Golf Club Centanni was, for more than twenty years, a small 9-hole pitch & putt course at via di Centanni 7/8, in Bagno a Ripoli — a town in the south-eastern belt of greater Florence. Founded in 2003 by the Bianchi family on the same land that had been home to the Centanni restaurant since 1962, the club closed its doors at the end of 2024. This page is dedicated to its memory, gathering the essential facts of its story — from its origins as a family trattoria to its final season — so that it can take its proper place as a recognisable chapter in the sporting and social history of the area.

This was never a large club: nine short holes, par 27, seven hectares of hillside ground, and a simple clubhouse built next to the historic restaurant. And yet, for many Florentines, Centanni was the front door to golf — at a time when the game was still widely seen as a closed pursuit. Hundreds of children and adults took their first swings here. The Memorial Gilberto Monami was played here, in four annual editions. And, hole by hole and year by year, a small but genuine village sporting community grew around it.

The origins: the Centanni trattoria (1962)

The story begins in 1962, when Silvana Burgassi and Silvano Bianchi opened the Centanni restaurant in a country house set on the road of the same name, on a panoramic spot in the hills of Bagno a Ripoli. The trattoria started life as a straightforward Tuscan kitchen and, within a decade, had become one of the area’s gastronomic reference points — frequented by Florentines on a Sunday outing and by regulars from the city’s southern belt. The operation was family-run, the menu followed the seasons of the kitchen garden, and the wood-fired oven for meat dishes became a quiet signature of the place.

For more than forty years the Centanni restaurant carried on its work around the core of the original farmhouse, gradually enlarging the dining room and tending the garden outside. It was in this setting, in the early 2000s, that the idea took shape of adding a sporting activity to the restaurant, on the land that belonged to the property. The inspiration was partly personal — the Bianchi family’s own passion for golf — and partly local: at the time, Bagno a Ripoli had no golf course of its own within easy reach, and Ugolino at Impruneta required commitments of membership and fees that were difficult to access for anyone who simply wanted to try the game.

The golf course is born (2003)

Golf Club Centanni ASD was formally founded in 2003 as a not-for-profit amateur sports association. The course design was entrusted to Vettraino, a specialist in short layouts, who laid out a 9-hole pitch & putt par 27 across roughly seven hectares of hilly ground. Every hole was a par 3, with distances ranging from 60 to 110 metres, designed to be played with short irons and wedges. It was a deliberate choice: create a course that was truly accessible to beginners, while at the same time offering experienced players a place to sharpen their short game.

Alongside the course, a driving range with ten bays, a putting green and a chipping area were built. The clubhouse was deliberately simple, set up in continuity with the restaurant itself: changing rooms, a secretariat and a small pro shop. The business model was light, built on modest annual club memberships, affordable daily green fees and close integration with the restaurant, which provided bar and kitchen service for members and visitors alike.

An accessible golf school

From the start, Centanni had the identity of a teaching club. Pitch & putt is the ideal discipline for newcomers: distances are short, the kit needed is minimal (three or four irons and a putter are usually enough), and a full round of the course takes barely an hour. Over the years the club ran taster courses, individual and group lessons, and summer activities for children. The Italian Golf Federation has long recognised the value of small facilities like this as gateways to the game, and Centanni fitted naturally into that network.

For many children and teenagers from Bagno a Ripoli and the neighbouring towns, Centanni was their first real contact with a golf course: a close-up, unintimidating experience, played out in a family setting. It is the kind of result that doesn’t show up in trophy cabinets, but which left a wide trail across the sporting fabric of the area.

The Memorial Gilberto Monami

The best-known event associated with Centanni was the Memorial Gilberto Monami, a charity tournament held in memory of Gilberto Monami, a figure tied to local sporting life. The tournament ran for four editions, ending in 2023, with a Stableford format over 18 holes (two laps of the 9-hole course) and was open to both members and guests. The proceeds went to the Italian Red Cross, Bagno a Ripoli Committee, in support of its rescue and assistance work across the area.

Over the years the Memorial became the club’s end-of-season fixture: a day of sport, a meal from the Centanni kitchen, an informal prize-giving. The fact that the tournament ran for four editions speaks to the club’s roots in the local network of associations, and to its capacity to turn a small sporting operation into a real expression of community solidarity.

Events and local tradition

Alongside the Memorial Monami, Centanni hosted modest in-house competitions over the years, junior gatherings and social events tied to the calendar of local holidays. The diary was never crowded — that wouldn’t have suited the club’s scale — but it was steady. The facility was also used by companies for golf-themed team-building days, by schools for promotional activities, and occasionally as a venue for visiting teaching professionals travelling through the area.

The closure (2024)

At the end of 2024 Golf Club Centanni closed for good. The decision came after a period of reflection on succession: Silvana Burgassi and Silvano Bianchi’s children, by now engaged in other professional paths, chose not to continue running the combined restaurant-and-club operation. The property was therefore transferred to new owners — the Travelli family in partnership with Niccolò Sborgi, both names connected to Blue Clinic and Villa Jole — who began the conversion of the area for residential use at the start of 2026, with new housing units planned on what had been the course.

The closure of Centanni fits into a wider national pattern: small members’ clubs are being squeezed by the cost of maintaining playing surfaces and by business models increasingly oriented toward integrated resorts. Even so, the end of Centanni represents a loss for the network of accessible teaching courses in the Florence area, as well as the conclusion of a family story spanning more than sixty years if you count the parallel life of the restaurant.

A chapter in the sporting history of Bagno a Ripoli

Bagno a Ripoli has a long tradition of grassroots sport and community organisations, and Centanni occupied a specific niche within it: that of the small, privately-run facility with a public vocation. Not a large federation club, not a mass sports body, but a family-scale operation that for more than twenty years made an additional possibility available to its community. Its memory belongs alongside countless other small ventures — bocce courts, parish gymnasiums, neighbourhood sports clubs — that have built Italian sporting capital from the bottom up.

Preserving the memory of experiences like this matters for reasons that go beyond nostalgia. It means recognising the plural ways in which sport is practised in a place, and the value of private initiatives that complement public and federation provision. Golf Club Centanni in Bagno a Ripoli belongs squarely to that heritage.

About this website

The domain golfclubcentanni.it was used by the original club right up until its closure. After the club ceased its activities and the domain was released, we chose to register it and dedicate it to a new editorial project: an independent guide to golf in Tuscany. This page is where we record the original club; every other page on the site carries autonomous editorial content with no connection to the former Golf Club Centanni ASD, the Bianchi family or the current owners of the land.

For the details of our editorial project, please see the About us page; for the legal information regarding the domain ownership and the absence of any relationship with the parties named above, please refer to our Terms of Use. For the guide to the region’s active courses: Tuscany golf courses — 2026 guide.