In Florence the spring was over and the heat had come. The carved palaces quivered like radiators in the sun. Hot blasts of air, as from kitchen stoves, moved through the streets laden with odours of meat and frying oil. In the cheaper cafés brick-faced British tourists sat sweating and counting their crumpled money. But from the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio one could look out across the roasting roofs of the city and see the rising hills around – vistas of vine and olive, cool blue and frosted silver; a series of diminishing horizons, jagged and sparkling, floating south like icebergs in the fresh clear air.
I’d had my fill of Florence, lovely but indigestible city. My eyes were choked with pictures and frescoes, all stamped one on top of the other, blurred, their colours running. I began to long for those cool uplands, that country air, for the dateless wild olive and the uncatalogued cuckoo. I decided to walk to Siena, some fifty miles to the south, along the old road through the Chianti hills.
So I packed a rucksack, rolled up a sleeping-bag, bought a map, and left the city in a pair of stout shoes. It was noon, but it might have been midnight. The sun was blinding and the streets deserted. I took the Via Chiantigiana and walked in a daze for two hours. At two o’clock I flopped in the town square of Grassina and ate my lunch – bread, wine, fruit, and a memorable ice-cream.
In the café shade sat a row of old men with short silver hair, squeaking at one another like crickets. Nearby stood a row of mules, covered with wet sheets, and dozing. In a dry and rubbishy gutter the town idiot sat fishing with rod and line. Curly-haired children, with the gilded faces of angels, taunted him happily and baited his hook with orange peel. For some time I watched a procession of girls, in flaming red dresses, filling their kettles at the public tap. Then heavy with wine I staggered out of the town and slept for two hours on a bank of sage.
Through the late afternoon I walked six miles, climbing slowly into the hills. The road was white and deep with dust. The dust lifted like smoke on the evening wind and coated my hair and hands with tiny fragments of marble – marble of the Tuscan cities and their white cathedrals. The hedges were rimmed with dust and starred with jasmine and dog-roses, huge blossoms, heavy, dilating, fat as clotted cream, and bigger than any others I have ever seen. And at six o’clock rose the dog-rose moon and hung pure white in the daylight sky.
My bag grew heavy, and heavier as I climbed. But at last I reached the crest of the Campo dell’Ugolino and took a farewell look at the Florentine hills – classical backcloths slashed with cypresses, powdered with grape-bloom by the evening sun, and glittering with alabaster villas.
At last I felt I was on my way, I had reached the first of those magical horizons, and my feet were sound. Larks started up, and cuckoos called, and bright green lizards shot from stone to stone. Under the long evening shadows I entered Strada-in-Chianti, and marked it on my map.
Strada, strung out along its street, was cool and busy, engrossed in flashing needles. Groups of young girls sat on the pavements embroidering and making lace. Old men with sharp knives split withies as though they were flaying devils. Old women, toothlessly chewing, were plaiting straw hats with black and frenzied fingers. Only the young men were idle, squatting on their haunches outside the wine shop talking of football.
I had a meal here – spaghetti cooked with oil and butter, black wine of the village, and two fried eggs. The plump girl who served me leaned through the window and sang with voluptuous melancholy into the street. The street was full of swallows, diving low. The room was full of flies.
When I had finished, the girl helped me on with my rucksack, feeling the weight of it and puffing huge sighs of consolation through her wine-coloured lips. ‘Why do you walk?’ she asked. ‘Are you German?’ ‘No,’ said I. ‘Then why?’ she repeated, mystified. I hadn’t the word, nor the heart, to answer her.
Now through the red of sunset I went out of the village to find a place to sleep. A wood or a ruin would do, and I walked three miles looking for it. An uneasy time, full of illusions of homelessness, as the daylight dies, and the rose-warm clouds go dull, like wet ashes, and I enter the dark country and am suddenly startled by the sight of my moon-thrown shadow walking beside me.
I found a wood at last and unpacked among the bushes. The ground was hard and covered with little stones and flowers. The air was thick with the scent of thyme and honeysuckle. I rolled myself up in my bag and tried to sleep.
