A tower of 1200's and a rural house of 1700's, both restored with every comforts, between Val d'Orcia and Crete Senesi. The “Casella Tarugi was built by the Tarugi family at the end of 1700 and was inhabited during the following years by peasant families of the Val d'Orcia.

We don’t know much about the history of this ancient building which used to be a tower for the defence of the border. The architecture seems medieval. It was made into a farm house and used, in more recent times, as temporary lodging for sharecropping families who’d been turned out of their own house.
The landowning families institutionalized agricultural stability in the form of the mezzadria (sharecropping) system. Mezzadria can be translated as share-cropping and it implies 'sharing half' (coming from meta = half). The mezzadria developed in central Italy in particular, after the disappearance of feudal serfdom.
'Mezzadria refers to an agricultural system of labor that was not unique to Tuscany but was most firmly entrenched there and among the most defining aspects of Tuscan life. Iris Origo, in War in Val d'Orcia, said of mezzadria that "like many traditional systems handed down from father to son, the mezzadria compact is both very complicated and very elastic ... It is not quite that of landlord and tenant, nor certainly that of employer and employee-it is more intimate than the former, more friendly than the latter. It is a partnership."[2]