Tuscany and Me

When I go to my friend Mary's house for my annual visit, we often rent movies for our evenings. Both of us like to get up early and retire early, and we're generally too lazy to go out after a long day of gardening, biking, hiking, beaching, shopping, and eating. (We try to cover all these bases every day, especially the eating.) Often Mary has a list of chores drawn up specially for my arrival, so those must be covered too. Last summer, lots of painting was involved.

I think Mary likes me to help get her started with things, as I appear intrepid about enterprises like painting. It's easy to be fearless about painting someone else's stuff. Last year we'd started my visit with a trip to Joshua Tree National Forest, because I had it in my mind that the desert would be a great place to view the Perseids. So when Mary announced that we must paint her Adirondack chairs, I thought, why not commemorate that great excursion?

As you can see from this little slice of her back yard, Mary is a proudly Unruly Gardener as well, although let's face it: when you live in LA, you can throw a sandwich out the window and wake up the next morning with a peanut butter and jelly tree. Which is not to say that Mary doesn't know her way around gardening. She does. She even worked as a professional gardener for a while years ago, until the skin on her hands went on strike. I've said it before: I learned to love gardening from her.

Mary has to be very careful about what she plants. A couple of years ago these geraniums made access to the garage very difficult. Last year a volunteer tomato plant blocked the door completely (but provided us with a bounty of deliciousness).

I envy things you can grow in a So Cal yard that I can't have in a Cen Tex yard.

Bougainvillea. Bougainvillea everywhere. Purple, like Mary's grand one that covers the alley fence. Pale orange, dark orange. Deep red (my personal favorite). To cover fences, trellises, walls, rooftops, cliffsides. Who cares that it is a treacherously thorn-wielding nutcase? Lots of beautiful things are difficult!

The Bird of Paradise was one of the first exotic things I ever loved about the southern California landscape, and I still love it. Never mind that this one very nearly made it through the corner of the house and into the living room, on an apparent mission to peck poor Mary to death in her sleep. "Invasive" is one of my favorite plant characteristics: if a plant wants to take over the world, what's wrong with that? People haven't done such a great job, after all.

[Pretend there is a scratch-and-sniff photograph

of night-blooming jasmine here.]

No photograph can do even remote justice to the unspeakable magic of night-blooming jasmine. It's just an unassuming shrub with little flowers that wait until evening to fill the air with the most intoxicating, romantic, unforgettable scent ever. If you have never experienced it, go buy yourself a ticket to some place that has night-blooming jasmine. Now.

One of the great things in Mary's back yard is her fig tree - decades old, grafted with old stock, and always heavy with figs when I make my August visit. Unfortunately, my vacation falls each year just before the figs explode into ripeness. However, that good tree almost always pushes a few ripe figs in my direction every day I'm there, even if it is early; and I sure do wish you could smell and taste one of those.

When our chores and playtimes are over, we are ready to do a whole lot of nothing for a couple of hours. Since Mary is a truly excellent cook, dining at her house is always better than eating out. So we stay home with wine and chocolate, and watch movies.

Sometimes we'll be on Jane Austen kick, and watch as many dramatizations of her novels as we can lay our hands on, throwing in "The Jane Austen Book Club" for good measure. Sometimes we'll have a foreign-film binge. Then there are the years when we need an infusion of Independent Women movies - this must be how "Under the Tuscan Sun" showed up.

Generally I try to avoid even fictional representations of What People Can Do With Significant Infusions of Cash, because as you have seen, I am prone to envy; and when you pair that with a tendency toward gluttony, it only leaves you five more cardinal sins for getting through the whole rest of the day. But Diane Lane rocked that fluffy movie for Mary and me, and we must confess to having watched it more than once.

(Mi dispiace. I must interrupt myself here to mention a book recommended to me by a friend when she found out I was about to make my first trip to Italy: Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's A Valley in Italy. Just looking at this woman's name should have prepared me for lines like, "The small castle in England from my previous marriage had been sold..." This sort of thing would ordinarily give me a case of the hives as bad as authors who insist upon using foreign phrases in their writings; but somehow St. A de T manages to portray her life with sufficient irony and self-deprecation for me to like her even if she did buy a villa in Tuscany with funds from having sold a castle.)