I shall not forget that night – it was worse than lying in the heart of a modern city. The moon came up over the trees and shone into my face like a street-lamp. Then, as though at the turn of a switch, the whole countryside suddenly began to whirr and roar, to squeak and whistle. The expected silence of the night became a cacophony of bellowing frogs, blundering beetles, crickets and cuckoos, mosquitoes, mice, donkeys, dogs and nightingales. There was no sleep or peace till the sun rose, and then it was too late and I was too stiff.
At seven I drank my bottle of water, cooled by the night, and took to the road. I was some two hours from Greve, the heart of Chianti, and there I planned to drink a lot of coffee.
I was in high deserted country, with vast views sparkling all round me. Wild wheat grew everywhere, hanging its frail bleached spears. The sun was remorseless in the sky. I went down into a deep valley of oakwoods, past sad shut farms with shell-pocked walls, over broken bridges shored up with tree trunks. This is a country of broken bridges, and almost every house has its wound. Up all these valleys the long war ground its lacerating way, leisurely dynamiting, negligently tearing off roofs, harrowing the face of the land like the passage of an ice-age. That is also the tragedy one senses in these shot-up farms, in the tommy-gun scars on the cemetery walls. Murder done quietly, passionately, with rescue bogged down on the other side of a mountain, arriving so seldom in the nick of time. No neat dreams of Hollywood but the casual truth of war.
At the bottom of the valley I found a green river and bathed in it. Soap-suds floated down among the pebbles from a washerwoman upstream; and white-smocked children, as neat as cherubim, walked along the banks on their way to school.
On this road I met a vast flock of sheep, driven by a cloaked shepherd and a mad-eyed dog. The sheep tinkled with bells. Their hooves thudded in the dust like thunder-drops. An occasional ram slunk by, his head low under the coiled weight of his horns. And one single remarkable sheep caught my eye – was it mascot or mystic symbol? – its shorn hide tattoed with an elaborate crucifix and scarlet fleur-de-lys.
Here also among the wheatfields stood a crude memorial to a young man murdered there in 1899. A wayside cross decorated with flowers and skulls, and a legend lamenting the deed. And nearby, cutting the hedge, a merry roadman in a brilliant waistcoat embroidered with stars and roses.
At nine-thirty that morning I entered Greve, a town smelling of pure wine. Its outside walls were shattered with dynamite, but within was an ancient piazza quiet and arcaded like a cloister. Here I rested and took a late breakfast, while a woman set up a stall of cherries and a dog sniffed a snake-skin in the road. There was no one else to be seen.
Later, with a bottle of Chianti, some bread and fruit, I climbed four miles through the blazing morning and entered Panzano, a village roosting like a red hen on the top of a sharp hill.
I found Panzano full of fête and excitement. It was the day of the annual bicycle race. Young men, with brown legs and very short shorts, were limbering up or pinching their bicycle tyres. In the square there were stalls selling ice-creams, medicine, balloons, copper jars, looking-glasses, and American chewing-gum. There were flags and summer-looking girls everywhere. It was to be a great day.
But I left it and came down a steep hill that coiled into the heart of another valley. And my feet began to ache and thirst to plague me. The road forked, and there was no signpost. I asked an old woman for Castellina, and evilly she bade me take the left one.
In this valley I paused at midday by a stream that came tumbling cold from the hills. In this water I cooled my wine, put my cherries to wash in a little whirlpool, and hung my burning feet in the chill current among the tickling fishes. It was an ecstasy of mirage and delirium – to be experienced only after four hours of footing a white-hot mountain road. I drank the cool wine and ate my bread and cherries, then stretched myself out among the wheat which grew to the water’s edge. The depth of the wheat was a tangle of wild flowers: moon-daisies, gentians, scarlet poppies; with columbines twining up the wheatstalks and hanging their blossoms among the ripening ears. It was a good place to be. Nearby, a charm of nightingales flooded the daylit branches of a wood. Slightly drunk, crooning and groaning, I sang myself to sleep.
