21st Oct – 29th Oct 2024
In my head, when I have thought about coming to Italy for the first time I have pictured myself in Tuscany. My mental images of the place being a mélange of all the pictures that I have seen online and in magazines, blended with a sense of Provence in a French summer. In my imagination it has been sunny and warm with the tall thin cypress trees and the renovated, tercotta-tiled villas sprinkled across the hillsides groaning with grape vines and olive trees. Some of this was true.
October can be a beautiful month here. The oppressive heat of summer giving way to more benign temperatures in the mid-twenties and the sunshine is theraputic rather than murderous. Or it can be wet and cool. Our experience was mainly the latter, unfortunately.
We headed into the hinterland of Tuscany, which really was beautiful and it reminded us a bit of our home county, Shropshire (autumnal vineyards, fruit laden olive groves, terracotta roofs and hilltop medieval villages aside). The roads were fairly winding and tortuous, giving Nick and Davide a bit of a challenge and making it noisy driving as the contents of the cupboards rattled around. We had a lunch/laundry stop in a town called Bolsena, situated on the lake of the same name. This is the largest volvanic lake in Europe, the last erruption being documented in 104BC. For some reason we were surprised to discover that Tuscany has many large lakes. Most are natural, but there are several reserviors created for hydroelectric porpoises.
Our next stop was a town called Lubriano. This is not only noteable on its own merits as an attractive old town built along the edge of a steep ridge, but it is what it looks at that puts it on the map. Across the gorge from Lubriano sits the curious town of Civita di Bagnoregio.
This is the medieval hilltop town of all medieval hilltop towns. Originally settled by the Etruscans about 2500 years ago, it is perched atop an isolated rocky outcrop in the middle of a wide gorge. Easy to defend, but a nightmare if you want to pop out to the shops…. Unfortunately the rock of the crop is not the hard stuff, it is the ‘tends-to-crumble-over-time-and-wash-away-in-the-rain’ stuff and so the town has become smaller as the centuries pass and bits fall away. It is a shadow of its former self and now has only 16 full time residents. It is, however, still a quite amazing place to see and visit. Since the 1960s it has be accessible by a long and steep footbridge, along which the residents are permitted to whizz up and down on their mopeds at certain times of day. They then transfer to their cars which are parked at the bottom of the hill under the footbridge, popping to the shops still being a pain in the proverbial. The little bar which managed our campsite organised us a ‘shuttle’ so we could go and see Civita, a gnarly 7km road journey away. We went in the late afternoon thereby catching it at sunset. For ‘shuttle’ read ‘some chap called Mario in an ancient car with no outward signs of having any taxi licence or formal status as a passenger carrying vehicle‘. He may have been the father of the lady in the bar. Mario dropped us off and gave us his number so that we could call him for a pick up later. No money changed hands at this point, but we were essentially marooned, so he was confident of his fare.
Civita was quite a marvel. A small toll is charged to walk across the foot bridge to the town and then a steep climb delivers you to the hill top and its warren of narrow streets and ancient buildings. There were a few bars and souvenir shops open for business but it felt very dead. We could see that many of the old homes were now tourist accomodation and that this late in the season, most of these were vacant. There were a few view points of the surrounding valley and hills but the worst view of Civitia is from Civita. We sampled a few wines in one of the bars whilst being amused by the antics of some of our fellow tourists – one can flâneur in Italy too – and waited for the sunset hour. Once it arrived we strolled back down the bridge and found a perch at the bottom to appreciate the town in the changing light.
As we sat there taking our photos we were approached by a woman in her late thirties, who slightly bashfully and in perfect English asked us if we had captured her and her boyfriend in one of our photos as they had walked down along the bridge towards us. Both of their phones had run out of power and they had no photos of themselves here. She asked if we had, could we forward it to her? Nick did his usual trick of extracting an extraordinary amount of information from her in about 10 seconds finding out that she was Swedish (hence the accentless English), her boyfriend was Italian, this was quite a new relationship and she ran a company in Sweden that combats food waste. Yes we had captured them in a photo, but that wasn’t going to cut the mustard! Nick morphed into David Bailey, performing a mini photo shoot for them, with multiple poses, and sent the photos to her later. This was a travel interaction entirely of the modern age. Night finally fell and the town disappeared from view. They do not waste any money on lighting this place up after dark. Happily Mario answered his phone and came back to take us home again.
