Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  I had arrived in midmorning and wandered along the beach and glanced into shops for a few hours. Restaurants were crowded and the tiny shops were jammed. Uphill, in the quieter residential areas, locals not working the concessions below gathered in front of their houses, sitting in shade and deep in conversation. Kids, like children everywhere in Italy, were kicking soccer balls, careening them off the stones of the pale yellow houses.

  The midday sun was blistering. Having a few hours before the final ferry of the day would arrive to haul tourists back to the mainland, I sought out the comfort of an outdoor bar, shaded by colorful umbrellas. I enjoyed coffee, a few cold drinks, ate proffered snacks, and watched the panoply along the crowded beach.

  Eventually, in the distance far to the east, the Porto Santo Stefano ferry came into view. At that first sighting, people started moving toward the pier. I went down and found myself far behind a massive jam of people. Still more people—there were several hundred of us by now—packed into the small area. The ferry backed in, dropped its stern gate, and people started crowding on.

  It became clear there was not enough space for everyone, and Coast Guard personnel started pushing folks back so the stern gate could be raised. Would I have to find a way to stay the night on Giglio? I wondered. A man in front of me, fluent in Italian, listened carefully to what a Coast Guard officer was shouting several feet away. “Ah,” the man said as he turned toward his wife. “A second ferry is coming.” It did, and within an hour everyone was accommodated.

  By then, it was late afternoon, and the beach was nearly deserted; only a few hardy souls were still in the water or under their umbrellas. The beach and town may have been drained of visitors, but there was no letdown of activity around Concordia’s massive bulk. All of us leaving the island crowded along the ferry’s deck rail, snapping photos of the giant cranes surrounding the doomed ship and the small workboats darting around its hull. A few of us speculated about the two bodies that had yet to be recovered. When the ship was floated upright a year after my visit, the remains of Indian crewmember Russell Rebello were found; as of the end of 2013, the body of Sicilian Maria Grazia Trecarichi remained lost.

  * * *

  I knew that I would return to Giglio and Capraia—and even visit giant Elba—one day soon. And perhaps I would stop at a few of the much smaller places that require patience to travel to. It would be in the off-season, not July or August, and at a time when Concordia would become only a distant memory for these Tuscan islanders.

  TEN

  The Deep South

  The essence of Tuscany is in its towns and cities, what Italians call civiltà. A dictionary will list the meaning as “civilization,” but that does not even approach its Tuscan sense. Civiltà is something like townishness, community, a civic sense, pride, identity all wrapped up together with its tangible consequences: the great churches and the paintings and sculpture inside them … and a lip-curling contempt for any other town that is not our town.

  —Alistair Moffat, Tuscany: A History (2011)

  THERE ARE a couple of ways to move south through western Tuscany. One is to head east from Pisa and then turn south, say at Pontedera, and then, after crossing the Pisa–Florence autostrada and passing through Ponsacco, head down Tuscany’s middle through some uninspiring industrial areas that thankfully give way to wheat fields, rolling hills, vineyards, vast swaths of sunflowers, and olive groves that cut through small villages.

  Here is a real opportunity for a tourist to become a traveler. If a cool, shady piazza in one of these villages offers respite, the traveler could spend an hour or so and enjoy a meal, or simply a coffee or cold drink at a local bar, sitting outside, soaking in the scene of a Tuscan village and its residents. Make a point to do this once or twice each day while on the road. The memories can stay with you for a long time.

  Or, the traveler can choose to venture south down the coast itself, through low rolling hills that offer occasional glimpses of the Mediterranean. Somewhere along the southern Tuscan coast is the invisible dividing line between the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian seas. The name likely changes at the port town of Piombino, near the island of Elba and the coast of the French-controlled island Corsica. On sections of this coastal road between Livorno and Piombino, parked cars line up for miles, their owners carrying umbrellas, coolers, and beach towels down to the rocky shoreline far below. Sometimes, this coastal road passes through towns and villages with their own public and private beaches and pedestrian walkways with tiny shops.

