Is there a square inch of Tuscany that’s unexplored? Yes. I constantly hear of towns I don’t know. Hundreds of borghi remain out of sight. We’ve found that roaming the back roads yields pleasures equal to the delights of well-visited places because without preconception the sense of discovery intensifies. I’ll venture this advice: Put down a water glass on a map of Tuscany and draw a ring anywhere. Pick a hotel in the middle of your circle, check in for three or four days, and venture out from there. You will make your own discoveries. This throws the emphasis on spontaneity.
WE DID JUST that. Wanting to explore the Tyrrhenian coast, Etruscan places, the Maremma—the low, formerly swampy stretch that now is primo wine country and lost-in-time hill towns, we looked on the agriturismo.it site and found a simple apartment in the country outside Buriano. I love driving thought flat agrarian land, fallow now, with distant blips of hills, castles, and towers. Plows turn up chunky brown clods that shine on the cut side. As we whizz by, the fields glitter and the earth smells of rain and dust and ground-down stalks of sunflowers and corn.
AN ALLÉE OF umbrella pines and old-growth cypress trees lines the long drive to a sprawling farmhouse with four apartments. A German couple lounges by the pool while their energetic toddler in water wings flays about with happy shrieks. It’s only a few days until the agriturismo closes for winter, and these northerners are braver than we are. The water even looks cold. In our upstairs apartment, the kitchen occupies only an angle in the living room and there are two plain bedrooms, two baths. When we travel by car, Ed brings his espresso machine and the milk foamer for me. We don’t plan to cook anything here, but it is nice to have excellent cappuccino and some bakery pastries in the mornings while we plan the days.
We unpack our oranges, grapes, cheese, and crackers. Put the yellow flowers I picked on the roadside in a glass, and we’re off to explore Castiglione della Pescaia on the coast.
BEACH TOWNS LIKE Castiglione can be junky. In July and August, the Tuscan coast is affollato, crowded. Our friends flock to these wall-to-wall stretches of sand, every inch covered with umbrellas and relaxed people (no one wears a one-piece bathing suit) having a fine time visiting with each other. Bring three or four suits because after every foray into the water, the costume is changed, often under a skillfully manipulated towel. In the evenings, everyone swarms into restaurants and cafés, later promenading again through the piazza, stopping for gelato. The festive atmosphere means holiday. See and be seen. It’s a cultural thing and you either like it or you don’t.
I’m excited to see Castiglione della Pescaia in this season, returned to locals, along with a few tourists out for a fall weekend. The fabulist Italian writer Italo Calvino kept a house outside town at Roccamare for thirteen years before his sudden death. That speaks well for the area, doesn’t it? We park near a harbor of sailboats and small craft at the bottom of town, and walk along a broad pedestrian street lined with outdoor cafés under gay awnings. Flower boxes still rave forth, even in early October. Sand-colored or stone, the buildings climb the hill in tight cubes. Rather dreamy; was this fairy-tale setting in Calvino’s mind when he wrote Invisible Cities? At the very least, it plays a prominent role in his last novel, Palomar.
This town isn’t going to be junky even in touristy August. Chalkboard menus offer fish and fish, along with big salads and grilled vegetables. After the charming promenade, we climb up, up, skirting fortress walls, to the castle. Along the way we pause for broad views of coast and long, long beaches. The skies are overcast today and the opaque sea gleams like a hammered pewter tray. Many tiny streets are appealing, with picturesque doors and flowering balconies. Near the top—and it’s steep—the barny and neglected church of San Giovanni Battista. And then we wind down again, going a different way. We’re near the cemetery where Calvino is buried, but we don’t stop. I prefer to imagine him looking out to sea and his character Palomar swimming out into a blade of light. Of the coastal Tuscan towns, Castiglione is a stand-out.