The next day we headed into Umbria, destination Solomeo. In the past Nick had read an interview with the cashmere business magnate, Brunello Cuchinelli, whose billion euro luxury knitwear empire is still based in this small town where he grew up. Rather than move the factory and adminstative arm to somewhere fancier and more urbane as it grew he decided to plough his money back into the town, building a new, sensitively designed factory here, buying up and restoring the crumbling old town infrastructure to house the offices and provide improved housing and facilities for the locals and his workers alike. He pays well, treats his workers like family, prioritises and promotes work/life balance and has created a small eutopia where once was a dying community. We decided to go and see it. It was a very pretty place, but did not cater to tourists. There was no factory shop, no Cucinelli ‘museum’ and no cafes or restaurants for non-workers. How refreshing in our modern times! It had been a bit of a pointless diversion, and there was no reason to stay here, but we were not upset. We had time to push on to Siena, so back to Tuscany, everybody!
We arrived in Siena an hour or so later and found a place to park within walking distance of the city centre. This was a big, free, multi-purpose car park. The main purposes seemingly being: rat run, lorry parking, camper parking, place for motorbike skills training, place for young people to congregate on their noisy trial bikes and to raz around trying to impress each other. Luckily some heavy late afternoon rain put paid to the noisy youth antics and the rest wasn’t an issue once night fell. The next morning we headed into the city. The rain continued but we were prepared. Siena seems to reside in that Goldilocks sweet spot as a city. It is not too big, not too small. It attracts tourists, but not too many. It has a plenty of old buildings, squares and streets but is not too spread out. Oh and it has the Mother of all Markets.
Siena’s main claim to fame is the Palio. This is a bat sh*t crazy horse race that takes place around the perimeter of its main square in the middle of the old town a couple of times over each summer. There are crowds, grandstands and a ton of imported sand. It is a religion here. It was hard to picture the spectacle of the event on this fairly quiet rainy autumn day but an internet search was informative! We interupted our touristic meanderings to tackle a bit of admin, which was to source a new sim card with data for our router. As the days get shorter our evening streaming hours are increasing and we are deep into Season 2 of Mad Men. What a show! Why have we waited 10 years to watch it? Oh, I know, so that we can binge all 7 seasons without interuption. I strongly recommend that you watch it if you haven’t already.
Around the city their are many statues of a she-wolf suckling a pair of human babies. Legend has it that the young twins, Aschius and Senius (for whom Siena is named), fled to the forest on two horses, one black and one white, after their wicked uncle, Romulus, murdered their father, Remus, and usurped his throne. The children survived by being suckled by the wolf and after they grew up they founded the city. The black and white flag, representing the horses, and the image of the suckling wolf remain potent symbols of the city. But I have questions…
The most obvious is, couldn’t someone have come up with a slightly more original origin story than one that involved a second generation of ‘twin-babies-raised-by-suckling-a-wolf-having-fled-a-murderous-throne-usurping-relative-who-then-went-on-to-found-a-city-named-after-just-one-of-them‘?
And secondly. If they were such young babies that they needed to breastfeed from a wolf for their very survival, how did they manage to ride horses into a forest?
Our Siena mooching was a little dampened by the rain, but there was a ray of sunshine that significantly brightened our day. Porchetta! On our way home we detoured through aforementioned ‘Mother Of All Markets’ which was arranged around the outer walls of the Medici Fortress, in itself quite impressive. This weekly market is the biggest in Tuscany and obviously attracts shoppers from far and wide judging by the number of nearby parked coaches and packed car parks. It was for the most part selling ‘wares’ which mostly describes the plethora of synthethic clothing items that you wouldn’t want to be wearing whilst standing too close to a naked flame, but there were a few food stalls, including a marvellous one selling the opium of the Hampsons, roast pig in a bun. We purchased one each, resisted the urge to just scarf them down there and then, beetled back to the bus, added some cheese, warmed them under the grill and enjoyed our dopamine lunch high in the warm and dry. Mmmmm.
Porchetta devoured we headed back into the countryside and the region of Chianti. Our destination, the small town of Castellina in Chianti, plucked from obscurity on a recommendation from our good friend, Dean, who came here eons ago. The good news about old, rural Italian towns is that they are mostly unchanged by the passage of eons of time, and this was a great spot to stop and visit for a couple of nights.
