PROJECTS & STORIES | Fortuitous pairings

by Roberta Busnelli


Autumn 2023. Rome is getting ready to host the 44^th edition of the Ryder Cup, the first time in Italy for the world’s biggest golf teams competition and one of the most-watched sporting event in the world.

With the 44^th edition, history, tradition, emotions and high sportsmanship will take the stage in Rome, at the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, from 25 September to 1 October. For the Italian golf industry, organising the 2023 Ryder Cup is a success story with historic weight, one which has decreed its triumphant entry among the international elite of the sport.

Founded in 1927 by British spice trader Samuel Ryder, it is held every two years and alternating between European and American cities. The Ryder Cup counterposes two teams, composed of 12 of the best golfers from Europe and the US, in a battle to win the historic cup and the national pride. The Marco Simone Golf and Country Club has been completely renovated to host the tournament and will become an iconic place with 150 hectares of wonderful countryside, the magnificent Marco Simone castle and its location at

just 17 kilometres from the heart of Rome, which means that landmarks such as St Peter's Basilica are visible from several tee boxes.

Given the importance of this Italian debut, the presence of the Antinori Family is a must. Indeed, this long lineage of passionate golf enthusiasts extends all the way since the beginning of the 20^th century, with the Marquis Niccolò Antinori, a pioneer of the sport, which was relatively unknown at the time in Italy.

Marchesi Antinori is a prestigious historic Tuscan company, dedicated to wine production for more than six hundred years: ever since Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the Arte Fiorentina dei Vinattieri in 1385.

Villa Antinori has been selected as Official Wine Supplier of the first Italian edition of the Ryder Cup. The wines that will represent Italian quality and wine tradition during the event will be Villa Antinori Rosso Toscana IGT and Villa Antinori Bianco Toscana IGT.

The fact that the ‘Villa’ will play the role of cultural envoy is no accident, as it’s the symbolic product of Casa Antinori. It was Marquis Niccolò Antinori himself who gave this wine the name of the family villa, an emblem of the identity of Chianti and Tuscany. Nestled amid the rolling hills of San Casciano in Val di Pesa (near Florence), Villa del Cigliano, designed in the label, has always been linked to the family. It’s here that Antinori generations have been born and raised, since 1546, the year in which Alessandro di Niccolò Antinori acquired the building.

Sealing the cooperation are the words of Guy Kinnings, the Director of the Ryder Cup and Deputy CEO of the European Tour, for whom this fortuitous pairing was an entirely natural choice, thanks to their history, traditions and passion for well-made things. The nearly 100-year history of the Ryder Cup, a hobby which became a renowned international sporting event over time, could only be intertwined with the long-standing entrepreneurial excellence of the Antinori Marquises, whose family motto is: Te duce proficio (the quest for excellence).

This common thread, made of history, patrimony and high quality, vocation and dedication, has also led to an equally natural cooperation between the Giorgetti Group and the Marchesi Antinori brand for Milan Design Week 2023. In the display spaces of Giorgetti Spiga - The Place in Milan (recently opened at 31 Via della Spiga), customers and visitors enjoyed Villa Antinori wine for the Ryder Cup. Indeed, because within the new Giorgetti home, inside a seventeenth-century building, everything is discovered gradually, in a journey into the structure, a truly immersive sensory experience. Fortuitous pairings, the ones that are entirely fitting, apt and natural, occur through elective affinities, through shared values and memories, through harmony and reverberations that arrive from afar. So distant, yet so close.