Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  I waited, on a comfortable bench in the nicely shaded Prado del Duomo, as the sun continued to work its way behind some tall buildings. The coolness of the forested hills began to seep into the square. Tourist crowds began to evaporate and, in their place, the locals came out for the passeggiata, or late afternoon “walkabout” so common in Italian towns and villages. Observing this daily ritual of friendship and community in village after village over the years is one of my favorite things to do. I watch locals meet and greet one another, catching up on the day’s neighborhood news. Youngsters flash by on bicycles or skateboards, a few kick soccer balls back and forth or slam them against stone walls of buildings.

  Eventually, I walked back down the main street to my car and began the hour-long drive back to La Gabella and my comfortable room at the Zia. The next day, I would move toward the south end of the Plain of Pisa, where a different kind of geography awaited.

  * * *

  My destination was Lari, one of Italy’s pasta production centers. The highway heads south of Pontedera, which, in addition to making scooters, sixty years ago was the Allied launching point against the German army that controlled Pisa, just twenty-one miles away, and the rest of northern Italy.

  The highway passes through one ugly industrial area after another. Then, with low foothills defining the Càscina Valley in the distance, the industrial scene slowly evolves into ever-expanding fields of wheat. Most of what is grown here is semola de grano duro, or semolina—hard, yellow wheat that produces glutinous flour used throughout Italy and North America for pasta. In Lari, much of the pasta produced is made strictly with flour and water—no eggs or oil.

  I had heard that Lari was worth a visit, but until I left the plain, entered the valley, and moved up into the foothills, I wasn’t sure it would be that appealing. I was wrong. Like San Miniato and other villages in this region, the heart of the small, compact old village sits in the shape of a rough-hewn circle on a hilltop with two long, spindly “legs” emanating to the north and southeast, each only wide enough for a single street and a single row of medieval buildings on each side.

  In addition to the wide clusters of chestnut and other hardwood trees blanketing the hillsides, great cherry orchards are spotted here and there. Lari is a center for more than pasta making. It also has a cherry festival every year that encompasses many of the smaller villages that surround it. This series of hilltops and valleys, with plenty of trails tying one village to another, must be a walker’s paradise.

  In the heart of Lari’s center, still surrounded by high city walls, sits a nicely restored Medici castle, Castello dei Vicari, or Castle of the Vicars. From its ramparts, one can see the three gates into the town and the narrow main street that winds around the stone castle below and is lined with shops, houses, and a small factory that makes yellow pasta in a variety of shapes and sizes.

  The earliest sections of the castle were in place by AD 900. Pisa controlled it for a while, then Florence, which greatly expanded and fortified it. For four centuries, Lari was the administrative center for much of the province of Pisa. That role ended in the early 1800s, when Tuscany became part of the Kingdom of Italy. Prominent, privileged families ran things here over the centuries; nearly one hundred different coats of arms line the walls of the castle courtyard.

  The castle is reportedly haunted, something likely suggested as a way to lure tourists or turn the castle into reality show fodder. At least two of the village’s residents, one teenager and one middle-aged woman I spoke with in a small restaurant, believe the ghosts exist. One ghost comes from the twentieth century in the form of John Princi, known as Rosso della Paola, or the Red of Paola. He was an anti-Fascist imprisoned within those walls by Mussolini’s minions. Guards claimed the Red’s death was a suicide, but few believe that explanation. There is also a room referred to as the “room of torments,” where witches were put on trial and prisoners reportedly were tortured. Their tormented souls wander between the walls. I didn’t come across any ghosts during my daytime sojourn, but the castle is not a place where I would want to spend a night.

  It was midafternoon and I sat on the restaurant’s outdoor terrace along one of the spindly streets branching out from the castle. It was too early for dinner, but the owner served drinks and caffè. A man sped by on a Vespa scooter with a toddler standing on the floorboard in front and a slightly older child on the seat behind him. None wore helmets—not an unusual sight in most of Italy—and when the man turned into an alleyway next to the bar, the scooter hit gravel and started to spin out, turning 180 degrees and threatening to dump all three. The father quickly got it back under control and disappeared down the narrow lane, he and his two children laughing—with relief, I suspect. The table of elderly men sitting next to me had witnessed the near disaster. They looked at the wide-eyed terror on my face, shaking their heads and chuckling quietly.