  The least rewarding way—unless the traveler is hell-bent to get to Rome—is along the autostrada, the E80. This route, like interstate highways in the United States, avoids towns and villages. Its higher speeds propel the traveler quickly from point A to B with brief glimpses, say, of castle ruins or a cluster of medieval stone houses perched on faraway hilltops. There is no incentive—and perhaps no convenient exit—to explore them. And with sections that charge tolls, the autostrada periodically offers self-contained rest stops, complete with gasoline stations, restrooms, and cafeteria food, never requiring the motorist to pull into a small village for such services.

  The coastal route, the mostly two-lane Via Aurelia, was my choice for a major multi-day foray into the south of western Tuscany. It would be a longer journey, but I would pass through small villages and towns, places ripe for discovery and worth stopping at if the mood strikes. I began just south of Livorno, bypassing the city that I had already spent time in, and made my first stop at Quercianella, a tiny village strung out along a high ridge overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The sign announcing Quercianella promised a brief rest and lunch.

  I parked next to a magnificent walled compound containing a mix of honey-stoned buildings separated by large expanses of flower gardens. The structures appeared to range in age from one hundred to three hundred years old. The oldest building, which sits in the foreground of the property, has all the appearances of a monastery. It was somber, with few arched windows, and with a short medieval tower with toothlike merlons of stone in a circle around the top. Each merlon was separated by a gap, called a crenellation, which would have allowed defenders to shoot arrows and toss spears and then dart behind a merlon for protection. The entire battlement sat on top of what medievalist scholars call machicolations, or riblike stone beams that lean out from the tower cylinder at a sharp enough angle to keep attackers from climbing to the battlement. If it was indeed built in the 1700s, I doubt anyone was shooting arrows at attackers. I suspect it was built to honor an image of Tuscany’s medieval past.

  Later research suggested that this former monastery could have been turned into a spa built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Many Tuscan spas were created in those days to draw well-heeled English visitors. A sign next to the locked iron gate had the name Villa Jana and the date MCMXXI—1921. This date marks the year a small brick building was converted into the two-story neo-medieval structure that dominates the property. It also has a tower, a four-story structure that looks more like a bell tower than a battlement. The expanded house and its tower look like they could have been built six hundred years ago rather than just ninety-one.

  Nothing suggested that tours or visits were available; the property appeared to be in private hands.

  A hundred feet down the road and atop the ridge overlooking the sea was a small bar that offered lunch. Next to the bar, a narrow, steep trail with stone steps led down to the rocky beach. There, sun seekers, snorkelers, and scuba-equipped divers had spread large towels across the bumpy surfaces of giant boulders. There was no sand down below, just a few scattered patches of pebbles among sea-battered rocks.

  I sat outside, with a terrific view of the sea, and ate one of the best pasta pomodoro lunches I have ever had, and learned about the area from an easy conversation with the bar’s owner, each of us using a comfortable combination of English and Italian.

  Quercianella first appeared on maps in the mid- to late 1700s. Apparently there was a lookout tower along the
coast, likely built by Pisa in the Middle Ages, and the village gradually developed around it. As roads to the area were improved, wealthy Italians constructed elegant villas here. Some still stand today.

  The town once had the full name Quercianella Sonnino in honor of Baron Sidney Sonnino, a now obscure Italian politician, born in Pisa in 1847. His political career in the newly unified nation of Italy spanned the late 1800s and the early twentieth century. Sonnino apparently loved this rugged area and its stellar views, so he built a castle that still rises up above the trees that dominate the small village. He died in 1922, and his grave is in a cave on the castle grounds. The “Sonnino” part of the town’s name apparently has outlived its political relevance and has been dropped.

  After a few hours at the bar, I continued on south. Via Aurelia goes through a succession of beach communities that could each be a major destination for a traveler wanting camping, bed-and-breakfast accommodations, or even a multi-star hotel experience. As elsewhere in the region, July and August are the months with the most crowds, which makes it difficult to find lodging for the night. I stopped at a few places to inquire about lodging and was told that no room was to be had until early September. If I had been so inclined, I could not have even rented an umbrella on a private beach.