Sigh. Even if I can't buy a place in Tuscany, I can at least visit one or two, and our travel agent picked us some marvels.

At the culmination of our epic bike ride from Siena, we stayed a few days at this little hilltop hotel oozing rustic charm and quintessentially Tuscan views from every spot on the grounds.

That's our room in the top right corner. That window is the bathroom window, actually, from which one had to tolerate views like this:

That brown expanse is just another plowed field, ready to produce something great to eat. This hotel also has an agricultural component, producing grains like faro and oil from their own olives (who doesn't?).

I'm not the only one here who finds lichen charming, am I?  (It must go back to my Irish side of the family.) But those views! The brief storm that heralded our arrival produced a beautiful next morning:

All that mist cleared quickly and the remainder of our visit saw sheer halcyon weather:

So many places to sit and listen to the birds, read a book, watch the clouds shift.

The swimming pool would have been my favorite place to be, but it was mid-May and quite cool to our Texas sensibilities. As far as I could discern, the only guests who went swimming while we were in residence had strong Scandinavian accents.

To be completely honest, this photo with the poppies in the foreground wasn't taken while sitting around at the hotel. I took it while we were on a short bike tour of the less hilly roads in the general area. Over on the left, where you can't see, there was a herd of goats being monitored by a senior white dog who came up to the road to bark at us as we rode by. It's that kind of place.

It seems Italian hotel rates include breakfast (which in turn includes lots of desserts). The breakfast room at our little Tuscan retreat gave me insight into why people come back from a place like this and redecorate their kitchens.

Left to my own devices I would have spent my days doing absolutely nothing more strenuous than turning pages and taking pictures. However, fortunately Floyd was able to talk me into riding down to Buonconvento, which he'd checked out while looking for a bank to help him solve the lost debit card problem. At first I resisted, for reasons that should be obvious.

But there's no avoiding the reality that Floyd always has the best ideas.

Some of the Art

I'm pretty awful at museums. When we were young, my sister Katherine and I would be taken by our adventure-loving mother to various museums, often along with my friend Sharon and her mother (grown-ups needed other grown-ups to talk and smoke with). We went to the Wadsworth in Hartford, the Peabody down in New Haven, and even to some of the museums in New York City, where I liked the dinosaur bones almost as much as those irresistible paintings where somebody's head was cut off and bleeding on a platter.

But in general I become bored easily, especially when things are as quiet as they are in museums. Makes me want to run screaming out the door.

So when we were planning a couple of days in Rome, I knew my museum tolerance would have to be taken into account. The Vatican Museum seemed like a must-do; can you really go to Italy for the first time at age 60 and not see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? I didn't think so. But what else did I feel I just had to see?

Even if I sort of knew that Rome is covered from stem to stern with art, it still surprised me to just be walking down any old traffic-clogged hill, peer into one of those gated archways, and see things like this:

or this:

or wait, what's behind this gate?

Oh, just a building.

Or how about this? This is just a street corner:

A pretty interesting street corner, though -

"Street of the Four Fountains." How do I reconcile these things with what passes for art in my own subdivision, in which, because of oddly named streets and their cul-de-sac spawn I can find myself on the corner of Moonshadow and Moonshadow?

I liked the worn-down, faded, really old things we saw, like the niche in the ruin of an ancient building we encountered on our way to the Colosseum:

 

This antiquity resided very close to a structure that seemed to be soaring above the city - not only because of its high vantage, but also because of all those winged horses:

This is, of course, the controversial Vittorio Emanuele II Monument, built to honor the first ruler of a unified Italy. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is also located here. As one blogger wryly notes, if this was the structure that won the design contest, can you imagine what some of the losers looked like?

We made it to the Colosseum (which surprises you by looming up out of nowhere as you walk along a very busy boulevard):

It was a good place to have our first of only two guided tours. But while there are traces and remnants of elaborate frescoes, mosaics, and reliefs all over the place within those grand arches; and although our tour guide kept telling us to think like ancient Romans, I just couldn't photograph them. Nor could I like the Colosseum.