  Early evening approached, and I wanted to drive back to the Zia in La Gabella with enough light to enjoy the countryside. This time, to avoid retracing my route through the ugly industrial center, I headed toward Collesalvetti, through the tiny villages of Créspina and Fauglia. This route goes through a far more beautiful portion of the Plain of Pisa, and Lari’s cherry orchards give way to stunning expanses of vineyards. Signs along the roadway declare that this route is a wine highway, Strada del Vino—a designation on many such roads throughout the wine-growing areas of Tuscany. On my roadmap, this one is marked in green, suggesting that it is a tratto panoramico, or panoramic drive.

  Several miles out of Lari, I pulled over to the side of the road and watched the sun drop down behind the low coastal range of hills along the sea twelve to fifteen miles away. The views along this “wine road” are equal in visual impact to the famed wine region of Chianti much farther to the east.

  In western Tuscany, one can avoid crowds and find easy walks in places like Lari, along with leisurely, traffic-free drives through hardwood forests, cherry orchards, and vineyards that seem to stretch forever over the slightly rolling landscape.

  In the heat of midsummer, the people in this delightful section of west-central Tuscany—the elderly men I talk to in local bars, the shop owners standing in their doorways catching the early-morning sun, the occasional teenager who stops to try out his English with il Americano—are not burned out by the hordes of visitors who blow through.

  For my part, I felt like I had “discovered” a world unknown to all but those who live here. Except for in San Miniato, I saw no one I could recognize as a tourist. My rarely used guidebook had nothing to offer about this place. It was another new and wonderful day in this ancient land.

  NINE

  L’Arcipélago Toscano

  The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

  —Vincent Van Gogh, letter to brother Theo (June 1888)

  EARLY-MORNING HAZE usually obscures the islands off the Tuscan coast. The sea, as changeable in shades of blue and gray as Van Gogh described it, often merges with the sky, making it difficult to see where one begins and the other ends. Sometimes, while standing on the low-lying hills above coastal Pietrasanta, I can see the faint outline of northern Corsica across the Mar Ligure, or as I choose to think of it, the Tuscan Sea.

  I’ve not made it to Napoleon’s birthplace, but I have been close. I’ve looked at Corsica’s southern end from the northern tip of Sardinia, and I saw its outline just thirty or so miles away as the ferry I was on headed toward the port at Capraia—a Tuscan island that is closer to French Corsica than it is to the Italian mainland.

  A professor of ancient history once told me that some coastal Tuscans and Ligurians believe Napoleon was not born in French territory but in his family’s villa just north of Pietrasanta, near La Spezia. After all, the Bonaparte family descended from Tuscan nobles who went to Corsica in the sixteenth century.
The birth name of his mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino, is Italian, and she had distant cousins who were nobles in the Republic of Genoa, just sixty miles up the coast from La Spezia. To top it off, his maternal grandmother’s birth name was Angela Maria Pietrasanta. It is easy to see why some can claim the future French emperor was Italian-born despite historical evidence that gives his birthplace as Ajaccio, Corsica.

  The various islands of the Tuscan Archipelago are arrayed between Corsica and Tuscany. Different islands can usually be seen from just about anywhere along the coast, rising like blue-grayish specks on the distant horizon. One of the best spots for viewing my favorite, Capraia, is a mile or so south of the Port of Livorno at the beautifully landscaped waterfront promenade, Terrazza Mascagni. It is named after the composer Pietro Mascagni, who wrote the opera Cavalleria Rusticana—the great, sorrowful Sicilian tale of unrequited love, religious hypocrisy, and tragic death. From the sweeping, curving terrazza, I could see the long line of cargo ships and tankers waiting to slide into the busy port, and beyond the vague outlines of the islands of Capraia and Gorgona, the northern-most islands of L’Arcipélago Toscano.

