April 12, 1997
Colle Val D'Elsa and Tuscany
We had pictured ourselves staying in a quiet farmhouse in the Tuscan hillside, breakfasting among the budding vines and taking long walks in the country. So when we sat down with the rental agent in Colle Val D'Elsa we asked for a secluded, rustic place, and that is what we got.
Our farmhouse apartment was in a small cluster of old stone houses named Poggiarello at the top of a wooded hill, ten kilometers of country lane and two more of bumpy dead-end dirt track from the nearest town. Life in Poggiarello was undistracted by telephones, radio, or television, or by neighbors for that matter, since there were no other living souls within at least a kilometer in any direction. It was also undistracted by heating, since the tiny radiators in the rooms never got any warmer than a stale cup of coffee, but by keeping our socks on at all times we stayed fairly warm. There was a single large red-tiled room on the ground floor which served as living and dining room. One corner was furnished with a tall wooden cabinet holding a small sink and two-burner stove of the size typically seen in the smaller class of motorhome. A short flight of stairs led from the opposing corner to the bedroom with its wood beam and terracotta ceiling. The bathroom floor was fitted with a central drain and the entire room served as the shower stall, which delighted Kathryn since she could splash water from her plastic tub at will. The apartment was decorated with charcoal drawings and small framed landscape photographs, taken in the surrounding hills and forests.
During the days we luxuriated in our isolation, cooking and napping, reading and hanging out the laundry. Kathryn played on the grassy slope outside our door and Mary liked to walk to the brick patio on the top of the hill and look out on the surrounding towns. The fields were in various stages of preparation, some deeply furrowed and ready for planting, other still unplowed and covered with briliant yellow flowers. Luminous green buds were starting to appear on the vines and The walls of our house were two feet thick, and the windows and doors were covered by heavy wooden shutters which could be swung shut and locked with thick iron latches.
At night Poggiarello was utterly empty and the woods were pitch dark. The wind shook the thick shutters over our windows, and I started to imagine zombies prowling around the farmhouse, waiting to devour unwary residents. My lurid fantasies grew increasely detailed each night and eventually I found myself inspecting the walkway to our house for the tracks of the undead and reluctant to venture outside at night. Mary found my obsession ridiculous, the fears of a city dweller unused to the remote countryside, and airly proclaimed that zombies didn't like girls. So I sent her whenever we needed to retrieve something from the car after dark and I noticed that she always scurried back in when I unlocked the door for her.
As the days passed Mary and I learned that we did not share the same tolerance for rural peace and quiet. While Mary was thoroughly content relaxing in our little stone farmhouse among the flowers and trees, I drank cup after cup of coffee, read every story and classified advertisement in the few English-language newspapers we had, dissassembled and reassembled the toy car I had received for my birthday, cleaned all my camera lenses, picked bug splatters off the car grille, and paced around grumpily. The friends we emailed seemed puzzled at my boredom and reminded me that a week in a country cabin with excellent coffee, no phone, and all day to nap and read seemed like an ideal vacation. I responded that deciphering the contents panel on a box of milk was not my idea of stirring reading. Fortunately we always had errands to run in town and I was always happy to leave Mary to the zombies and drive down our bumpy dirt road, a cloud of dust behind me, and spend more time than was really necessary to buy two dozen diapers or a liter of milk. I learned the Italian words for "drill", "hole", and "here", and found an kindly auto mechanic who interrupted his backlog of work to make the necessary mounting hole in my camera gunstock, and while searching for someone to develop our accumulated film I learned that developing is sviluppo and proof sheets are provini. I whiled away an hour on a fruitless search for a fishing license, which took me to a travel agent, a rental agency, and the local police station with little slips of paper bearing my crudely constructed questions, and I was always sad when I had finished my errands and run out of excuses to stay in town.
Fortunately we also spent some of our days visiting nearby towns. Colle Val D'Elsa was conveniently located and we could reach any place in Tuscany in less than an hour. We spent a day wondering about the puzzling towers of San Gimignano. In its heyday this walled city on a hilltop must have looked like a medieval Manhattan, with 72 tall towers standing high above the town. Today only 14 towers are left but they still give the city an unmistakable skyline. Our books gave varying explanations for the towers. One theory was that they were built as demonstrations of power and wealth by the rich families of the city. Another is that those same familes, needing to store their precious stocks of saffron within the confines of the city walls, built up when there was no room to build out. Other books informed us that the towers were military in purpose, a final line of defense in times of siege. None of these ideas made much sense after we had seen the towers for ourselves. They are stark and unadorned, without the sculpture and decoration that a rich man would commission for his family monument. They must have cost a great deal to build, certainly more than the cost to take over a neighboring structure for a warehouse or even to expand the city walls. And as fortifications the towers would have been fatal for their defenders, who could be trapped in the towers without access to much water or food, and starved out or simply incinerated by fires set at the tower's base. There were no arrow-slits in the blank walls, and we had a hard time imagining a defender hanging himself far out over the roof platform and trying to aim an arrow at besiegers hidden among the jumbled roofs ten stories below. We toured some of the museums in San Gimignano, hoping to find clues to the towers, but although the towers were shown in many of the medieval paintings of the city that we saw, their uses were not.