Besides, this is about art. When I'd been poring over the map of Rome trying to decide how to choreograph two days so we might see a great deal but not wear ourselves out, I was happy to discover that our Pantheon-Colosseum-Borghese day would bring us past the Spanish Steps. Like any good English major, I copied Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" into my trip diary and held him close in my heart.

The speaker of the poem is addressing the figures on the urn with equal measures of pity and envy:

          Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

               Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

                    Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

          Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

                    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

We stood at the top of the Spanish Steps, and I looked down toward the apartment building where the 25-year-old poet died of, naturally, consumption; and I thought of all the wonderful, heartbreaking, unattainable dreams of my life that remain utterly perfect because they are still dreams.

The nearby statue of Byron gave me an excuse to trot out lots of English major trivia (is that a redundancy?) for Floyd, who was quite patient about it all.

And even if Byron and Shelley had made great fun of the delicate, super-romantic John Keats, my love remains undiminished.

To get back to the question of what I needed to see: Bernini. As with so many things in life, I found him accidentally, and because of Jane Austen. I can't tell you how many times I've watched one particular version of Pride and Prejudice just for the moment when Miss Elizabeth Bennet is visiting the estate of Mr. Darcy and there's a shot of her standing in his sculpture gallery in front of a statue of a veiled woman. A sculpted veil with a face "behind" it?  How could that be possible?

Then one day I'm scrolling through Reddit as usual, and here's an image of another artist's "veiled" statue. This is a thing? Like any modern student of the world, I ran a Google on the topic and discovered that some guy named Bernini had also sculpted a veiled woman, along with some perfectly astonishing other pieces.

And then a Redditor posts a photo of one small portion of a Bernini statue that is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, and that was that. I had to go there and see The Rape of Proserpina.

Obviously this photograph was not taken by me. It's a good photograph, for one thing; and for another thing, the sign says "No Photographs" and people who went to Catholic school for thirteen years do not take such admonishments lightly.

But it was more than that: I couldn't have taken a photo if I'd wanted to take one, or even if I'd wanted to fly in the face of every rule I've ever been taught.

Floyd and I just walked around and around this great masterpiece for many long minutes. If there were other people in that room, I cannot remember them. If there was other art, I can't recall it. What I can remember is how those marble fingers press into that marble flesh, and how Persephone's tears look on her cheek and on her breast. And how her hair flies, and how every inch of her marble body silently screams terror. And how you can see sunlight through her marble cape.

To borrow again from Keats, speaking to the Grecian urn:

     When old age shall this generation waste,

             Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

               Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all

               Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I had seen all the art I needed to see in Rome. 

One Night in Siena...

...is not enough. That's what happens when you set up a trip in ignorance, which seems pretty much a given when you are in fact ignorant about your destination: things that look great on paper suddenly don't make much sense. Oh, well. I'd been planning  my second trip to Italy before I departed for this one, so no big deal: Siena is alive and well and in my future.

We took the high-speed train from Rome to Florence (I really believe I should be saying Roma and Firenze, but for some odd reason using the proper names seems precious) and then a plain old train to Siena. Taking pictures from a vehicle of public transportation always makes me cringe: I feel like my father with his Instamatic, excitedly shooting photos of clouds outside the airplane window.

But for heaven's sake! This isn't just clouds, this is really Italy. Cloudy plastic windows or no, I'm really in Italy! It's nice to know as I embark on my seventh decade, I can still be completely awe-struck.

The train station in Siena could stand alone as an example of why you should pay close attention to the travel experts who suggest you pack lightly. Since you arrived by train, we'll grant that you were able to hoist your luggage onto the train, down a narrow aisle, and perhaps even up onto the overhead shelf. It seems you were even able to get your luggage off the train. Yay, you!

But I don't remember reading anything about the 934 escalators that lift you up up up and more up to street level in Siena. It was as if you took escalators to the top of a mountain to ski. Just when you started to think this must be it, you'd look up and there would be yup another escalator.

