About us

We, Jean and José, met while we were working as waiters in restaurant Villa Rozenrust in Leidschendam, the Netherlands, owned by the Italian Giovanni Matarazzi. That is where the love for each other and for Italian wine, food and culture originates. After her study at the Hoge Hotelschool José (born in the Hague) started working at the tourist information Zuid-Limburg in 1993 and Jean (born in Limburg) at the spa Thermae 2OOO in Valkenburg aan de Geul. We took our children on holidays to Italy and learned Italian in Belgium and later at IPLI in Maastricht.

In 2002, José started working at the Dutch nature reserve organisation, Natuurmonumenten Zuid-Limburg, where she worked as forest ranger communication until 2022. This sparked the love for nature. Jean worked at Thermae 2OOO for 13 years. After that, he opened an Italian delicatessen, Culitalia, in Valkenburg in 2010. Many of the products in the shop were imported directly from Italy. That’s why we travelled quite often to Italy to get new supplies: coffee and olive oil from Liguria, ceramics from the region around  Bassono del Grappa, cheese and sliced cold meats from Trentino and Piemonte.

In 2018, during one of these trips, we visited our Italian teacher on the organic estate Migliarina & Montozzi in Bucine, in the region Valdarno between Florence, Arezzo and Siena. We fell in love with the place immediately and dreamt about having our own place in Tuscany. Soon after our first visit to the estate Migliarina and Montozzi we found it and we spent our holidays there. From that moment onwards every buying trip would end there. Tuscany became our second home, also for our children and their friends.

We liked it so much, that a new dream arose: we wanted to share this lovely estate and its beautiful nature with others by opening a B&B. In October 2020 we found out that there was a beautiful villa on the estate – called La Villetta – which would be perfect for  a bed & breakfast thanks to its set-up. We were sold on it right away, as were the owners, but in January 2021 a competitor suddenly appeared: a buyer for the villa. Luckily, in April 2021, we received a text asking if we were still interested. Yes!! And so it happened: we signed the lease contract on 15 June 2021 and on 1st Augustus that summer we opened the B&B. Since then, we have welcomed many international guests for a short or longer stay in our B&B.

Our children have visited us in Tuscany several times and every now and then we go back to the Netherlands to visit family and friends. In April 2022 we have welcomed Entlebucher Sennenhund Mykyta from Ukraine in Bucine. We are really starting to feel at home on the estate and are discovering more beautiful spots in Tuscany all the time. We hope to enjoy it together with our guests for many years to come.

José also became a member of the Carnevale in Castiglion Fibocchi, 10 km from Casa le Rondini. Her first blog from Tuscany for the Dutch website Ciao Tutti is about the colourful Carnevale dei Figli di Bocco. If you’d like to read her blog (in Dutch), please click here.

José was a guest of the special international edition of the Dutch radio programme Vroege Vogels as a Dutch person living abroad. She was interviewed on the estate of our casa. That was a nice link with her work as a forest ranger for Natuurmonumenten during 20 years. The show (in Dutch) was broadcasted on 8 January 2023. If you like, you can listen to it here