We drive along Pineta del Tombolo, a pine woods with paths to the beach. Curious about the all-inclusive vacations Italian friends often take, we stop at the beachside, four-star Riva del Sole Resort and Spa. The first thing we learn is that it fills quickly for the following summer; families return year after year. The rooms are contemporary and attractive, the sandy beach long and private. Your responsibilities fall away as you check in. Play activities, sports, and cooking classes keep the little ones busy. Three pools, biking, mini-golf, tennis, running tracks, restaurant, pizzeria, bars (one on the beach)—you don’t have to leave the pine-shaded grounds. Relax. We had salads for lunch in a functional but pleasant café with super-friendly staff, sitting inside because of the cool day. But for most of the year, the terraces probably catch sea breezes and pine-scented air. Ed and I prefer small hotels. And I’m not one for endless sun exposure, but I can see the appeal of going with the flow here.
If I were a guest, I’d surely take a boat tour of nearby Diaccia Botrona reserve, a protected marshland of calm beauty and big skies, like the views in Dutch landscapes. Eighteenth-century efforts to promote agriculture in Maremma led the grand dukes to drain vast stretches of marshland, and Preglio, a large lake, is now the reserve for turtles, flamingos, and hundreds of other creatures and plants.
“You take delight,” Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities, “not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” I agree. His castle-topped fishing village answers my question about the quintessential Tuscan beach town. I also delight in at least seventy wonders. Lemon gelato, for one.
AS WE DRIVE up to Vetulonia, I begin to notice patches of pink haze on the roadside as we zip by. At a curve, I focus and am astounded to see that those blurs are beds of tiny cyclamen. Thousands! These woods must be enchanted, under a spell cast by the Etruscan past. A field of tombs lies just off the road. A round, slightly domed one looks like the ancient structures you see scattered in olive groves in Puglia, an archetypal primitive house. Below town, there are later ruins—a Romanesque abbey, some remnants of a Roman settlement—but never forget, this is Etruscan territory.
Vetulonia was one of the twelve major towns leagued together for reasons of trade, religion, mining, and common culture. Prime time for the Etruscans was long, 800 to 400 B.C., with more time on either end as they waxed and waned. Everything that remains shows them to have been advanced and resourceful. They drained the Maremma swampland! When Romans took over around 300 B.C., the area fell backward and gradually the boggy terrain returned. The Etruscans were highly artistic. I’ll never forget the tomb paintings in Tarquinia, another of the twelve city-states. Frescoes show the dead and friends banqueting, dancing, enjoying life. Cortona, where I live, is another Etruscan center. A large metal chandelier with explicit erotic figures was found there, proof of a sensual culture. Tombs (called melone for their shapes), stairs bordered with stone scrolls, a thin, fragile bronze sheet covered with writing, and much else has come to light there in recent years; for always, farmers have been turning up bronze votives in their fields.
This little rook’s nest has blissful views. Vetulonia’s houses seem intact from medieval times. What a pity they have asphalted the street. Most Tuscan towns have retained stone and cobble streets; this looks incredibly wrong—ugly.
We have come to see the Museo Civico Archeologico Isidoro Falchi, which houses in seven rooms objects pulled from the local tombs. Falchi was a medical doctor with a passion for the Etruscans; his amateur, careful explorations continued for seventeen years. Grazie, Isidoro! This collection is haunting. Funerary urns for cremated bodies look like miniature homes fashioned in clay. Who could imagine that so many of these fragile vessels could survive? The black colander with a whimsical pattern of holes—someone rinsed the berries in that. Iron frying pan—cook the deer’s liver. A finely shaped funnel for transferring the olive oil, a pair of bone dice with circles for numbers, a disk on a rod for a game of skills at drinking parties, which involved flinging wine lees at targets and uttering the name of your true love. What modern-looking hand scales. Many shapely jugs and storage jars. My hand reaches out, wanting to cup the curves. The warrior’s helmet is pierced with holes around the face opening, perhaps for the lacing of the soft lining. One hundred and forty were found in a ditch; most were damaged but this one is perfect. What touches me most is fine gold jewelry worn to the grave. Any woman throughout history would covet the long gold necklace fitted with twenty-four coin-size embossed medallions. The gold, beaten thin, is almost like gold leaf. Earrings and rings loved by someone in the fourth century B.C., some so small they must have belonged to a young girl.
