About Tuscany

Tuscany is quintessential Italy.
“And where is there, other than Italy ?” - to quote a friend.

Tuscany is where Italian was born as a language, in the sense that of the many Italian successor dialects to Latin, Tuscan was the one that came to impose itself as standard Italian not least because the great city states were Tuscan.
Dante, the greatest Italian poet was, after all, Tuscan.

Tuscany is perhaps the Italian region with the greatest wealth of historic artistic towns and cities, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo - to mention the most obvious. It also has some of Italy’s most striking landscapes, the beautiful hills often topped with old villages and castles, the characteristic tall cypress trees punctuating the vista, a landscape shaped by man over millenia, yet still with wild wooded areas. Tuscany also boasts excellent food and fine wines such as Chianti or Brunello di Montalcino.
Tuscany deserves its reputation as one of the best regions of Italy to visit.

I first explored Tuscany in the summer of 1977 when, while hitch-hiking, I was fortunate enough to fall in with a young man from Antibes as I was trying to get from Pisa to San Gimignano. He was also there to explore but had wheels in the form of a Renault 4 and he had a tent. As we were both glad of a travelling companion we ended up staying together for five days. This was when with his help I first started to learn some Italian.
You really need a vehicle of your own to make the most of Tuscany and get to some of the places off the beaten track.
Clara and I took my parents on a week’s driving tour of Tuscany over twenty years ago, that time staying one night in San Gimignano in style in a fine hotel on the main square, not to mention also Siena and Bagno Vignoni.

My oldest Italian friend, Umberto Cini, who I did my interpreter training with, is a Tuscan from Livorno.
His sister-in-law runs an agriturismo, that is farm-based holiday rooms and flats with food if required, near Volterra. So this seemed a natural choice for a destination, when my father asked me a couple of years ago to come up with a place for a gîte-style holiday for my parents, brother and sister and partners. The project took some time to come to fruition but was finally realized last week.

The farm at Statiano turned out to be in the deepest and most picturesque countryside. Everything is still lush and green at this time of year with a profusion of wild flowers. The buildings are very tastefully renovated and comfortable while preserving their rustic character. Our host Tina was very helpful with advice on excursions and, when we ate in, the local home-cooking food and the farm’s wine were of high quality, including even wild boar one evening.

Sadly the weather wasn’t up to much, confirming that even in the Mediterranean one should “ne’er cast a clouth before April’s out”. It rained at some point every day except Friday when we could finally do some serious sitting about outside in the sun in the grounds around the house admiring, and in my case painting the views. Even so, with the exception of a planned evening stroll around Volterra where we ended up sheltering in a café from a grim 9°C downpour, the weather didn’t prevent us from getting out and about.

Driving up from Pisa airport on the Saturday we struck lucky at a roadside bar/family restaurant in the countryside which hadn’t really intended to serve any customers but did the eight of us proud at a table parallel to their own family’s with a lunch of local prosciutto, wild boar salami, their own pecorino cheese, pickled wild mushrooms, shell your own fresh beans and other delicacies. This rather set the tone for a week of gastronomic Tuscan eating. After arriving at the farm and sleeping all of this off, we took a walk to explore the immediate vicinity, seeing a wealth of cyclamens and finding porcupine spines, though the animal itself was to elude us all week.

Umberto and Silvia (Tina’s sister) came up from Livorno to see us on the Sunday. Umberto, ever a mine of local information, showed us the nearby hill villages of Micciano and Montegemoli, where another ourstanding lunch was had and we later strolled ourselves around Montecatini VC. In a way being off the tourist track seeing these delightful villages is every bit as satisfying as visiting the more famous, and objectively more beautiful, yet in practice overcrowded Tuscan destinations.

This proved to be the case on Monday when we revisited Volterra (where twenty years ago we had seen the square occupied by colourful flag throwers and thunderous drummers) in the morning and San Gimignano in the afternoon. San Gimignano with its elegant towers is still as pretty as always but it has really got very busy.

So instead on Tuesday we did a bit of a Carducci trail to the 4km long avenue of old cypress trees leading up to Bolgheri and the hill town of Castagneto where it was very quiet and also very wet, so we sheltered in a wine bar to sample some local products. Later down at the coast where we had a light fish lunch in a place overlooking the sea, it stopped raining and we visited Populonia climbing the fortress tower for the view towards Elba and up the coast., before a brief look over the fence at the Etruscan burial mounds down by the sea.

Wednesday saw the younger generation more active on a beautiful 8km walk along the track that mainly follows the ridge from Micciano to Querceto where we had left a vehicle to get us back to the farm. It was easy going with some great views. The highlight was an astonishing encounter with a heavily pregnant semi-wild pig that wandered up the track towards us where we stood stock still for ten minutes, as she approached us, sniffed us and then decided it was safe enough to walk past us.

On Thursday we took quite a long drive to revisit Siena. While just strolling about the large old town is rewarding in itself, as too the experience of a leisurely lunch on a terrace in the glorious PIazza del Campo, some of Siena’s geatest glories are indoors in the many renaissance frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico, the Cathedral and the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

On the finally warm and sunny Friday the younger ones strolled around the hill village of Libbiano, which while appearing to be a stone’s throw across the valley from Micciano is actually a 12km tortuous drive from it, before doing a three hour walk along the track into the Monterufoli nature reserve, though sadly no wild animals bigger than squirrels were forthcoming this time.

And so all too quickly a varied and enjoyable week in rural Tuscany was at an end, leaving only a desire for more in better weather.

But as with any holiday, what really counted was the company and it was a great experience to have the whole family together for a week in such a pleasant and amicable atmosphere.