- History
In 1587 the people of the village decided to build a monastery in honour of the Cappuccini monks who helped the population during the difficult times.
It was a sort of self taxation which produced a great work. The beginning of the works was represented by a stone carving on the cistern in 1589, and the monastery consacration in 1599.
San Gimignano, which in the Middle Ages was a prosperous village on the silk route, experienced a big decadence after the route was moved. This allows us to still admire this medieval village and its towers which have remained intact. At an attentive look, also the monastery and the adjacent church, la Collegiata, which gives the name to the hotel, has a style preceeding the late Renaissance.
During the plunders of the Church belongings, with the coming of Napoleone, the monastery was occupied and then abandoned. The tower was built in the XIX Century, in fact we can notice the different colour of the stones, which anyway came from the demolition of nearby churches and buildings. In the XX Century the building became the summer house of the Guicciardini-Strozzi family, as confirmed by a postcard found by chance in a market depicting the Collegiata, from which we took the logo of the hotel. Eventually it was bought by a company to turn it into a hotel but the project was left unfinished, until in 1988, when to business men active in the Milano finance, decided to invest in the project.
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