Hotel Antica Tabaccaia

Antica Tabaccaia Resort**** has far origins and every feature of the structure remembers the details of the historic mansion of the ancient period. From it was origin a very particular type of tobacco, The Kentucky

It is a tobacco derivative, by hybridization and selection, from the North American flue-cured type. Kentucky tobacco is a dark tobacco belonging to the class of flue-cured, cared with direct fire, with special woods, smoke of whose slowly penetrates into the cells of tobacco leaves, giving them a dark blackish color.
Processing of tobacco leaves was carried out by dedicated women, who in the beginning used to stick with a needle and thread all “cimarole” (finest leaves) collected, forming lines that could weight up to 30kg.
The “cimarole” were then hung on the "bacchiole" (beech branches) for a few days. inside the Antica Tabaccaia (on the floor terracotta suite) there were many furnaces that were used to drying the leaves, the ignition of the furnace was performed by a very experienced person because the “fuel” used was the oak wood and the furnace had not to produce flames but only smoke.
The floors are still in typical Florentine “cotto” (Florentine terracotta), in past it allowed to hold the heat of furnaces and to release it even after turning off the furnaces.
The wooden beams on the top floor are still connected by hollow tiles (tavelle), tiles were also made of the same raw material of the floor and they had the same function of it. The leaves were dried in the gallery on the top floor where there were small windows (as there are now), where, if there was too much smoke, you could open them from the outside.
The spaces to dry the leaves were composed by long and narrow compartments (now suites and rooms) without any air vents. In fact today, each automated rotating window is a unique patented project that allows the Antica Tabaccaia to re-light these points and therefore to welcome guests in the hotel rooms and now faithfully reproduce the wall that once formed the drying channel of the tobacco leaves.