TUSCANY BELLA PROPERTIES

Tuscany Bella Properties is a partnership between Katharine Ogden Michaels and Elizabeth Wholey,
who have both lived and worked in Italy for over ten years.
They are personally familiar with all the properties represented here, having helped to restore, furnish,
maintain and manage several of them. Katharine and Elizabeth have been friends and collaborators
on a number of businesses off and on since the mid-seventies.

Katharine Ogden Michaels was brought up in Connecticut and Vermont, where she learned a love
of landscape (and stones) that made moving to central Italy a kind of homecoming.
She graduated from Yale University, and later got a Master’s degree from the University of California
at Berkeley in English and American literature.
She lived part-time in Rome from 1986 to 1990, moving to the high hills on the border between
Tuscany and Umbria in 1991, where she found and began restoration of the houses that later made up
the core ALTABELLA properties.
In 1992, she helped a family from Los Angeles find, purchase and restore the estate known as Villa Giaggioli
outside of Florence, whose agricultural and other operations she continues to manage.
Between 1990 and the present, she has done full restorations of seven Italian farm house properties
and villas in Tuscany and Umbria.
She now lives in Rome and Umbria with her husband, writer Leonard Michaels.

Elizabeth Wholey was brought up on a small farm in Northern California, where her parents grew
many of the trees and vegetables which she now cultivates in her own Italian kitchen garden.
Elizabeth credits her Californian-Italian immigrant neighbors for instilling the passion for cooking,
gardening and a way of life which she is now able to fully enjoy.
She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied art and art history.
There followed a period of writing art reviews, then 17 years as the owner of a successful graphics firm in Berkeley.
In 1993, Elizabeth moved to the Tuscan Umbrian border, where she restored
the old stone farm house she lives.
During the same period, she also helped to design and plant the gardens around the Altabella houses.
In addition to being a founding partner of Tuscany Bella Properties and Elizabeth Wholey’s Art and Artisan
Tours of Tuscany and Umbria, she is currently co-writing a cookbook for Amore Sapore, Italian cooks with
whom she works when she is not exploring the back roads of central Italy.