ON A WINDOWSILL of a modest stone townhouse, someone keeps a pot of succulents. I’m always photographing windows with curtains edged with handmade trim. Starchy white and prim—you know there’s roast chicken for Sunday pranzo and the house is immaculately clean. A crafty woman has crocheted for each of the two sides of the window small squares in a pyramid shape at the bottom. They’re connected by thin knotted strands of thread to meet the inverse pyramid of squares at the top. To work out this design, the woman who tends the succulents had an instinct for design that reaches back to those distant Etruscan ancestors.
As we turn into our agriturismo’s lane, a brindled cat leaps out of the bushes around a tumbledown barn. Barely older than a kitten, the little thing is a glorious patchwork of all the cat DNA in the neighborhood. Caramel, alley-cat spots, white, black, and tiger-gold, with a winning face: nose and mouth white, pale ginger speckled around celadon eyes, black ears splotched with touches of ginger. She slinks to us, tail in a question mark. Used to guests, she follows us up our outside stairway and waits by the door. We’re smitten. Yes, milk. Yes, bits of bread and cheese.
The cat devours. Nudges at the stairway door, wanting in. We draw the line but are conflicted. Let her in? No. Yes. No.
After an hour, as we leave for dinner, she comes out of the brush to the edge of the bushes and stares.
LUCKILY, IN DEEP-COUNTRY Tuscany, you can depend on good restaurants. Tonight, we try Locanda Mossa dei Barbari, just below Buriano. We find a down-home, checked-tablecloth trattoria owned by the friendly Baldoni family. Why the name “Movement of the Barbarians”? Alessio explains that it’s not barbarians but Berber horses that knights used to race on the road. We join a few local families and a jewel-laden woman with bouffant hair. Her husband is burly, blunt-jawed, and keeps going out to smoke.
Crisp fried vegetables, house-made tagliatelle with fresh mushrooms, and a platter of mixed meats grilled in the fireplace—pork, chicken, veal, and a slab of tasty bacon. Tuscan comfort food. He brings us a wine of the region, Elisabetta Geppetti Fattoria le Pupille Morellino di Scansano, 2014, ink-dark and serious.
The menu is in Italian and German. We ask Alessio if many Americans come in the summer. “Only a little drop, mostly tourists are from Germany and now some are Russian.” He nods toward the bejeweled woman. “They are buying property here.”
EARLY THIS MORNING, after feeding our feline friend, whom we’ve named Tabitha because it seems to suit her, we are returning to Buriano for a look in daylight. We break our own rule: Do not drive into the centro through a narrow gate designed for donkeys. We go because we followed another car in. Mistake. That car was a vintage Fiat the size of a grasshopper. How many times have we made a similar mistake? Okay, we’re done for. We have to fold in the mirrors, as the car barely scrunches through. Then we’re in a minute piazza with no exit sign that looks feasible. I jump out, and a woman points to what I thought was a sidewalk. Down we go. Unscathed. Released at last.
We park and walk back, up to what remains of a tower and the Rocca Aldobrandesca. Famous in Tuscany, the Aldobrandeschi family were feudal overlords here from the ninth century. They later lost the town, regaining it in the eleventh century. Siena and Pisa had their way with it, too. (I used to think Tuscan history was the most complicated until I learned more about Puglia and Sicily.)
In the piazza, a few women buy produce at a shoebox-size stand. Stony lanes crank up and around the hill, offering views over the Maremma. I look at the women’s legs to see if they have well-developed calf muscles. The churches are closed, but we are offered a glimpse into the intimate history thanks to the photographs from the past posted on stone walls all around town. War, harvest, weddings, schoolchildren, festivals. Beneath them, names are listed. The faces are full of life. Young men carousing, a bent-over priest, girls with linked arms, chapped-cheek baby. Ubi sunt…where are those who came before us? Only 178 souls live in this tranquil hill town.
THIRTEEN KILOMETERS AWAY from Buriano, Montepescali is even smaller.
From our flat-land agriturismo, we can see it capping yet another small peak in the Maremma, its towers glowing at night.
