Quercus’s Ember Lodge, oriented to catch the morning light.

The Viscontis of Georgia

Fleeing the Years of Lead in the 1970s, a branch of the Italian aristocracy traded Milan for rural Georgia—where their family estate has since become one of the South’s most singular hotels

By Jennifer Noyes

On 4,000 acres along the Flint River in Gay, Georgia, about 90 minutes from Atlanta, down an inconspicuous driveway, you’ll find Quercus. The hotel recently joined Relais & Châteaux, alongside Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee, and Le Sirenuse, in Positano. Rates start at $2,700 a night, all-inclusive, adults only. On paper, it sounds improbable. Then you arrive, and it quickly does not.

The story of Quercus begins, as many good stories do, with lineage and escape. In the late 1970s, amid Italy’s Years of Lead—a period of bombings, kidnappings, and political assassinations—Uberto and Antonella Visconti di Modrone, members of the same family as the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, left Milan for a quieter life. They first landed in South Carolina before being introduced to the governor of Georgia, who, upon learning the duchess was considering a move to Africa, suggested Meriwether County instead.