbal tea in front of a crack- ling fire in the castle’s main living room, a small chamber lined with sombre, centuries-old landscapes painted in oil, overstuffed sofas, and intricate frescoes overhead. The previous few years had spelt uncertainty for the sprawling estate, with expenses steadily outstrip- ping the modest income generated from renting out the many houses on the property as holiday homes. They had toyed with leasing it, going so far as to host a team from a luxury hotel group. “When they were telling me what they wanted to do with the property, I got shivers across my body,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do it.”
For Selvaggia, who had spent her teenage years in Paris but never took to city life, the pull of Calcione was undeniable. “I’ve lived in so many places, but knowing I had this to return to—I couldn’t let it go.” From then on, she decided, she would remain there and devote her time to developing it as an independent, sustainable hospitality project, while simultaneously throwing herself into another passion: becoming one of the first women to compete in the Palio di Siena.
Despite the Palio’s notorious reputation, Selvaggia spent the next two years training for her first race. Alongside a seasoned jockey, she learned how to steady herself with the strength of her legs, instead of balancing on stirrups, as the horse twisted and leaned around corners. “I was on a horse from 6:30 a.m. onwards,” she says, smiling at the memory. By the summer of 2023, she had already competed in a handful of practice races. Her path seemed set: she would live at Calcione and train for the Palio, realizing her dream of being the first woman to race in almost 70 years (and third, ever). But over the next several months, things did not go as planned.
For years, Selvaggia and her family had spent part of their summers in the rugged stillness of Montana, where family friends operated a cattle ranch in the Crazy Mountains. Even as an adult, when the rest of Italy migrated to the seaside in the late summer months, she always returned. It was the final day of the season and the cattle had been gathered from the vast Western plains, herded back to lower ground in preparation for winter. Selvaggia turned her towering quarter horse toward the ranch, setting off at a trot—just as she had every day for weeks. “I don’t know exactly what happened,” she says, her voice tightening. “The horse must have tripped in a badger hole. The only problem was that there was a giant stone where my head landed. Of course, after two years of training for the most dangerous race in the world, this is how I get injured.”
The next three months were a fog. “I couldn’t walk,” she says. “I forgot how to speak Italian.” Friends nursed her back to health, even fashioning a contraption of jerry-rigged reins to keep her from collapsing if she fainted in the shower. Despite the warmth and care she felt in Montana, however, her thoughts kept drifting to the castle. “I would have these recurring dreams,” she says. “My mind always returned here. To what I was trying to build—both with Calcione and the Palio.” After an arduous journey—her injuries meant she was unable to fly—she finally made it home, traveling by train and ship across continents.
Once back, she found her mind—and memory—fractured. She had to reacquaint herself with the place she had always known. “Suddenly, everything was new again,” she says. “I could look at it with fresh eyes. It was as if I were a newborn child—I had so many moments of awe.” Over the past year, Selvaggia has devoted herself to rehabilitating Calcione.
One by one, she’s been restoring the 11 bedrooms, swapping out the tired fixtures in the bathrooms with modern showers and claw foot tubs, placed so guests can gaze over the rolling hills out the window. She imagines holding concerts in the 17th-century church, a double-height, fresco-adorned chapel located behind an assuming door in the pantry. Next, she says, she’ll tackle the kitchen, where a finicky wood-fired stove has served the family for generations and copper pots owned by her great-grandparents still hang in glass-fronted cabinets.
“Recently, my grandmother found a pamphlet from the 1700s issued by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany,” says Selvaggia, flipping through the pages of a thick, vellum-bound book from the 1500s as thick and tall as a cereal box, where in minuscule, looping cursive it logs the crops harvested and money spent by the farmers that worked the land for nearly a millennium. It’s just one of hundreds of similar tomes squeezed onto carved wooden shelves in the castle’s stone-walled library, a cavern-like room lined with glinting military medallions, marble busts, and even a barrel filled with rusting, ancient swords.
“It was like a newsletter, listing the year’s events and upcoming decrees. And at the very end, there was a whole section complaining about my family—how we never answered our mail, how we were impossible to reach, how we refused to follow the rules,” she recounts. The document, Selvaggia adds, was tucked into the back of a slim book about cheese-making. “That was the level of importance my ancestors gave it. But finding it gave me a push. It made me want to keep forging my own path.”
For now, she plans to sustain the castle by renting it and its surrounding houses for visitors and celebrations. And at the same time, she has thrown herself back into training for the Palio. “The first time I rode after the accident, I cried with happiness,” Selvaggia remembers. “My main concern now, and what is holding everything together, are those breaths of fresh air I get once a day on the back of a horse.”