These sights in Tuscany are common. Driving around the Cortona area, we can identify the profiles of Montepulciano, Foiano della Chiana, Sinalunga, and Monte San Savino. Since Italy is 40 percent mountain, you see a Monte this or a Monte that nearly everywhere you wander.
We asked Alessio last night about Montepescali. We knew its nickname, “the Balcony of the Maremma,” and that Corsica could be seen from its ramparts.
“Bella,” he said, “and you’ll have it all to yourselves.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that the entire population is nine, down from ten a year ago.” Someone had died. “Montepescali was different in the 1960s. People lived there. Now you have to say ‘Buongiorno’ every day to the same nine people.”
TODAY, FULL OF sunshine, we take the excellent road up to see these nine people who live within the impressive medieval ramparts of Montepescali. Nothing about the town gate hints of life after the Middle Ages; time here is arrested. The eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth centuries never arrived. The round brick fortification, high walls, and watch towers are straight out of fantasy. It’s quiet as the day after doomsday. In Piazza del Cassero, three cats sleep on the steps of Chiesa di Santi Stefano e Lorenzo. Three women huddle outside a facility for the elderly. Most windows are shuttered but as we walk around the upper neighborhoods, I see over a wall a tended garden profuse with plumbago and jasmine. From a doorway where a woman is sweeping her stoop, the aroma of roasting meat drifts out. Is she dining alone? Would she like two guests?
“I’ve already counted twenty,” Ed says, matter-of-factly. “And the 2010 census says two hundred seventy-five live here.”
“Are you sure you’re not counting the same people twice? That number is probably for the outlying areas as well.” We’re at the perfectly scaled Chiesa di San Niccolò, with its pretty campanile.
“Beautiful town, but a bit remaindered.”
“Nine people isn’t exactly a crowd!” I say. “Maybe the Russians will repopulate it.”
FIFTY-EIGHT KILOMETERS TO Campiglia Marittima. Big town! Thirteen thousand people. The olive and the artichoke reign, along with the hazelnut and, of course, vineyards. Any script set in medieval times could start filming without rearrangement—like Buriano and Montepescali, this place is fabulously intact, but it isn’t encased in amber. Campiglia’s piazza is awake, the bar’s terrace a hive of teenagers and locals stopping in after lunch. We’re starving and happy with a prosciutto and cheese panino. I hoped to find addormentasuocere, oddly named “send-the-mother-in-law-to-sleep,” but alas, I cannot find these clusters of caramelized local peanuts today.
Campiglia, like the other hill towns, has Etruscan roots. The remains reveal sulfur, iron, and silver mining, copper processing, and also marble quarries. They were, after Roman times, traded back and forth among feudal families, then became a Florentine military stronghold. Similar histories, these quiet places. The miracle is how they endure. Americans are accustomed to everything being leveled frequently. That the two white arches in the piazza, the stony lanes, covered steps up between streets, the clock-tower building covered with stemmie, coats of arms of local rulers, have endured untouched always seems so preposterous to New World people.
We look in the door of the public library and a woman comes downstairs to see who’s there. The library isn’t open, but would we like to see the paintings of Carlo Guarnieri, local artist who lived from 1892 to 1988? We say yes, though we do not expect to be enthralled. “He lived with his mother,” she says, and that’s all the detail we get as she leaves us among his paintings and engravings.
We are enthralled. He has painted six old men who might still be lingering near the stalls on the local market day, just as you still see all over Tuscany. One is seated, back to his companions, holding a cane. He’s contemplative, a beret, a far-off expression on his face. Here’s the artist’s mother, sideways in a chair. The painting is as much about the folds in the drapery backdrop as it is about her. A portrait of a young woman in a blue armchair centers on a creepy fox stole around her shoulders, and the way her hand cradles the head. Marvelous, the woman in white against a red background. She’s stern except for the white plume on her hat.