  “We are usually booked a year in advance,” one beachfront manager told me. “The same people come back year after year and demand the same spots, over and over.” Most are English, but some German, French, and Dutch travelers make up the bulk of repeat business. Americans? “Not many. I do not recall any this year or last.”

  But the towns and villages here are so close together that if reservations can be made in advance farther inland, the drive to an appealing public beach is a quick one.

  Leaving Quercianella, Via Aurelia carried me to Vada. Its five miles of appealing white-sand beaches are so unlike the steep boulder-strewn coast at Quercianella. To get to the beach area, there are many turnoffs along its five-mile stretch. I chose the first one, at the north end of a vast pine forest. It took me a few miles west to a concessions area and the beginning of white sand. Parking is along the road or among the trees in a haphazard pattern that is somehow typically Italian: it looks confusing, but one just needs to stop, leave room for cars to get through, and not block anyone who already has squeezed their vehicle among the skinny pine trees.

  The foot trail through low scrub pines is not long, perhaps a few hundred feet, and the panorama quickly opens up to a stunning expanse of white sand, pocketed here and there with umbrellas and multicolored beach blankets.

  Children are in control here, reminding me of a guidebook statement read long ago that, in Italy, children are royalty. They are everywhere—exploring the line of pines along the beach, building castles in the sand, burying playmates up to their chins, splashing in the waist-deep waters on the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea—while watchful parents sit under umbrellas, only occasionally rising to go out to the water, swim a few strokes, and come back to the shade.

  Farther out toward the water, a stubby peninsula of sand, protected from erosion by a low stone wall, seems to appeal more to solitary adults and couples. The ubiquitous African sellers of everything from facial tissues, toys for the kids, cigarette lighters, floppy hats, walking sticks, gum, umbrellas, and just about anything else, it seems, work the beach as far as the eye can see. These are hardworking immigrants with temporary residence permits who live in group houses and every morning ride local buses to assigned areas. I never saw them, in any of these communities, take breaks; loaded down with goods and with prices up for negotiation, they are constantly on the move from one cluster of sunbathers to another.

  I spend an hour sitting on the low wall and watch the swimmers and snorkelers packed in the blue-water bay. I do not plan to spend the afternoon planted on a beach soaking up sun. I still have a ways to go before I reach the small, nondescript but friendly twentieth-century town of Donoratico, near Castagneto Carducci. I had settled for a one-star hotel there when I discovered all the beach communities were booked solid. This small postwar town sits a mile or two from the coast and was my base for three days.

  As I walked off the beach at Vada and through the pines, the high-pitched loud buzzing of cicadas in the trees overhead persisted. Every July, a campground hostess told me, when the temperature and humidity hit a certain level, they emerge from the soil and crawl into the trees, where females lay eggs. “They sometimes make for eating, a delicacy,” the hostess said. “But they are not for me.” “E non mi! [And not me!],” I replied in Italian to her excellent English.

  En route to Donoratico, I decided to stop in at Bolgheri, a few miles inland and perhaps twenty miles southeast of Vada. Bolgheri, a walled village with origins in the eighth century, sits in a sea of vineyards. Friends tell me that some of the best Tuscan wines, in sharp competition with the more established Chianti region well to the east, come from around Bolgheri.

  A narrow, paved road heading directly east off the Via Aurelia leads to the town, which is nestled in the low-lying hills, the Colline Metalifere. Towering over the three-mile route are six hundred cypress trees, perhaps the most famous in Tuscany, which is well known for its stretches of cypress that line roads and act as sentinel-like windbreaks along edges of fields and vineyards. Bolgheri’s cypress clusters have been there since the early 1800s. They climb to heights of well over one hundred feet and are so massive and so close together that they appear as a solid wall along the narrow roadway, broken only where a crossroad slices north–south through it.

