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Ca’ dei Frati, “House of the Friars”, owes its name to Carmelite monks who once tended vineyards here, their coat of arms still gracing the old cellar doorway and now the winery’s emblem, a reminder of centuries‑old devotion to the land.  

Although the estate’s origins can be traced to a 1782 reference to “a house with a cellar in Lugana within the lands of Sermion known as the Friars’ place,” it wasn’t until 1939 that Felice Dal Cero, sensing this land’s latent promise, established the modern family‑run vision on those southern shores of Lake Garda.  

Over decades, the family expanded from those modest 4 hectares to nearly 200, guiding four generations of meticulous viticulture amid glacial soils – a unique mineral signature nurtured by the lake’s moderating influence, which bathes the vines in sunshine by day and cools them at night.  

Today all vineyard parcels in Lugana di Sirmione – and even the newer 11 hectares in Valpolicella at Pian di Castagnè – are estate‑grown and individually vinified, producing wines that speak with crystalline clarity of Turbiana (Lugana) or bold Valpolicella red. It’s this obsessive attention to plot, timing, and vine behavior, practiced daily through the seasons, that has transformed Ca’ dei Frati into a living testament: a historic refuge reborn as one of Italy’s most respected benchmarks.