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The San Martino Vineyard
The vineyard rises
steeply from 300 feet above sea level to 600 feet
through a series of terraces, starting from in back
of the buildings along the street named Corso
Vittorio Emanuele and stopping directly at the wall
of the museum itself. Originally, the grounds were
part of the monastery, a vast area set in isolation
above the city. That situation prevailed for
centuries until the late 1800s when the newly
unified Italian state passed a series of laws
expropriating a great amount of property belonging
to the Catholic church in Italy and, thus,
essentially closing many monasteries. Since the late
1860s, San Martino has been a museum owned and
operated by the state.
 The vineyard is in private
hands, however, and the owner seems intent on keeping it
intact, isolated and as green as possible. The division
of the vineyard from the old monastery in the late 19th
century unfortunately led to the lack of an integrated
plan to care for the grounds, particularly where run-off
from rainfall on such a steep slope is concerned. There
have been a number of earthslides over the last century,
with water building up behind some terrace walls and
then eventually bursting them. Restoration, however, of
a large section of the terrace walls below the museum is
in progress, and much of the property is still under
cultivation as a genuine, producing vineyard. The most
striking thing about the vineyard is that it rests above
an urban area of over a million, yet it is pastoral,
almost surreally so—an unexpected patch of green and
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