The Best Restaurants in Chianti: a Local’s Guide | Abercrombie & Kent abercrombiekent.com

Abercrombie Kent is an award winning luxury travel company, offering luxury vacations, private tours and small group adventures worldwide.

The rolled gold hills of Chianti, where a Slow Food ethos existed long before the term was coined, produce some of the finest food and drink in the world. Tuscany resident Lee Marshall shares his insider recommendations for the best places to eat and drink from Greve to Radda.

Good food and good wine aren’t luxuries in Chianti. They are moral imperatives, basic human rights. You only have to cast your eye over Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 14th-century fresco panel The Effects of Good Government in the Country, in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, to realize that a well-tended, productive rural landscape and a well-balanced, productive civic society have long been seen as two sides of the same coin in the region.

Tuscans are often bemused by the sight of all those visitors taking photos by the side of the road, of lines of cypresses or great expanses of nodding sunflowers. That farming and beauty should go hand in hand is for them a given. Artist Daniel Buren understood this when, asked by the Castello di Ama winery to contribute to its site-specific contemporary art collection, he created a mirrored wall with windows onto the olive groves and vines below. All you need do to turn the Chianti landscape into a work of art is frame it.