Damiano Ciolli
Lazio, ItalyDamiano Ciolli works seven hectares of Cesanese d'Affile on the deep red volcanic soils of Olevano Romano, a hilltop village forty-five kilometres south-east of Rome. The estate produces fewer than 25,000 bottles a year, all built around old Ciolli family vineyards, including the 1953 single plot that becomes Cirsium. It sits at the centre of the Cesanese di Olevano Romano DOC's quality renaissance.
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About Damiano Ciolli
Olevano Romano is a medieval village perched at six hundred metres on Monte Celeste, in the wedge of Lazio that lies between the Castelli Romani lakes and the Cesanese hills of Ciociaria. The Ciolli vineyards sit lower than the village, between three hundred and four hundred and fifty metres, on terraces of deep red volcanic soil sheltered on three sides by the surrounding hills. Daily breezes off the Tyrrhenian sea keep the warm summers in check, and the diurnal swing keeps the Cesanese d'Affile fresh.
The Ciolli family have farmed these vineyards for at least three generations. Damiano's grandfather Guido and father Costantino worked them in the post-war Lazio model: tend the vines, sell the must in bulk to Roman bottlers, repeat. Damiano took the cellar back in 2001, at twenty-three, on the conviction that Cesanese d'Affile could make wines worth bottling under their own name.
He works the estate with Letizia Rocchi, his partner and a viticulture and oenology PhD. Together they farm without herbicides or chemical inputs, lean on green manure and biodynamic preparations to keep the volcanic soils alive, and let indigenous yeasts run every fermentation. The cellar work is unhurried: Silene matures a year in concrete, Cirsium goes into French oak for eighteen months on the lees, then both rest in bottle before release.
The range is short by design. Silene is the regular Cesanese di Olevano Romano Superiore, drawn from vineyards planted in 1981 and 2002, around twenty thousand bottles a year. Cirsium is the riserva, all from Damiano's grandfather's 1953 plot, produced in only three or four thousand bottles. Botte Ventidue, the white, is a more recent project from Letizia: roughly seventy percent Trebbiano Verde with thirty percent Ottonese, both old Lazio whites that the Castelli Romani co-operatives had largely abandoned.
Cesanese d'Affile is sometimes pitched as the Pinot Noir of central Italy, which oversells the comparison but captures something real: aromatic, mid-weight, more about lift and detail than power. The work coming out of Olevano Romano in the past two decades, with Damiano Ciolli at its centre, is what dragged Lazio's Cesanese DOCs back into the conversation about serious Italian red wine.
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Plate I · LAZIO
Damiano Ciolli on the Lazio wine atlas
Common questions
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The estate is in Olevano Romano, a hilltop village in the province of Rome about forty-five kilometres south-east of the city. The vineyards sit at three hundred to four hundred and fifty metres above sea level on the volcanic slopes below the village, in the Lazio region.
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