Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  Calci has an interesting church and friendly people sitting in the shade of a terrace outside one of the village’s few bars. But what makes it unique for me is its layout. The town snakes its way along a stream, the Zambra, which flows under numerous small bridges and between houses and, a local told me, is full of fish—trota fario, or brown trout—along with eels and other edible creatures. In the heat of July, however, the Zambra is nearly dry.

  This village was built in a narrow valley that has been dubbed in this modern era of tourism as the Val Graziosa, or Pretty Valley. It is a name like the one given to my Idaho childhood home: Treasure Valley, or another valley farther to the southeast, Magic Valley.

  At Val Graziosa’s eastern end, Calci is perhaps only three or four streets wide at its base and tapers to a fine point as it climbs uphill and, without transition, blends into the much smaller village of Castelmaggiore.

  The village’s main west–east road up Monte Serra, one of the hills of the Monti Pisani, is narrow, barely wide enough for two cars going in opposite directions to pass one another. At different points, a driver often has to pause and wait for another vehicle coming from the opposite direction to go by.

  The few soft peaks of this Monti Pisani range are like foothills of the Alpi Apuane, similar to the Strettoia Hills between Seravezza and Massa east of Pietrasanta. These Pisan hills sit between the provinces of Lucca and Pisa and are bordered by the Serchio River in the west, the plain of Lucca in the north, the Lake of Bientina in the east, and the Arno River in the south. The view from Monte Serra’s summit takes in the Apuan range to the northwest and, on the clear, cloudless day I experienced, all the way to islands of the Tuscan Archipelago.

  My roadway, from Calci and into Castelmaggiore, twists and turns, traveling back and forth over bridges only one lane wide. Villagers walking along what little there is to the roadside simply trust you will not run them down, but still wait for enough room to slip by and hope another car isn’t coming downhill at the same time.

  There are several escape points from this road that take you to even smaller villages on hillsides framing Calci. I impulsively took one of these exits, driving through ancient olive groves and land sprinkled with a few small vineyards. Vineyards do not dominate here; they start to take over much farther to the south of Pisa, beyond the Plain of Pisa and more in the area of Bolgheri and even farther south, to the east of Grosseto.

  Here, olive groves take up much of the real estate. I got the sense I was driving through a rolling sea of the greenish-silver trees. Periodically, I would see new swaths of young trees, planted perhaps in the last decade—or maybe last week. It is hard to tell because olive trees grow so slowly. Folks planting young trees do so for future generations—not for their own. It can take one hundred years for an olive tree to begin major production. And while the aboveground portion of the tree can survive for perhaps five or six hundred years, the root system can last a few thousand, sending up new shoots when the upper tree dies or is burned out or otherwise is trashed by the chariots or mechanized tanks of marauding armies.

  With each journey in Italy, I learn more and more about olive trees. In a trip along the Calabria coast several years ago, I met an old man, as gnarled as the olive-wood limb he had slung over his shoulder and sun-beaten into indecipherable age, who told me he had trees in his grove that were planted at the time of Christ. A few years later in Sardinia I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast situated on land that once housed a sixteenth-century monastery. Five-hundred-year-old olive trees surrounded the B and B, built in the 1980s.

  Ahead of me, as I make my way up a narrow road that is more hard dirt than asphalt, a church steeple pops out of nowhere. Then a few buildings swing into view as well, looking as old as the mountains that cradle the stone structures. A battered sign tells me that this is the tiny borgo of Tre Colli. With perhaps a dozen residents living in a handful of buildings constructed in the Middle Ages, this spot is not even recorded on my maps or listed in any English guidebook. But even Calci, a bustling town of possibly sixty-five hundred people, does not merit more than a sentence in the guidebook I sometimes use, which is one of the most detailed available for English-speaking visitors to Tuscany.

  A plaque on the church in Tre Colli speculates the structure might date as far back as the eleventh century, but that the first mention in any known documents was two hundred years later. And the early notation wasn’t a positive one; it says the Pisans, in AD 1288, destroyed it. The reason why is not given. I suspect it was to bring the villages of the Plain of Pisa under the city’s influence.

