Waves of Time

There is a way of seeing Amastuola that only reveals itself as you climb toward the masseria. The avenue opens little by little, centuries-old olive trees file past on either side like a silver wall that forms and dissolves, and suddenly the view widens: the vines do not run straight, as you would expect. They roll. They follow one another for nearly three kilometres in parallel waves that seem to move as you advance, and when the wind or the low light of sunset touches them, they take on the look of combed velvet.1 That design bears the signature of Fernando Caruncho, the Spanish landscape designer who imagined it — and who has passed away in Madrid at the age of 68.2

To call him simply a landscape architect, however, would be reductive — and he would not have liked it. “I am a jardinero, not a landscaper,”³ he liked to repeat. A philosopher by training and a gardener by vocation, Caruncho spent more than forty years building one of the most recognisable bodies of work in contemporary landscape design. But among all his creations, Amastuola holds a special place: here, for the first time, he designed an entirely agricultural landscape as if it were a garden.⁴

The encounter

It all begins in 2003, when Peppino Montanaro purchases the Amastuola masseria — abandoned for decades — together with the roughly 150 hectares of land surrounding it, on a plateau 220 metres above sea level, in an area rich with archaeological remains where agriculture has been practised for millennia. The idea was bold: to turn that land into a large organic vineyard. It was precisely the ambition of the project, Montanaro recalled, that led him to seek out an experienced landscape designer; after a period of research, the family found Fernando Caruncho — the only one among those considered who had already worked with agricultural elements in his gardens.⁵

The family had come to know him through his books. “We discovered Caruncho by reading Mirrors of Paradise, a collection of his first fifteen years of work,”⁶ recalls Giuseppe Sportelli, commercial director of the Amastuola winery. “We connected with Fernando immediately: the artist links the human and the natural in a way that reminds us of our place in the scheme of things.”⁶

Caruncho visited the estate on a cold winter morning, as the snow was falling. He described that moment as deeply musical — a special day in which time and space appeared to him as a single perception.⁷ From that first look, the vision of the waves began to take shape.

A grid against the waves

Caruncho was, by his own admission, a master of the right angle. His gardens in Spain and across Europe are compositions of rigorous geometry, reflecting pools, orderly parterres — his love of the grid was almost cubist. At Amastuola he did something different. He took his allegiance to straight lines and set it in tension with an organic impulse: the straight roads crossing the estate intersect with the ripples of the vines in a continuous balance between usefulness and natural beauty.¹

“Visually you get the shock of the grid against the waves. That shock is everything.”¹

It took around eight years of work to bring the project to completion in its entirety.⁸ Then came the work on the olive trees: some two thousand ancient specimens, many dating to the thirteenth century, some with trunks more than two and a half metres across. They were destined to become firewood; the family decided they would have a different future. With Caruncho’s collaboration they were recovered and relocated into twenty-four islands, arranged organically across the vineyard and along the historic roads of the masseria.⁸ Their leathery canopies act as a counterpoint to the glossy green of the vines — silver-green against deep green, ancient memory against movement.

The genius loci

To understand why Amastuola is the way it is, one has to enter his way of working. Every project began with a visit to the place — not to impose something on it, but to listen to it. The ideas, he said, were already there: in the light, in the earth, in the climate; they only had to be read, and then drawn. If that did not happen, he waited. He called that waiting the genius loci, the spirit of the place, convinced that it is things that want to come into contact with us, and that our task is simply to make room for them.⁴

Geometry was his instrument for establishing that contact, the very grammar of the garden. And light was the material of transformation, a presence he considered almost physical. A garden, for him, was “a geometry illuminated by light that connects the human being with the landscape, and therefore with the cosmos.”³

At Amastuola, all of this took on a precise form. Caruncho spoke of sensing, before that land, a deep connection with the pre-Socratic philosophy he loved — with Heraclitus and Parmenides, with the idea that everything is movement and perpetual transformation. It is no coincidence that we are in Magna Graecia, where many of those thinkers had lived. The waves of the vineyard are born from there: from the idea that nature, and we within it, are always in motion.⁷ “The wave of change” is the metaphor the Montanaro family made their own — landscape as the rhythmic succession of the seasons, in which time alters colours and forms, and the hand of man intervenes by pruning a tree, restoring a dry-stone wall, a road.⁶

For Caruncho, the waves of Amastuola are a movement that carries with it — as the Pythagoreans said — a music of its own.⁷

A music that, he added, speaks not so much to the mind as to the senses and the heart, in a universal language.⁷ Perhaps this is why the vineyard-garden moves everyone who walks through it, even those who know nothing of its story: before understanding it, one feels it.

A collective work

There is one last aspect of his thinking worth remembering, because it says a great deal about Amastuola too. Caruncho never regarded his gardens as individual works. Speaking of Amastuola itself, he maintained that the beauty of that space was not his own doing: he had merely uncovered the correspondences already present in the place.⁷ The rest — the will, the vision, the faith in an idea — belonged to a group of people who had believed in it: the Montanaro family, those who worked the land, those who continue to care for it.

When a vision like this is realised with authenticity, he said, it becomes an act of collective love — and it gives back to people something essential: dignity, hope, a sense of recovered innocence.⁷ The gardener, in the end, does nothing but reveal a splendour that was already in the place, and that returns to the place.

Today, arriving at Amastuola, that splendour is still there. The light keeps changing hour by hour, the waves of the vines keep shifting with the seasons, the olive trees keep watch. A landscape, Caruncho said, cannot be understood in a single instant: it must be crossed over time, waited for, seen to transform. His vineyard-garden will do exactly that in the years to come — and will keep telling his story.

Thank you, Fernando.
The waves of time you drew still cross this place.

Sources

1. Description of the vineyard project, official Cantine Amastuola website and New York Times Style Magazine feature, “The Shockwaves of Fernando Caruncho” (2019).
2. News of his passing: Gardenia (Cairo Editore), “Farewell to Fernando Caruncho, Spanish master of landscape” (2026).
3. Fernando Caruncho’s statements on his idea of the garden, light and geometry (interview with AD Italia and project materials).
4. Fernando Caruncho Architects / Amastuola project documentation: the first entirely agricultural landscape conceived as a garden.
5. Interview with Giuseppe (Peppino) Montanaro, Gardenia (Cairo Editore), on the origins of the project.
6. Giuseppe Sportelli, commercial director of the Amastuola winery, interview “The wave of change at Amastuola,” DoctorWine (2020).
7. Video interview with Fernando Caruncho on the Amastuola project (transcript; the phrases reported here are rendered in indirect form from his own words).
8. Vineyard profile and recovery of the ancient olive trees: FreshPlaza and Cantine Amastuola website.