Also in San Gimignano I was overcome with an attack of cheapness and refused to pay the L10,000 admission to the wonderfully-named Museo di Tortue. I regretted this decision for weeks afterwards. Some of the paintings in the more conventional museums had included hideous scenes of flayings and beheadings, and I can now only imagine how satisfying a museum dedicated to the art of torture would have been.
On another day we visited the Piazza di Miracoli in Pisa, home to the Leaning Tower and Pisa's magnificent cathedral and bapistry. Uncommonly for Italy, these buildings are set apart from the surrounding city in a grand park of smooth green grass, perfect for lounging, napping, and playing with little babies. There were numerous signs warning visitors to stay off the grass, but as thousands of people were disregarding them we felt no need to squat on the pavement. The groundskeeper had clearly given up trying to keep people from trampling his grass, but he still asserted his authority over the lawn by roaring his truck-sized mowing machine through the crowd of prone bodies, scattering tourists and picnic lunches right and left. We were careful to set Kathryn down on a strip of recently mown grass.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa began to tilt only a few years into construction, when the building had reached the third tier. In what we imagined as a classic example of bureaucratic inertia, construction continued right along on the same unstable foundations as the tower continued to lean more and more. I visited the Leaning Tower as a little child, and remembered climbing up the stairs to the columned balconies to enjoy the view. Thirty years later, the tower leaned more than I remembered, and no-one was climbing it anymore. The tower was fenced off, wrapped in steel cables, surrounded by excavations and construction debris, and weighted down with giant piles of lead. It was dirty and deserted, isolated at one end of the plaza while crowds of holidaymakers laughed, ate, and enjoyed themselves in and around the other buildings which were shiny white from recent cleaning and adorned with newly restored roofs. The tower made me think of a sick man, wrapped in a tangle of life-support tubes, lying in a dark corner of a hospital long after visiting hours. We went to the souvenir shops that line the plaza and bought Kathryn a miniature Leaning Tower. There were big ones and little ones, gilded ones and colored ones, towers fitted with light bulbs and towers attached to keychains. In the end we picked a small soapstone tower just like the one I had brought back from Pisa many years ago. I could not tell if the molds had been reworked to reflect the increased lean. My tower had lasted for three decades, but that same night Kathryn broke a large chunk out of the base of her tower. We wrapped the broken base with duct tape and lectured her on taking care of her toys.
We also visited Florence and Siena from our farmhouse in Poggiarello, and learned another disadvantage of staying in the countryside. With a little baby to bathe, dress, feed, and put down for a nap every morning, we seldom left the house before ten-thirty and were lucky to spend an afternoon in the city before heading back to the farmhouse. In Florence we had time to visit a bank, find the American Express office, climb the 400-odd steps to the top of the Duomo tower, and visit the Gallerie Academie. On the day we visited Siena we were particularly disorganized and had only time to find parking, walk to the Piazza del Campo, and go home. We vowed to return and explore both cities in greater depth, but although we had a chance to see more of Florence a few weeks later, we have yet to return to Siena. Perhaps traveling always leaves us with vows to return, someday.
Traveling on a Budget:
Staying in a Tuscan farmhouse apartment is quite affordable. Through a good and English-speaking rental agent such as Holiday International in Colle Val D'Elsa (tel 0577 922619), an apartment like Poggiarello costs only about L650,000 (about US$ 390) a week. Our heating was extra, and useless, but even so rural vacationing was a budget sort of way to see Tuscany.
Staying Connected:
For various reasons we had to make a number of telephone calls to the USA from the payphones in Colle Val D'Elsa, and found that calling international using an AT&T calling card is convenient but quite expensive. We don't know the cheapest way to call home, but have a hard time believing that AT&T is it.
We also had occasion to use the Italian postal service for something other than postcards, and were soundly disappointed. A highly time-sensitive letter, for which we paid L48,000 to assure delivery by special ultra-priority international service with guaranteed receipt in 48 hours, took over ten days to arrive. Two separate parcels of books sent to us via general delivery (poste restante) in Florence (a service misleadingly reported as reliable in our guidebooks) disappeared without a trace.
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