People arrive looking for Tuscany and find a version of it that still has a butcher, a doctor and a school.
This is where we live and where most of our houses are.
We work in a cluster of hill villages in the comune of Roccastrada — Roccatederighi, Roccastrada itself, Sassofortino, Torniella — and outwards from there across the province of Grosseto.
The altitude is the point. These villages sit up on the ridge, not down on the plain. In July and August that is the difference between a house you can sleep in and a house you flee. Evenings cool down. The stone stays cold. Air conditioning is not the first thing anyone installs.
The sea is close. Castiglione della Pescaia and Follonica are a drive of well under an hour — near enough to go after work, far enough that you are not living inside a summer resort with shuttered streets in November.
Health care is not far. The main provincial hospital is in Grosseto, about half an hour down the hill, and there is a second hospital at Massa Marittima on the other side. For buyers who are thinking ahead — and most of ours are — that is a reassuring geography, and it is one reason we recommend this area rather than more remote corners of southern Tuscany.
Grosseto itself is around half an hour away: supermarkets, specialists, the station, everything a village does not have.
What is not here. Tour buses. Restaurants with laminated menus in five languages. The prices that come with both. The celebrated valleys further north have all of that, along with the crowds and the figures to match. What you get instead is a village where the bar knows your order by the second week.
Why our houses are here. Because we are here. Our office is on Via Roma in Roccatederighi, and most of what we sell is within a few minutes of it: village houses with terraces over the valley, a few country houses on the edges, land with olives. We are not brokering photographs of places we have never walked.