Eventually we ended up on a very quiet street in a very quiet part of town. There was no taxi queue here and nothing that looked like a phone booth. Where exactly were we, and how would we get to our hotel? For all my exhaustive pre-trip research, I hadn't thought to figure out this little piece of our journey. Since Floyd and I have a running contest as to which of us is the shiest, neither one of us was inclined to enter a store and ask directions we doubted we would even comprehend. Time for the gps.

Like most things on a gps screen, it looked quite simple and straightforward: a kind of < shaped route to our hotel. Like many of the places we were to visit in Italy, Siena seems to exist on ridges leading down to chasms. Not the nearly bottomless chasms we would see later, but steep enough and deep enough that you can't walk a straight route from here to there; you have to take routes that look like <.

We made it to the hotel by sweat and guesswork, pulling two suitcases and hoisting a backpack apiece. Nothing like arriving in a lobby that looks like this when you look and no doubt smell like you just dug your way out from under a rock.

Buongiorno, I panted to the man behind the desk. Abbiamo una prenotazione. 

In true Italian fashion, the man behind the desk was extremely gracious about my attempts at his language, and led us to a very sweet room. Before we could even take advantage of a bathroom twice the size of the one we had in Rome, hunger and thirst drove us out the door, and we made for a ristorante I had already visited thanks to Google Street View.

Here's a thing about Italy: we were sitting in this place that had the worst reviews of any restaurant in Siena. I'd done my homework; I knew these things. A suicide move?

The food was fabulous, the wine was wonderful, the tiramisu (in the form of a little pudding in a bowl, not the cube of ladyfingers & cream one encounters here in the states) delectable. Okay, then! Worst food in town!

Siena is a town of little narrow streets, of course, and a truly wonderful, famous piazza that somehow hosts a horse race in the summer. Glad to miss that.

Here we encountered one of the first glitches of our trip: the bancomat, having just issued me a few euros, swallowed Floyd's debit card and refused to spit it back up. First-world problem, indeed. But it was in Floyd's account that most of our $$ resided. Left to my account, we'd be eating our meals from the side of the road. (Note: although my mastery of Italian prepositions is famously, even laughably inadequate, in English I do know the difference between on the side of the road and from the side of the road). It would be several phone calls and a few days before all complications were resolved, but hey, what is travel without adventure?

Despite such unfriendly treatment by the bancomat - perfectly predictable, I think, when you visit Banca di Firenze in Siena for Pete's sake - we found Siena a very warm, family-feeling town. There was a very noisy carnival happening on one end of town, and the usual weekend revelry in the famous Piazza del Campo - the sloping one with the horse race. The local ragazzi were walking arm-in-arm, laughing, flirting, smoking, teasing like ragazzi the world over. We saw lots of teeny kids with their grandparents, a pattern we observed everywhere we went in Italy.

I can't really explain why I don't have more photos, except to say that at the time I wasn't thinking of some kind of illustrated diary. I was often trying to keep my head from exploding with the sheer amazement of it all. I'd go around for hours with the camera, pulling it out of the backpack over and over again to capture what seems now like every doorway and alley; then I'd just leave the darn thing back at the hotel. I wanted to experience Italy more than I wanted to take pictures of it.

Then there's the problem of not being a very good photographer.

At some point during our one Saturday evening in Siena, a very nice, very talkative young man arrived at the hotel with the bicycles that were going to ride to our next destination. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Marco would reappear later in our narrative; for now, he had lots of enthusiastic suggestions about our route (which was typed out for us kilometer by kilometer so we could judge by the bike computer exactly how far off-course we had wandered), our Tuscan destination, and - more importantly! - where to get the best food in Siena. Never mind that we had consumed a full meal, a bottle of wine, and dessert as a late lunch. Let's go find dinner!

Sunday morning in Siena is church bells. 

Church bells, and an okay hotel breakfast, and bike shorts. 

Ever since I've known Floyd, nearly eleven years now, I've found myself signing up for various endeavors that seem like brilliant ideas at sign-up time. Then, when the actual day presents itself, another story altogether. (I am thinking of various skating and skiing episodes from which I may never fully recover.)