Ed is most intrigued by Guarnieri’s many woodcuts, especially the one of Dante at the final moments of his journey. He calls me over to look at the clasped hands. The posted note says, “The vision just ended, the verses are over, the book is closed between the hands, and the eyes look down…divine prelude of a dream that dialogues with death and goes beyond life on earth…” His self-portrait shows him also with clasped hands and a strange coat of flowers, a forceful, chiseled face. The woodcuts—he began at age thirteen—are extensive, the technique masterful, and the intent stated on the notice seems accurate: “…woodcut is not only engraving an image on a wooden table that must be inked and printed on paper…it brings out that vitality restrained in the wood, mysterious in its nature of unconscious matter that suddenly offers a glimpse of the secret of life…”
We walk out rather dazed. “He had a big talent and who has heard of him outside his hometown? He should be known—he did significant exhibits in his time. Did you read? He was a war hero. World War One. He falls right into the Italian modernist traditions we’ve admired at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome and Museo Novecento in Florence.”
“Many a flower is born to blush unseen…,” Ed quotes.
VIA CAVOUR, VIA Pietro Gori—under many street signs hang round frames with portraits of the person the street name honors. Marked with a marble plaque is the house of Isidoro Falchi, the archeologist who discovered Velutonia, carried out important excavations at Populonia, and practiced medicine in this town. His medallion shows a man with strong features and an unruly beard. Behind him a symbolic heap of stones.
On a second-story shuttered window I spot a for-sale sign, the property listed by Bella Tuscany Immobiliare. Since any Italian would say “Bella Toscana,” I have to assume they have named their agency after my second Italian memoir, Bella Tuscany.
ED IS GOING through a Mina phase again. Mina being Mina Mazzini but everyone knows her as Mina—one of the great Italian voices. Speak of her in the same breath as Whitney Houston, more octaves than you can count on one hand. Driving back to our abode, Ed says, “I read that Gino Paoli had or still has a vacation house in Campiglia Marittima.” He tells me that Paoli started Mina’s career in the sixties.
He turns on his music. “What’s this one?” I ask.
“ ‘Il Cielo in una stanza.’ You’ve heard it a hundred times. This is Gino Paoli. ‘Heaven in a Room.’ I read that he wrote it in a brothel.
“And I know you like Ornella Vanoni’s ‘L’appuntamento.’ ” Ed smiles. “It’s coming up next.”
Blissful to fly through the bucolic Maremma countryside with the music turned up.
TABITHA IS WAITING. She runs up to us and follows. I’m worried. The agriturismo is closing. I asked the housekeeper this morning if she belonged to anyone. “You take her,” she exclaimed. “She is a good cat.” We can’t. We don’t live here all year and though I might be foolish enough, Ed refuses to haul animals across the ocean. She’s darling. I write my friend Sheryl in Cortona, who has two cats plus a couple who stop over daily for food. Will you take her?
WE ARE CURIOUS to eat at the Slow Food restaurant Oste Scuro Vin Osteria in a residential neighborhood in nearby Braccagni. We are the last guests of the season; the owners have packed their car this afternoon with prosciuttos and cheeses and wines for the drive to Sicily, where their relatives live. Unusual: He’s out front, she’s in the kitchen. The space has an industrial look, with bright yellow walls and contemporary angular green tables and yellow chairs.
After a long day, we savor a leisurely dinner. Red shrimp with farro, a plate of anchovies and parsley under curls of butter—we are off to a good start, especially with a bottle of Leonardo Salustri, Montecucco Sangiovese, 2013. We are big fans of Montecucco, and this one tastes as expansive as we feel tonight. The menu proves there is a chef who knows her traditions. Her gnocchi, made from the red potatoes of Cetica near Arezzo, are puffy and delicate. We go forward with tender lamb tornedos on a bed of spicy chicory. For dessert, a homey lemon meringue tart. It’s dense and custardy, with the intense lemon flavor only Italy can achieve. Imagine, a restaurant of this quality in a town of fifteen hundred people. Miracle of Italy.
SHERYL SAID YES. (But her husband, Rob, is not thrilled.) Tomorrow I will find a box, food, litter, for the trip home. Ed remains dubious.
LATE START. I’M engrossed with Calvino’s Palomar. Also, I look up Bella Tuscany Immobiliare. I am shocked at the comparatively low prices of houses, 30 or 40 percent less than in our part of Tuscany. Why? This is a stunning area, well located for exploring and for the beaches. Food, check. Wine, check. I send off links to two friends who’ve despaired of finding a Tuscan retreat.