  This village is definitely not a tourist destination. There are no signs indicating places to stay and no restaurants. But driving through it, stopping for an hour to sit in a roadside olive grove with a view of the ancient church higher on the hill, and eating my lunch while leaning against a gnarled tree that was three or four hundred years old, was well worth the diversion.

  There was plenty going on to keep my attention in that tiny space around my tree. Chewing on the soft local bread I picked up in a tiny market in Calci along with slices of a local salami, balancing a small tub of pickled olives on a thick root I used as an armrest, and sipping from a bottle of mineral water con gas, I studied bunches of soft, gray-green leaves with their silver-white bellies. And the ancient, broad trunk I was leaning against brought to mind a line I read in a book about olive trees: “Its big, gnarled old trunk hid a thousand secrets in its wrinkly bark, and the slight breeze that blew up from the mouth of the valley shivered through its branches.”

  Alex Dingwall-Main’s passage in The Angel Tree could have been describing my tree in Tre Colli. The tree was a study in whorls seemingly sculptured by the hand of some great artist aiming to nourish the soul—the artist’s and mine. The trunk was blackened in spots, attesting to a long-ago fire, and here and there alongside the main trunk, jutting out of a cluster of roots resembling the shape of a partially deflated basketball, were narrow, deep-green shoots, sturdy testaments that this old tree still had a vibrant future. All I could hear in the heavy summer air was the sound of birds and grasshoppers. Not a single car passed by on the road twenty feet above.

  No sooner had I left Tre Colli and returned to the narrow main road out of Calci, appropriately named Via Panoramica Calci, than another surprise awaited me farther uphill. Glancing over the edge of the road into a deep valley, I spotted a couple of other ancient buildings, including one with a church steeple. This, a sign informed me, was San Bernardo.

  Once a small borgo, San Bernardo has its legends, much like Pietrasanta’s unlikely legend that Michelangelo designed the Duomo bell tower there. The French abbot Bernardo of Clairvaux reportedly visited the tiny monastery, known then as the hermitage of Santi Jacopo e Verano alla Costa d’Acqua, or the Saints James and Verano at the Water Coast. Bernardo had been in Tuscany in 1135 to meet with Bernardo di Calci, who some sources refer to as Bernardo di Pisa. The Calci Bernardo would become Pope Eugenius III ten years later. The two Bernardos had met to discuss peace terms between rivals Pisa and Genoa. While on retreat at the monastery, one of the earliest in the Pisan Hills, Bernardo of Clairvaux reportedly wrote the well-known final prayer of the Rosary, “Salve Regina” or “Hail Holy Queen.” Some scholars dispute this, of course, and several possible authors have been credited, including a German monk and a pope. But folks in and around Calci believe otherwise.

  Today, the deconsecrated church, declared a national monument and restored in the late 1960s, and one two-story medieval building, which probably was the monastery, are all that are left. It is now an agritourismo, a place for tourists to come, stay, eat local food, and experience Tuscan farm life. The church, with a porch made of local stone, is small and simple with only a belfry and no bell tower. I drove down to it. There were no vehicles present or people walking about. But the place offered a magnificent view of the Plain of Pisa to the west. I am sure that on a clearer day, I’d have been able to see Pisa and its tower.

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* *

  San Bernardo is near the summit of Monte Serra. At the top, I find Italian Army soldiers on maneuvers. I stop, watch as a crew sets up a communications station, and I speak with an officer who advises me not to miss the village of Buti on the downhill side of the mountain.

  “It is lovely,” he said. “And if you can avoid the bicyclists, the route to there is through magnificent trees and, farther down, olive groves.” My intention was to pass through en route to the more touristy town of San Miniato, then head back west to Pontedera before dipping into the southern reaches of the Plain of Pisa, ending up in Lari. But I generally follow advice such as the officer’s, and Buti, tucked into the cleft of a hill, proved to be a pleasant two-hour layover in the heat of the July afternoon.