  There are other well-known cypress-lined roadways in Tuscany: in the area around Pienza, at La Foce, and at Monticchiello. But these are lightly strung out, not so packed together as on the road to Bolgheri.

  The cypress, with origins in Persia or Syria, is such a part of the modern traveler’s image of Tuscany that the tree is often referred to as the Tuscan cypress. For Greeks and Italians, the tall, bushy, dark green tree is dedicated to Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt. The trees can live for at least two thousand years and likely were revered by the pre-Roman Etruscans who lived here more than three thousand years ago and populated much of what is Tuscany today. Such trees have fragrant wood, and early peoples planted them around houses. The Etruscans marked their cemeteries with them. The cypress, like olive trees, seems magical to me, whether up close or at a distance, surrounding a farm complex or a stone-sided winery high on a Tuscan hill. Paintings and photographs capture the individual beauty of these trees and give us the images of Tuscany that we all treasure.

  The six hundred trees—I took a friend’s word for the number and did not count them—come to a sudden stop at the large stone entryway into Bolgheri. The town’s original castle was demolished and relocated to its current site in 1496.

  Off to the right of the main gate sits a small shop selling wine. The most exclusive vintage in the store is the Sassicaia. It is from a local winery, Tenuta San Guido, and is priced at a thousand euros, or a little more than thirteen hundred dollars, per bottle. This specific winery opened in the late 1940s, but real expansion of the industry in this area didn’t begin until the 1990s, when the wines began to win various international competitions. Bottles of various vintages were for sale at far more affordable prices, of course, along with wines from other producers in the area.

  The store, in addition to wine and local meats and cheeses, sold dried pasta in shapes and colors I have not seen anywhere else in Italy. Most of the pasta was in long, thin strips colored black and white; some came in the rounded shape of hats with stripes of various colors. I asked a clerk if these pastas are modern creations developed for the tourist trade or if they are traditional in this small village. She merely shrugged. “It is ours.”

  I talked for a few moments with a very busy Silvia Casini at the front door of her wine shop. She said Europeans and Italians visit the town from far away, “But few Americans make it here. You can see how crowded we are today. All Europeans, I think. But in winter
it is quiet. Only sixty-four people live here around the year.”

  A few blocks deeper into the village I came across a small cemetery, complete with a caretaker who was more than willing to speak to anyone wanting to know its history. One grave belongs to the poet Giosuè Carducci’s grandmother, Nonna Lucia, who lived there for most of her life. He did, too, but only for a few years as a small child. But Bolgheri has not seen fit to add his name. The town does honor his grandmother with a small statue, if only because she was connected to the famed wordsmith and had spent most of her life there. Near the cemetery gate is her modern statue.

  Giosuè Carducci and his family moved here in 1838 from Valdicastello, next to Pietrasanta, when he was three. A decade later the family moved a few miles southwest to what is today Castagneto Carducci, a hill town that, along with Valdicastello, claims Carducci’s name.

  * * *

  Early one morning I took a small provincial road that leads directly south of Bolgheri toward Castagneto Carducci, about seven miles away. Bolgheri is on a wide plain surrounded by vineyards. Castagneto Carducci tops a high hill that doesn’t quite qualify as a mountain. I decided to bypass that town and continue south along the provincial road through a wilderness of trees. Gaps in the foliage provided occasional glimpses of vineyards and olive groves on the hill’s flanks. I wasn’t sure where I would end up; this was a trip of exploration; I would stop as the mood struck me.

  Heading up, down, and around one of many coastal hills, I passed dozens of bicyclists, all dressed in various team colors. At one spot, above the tiny village of Suverete and on a section of the road identified as La Strada del Vino, or “the Wine Highway,” a van was parked alongside the road. It had bicycles attached to its roof and on its front and back ends. A man stood next to it and, one by one, bicyclists in skintight shorts and shirts would pass by and grab the bottles of water the man was handing out. They were moving uphill, sweat dripping profusely despite the early hour.