  The seven principal islands of this archipelago stay in my line of sight as I move eighty miles to the south to the port of Piombino. Here, the more northerly Ligurian Sea becomes the Tyrrhenian Sea, which will bathe the western coast of the Italian peninsula all the way down to the toe of the boot and along Sicily’s northern coast.

  At Piombino, the even closer Elba pops out of Mar Tirreno. Ferries depart almost hourly for Elba from this modern, industrialized port that was nearly destroyed during World War II bombing. And still farther south, at the far end of Tuscany, just a few miles from its border with the region of Lazio, is Isola del Giglio, a short ferry ride from Porto San Stefano, west of Orbetello.

  There are three islands to the west of Giglio: Isola di Montecristo, Isola Pianosa, and Isola di Giannutri, which is opposite the village of Tarquinia on the mainland, in the region of Lazio. Despite its position, Giannutri remains under Tuscan control. At fewer than four square miles in size, Giannutri is among the smallest of the seven islands. It and Pianosa are reachable by ferry, but only sporadically, generally from Easter through August. During this summer season, boats going there leave from Elba and Piombino, but despite being in Tuscany for several months, I found it difficult to arrange transport. While staying on Capraia for several days in late August 2012, I purchased a ferry ticket to Elba with the hope of later finding a ride to Pianosa, but rough seas made getting to Elba impossible in the time I had available.

  The small ferry between Capraia and Elba had canceled its service because of weather. I was in danger of being stranded on Capraia when the much larger Toremar ferries were nearly shut down as well between the island and the mainland at the port of Livorno. As it turned out, I was able to catch the last ferry, which plowed and rolled through roiling water, reminding me of my U.S. Navy days when I rode a World War II–class destroyer in a three-day North Pacific typhoon.

  When we finally reached Livorno, the Toremar ticket clerk said I likely could not get to Elba for a few more days, even if I traveled the nearly fifty miles south to Piombino, from where several ferries daily make the short hop to Elba. It was the end of August; the tiny people-only ferries to the smaller islands were shutting down for the season, and the larger ferries were staying in port until the weather cleared.

  My frustration at my decision to wait too long into the summer season to visit these islands brought to mind a quote I once read in Joseph Conrad’s book The Mirror of the Sea: “The sea has never been friendly to men. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.” My Navy experience taught me how a great sea can suddenly become unfriendly. But my “human restlessness” has never stopped me from clambering aboard vessels large and small. I was willing to chance a ride to Elba and the smaller islands; Toremar and other private operators were not.

  The northernmost island in the Tuscan group, Gorgona, which I could see from Livorno’s promenade, is a still-functioning agricultural penal colony that occupies a medieval monastery. It is impossible to visit no matter what time of year. A traveler en route to Capraia can see it up close from the deck of a Toremar ferry as it pulls into the tiny port to drop off supplies, prison personnel, and, sometimes, chained-up prisoners and their armed guards. Then, those ferries move on from this somber prison island to Capraia, a mere twenty-two miles to the southwest. It, too, was a penal colony from 1873 to 1986, but now it is the destination of vacationers, primarily mainland Italians. High on the hill above Capraia’s tiny port, those solemn prison walls surround stone buildings that sit empty.

  While Capraia, Elba, and Giglio are heavily visited, principally during July and August, Pianosa, Montecristo, and Giannutri remain tougher to reach. Pianosa, for example, also a former prison island, has only a handful of year-round residents. Pianosa.net states it is home to a few policemen, “the family of a former prison guard, and two or three inmates on probation.” Now a nature preserve, Pianosa’s prison was shut down in 1998 when the government transferred its mostly Mafia-related prisoners to mainland lockups. The Italian government requires tourists to get special permits if they want to visit.

  Pianosa, at four square miles, is slightly larger than the southernmost Tuscan isle of Giannutri. A man I spoke with on Capraia told me he had been to nearly all seven of the significant Tuscan islands, but spent only one day on Pianosa. He said the number of visitors is limited—I later found out that the number was 250 per day—and they must get there on a small, privately arranged ferry from Piombino. There is no overnight lodging, only day trips. Visitors can wander, and snorkel or scuba dive in the island’s crystal-clear water, but fishing is not allowed. There is no need for automobiles on Pianosa: Its highest point is about seventy feet above sea level, making it a foot traveler’s dream.

