The Italian historic city is a different kind of investment from almost anything else available in the global real estate market. It is not merely that the buildings are old, or that the streets are beautiful, or that the views are exceptional, though all of these things are true. It is that the supply of genuinely exceptional property within these centres is structurally fixed and will not increase. Every building in the historic centre of Florence is protected by the Italian Ministry of Culture. No new building of equivalent quality will ever be constructed within the UNESCO perimeter. What exists now is what will exist in fifty years, and the demand for a share of it will not diminish.

Building Heritage works in the historic centres of the cities where we operate: Florence, Lucca, and the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria. In Florence, this means apartments in Renaissance palazzi on the Lungarni, historic residences in Oltrarno, pied-à-terre in the most sought-after streets of the centre, and the occasional piano nobile in a building of architectural significance. In Lucca, it means apartments and residences within the intact sixteenth-century walls, in palazzi whose internal spaces retain the proportions and materials of their original construction. In the Umbrian and Sienese hill towns, it means historic houses in centres of remarkable coherence, where the relationship between architecture, landscape and everyday life has a quality that the more famous urban centres can no longer provide to the same degree.