Think Chianti, think wine. Think of the traditional fiasco, the squat bottles wrapped in straw baskets. Historically this was to protect them during transport and to be able to provide a flat base for the original round bottomed, hand blown bottles. Once synonymous with Chianti, now only a few wine makers bottle wine in fiasci, most having gone to the more standard-shaped bottles. We, of course, directed our wanderings into a cave on the edge of the town.
They had wine production and sales here but no tastings, so with a moderate ‘cart-before-the-horse’ technique of wine buying, we purchased a couple of bottles (including a fiasco) of the local brew here, then found their wine shop in the centre of town in which to do some wine tasting drinking. Here they had one of those self-service wine dispensing machines that takes cards. Coupled with a small plate of nibbles, some interesting chat from our host, and a self guided tour of their small 600 yr old wine cellar, we had a pretty happy hour. At four o’clock in the afternoon.
The symbol of Chianti is the black cockrel. It adorns any and everything deemed to be authentically Chianti. This has its origins in a legend from the Middle Ages when the Republics of Siena and Florence were fighting a bloody war for control of the Chianti area. There was proposed a competition to decide the matter once and for all. On a specified day a knight from each of the towns would ride off at dawn towards each other and the border would be drawn at their meeting point. The start time for this would be dawn, determined by the first crowing of a rooster. Siena chose a white cockrel, who was much pampered and because of this he was happy as Larry, had a lie-in on that day, not waking and crowing until after dawn. Florence chose a black cockrel who was shut in a tiny cage and not fed for several days. He was really pissed off and started shouting about it well before dawn. Thus Florence’s knight had a very cheeky head start and consequently the Republic of Florence took ownership of a much larger chunk of Chianti than Siena, a situation that persists today.
The gloomy and damp weather continued here, slightly curtailing our plans to go for a longer walk but we did get to appretiate the charms of the town of Castillana, explore an unusual nearby cemetry and do some laundry. Sometimes travel is low key.
Our visit to Florence was another of our anticipated ‘big ticket’ destinations of the trip. A place that many people have expressed as being one of the most beautiful cities that they have visited. I was looking forward to it. Our choice of camping spot was heavily influenced by its proximity to the location of the city’s Parkrun, which was to be my last of the trip. The ‘spot’ was a free car park in a residential city suburb that was on a bus route into the centre of Florence. Pretty ideal. We arrived and were lucky to snag the last space big enough for us, pleased not to have had to resort to our non-existant Plan B. We had three nights here, giving us two whole days in Florence and we spent the afternoon organising our plan of attack and booking tickets to the Ufuzzi, the famous art gallery.
Day one in Florence started with the Parkrun that was in a small park a mere 500m from our spot. It was another event where the field was bulked out with a bunch of British tourists. It is amazing how many UK Parkrun enthusiasts turn up at various events elsewhere. The locals are quite bemused but very welcoming. I wonder whether the next 20 years will see the snowballing British enthusiasm for this event be matched in other countries. I hope so.
Post run (no records broken for me) we showered, had brunch and caught the bus into Florence. We were moderately overdressed as the weather improved considerably as the day progressed, but that was better than the reverse situation. Our meanderings took in many of the streets of the old town, random small churches and official buildings. Everywhere you looked there was an impressive statue or a fountain, sometimes combined.
The main sight of the city is the spectacular Duomo, or Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore. Built between 1296 and 1436, its pink and green marble edifices dominate the square in which it sits and its huge octagonal dome, designed by the architect Brunelleschi is still the largest masonry dome in the world. The queue to get in was ridiculous so we just admired it from the outside, as is our usual technique of sightseeing.
We saw the other sights of Piazza della Signoria, Campanile di Giotto, Palazzo Vechio and Ponte Vecchio and on multiple occasions braved running the gauntlet of the market stalls around the Mercato Centrale. More than 50% of the stalls were selling copious quantities of ‘Italian made’ leather goods, but I am not sure how genuine their provenance was. They all looked a bit too samey to me.
We continued our strollings across the river, starting to think about the next meal. Nick had his eyes on another Bourdain establishment, but unfortunately it was shut. By the time we had walked back towards the main central area of the city we were hit with that inescapable truth of eating out in Italian. The good restaurants, catering to locals and serving good quality, authentic food are open for lunch and then dinner. If you are hungry between 3.30pm and 7.30pm then you are in trouble. Either you stay hungry or you are committed to eating at one of the throng of lesser restaurants catering to tourists. We did several laps of the centre, wishing this not to be true, getting hungrier and more irritated with each other, finally caving and picking the least tacky place we could find. It was food, it was disappointing, it was a lesson learnt. We went home.
