Forty years ago, Brunello Cucinelli and his wife, Federica, began restoring and reimagining a crumbling estate in the small Umbrian village of Solomeo. Today, as he stands among the 20,000 vines that were recently planted there, the Italian fashion designer is transported back to the sights and scents of his childhood.
With the wheat field adjacent to the vineyard having just been plowed, “there is only the scent of the churned earth, dried leaves, and wild herbs,” he says. “I don’t want to sound too poetic, but until I was 15, I lived in this kind of environment on my parents’ farm in Perugia, surrounded by the soil. This is where my soul resides.”
