IL REFUGIO
Historical estate/residence in the heart of the city of Siena
IL REFUGIO
Il Refugio is a vacation home located in the heart of Siena, welcoming guests within the former boarding school. Our 40 rooms are the ideal home for students, researchers, and professors, whether for short or long-term stays.
The property is located in the historic center, right near Porta Romana. It’s a strategic location for those studying in the Departments of Humanities, Cultural Heritage, Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics, or for those attending the former San Niccolò Psychiatric Hospital. Also nearby are the Santa Chiara Lab, the Humanities Library on Via Fieravecchia, and the Servi (or Funaioli-Mazzi) complex.
THE GARDENS
Wild chestnut trees, firs, walnut and plum trees, laurel trees, a Japanese maple, a rose bush, and a reed bed surround with their foliage five white marble basins, used as decorative motifs, as was customary to decorate the green spaces of the most important 19th-century residences in the Conservatori Garden, a hidden corner of paradise in the city. Located in the heart of the city, the terraced garden enjoys a breathtaking view of the old city walls, Porta Pispini, and the garden of the Nobile Contrada del Nicchio.
Here, during the 19th century, the girls staying at the boarding school devoted themselves to gardening as an educational activity: caring for the plants taught a method and enabled them to acquire the manual skills studied in chemistry and botany textbooks and on maps depicting plant species.
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.