In theory, biking from one Tuscan town to another seems idyllic. To judge by the Internet, everybody in the world goes biking through Tuscany! I'd read one woman's account of biking 21 kilometers, of which she was very proud; and so I'd been biking through our flat neighborhood for weeks, translating miles into kilometers and talking myself into the idea that I could absolutely do this. Siena to Buonconvento? I'm there! What's 40 kilometers? Not that many miles!

Here is Floyd at the main gate as we departed from old Siena:

If he looks pensive, it is because he is wondering how in the world he is going to get me all the way to Buonconvento without oxygen tanks or a tow rope. While a ride of 60 hilly Austin miles may be his idea of a really fun sufferfest every Saturday morning, Floyd knows I avoid hills like the plague. In addition, we were about to dive into some automobile traffic that was less voluminous than Rome's but ten times as enthusiastic about getting from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.

Across the street from this ancient Porta San Marco, a view of our future:

I'll just say we had a few busy miles and only one roundabout to deal with before we reached the outskirts and the roads became peaceful. And I never want to hear the word "roundabout" again, okay?

We were pedaling ourselves into a stretch of our journey that stuck me then and strikes me now as one stereotype after another.

Inevitably we reached a very long hill I could not conquer in a seated position. Up, up. up, push, push, push, keep in mind that the dozens of Vespa daredevils on the road this morning will make a startling noise with some frequency, push, push, keep in mind that walking is exercise too... May I take a moment here to say that, no matter how many times I begged him to leave me by the side of the road to die, my dear sweet spouse stayed with me the whole time? And while I was push-push-pushing up the sides of these hilly roads, he was riding right behind me? At about .25 miles per hour? He's a wonder, that Floyd.

Enough of that brand of fun; let's eat instead. But we are in the middle of (a lovely) nowhere. Wait, is that a sign for a restaurant? Let's go look.

As we were eating our lunch, the extended family whose place this is were eating at a long table behind me. We were the only ones there: Floyd and me, and the grandparents, parents, and two little boys who were - like certain grandchildren I know (not that I'd name names, but Marty, Ray, and Marion) - doing more running around than eating.

Meanwhile we had this view from the patio:

I like to think that not everyone could rise from such a lunch table and get right back on the bike. It's probably best that we had no choice.

Marco had mentioned a little detour we ought to take, and as tempting as it was to get to our hotel, we took the turn to Murlo, "a tiny medieval borgo and one of the oldest settlements in the area." What did an extra couple of kilometers mean to mildly intoxicated powerhouses like ourselves? We went.

Murlo really is just a little walled town out in the middle of the countryside. Although we encountered a number of tantalizing aromas wafting from the windows on this Sunday afternoon, we only saw three other human beings. Two were on a motorcycle, arriving as we arrived and leaving almost as soon as they'd parked. The other was a man moving his car into the parking lot alongside actual Etruscan ruins:

I take it that in this little dugout, bronze forms were made - pour in your clay and, after a suitable period, remove the mold to reveal your amphora, or statue, or whatever. This is the kind of tourist experience that causes books to multiply on shelves once you're home: I found myself wanting to read about every place we encountered.

We now had only about ten kilometers to go. A number of them were vertical. And while one nice thing about wheeling yourself uphill is the inevitable downhill, two complications: one, these were pretty major hills for me, with some mildly intimidating downhills. I thought, as I have done many times in the past, it would be a terrible thing to struggle through such a long climb only to be killed on the descent.

And two, our hotel is located on top of a hill. I should say, on top of at least three hills outside Buonconvento. I may not know technically where the term "16% grade" comes from, or what it means; but I know I can't do it on a bicycle. (Up, up, up, push, push, push...)

It is very handy to have a camera. You can stop and take photos, saving a little face while struggling to breathe and get your heart rate down from the red zone.

We made our way at last to Agriturismo Pieve a Salti, where we were given absolutely a room with a view:

We'd become so accustomed to splendid weather - all that golden Tuscan sunshine and those fluffy white clouds creating shadows here and there across the landscape - that we hadn't given much thought to the gathering darkness. Twenty minutes after our bikes were parked, the storm arrived.

And that, I have to say, was beautiful too.