  I regretted not being able to get to this island. I wanted to feel the kind of solitude that I once enjoyed on a small Scottish island in the Western Hebrides. Capraia, Giglio, and Elba certainly do not provide that kind of solitude, even in the off-season, although Capraia is less crowded and more intimate than the other two.

  Even more intriguing is the island of Montecristo which, along with Giglio and Giannutri, marks the southern extent of the archipelago. While it is southeast of Capraia, Montecristo swoops farther to the east, making this island the farthest from the western coast of the peninsula, because the mainland dramatically curves southeastward.

  Montecristo is nearly uninhabited except for a clutch of forest rangers who spend summers there. Its wild vegetation and low trees make it an ideal bird sanctuary. The only way to the island is on government-owned or private boats. Again, intrepid visitors need special permits, but the government generally gives them only to university researchers interested in studying the flora and fauna, including the handful of wild goats whose ancestors were thought to have been brought there by the ancient Phoenicians some three thousand years ago.

  With Montecristo nearly unreachable for the general traveler, visitors, meanwhile, can far more easily get to Giannutri. Shaped like a half-moon, it is only about sixteen hundred feet wide, three miles long, and has perhaps twenty residents. The island’s first known inhabitants were Romans, and the ruins of a second-century Roman villa remain, along with a lighthouse from the 1800s. Local legend relates that the island is home to ghosts, including a woman who can be seen dressed in flowing white linen, flitting across the tops of cliffs and shrieking into the wind. I’ve read brief descriptions of this apparition in local guidebooks but never met anyone who had seen the sorrowful lady. Still, it would be worth the experience of trying to see her. She doesn’t seem to mean harm to anyone.

  Giannutri’s mule tracks make it, like Pianosa, a good place for walkers and birders. An abundance of fish and other sea life make it another snorkeler’s dream.

  * * *

  By the time I started learning about Tuscany’s islands, it was late in the seaso
n, which made it difficult to get to the smaller ones. I did get to Giglio and Capraia in the final days of August and early September, and of those two, Capraia was my favorite.

  It has only about four hundred year-round residents. That population swells mightily in July and August, as this tiny seven-and-a-half-square-mile island, with its eighteen-mile coastline defined by millennia-old lava flows, is a major summer destination for Italian tourists. Still, it does not seem to get as overrun as Giglio at the far south of the archipelago. This may be because getting to Capraia requires an hour longer on the ferry than traveling to Giglio. Giglio’s port is larger, with more hotels, restaurants, and a clean sweep of sandy beach next to the ferry landing. On Capraia, sandy beaches are small and away from the port, and reaching them requires walking down steep paths or chartering a small local boat.

  For this visit in early September, I travel from Pietrasanta to Livorno by train and catch a bus to the port that was so crucial to British merchants and warships beginning in the seventeenth century. During World War II the badly bombed-out port became a major re-supply hub for the Allies during the last year of the war in Italy. But the city has clearly been reclaimed by proud Tuscans and retains its Livorno name rather than the British appellation of Leghorn. Much of it has been rebuilt, particularly the area around the port, and now has well-defined neighborhoods and city center. Its historic center has been blended nicely into newer, rebuilt neighborhoods that slowly came back to life after Allied bombing in 1944.

  I arrive at Livorno’s port and the Toremar ticket office with a few hours to spare before the next ferry would depart for Capraia. Then it would take a few hours, on calm, deep-blue seas, to make the transit. I pass the time sitting in the hot, late-August sun at a nearby coffee shop, sipping espresso and watching tourists begin queuing up for boarding the huge ferry. Large trucks, full of supplies bound for the island, are being loaded into the large vehicle bay. This one, the ticket agent had told me, would not stop at Gorgona, but I hope to at least view, at a distance, the still-operating penal island from the giant ferry’s deck.