Sotto il Cielo Toscano

The wi-fi is a bit weak here tonight, so I’m writing this in Word, and hopefully the website will let me upload later in the evening. [It did!][...kind of.] 

This was a day of unexpected pleasures. We didn’t have much planned: visitors to this region either stay a week or more, travelling round in their own vehicles, or are allowed off their bus for a few hours. We have three nights/two days, and no transport. Yesterday we saw what you have to see, Cortona, and so what do we do today? Would it be the fantasy, sipping wine and eating cheese all day? Although the farmhouse we are in is lovely*, the outside is not quite so inviting, with the garden having some overgrown roses and plastic playhouses and other toys surrounding the deckchairs on the small lawn. It doesn’t quite meet the fantasy standards. 

*Remember I hazarded a guess at the building having been built at the same time as the 1764 house out the front? I was wrong. I noticed another brick in this building this morning: 1954! When you build to traditional methods, it’s hard to tell the age. I think ‘timeless classic’ is the phrase.

Anyway we started the day slowly again to see how it would work out. Awake around 8 (Stephen slightly earlier than me today) with a cuppa in bed and a bit of reading before bothering to get up. Finally dressed around 9, breakfast a bit later. Coffee outside in the morning sunshine. Nobody was anxious to make a decision. Or even move. Finally at around 11 something happened.

Grape picking

All the grape pickers: Aldo, Fiona, Anna-Maria, Francesca

Yesterday Stephen had videoed Aldo, the father of our Airbnb host, making wine. He needed to ask him to sign a release form, allowing him to use the video in his e-book, so at 11ish we set off over the road with the documents. Today the host’s niece was there too, Francesca, visiting from university in Perugia. We were hoping that Aldo would be back in the shed, because Stephen wanted to get some footage of him pressing the grapes, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, he was out in the fields, picking again. So Francesca and Anna-Maria suggested we go out there with them and film that. Off we went, a couple of kilometres up the road in Francesca’s car. They were taking some empty buckets and some water for him. And then while Stephen videoed, we all started to help cut the grapes. It was fabulous! I’ve never had a fruit-picking job (and I still don’t want one) but it wasn’t bad. The vines are grown at a reasonably comfortable height, and the secateurs were sharp. You don’t have to be picky about what goes in the bucket, because everything that is not juice gets strained back out again, so you just cut and drop it straight into the bucket. But the grapes are so ripe and soft and ready to burst, just holding a bunch while you cut the stalk can be enough to have juice exploding over your hand. It took no time to fill a bucket, so we just kept going. We finished the row in about 20 minutes, and I felt I had made a definite contribution to this year’s production. Not significant, but it was there. Who would have thought I’d go grape-harvesting in Tuscany on this trip?

Tuscany, more to the south. 

The lake you can see at the foot of the hills on the left

 is L. Trasimeno

From there Anna-Maria again offered to drive us in to Camucia so we could catch a bus back to Cortona for the afternoon. We had secretly been hoping she might, but we didn’t want to ask. We had read about a couple of places that we hadn’t seen yesterday that were probably worth a visit, so a second trip up the hill would fill in the day nicely. And of course we wanted to experience Cortona again. So that happened. Drop off at the station, buy return tickets, 10 minutes in the sun waiting for the bus, up the hill to the Etruscan gate, and then walk round inside the walls, away up to the right. There was a piazza and a park that we had missed, so we went to see them. Garibaldi Piazza was a little higher up, and a bit further round the hill to the south, from where we were yesterday, and so it had a slightly different view from its lookout. And there is a long park of French-style laid-out gardens stretching further off from there. We walked through the park for some time, although not to the end, before coming back. It was another of those times that you need to recognize when they occur: brilliant weather, beautiful view, agreeable surroundings, no worries. 

The other place on our list was on the opposite side of town, so our plan was just to walk the streets in that general direction and have lunch along the way somewhere. The streets led from piazza to piazza, and were fairly full of more busloads of Americans. There were lots of galleries and artisanal craft shops along the way, and one group of pictures displayed outside caught my eye. We popped into a gallery that had paintings that were parodies of famous works, with cats. I nearly bought a “copy” of Leonardo’s Lady with a Ferret, which was a Lady with a Cat, but in the end I thought some of the details might annoy me a bit too much. Instead I bought a parody of God reaching out to touch Adam, in which a cat replaces Adam. I like the concept, and it made me laugh out loud when I turned the corner and saw it. 

We had lunch a few doors down from there, then continued across the town. We saw the opposite city wall much earlier than we expected, and our sense of direction had been spot on, as the Diocesan Museum was right in front of us too. We had spurned it yesterday, thinking we’d seen enough church museums, but I saw a list of the paintings it held, from local churches, which made it worth a look, if you had nothing better to do. It also had a Hall (not haul) of Treasures, which were mainly vestments worn by a Pope who held a Mass in the town some centuries ago then donated his robes. There was also a reliquary, and we asked at reception what the actual relic was (why wouldn’t they put that information on the display? It’s been the case several times. Nobody cares about the reliquaries, which they describe in loving detail; people just want to know what’s in it.) It turned out to be, ostensibly, a scrap of the clothing Jesus wore on the day he healed a woman with a hemorrhage.  Not a Bible story I remember, I have to say. And surely every single person who was told that this was a scrap of Jesus’ clothing, from one particular day, that turned up out of nowhere in the 13^th century, had to have had some private doubts as to its authenticity, and yet, here it is, surrounded by silver and jewels. I marvel at the extent of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect in the phenomenon of relics, and am impressed at the entrepreneurship of the medieval relic dealers and their gall.

We now started to wend our way gradually down and back across the hill, back to the Etruscan gate, keeping in mind that it was a good day for a gelato on the way. Another piazza, another gelateria, but soon we were at the bus stop, waiting for the 4 o’clock bus. We wanted to get back to the house because Aldo was going to be crushing the grapes at 5ish, and it might only take him half an hour, Francesca had said. We got the bus, went to the station and saw a taxi pull in. The driver went in to the Station Bar to have a coffee, and then he would be free for a little while, so he was happy to take us to Fratticciola. That was 5Euros saved in a call-out fee, and no time and frustration expended in phoning number after number looking for an available taxi. Perfetto!

When it was nearly 5, Stephen went across the road to get his videoing done, while I fell asleep on the sofa. Stephen didn’t get back till 6, with a broad smile, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of wine. We had some as an aperitivo: it’s weak, but not watery: a very mild flavor. It’s made without any additives, not even sugar or yeast. All he uses is a hydrometer to check the alcohol content. There was a trace of spray on the vines, so it might not be organic, but it’s natural. They make about 1000 litres a year, and they have olives for oil, and Anna-Maria pointed out some ploughed fields today on the drive to Camucia, that she said were theirs too.  

Yesterday we had bought some ingredients thinking we’d end up having dinner at home. That wasn’t the case in the end, but tonight it was. We used a recipe that Filippo taught us 20 years ago and we have used often since: the simplest carbonara you’ll ever make: cut up finely or mince some bacon (or any other tasty meat – I think we bought pancetta or prosciutto), fry it lightly while your pasta cooks, then when the pasta is drained, stir it, the meat, and one raw egg per person all together, letting the heat of the pasta cook the egg. You can stir it over a low heat if you want the egg a bit more cooked and drier. We had this with more wine outside in the (just slightly less than) balmy evening. 

Then we went for a walk to see the sunset light and silhouettes of trees along the hillside horizons. We bought icecreams at the tabacchi for dessert, and that was the day done. A day under the Tuscan sky. Nigh on perfect.

Tuscan sunset