When I took to the road again, and had walked some miles, the sun was not where it should have been. I had a feeling I was walking in the wrong direction. And I was.
Two country policemen appeared, unshaven, brandishing rifles, who bid me halt, examined my papers, sucked their teeth at me, inquired why in God’s name I was walking, on foot, and then told me Radda was just round the corner. I didn’t want Radda; it meant I had come nearly ten miles out of my way. But there was another road back to Castellina, along the top of the hills. ‘Pleasant?’ I asked. ‘No, brutish,’ they said.
They were right. First I climbed the cliff into Radda, sucking sharp lemons and grunting under my burden. Then for two and a half hours I walked the hog’s back, through dust and rocks and thorns, but on top of the world, with the great blue distances south of Siena appearing for the first time.
It was hard going, but I wanted to sleep south of Castellina that night. I met no one on that road but snakes and lizards. I walked with sweat in my eyes and the devil of thirst in my mouth. But I passed through one of the most wild and beautiful stretches of country in the whole of middle Italy, the roof of those green and secret valleys where the grape-bubbles of Chianti swell and sweeten in the sun. That night I camped on a high plain two miles south of Castellina, on a platform of ground commanding great views. When the blue night came, the distances below me, with their many villages, sprang into clusters of light, like diamonds scattered on velvet. I lay down with my head against a bush, and in the bush there was a nesting bird. For some time she fluttered nervously with her wings, but in the end we slept at peace together; and I slept well.
When I woke late on that last morning the first thing I saw was a fantastic town of golden towers, surrounded by oak woods, lying some fifteen miles to the west. It was San Gimignano, that medieval parody of Manhattan, soaring, glittering, and unbelievable.
Then, as I moved my head, suddenly I discovered Siena, hiding behind the bush. I had been waiting for my first sight of it, and I had somehow missed it in the twilight of yesterday. It stood far off, but clear, a proper city, rose-red and ringed by a great wall, with cathedral and palaces topping its trinity of hills and all the green country rising and breaking round it. It was a city compact as a carved Jerusalem held in the hand of a saint. And behind it hung a folded mountain, blue, like a curtain nailed against the sky.
So I took the road once more – the last leg of my journey, and of my strength. The sun was inexorable, the landscape already quivering like water in the heat. I walked in a dream of thirst and aching muscles. Lizards and dragonflies sprang from beneath my toes. White oxen, with horns like swords, ploughed drunkenly in the fields, slicing the chocolate earth.
Then I spied a farm on the skyline, with two women herding pigs. I decided to beg for water. I came up the hill, blond, burnt, in my khaki slacks, bowed by my fool’s burden. But the women saw me coming. ‘Tedesco! German!’ they screamed. Pigs, goats, poultry were driven into the farm, doors slammed, windows shuttered. Guiltily I passed the shell-shot buildings, and silently they watched me.
A long morning of exhaustion and enchantment, sucking dry lemon-skins, with the exquisite landscapes growing like dreams one out of the other. Vines and mulberries and moon-coloured olives; wayside Madonnas laced with dusty flowers; and steep little fields tilted towards the sun, full of red wheat and flickering salamanders.
By noon I had walked twelve miles and Siena stood above me. My three-day journey was almost over. Slowly I crawled towards its rusty walls. By now Siena had become for me a city of ice, of courtyards dripping with wet roses, of sparkling fountains and flashing fish.
It was not quite that; but it gave me a cool room, and chaste white wine, and a long sleep in a bed. It also gave me streets too narrow for Cadillacs, streets in which to walk and draw one’s fingers along the walls of palaces, in which to hear the sounds of choirs, mandolines, and flutes, and cataracts of conversation. It was a city gilded with the patina of ancient devotions, the brooding celestial visions of its fourteenth-century painters, the gaunt glory of its supreme personality, St Caterina. It was a city that seemed all molten gold by day, and by night a ghostly silver, beaten out by a huge and antique moon. It was a city of pilgrimage, and one to which one must always return.
But next time I think I’ll take a train, or perhaps a string of mules.