Villa Vai al Mulinaccio
A House of Memory in the heart of the Bisenzio Valley
The villa was built by Cosimo Sassetti between the end of 15th and the beginning of 16th century. Afterwards the villa belonged to the Strozzi family and to the Vai family (1661) who trasformed it in a great estate.
The villa, as residence of the navigator Filippo Sassetti (1540-1588), is part of the Houses of Memory circuit.
The complex, which develops around a side court, is formed by the villa and the annexes as the carpentry, the wash-houses and the rooms for pressing the olives. In the patronal part are painted walls and the beautiful wooden ceiling. The farm keep an old kitchen called "big kitchen", with a great fireplace supported by stone corbels.
In the walled up garden, realized between 1737 and 1738, there is an elegant Nymphaeum with three niches decorated by mosaics and nacres and surrounded by terracotta vases. Here is also a building, that served as wine cellars in the lower side and as hayloft in the upper side. There are also traces of the old furnace.
In the garden there's also the oratory of Saint Anthony Abbot, built in 1722, with eighteenth-century statues, of local arts and above the altar it is possible to admire a painting that represents a Madonna with Child between the Saints John the Evangelist and Anthony Abbot by Antonio Marini (1845).
Now the villa belongs to the Municipality of Vaiano and can be visited only on the occasion of events.