  Buti’s wide-open village square has a fountain at one end, on this day surrounded by preteen boys and girls playing in the water and using—nonstop, for the two hours I was there—water-filled balloons to squirt passing cars and playmates. Adults driving by and getting splashed would pause, roll down a window, and have a friendly talk with one or two of the youngsters. Everybody knows everybody here.

  A nice bar, my chosen hangout, dominated the other end of the square. I sat in the shade of the bar’s patio, engaged in light conversation with the usual elderly denizens taking a break from their almost-continuous hands of the card game Scopa, the Italian noun for “broom.” The word is a reference to the players’ attempts to “sweep” all cards from the table. These cards, forty to a deck, bear no resemblance to poker cards or typical suits Americans are used to. Decks can be based on designs from sixteen provincial areas, including Trieste, Piacenza, Naples, and the region of Sicily.

  These games, ubiquitous in bars and town squares all over Italy, are a delight to watch. The players are mostly men—the only time I saw women playing was in a private workers’ bar in Pietrasanta—and the game can get loud and raucous. The uninitiated might think that players in the Pietrasanta club are about to come to blows; they often get in others’ faces, shouting and gesturing, but everyone always remains friends. These were, after all, people who as children had learned to ride their bicycles in the same central piazza; kicked soccer balls back and forth, bouncing them off the ancient stone fronts of banks and tobacco shops; chased one another down medieval streets; and who went to work together as artigiani in the marble workshops or as miners, or who became bakers, or even bar owners. Nearly every afternoon, these now-retired men continue to gather, drink their small glasses of white wine, and laugh and joke and attempt to “sweep” the cards.

  Players, violently slapping down cards onto the discard piles, sling out words barely discernible to those knowing only school-taught Italian. In the late afternoon or early evenings when several players are spread out across several tables, the uproar can become deafening.

  This was true in Buti, or Calci, or Pietrasanta, or just about anywhere I went in western Tuscany. Now, in Buti, one of the retired men, white-bearded, dark eyes sparkling, offered to teach me the game. The other three men sat back as this fine gentleman attempted, using Italian words I could scarcely follow, to explain the mysteries of Scopa. But I could not grasp it and quickly realized that I was out of my league. I scooted back my chair, motioned for the four to resume, and ordered a round of white wine for the gentlemen. When the drinks came, they picked them up and tipped their glasses toward me. When I left more than a hour later to resume my drive toward the hill town of San Miniato, they paused in their game, got up from their table, and walked me to my nearby car, one with his arm through my arm as many Italian men do as they walk side by side, and wished me addio, each shaking my hand.

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  Not being a drinker but knowing many, I can only guess at the feeling of warmth that a small glass of good wine can give. It must be like the feeling I had after experiencing the hospitality of those small-town Tuscan men. I carried this warmth with me while driving south out of Buti to catch the main highway east toward San Miniato, doing my best to stay off the autostrada to Florence. I followed the state highway through Pontedera, where most of Italy’s scooters are made, along a brief stretch of the Arno River, and through smaller villages such as Castel del Bosco, translated as Castle of the Woods.

  I took the turnoff to the south toward San Miniato, climbing into the Apennine foothills along a beautiful, tree-lined road that burst open every now and then with magnificent vistas to the west and south of the Plain of Pisa. San Miniato is one of the more touristy small towns in this area. Its draws, I suspect, are the vistas and its position high up as a Tuscan hill town.

  Along the road to San Miniato, I saw the familiar wooden Via Francigena signs, and realized that the medieval pathway followed by pilgrims and armies to Rome swung by here and briefly bumped against the Apennines. What gave San Miniato its historic prominence was its location along the west–east route from Pisa to Florence as well as the early northwest–southeast road between Lucca and Siena. It also was where German Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II, at various times in the twelfth century, built massive fortifications to solidify their rule here.