The next day we were back in the city and during another hour or two of wandering we stopped for a pitstop whilst exploring the indoor Mercato Centrale. On our way round we came across this stall creating cheesy goodness by just rolling cooked ravioli or gnocchi directly inside a round of parmesan. Mmmmm. Despite how lovely this looked we decided that we needed to sample the local delicacy of a lampredotto (tripe) sandwich. This is strips of a cows 4th stomach, slow cooked in a tomato sauce and served in a bun. We shared one between us and caused a fine old mess in the act of passing it backwards and forwards. It was quite tasty, but I think that was mainly due to the sauce. I wouldn’t rush to have another one. In the market the food was served street style, but the drinks were served to the tables by wait staff. It seemed rude not to have a glass of white wine too.
In the afternoon we had tickets to visit The Uffuzi. More acurately titled the ‘Galleria Degli Uffuzi’, this is Florence’s premier art museum and houses the world’s greastest collection of Italian Renaissance art in the enormous U-shaped ‘Palazzo degli Uffuzi’. Originally built in the 1500s as a government administration building, the Palazzo still bears the mark of its origins, with ufuzzi meaning offices in Italian. It also is home to an unfeasibly large collection of sculptures, many from Ancient Greece. It was an epic place to visit, both in quantity and quality of the artworks, and in the sheer size of the building and number of visitors. The info advised allowing 3-4 hours for a visit. We managed to stick it out for 2 hours, doing a moderately abridged ‘rapi-tour’ of the place, dodging the crowds and whizzing past pieces that didn’t interest us. There were some key works by Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Räphael, Carravagio and Leonardoda Vinci, so we feel that we have ‘done’ some greats as well as generally soaking up some culture.
There was also this sculpture that looks uncannily like my father. He said it didn’t look like him as it had no glasses, but I fixed that.
Florence had been lovely, with some quite beautiful sights to behold. We had seen a lot of them and our Old Sh*t appretiation batteries were running very low. Our next planned stop was Pisa. Did we need to see another old city with a tourist-trap hot spot? Mmmm…… Could we really bypass Pisa and its famous tower whilst passing so close by? No, of course not! To Pisa we go!!
We really did just make this a whistle-stop visit. We arrived at lunch time, found the only campsite in the city, settled in and set off walking into the centre mid afternoon. Once we had made our way through the ubiquitous non-scenic, residential neighbourhood of appartment blocks we arrived in the old town and found the river, both of which were charming and beautiful. In fact, I may go as far to say, were generally more pleasing on the eye than Florence.
We initially walked a short distance away from the centre to find ‘Tuttomondo’, a large mural done by the renowned American mural artist Keith Haring. This is on the rear wall of a church and one of the last he painted before his death a few months later from AIDS in 1990.
We walked back to the old town and went to find the tower. This was obviously not difficult. It was just a question of continually walking in the direction where there were more people than where we were at any particular moment in time. We felt like homing pigeons, equipped with an innate talent for navigation.
For all the photos that I have seen of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I was still quite suprised by it. I was suprised with how small it is, how beautiful it is, how clean and well restored it is, and, most suprisingly, how ‘leany’ it is. I was also suprised by the other two handsome buildings sharing the large Cathedral Square with the tower, namely Pisa Cathedral and the Pisa Bapistry. They both are also worthy of photographs. The whole area has large grassy areas, creating some separation from the crowds and improving the views. The Cathedral and Bapistry also have some degree of subsidence due to their unstable foundations, causing the brain to be slightly confused as to what constitutes the normal horizontal and weirdly, in all my photos the tower seems to be leaning less than it is in real life
I could write a paragraph here about the history of the tower, its lean and the massive job between 1993 and 2001 to correct its tilt from an alarming 5.5 degrees to an acceptable 3.97 degrees, but I am tired of all that history stuff.
We appretiated the buildings and the tower in the light of the setting sun, ate pizzas in a tourist restauarant at 5.30pm, because, well, that was the time we were hungry and we had obviously not learnt our lesson, and then we walked home in the dark.
Our time in Tuscany had come to an end. It had been quite different from how I had pictured it, but marvelous nonetheless. From here we continued northwest, and back to the coast of the ‘Italian Riviera’