Spring Break in Tuscany

Flying back to England after five days in Tuscany, my first thoughts about how to describe this adventure are of time and space. If the past couple months have been a lesson in the presence of the past—weekly doses of palaces, castles, colleges, and museums that celebrate times before the U.S. was a country—the last five days have been a master class in an even earlier time. Consistently we were walking streets and visiting buildings that predated Columbus finding America. What was considered old in England is likely a Renaissance remodeling job of a Roman or even Etruscan building here in Tuscany. A church near where we stayed describes a 1604 painting as modern, and I suppose it was compared to the medieval frescoes of a couple hundred years earlier painted on the adjoining walls.

Tuscany is a very distinctive space, made all the more clearly distinctive when driving from the flat farm lands near Rome. From artichoke plants to huge rosemary bushes, to olive groves, to hillsides of vines, Tuscany’s rolling hills and agricultural setting is also very much a cultural one. The hill towns make clear why an Italian “nation” has always been such a challenge. While they share an agriculture, each town stands on its own with distinct pasts and presents. Sienna and Firenze (I have to find out why the English—and Americans—use the name Florence) were the big kids in the neighborhood and a number of other town’s fortunes were dependent upon them, but others carved (literally) their own place.  I suppose one could say something similar about certain regions of the U.S. and elsewhere, but it is striking here.

            We stayed half way between Florence and Sienna in a modest not-hill town, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, at an old house converted into seven apartments. Actually we were in the converted barn. The views outside our place were spectacular. We took dozens of landscape pictures during our time in Tuscany, but it will take a better camera (and photographer) to capture the scene and atmosphere.

        The first hill town we visited was Sienna, the widely acknowledged best of the bunch. The piazza and duomo (cathedral) are justly famous—really beautiful buildings—and a nice essay could be written comparing this setting with Brugge.  

"PiazzadelCampoSiena" by Massimo Catarinella -

where's the car?

The narrow, medieval streets are a maze, and that was unfortunately literally true for us, as we were completely lost when we left the city center and headed for our car, which we had so confidently parked near a school whose name we didn’t write down and of course forgot. (That 50-word sentence is an attempt to capture our meandering ways.) We couldn’t ask anyone how to get to our car, because we didn’t know where it was. As we walked down one narrow lane after another, we would remember a window or door or sign and feel momentary elation until we realized we had (or had not) since taken a turn that put us in unknown alley. The weather wasn’t awful, but it was drizzling, and by the time we did find the car, we were miserably wet.

        We learned our lessons on a trip to San Gimignano and Volterra. We wrote down in detail our starting places and took pictures of the parking space with what we thought were distinctive backgrounds. That the towns were considerably smaller, with generally straight (if still narrow) streets, helped considerably. Both of these hill towns have wonderful settings. San Gimignano is distinctive because of its fourteen towers (once upon a time there were seventy). They dominate the town from afar and within the walls. The piazza has a medieval well in its center and two gelato shops along the side (one with a line of American school kids, the other with Italians school kids, but we still managed to secure a cone and cup of the rich treat).

well in the piazza, with two of the towers

 

The duomo’s walls are covered with magnificent 14^th century frescos telling Bible stories—we were impressed with how much of our Catholic schooling we could recall in recognizing the tales. The details of the faces and the clothes are so remarkable given that the artist was working with wet plaster and had to finish the work before it hardened. It is also remarkable how preserved this art is six hundred years later. 

One chapel in the duomo is devoted to Saint Fina, the saint of gillyflowers, who was grievously ill and paralyzed at age ten, and for the next five years lay on a wooden plank (legend is that she fused to the wood) until Saint Gregory the Great appeared in a vision and announced she would die in three months on his feast day, March 12th. His prophesy came true, and when the townspeople removed her body from the plank the church bells rang out on their own and gillyflowers—known as Saint Fina’s violets—burst into bloom on the plank. It became a shrine, and the sick who visited it were cured.

       No point in trying to make a clever or even smooth transition from that story. The next hill town, Volterra, we approached on a road that wound across the hills so that we saw it from afar on three sides before reaching it.  Outside the medieval walls are ruins of a Roman amphitheater. Nearby, part of the walls and fortress are a state prison. It was a weird juxtaposition; we wondered what conditions were like inside the prison. At least they probably aren’t waiting to meet with lions or bears on stage.

The town has an Etruscan museum that honors its pre-Roman past; a Basilica that is probably the earliest church we will ever see, a peaceful walled park, and a piazza with a palace. We thoroughly enjoyed this place. It just didn’t have any stories to top the previous one.

Approaching Volterra

medieval basilica

         Firenze is just about the complete opposite of the hill towns. It is a massive modern city in the valley along the Arno. We were stuck in traffic, surrounded by a swarm of motorcycles and scooters. As city workers blocked traffic to cut down some shoes on a wire across the street, they were met with a cacophony of horns and gestures. What a show for us tourists! But Florence does share an early Renaissance past with its region, and the major sites there are almost unbelievably major.  Dominating them all, is the massive duomo with its Brunelleschi dome (largest brick dome ever) and Giotto’s bell tower next to it.

 

It is awe inspiring—as was its intention. Interestingly to us, the wall paintings and sculpture inside the cathedral were not as remarkable as many other churches in Tuscany. But the art on the dome, which gave us instant headaches as we strained to view it, is magnificent. I would love to lie on the floor and look up, but I’d be quickly trampled—and this is the off season for tourists. Probably the second biggest attraction is the Market, with its leather goods and many tourist items (don’t worry we aren’t coming home with plastic bell towers for you). The actual Mercato Centrale is filled with food stalls celebrating the modern abundance of this area (and the rest of the world). We stopped for slices of pizza and glasses of chianti—when in Florence…

Speaking of food (now this is a transition),we learned how to make pasta in various forms from Vilma of Pasta Fresca in our town. I admit to some skepticism at first, but was completely won over by Vilma’s style, energy, and good humor; she was a perfect match for Kate. We made three kinds of ravioli as well spaghetti, farfalle (bowties) and penne. The recipes and techniques had been handed down from grandmother to mother to our teacher, who had been running the pasta shop for twenty-two years. We ate our hard work for lunch, and it was delicious with a bottle of chianti and Vilma’s sauce. We currently have great determination to put our lesson to use—beware if we stick to our resolution!

In the midst of all this ancient settings and traditions, we went to a very modern winery for a tour and tasting. The Antinori family has been making wine since the 12^th Century, and it is clear they plan hundreds of years more, given the massive, futuristic facility they opened in 2011.   The vats are huge and the caves have row upon row of barrels. Antinori has become a very large enterprise with multiple sites and various wines, but this shrine is mostly devoted to chianti. 

 

We visited other towns and sites, but I’ve run out of stories and leave you with some more pictures and captions:

	Carousel in Florence piazza
Butcher shop in Greve in Chiani--his brothers are all hanging from the ceiling inside
Rosemary Bush & Olive Tree	Olive Jars at Antinori Winery

            A final note to travellers: Our Alitalia flight home was cross listed with Etihad (UAE) Airways so beware when booking--no Chianti or Peroni on the way to London. On the other hand at least it flew, not like the hundreds of other flights cancelled because of a strike.