CASTELFALFI, Italy, June 27 (Reuters) - Tuscany has long been so overrun with Britons lapping up the culture and the wine that it is known as "Chiantishire" like a British county.
Now the Germans have gone one better, buying an entire village and surrounding farmland.
But despite newspaper headlines in nearby towns about a "German conquest", the locals in Castelfalfi -- all four of them -- do not seem worried about the threat to their tranquillity.
"It's a bit too quiet around here," said 73-year-old retired gamekeeper Camillo Carli, leaning on a wall in his singlet.
Perched on a breezy hilltop with commanding views over the Tuscan hills, silent but for birds and crickets, Castelfalfi is the kind of unspoilt pastoral scene that makes tourists to Italy sigh blissfully. It will not remain that way for long.
If its new owner -- Europe's largest tour operator, the German company TUI -- gets planning permission, it will get a name change and a makeover to become a huge four-star holiday complex for German, Nordic, French and British tourists.
Settled since Etruscan times, with a medieval castle on the site of an ancient Roman fortress, once owned by the Medicis who ruled Florence in the Renaissance, the hamlet has been gradually abandoned over the past century.
At first glance it looks immaculate, with potted plants on the pavements and a tidy, leafy square.
But behind the pretty facade, all but a few doorways are thick with spiderwebs, most of the windows have no glass and there are pigeons and swifts nesting inside the houses.
The village school was shut down three decades ago. The medieval church of San Floriano is overgrown with lavender, its roof has collapsed and the clock is stuck at 7:22.
NO LONGER ITALY?
This is not Castelfalfi's first brush with the Germans: the ancient castle, with its strategic views over the hills towards Florence, Pisa and Volterra, was the occupying German army's local headquarters in World War Two and was hit by Allied bombs.
Some fans of the village fear that it will soon cease to be a genuine, historic little piece of Italy.
TUI's plans, still subject to local authorities' approval, envisage two golf courses, three hotels catering variously to sports fans, adventure tourists and families, plus rental apartments and restaurants and sports facilities.
The company does not want to say how many tourists the renamed "Toscana Resort Castelfalfi" will host, but the media has estimated its capacity at 3,000 people.
"It's going to be a holiday village, isn't it? Not an Italian town," said Lorraine Thorne, an English woman teaching oil painting at a small artists' summer colony in Castelfalfi.
But with only one shop selling olive oil and wine grown in nearby farms now owned by TUI, a roadside restaurant in German hands and a pool and conference centre also owned by TUI which on a recent visit was hosting a German drugs firm, the hamlet is not exactly bubbling over with Italian culture anyway.
The German takeover of Castelfalfi has sparked debate about how far Italy should go in its embrace of foreign tourism.
Tourism experts see it as an extreme example of the trend towards "diffuse tourism", where developers buy up properties around a town to turn them into hotels or holiday apartments.
For Mayor Massimiliano Dindalini of the Tuscan commune of Civitella, developers should not be allowed to buy up "living communities", but a virtually abandoned hamlet like Castelfalfi has to choose between outside investors or slow decay.
"It doesn't make any difference to me which country they come from, but what kind of investment plan they have," he said.
PRESERVING THE LANDSCAPE
TUI rejects the notion that it wants to turn Castelfalfi into some kind of Tuscan "theme park".
"That is absolutely not our aim," the company's head of media relations, Robin Zimmermann, said by telephone from Germany. "We want to keep the typical Tuscan landscape because the target group for Tuscany wants such a landscape."
Not that Tuscany needs foreign encouragement to dress up for visitors: on a recent visit the town of San Gimignano echoed to the sound of medieval drummers, Volterra's religious hospital order was in medieval garb and they were jousting in Arezzo.
To preserve the Tuscan landscape, TUI plans to keep up farming activities around Castelfalfi, serving up the produce from the 30 hectares (74 acres) of Chianti vines, 8,000 olive trees and the Tuscan beef herd at the tables of the restaurants it will build.
Although TUI did not buy the local Roman Catholic church, it has promised to help restore the 12th-century temple and Father Paolo, a priest from a nearby town, said as he took pictures of the picturesque ruins that a rescue plan was at an early stage.
Camillo Carli, whose house rented from the church is stuck on the back of the ruins of San Floriano, had a twinkle in his eye at the prospect of such repairs, and of more than 300 jobs promised and business from free-spending tourists.
"If there is cash, it will be cash for everyone," he said, rubbing forefinger and thumb. "Otherwise there's just misery."