  Some sources claim that the eleventh-century Tuscan countess Matilda of Canossa was born in San Miniato. Most historical sources are uncertain about her birthplace, and San Miniato is left off the list of possibilities proffered by some. Matilda’s biographer, Michele K. Spike, thinks Matilda was born in Mantua, 165 miles to the north, in the Lombardy region.

  Still, the memory of Matilda is not lost on modern Tuscans. She is highly regarded because, despite her ancestral connections with the German emperors who ruled northern Italy, she favored Italians over the Germans. And much of her life was spent in Tuscany, building castles and launching public improvements, such as the so-called Devil’s Bridge across the Serchio River at Borgo a Mozzano north of Lucca. Her father, Bonifacio III, used the Serchio as his route to the Mediterranean and recognized all its advantages: collecting taxes in villages along its route and using it for trade with Pisa and other merchant cities.

  Matilda also was a warrior who led armies. In one instance, her forces rebuffed the army of the German emperor Henry IV when he tried to assault her castle at Canossa high in the Emilia-Romagna region. (Henry’s son and successor, Henry V, did not support his father and named Matilda vice-queen of Liguria, a title, Spike tells us, that seems to have been created just for her but one she never used.)

  She also is well known in Tuscany for her support of much-beleaguered Pope Gregory VII through his conflicts with Henry IV, and his hotly contested reforms of the Catholic clergy.

  The ruins of many castles occupied by Matilda over her long life (1046–1115) dot the Tuscan countryside and portions of Emilia-Romagna, near its modern boundary with Tuscany. San Miniato has one tower dedicated to Matilda, but that does not necessarily mean that she was born there. Many other towns and villages have Matilda towers, including one in Viareggio, and one that still stands on the Tiber Island in Rome, her home when she was in the city visiting Pope Gregory VII.

  According to Spike, throughout her life Matilda donated property to at least fifteen churches throughout Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna and gave gifts of gold and silver to Modena. This countess is remembered not only for these gifts and her support of Gregory, but how she stood up to a ruthless German king. On a social level, she fought against the dehumanizing feudal system that had kept the peasant class dependent on the nobility for centuries.

  I crossed paths with Matilda many times throughout western Tuscany, realizing that her influence spread far beyond the region’s boundaries. The more I learned about her, the more of a hero she became.

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  San Miniato’s name once had the appellation al Tedesco (to the German) because of this early medieval influence.

  The mighty castles the Germans built no longer stand guard. But while walls are mostly gone, it is obvious from the layout of the town, across three ridges with deep valleys in between, that the walls were inco
rporated into certain buildings. Two full towers dating to the German era also remain. One has been transformed into the bell tower for the village’s thirteenth-century Duomo.

  This tower that is called the “Tower of Matilda” has a giant clock on its early medieval stonework. A grander, taller tower near the town’s highest point, the Tower of Frederick, refers to Frederick II (1194–1250), who followed his father Henry VI and grandfather Frederick Barbarossa as Holy Roman Emperor.

  Ironically, the Germans, who returned in the twentieth century after an absence of seven hundred years, reduced Frederick’s tower to rubble during World War II. They did not want the advancing Allies to have a vantage point over the sweeping Plain of Pisa, to zero in with heavy guns on the retreating German soldiers. The tower was rebuilt in the late 1950s and “looks exactly the same as the first one,” a local restaurant owner told me as I ate lunch beneath a covered medieval entryway just down the main street leading uphill to San Miniato’s historic center.

  Following an excellent dessert of a classic tiramisù—actually a dessert I usually avoid in Italy because it is so common and other local specialties often seem more compelling—I joined the steady throng of tourists and marched up the street toward the Prato del Duomo.

  As the afternoon wore on, the crowds grew smaller. San Miniato seems to be like Venice in the sense that the majority of visitors are day-trippers, not folks who spend nights in local hotels or pensions. Unlike most of the other villages and towns I visited in Tuscany, this one is indeed listed in guidebooks. It has the drawing card of a museum of sacred art, which holds famous works by such Renaissance painters as Filippo Lippi and Fra Bartolommeo.