LOVE NEST

A former clandestine retreat in an ancient fortified house in Italy is reborn as a couple's weekend sanctuary.

- Laura May Todd

It's early fall in northern Italy, and designer Paolo Castellarin and his husband, Didier Bonnin, an executive at a French luxury brand, have just set the table for lunch. We're sitting under the terra-cottatiled roof of what several hundred years ago would have been an outdoor kitchen, one of numerous stone-walled buildings in the complex making up their weekend home in the hills near Piacenza. It's that sweet spot in the season when a daytime breeze still warms the skin.

As Castellarin doles out stuffed pasta cooked in butter and sage onto illustrated Richard Ginori plates, he explains that long ago this house was a thriving agricultural center. He learned that it was constructed in 1182 as a casaforte a fortified mansion on the ruins of a Roman fort. In the intervening centuries, it had turns as a convent and a partisan stronghold during the Second World War. A previous owner, some decades ago, had even unearthed neolithic pots and a millennia-old graveyard, the mummified remnants of which now reside in a nearby archaeological museum. More recently, it was the hidden love nest of a prominent local businessman, who would escape here for weekends with his mistress and also hold illicit parties undetected by his family.