Ed is writing a poem. Tabitha waits outside the door as we start to leave for Populonia. I give her milk and a can of food I bought yesterday. She weaves her skinny form ingratiatingly around my legs. Yes, I’m smitten. As we reach the car, all of a sudden another cat emerges from the bushes. Almost identical to Tabitha. Oh, no. Will Sheryl take two? I know she can’t. The new one comes right up to Ed. “It was never meant to be, Franny. These are farm creatures. They’ll be okay.”
ON A BLUFF above the Tyrrhenian Sea, the village of present-day Populonia is the remnant of the only Etruscan town built directly on the water. Remnant, indeed—we find a stupendous view of sea and sky, a forested hill plunging to the strand, and a tiny village protected by massive fortifications. One atmospheric main street with a few shops and cafés, a side opening into a fortress-walled piazza with a small, plain church. Capers spill down the walls.
That’s it. A brief turn around town and then down to the beach and fishing harbor. Glimmers of anthracite in the sand recall the Etruscan mines and the excavations of Isidoro Falchi, indefatigable archeologist. Ancient iron slag heaps once besmirched this beach. Now along the Bay of Baratti, there’s this sweet curve of blond sand extending into a pine forest. A heavy-set woman braves the water, out to her waist. A short walk and we find ourselves seated on the terrace of a seaside restaurant. At the entrance, men play cards. Suddenly this seems like vacation. Maltagliata—“badly cut” pasta (usually made from leftover pasta dough)—with shrimp, zucchini, and tomatoes, with a mezzo-liter of house white. A view of boats and mimosa trees seems just right.
SAN VINCENZO, WHERE we came years ago to dine at the world-famous Gambero Rosso. The waiter wheeled over a cart of olive oils. Which did we prefer for our salads? We were dumbfounded, knowing little about olive oil at that point. I selected the greenest, and the waiter smiled and nodded. The dinner I still remember thirty years later. Gambero Rosso is gone now, and in early October, the beach town is getting ready to fall into a long doze. We stroll down the wide main street, made for the evening passeggiata, with ample bars and gelato shops.
What is glorious about October travel is that we walk San Vincenzo’s eleven kilometers of sandy beach and have it to ourselves. San Vincenzo will be hopping in the summer, but now how peaceful. Costa degli Etruschi, the Etruscan coast, stretches from Livorno to Piombino, eighty kilometers of beach. Spring and fall, you’ll have it to yourself. Resolution: Return to the Etruscans in spring and fall for my necessary beach fix.
TABITHA IS NOWHERE to be found, nor the companion cat. Ed leaves two open cans for them. Sheryl had to decline the gift of two. She does not want to become a cat lady. They must stay, and if I don’t see them again it will be easier to go.
On our last night, we pop over to the village of Braccagni again. We noted Ristorante Bernasconi by the train station when we drove through last night. It’s open, they have a table, though it’s crowded with locals, and soon the waiter has brought us—his suggestion—the same wine we had in Buriano, the Elisabetta Geppetti Morellino di Scansano. We’re right at home with the cozy red walls and white tablecloths, the old-style menus. We waste no time ordering the mixed antipasti and ravioli with classic ragù. What’s better on a crisp fall night?
TABITHA, STORYBOOK CAT, we leave behind. She comes to the car as we pack to leave. Let me not anthropomorphize, though I could. Just to say, she knows. We drive away and she watches, tail straight up. “Turn on Mina,” I say. “Loud.”
NOTES:
“Many a flower…” from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray.
Other winning villages in the Buriano–Vetulonia area: Scarlino, Caldana, Ravi. Very well known and appealing are the wine centers Bolgheri and Castagneto Carducci, with a magnificent cypress-lined entrance. We love Marina di Bibbona for the pleasure of dining at La Pineta.
While in San Vincenzo, we were not able to go to Ristorante Il Bucaniere, owned by Fulvietto Pierangelini, son of the owners of the famous Gambero Rosso. A must on the next visit.