Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  I pulled over, got out of the car, and watched the groups of riders passing by. I asked the man whom he represented. Partly because of my poor understanding of detailed Italian speech and partly because of his rapid pattern of speaking, I caught only snatches of his response. It seemed to be a regional cycling club in active training. The Giro d’Italia (the national race second only to the Tour de France, which is usually held in July) had been in May, just a few months before my drive. Training is year-round; numerous cross-country races fill the calendar in most European countries.

  These Tuscan hills are perfect for training. Many of the routes through them mirror the routes of the major races in Italy, France, and Spain. “Up, up, up!” he said as he positioned himself to hand water bottles to two more racers rounding the curve a few dozen feet below. “Then, speed and confusion. Control! Discipline.” He paused while a group of six riders flashed by, each biker grabbing a proffered water bottle. I thanked him and reflected on the dangers to the bike riders I had seen during my travels all over Tuscany’s coastal hills. They are on narrow roads, often with tight turns where oncoming cars cannot see them. I don’t know how many collisions between bike and car occur annually, but from what I have seen while driving around Italy over the years, the riders are a savvy bunch who know how to keep to the far right. I suspect crashes with automobiles are few.

  The water-bottle man laughed. “In Italy, everyone makes way for the riders,” he said. “It is life here.”

  Ahead, beyond the nondescript village of Suverete, I could see Sassetta along a steep mountainside, with the lower part of the village fronting a massive cliff that drops down into a deep gorge.

  Sassetta spills over the small summit while surrounded on three sides by a deep and appealing chestnut forest, now designated as a park area of nearly two thousand acres. Interspersed among the chestnut trees are briarwood shrubs, five to six feet tall, that produce hard, bulbous growths on roots and trunks. Sassetta craftsmen have been making smoking pipes from this briarwood since the late 1800s. A young woman in the tiny tourist office near the village’s entrance told me that the craft has been handed down from father to son for generations.

  Sassetta is worth a visit and perhaps an overnight stay. Even when I was there in the height of the tourist season, it seemed that few visitors have discovered it and its numerous walking trails through the hills. I wandered the once-medieval stronghold, finding numerous pink-marble carvings—made from rosso di Sassetta—of various animals: deer, rabbits, and dogs.

  After my visit, I read that these carvings are modern, the result of an annual sculpture symposium held over ten days every July. Five sculptors are invited to create these works of art in the outdoors while townspeople and visitors watch. Anyone can vote for his or her favorite pieces, and prizes are given. All are displayed along the so-called “path of art” I was wandering along.

  Near the top of the village sits the Chiesa di Sant’Andrea, with a façade and bulk that date back to at least the 1600s. No one seems to know the origins of this church beyond its expansion and remodeling five hundred years ago, only that it sits over Roman catacombs holding the bones of an anonymous martyr.

  Narrow pathways between medieval buildings, made out of local limestone, shoot off from the little square in front of the church. The visitor can take several routes out of this small village center and find trails through the surrounding bosco, or woods. I walk perhaps a mile or two along one of them. It was moderate walking in a green wonderland; occasional views of the Tyrrhenian coast and the gray sea pop through the trees. Humidity is high. It is summer, so cicadas are in full concert in the chestnut trees. I had spent three hours in Sassetta. It was now late morning, and if I wanted to get to Populonia, I figured it was best to move on.

  * * *

  Many villages throughout southern Tuscany claim Etruscan origins. They make up the land known as Costa degli Etruschi, or Coast of the Etruscans. In the first century BC, long before Rome was a local power much less an empire, Etruscans dominated this landscape. They even carved a trade route through the towering Apennine Mountains, establishing a village where the city of Bologna now sits and still farther east to their trading center at today’s Adria on Italy’s east coast, thought by some historians to be the source of the Adriatic Sea’s name. They could have been here far back into prehistory, coming from somewhere else. Or, perhaps, they were merely an amalgam of prehistoric tribes.

  The Costa degli Etruschi designation likely was created to appeal to tourists, but it does include a significant portion of the Etruscan sites that dominated what was known in ancient times as Etruria. This area encompassed much of today’s Tuscany, from Livorno south to the region of Lazio, all the way down to Rome. Early kings of Rome were from a people known as the Sabini, a large tribe encompassing an area to the east of Rome. The last three kings of Rome were Etruscans; their kings ruled there until 709 BC, when the Roman Republic was founded and consuls were elected.

  The earliest Romans, then, were a combination of Etruscan, Sabini, and tribal people known as “Latins,” drawn from around Rome’s various hills and the countryside beyond. Etruscan DNA reached way down through the generations. The family line of the greatest Roman of them all, Julius Caesar, is believed to have had Etruscan origins.

  So it was Etruscans who dominated the landscape before Roman civilization emerged. Their earliest maritime villages, David Abulafia writes in his book on the Mediterranean, were where “the great leap towards urban civilization first occurred. These were rich cities, well organized, with literate elites, handsome temples, and skilled craftsmen.” It was their skills and the culture they created that Rome drew from as the newly unified people moved from their mud huts on Rome’s Palatine Hill to a city of rough stone and brick. It would take seven hundred years after the founding of the Republic before Augustus, the first emperor, transformed it into a city of marble.

  One of the southernmost early Etruscan cities in Tuscany was my next major stop: the ruins of Populonia, a pre-Roman port created around 900 BC.

  Far down the mountain to the west of Sassetta, at the end of a curving mountain road still showing occasional flashes of those colorfully garbed bicyclists at full downhill tilt, is the small village of Suvereto. I stopped there, briefly, for an early-afternoon coffee and a panino. I sat in a small square just outside the town’s old stone gate. A remarkable tree with long, narrow, leathery leaves and a blackish bark that I did not recognize shaded several tables full of friends enjoying conversation and caffè. Small acorns could be seen throughout its thick foliage. I asked the man at the bar about the tree. He said it was a leccio, which I later found out was Italian for holm oak. Sitting by that tree, observing life in this small village, and listening to conversations in Tuscan Italian, was a pleasant break.

  The ancient Etruscan port of Populonia was still farther to the southwest, on a level coastal plain and perhaps less than an hour away along a nearly straight road. This now-large archaeological park has tombs dating back to pre-Roman times. A short distance away from the necropolis, or cemetery, and toward the coast overlooking the sea at the Gulf of Baratti, is the mostly unexcavated remains of the ancient city.

  The park covers nearly two hundred acres, encompassing the Etruscans’ only significant coastal city; their other cities are sprinkled throughout inland Tuscany and northern Lazio—some built over by the Romans and later by builders in the Middle Ages, creating the towns and villages we know today. Others, like Populonia, survive only as ruins with a scattering of twentieth-century restoration. Few Etruscan ruins are of the magnitude of this site, which had its earliest beginning in the sixth century BC. It then operated from the fifth century to first century BC as a center to process iron ore.

  Archaeologist Anna Marguerite McCann, in a 1977 article from the Journal of Field Archaeology, writes that the “ancient city [Populonia] … lies still unexcavated. Material found from the tombs may go back as early at 1000 BC.” Over the intervening millennia,
sea level at the Gulf of Baratti has risen more than eight feet, submerging the Etruscans’ coastal structures and slag from the processing of ancient iron ore. Archaeologist McCann writes:

  The height of Populonia’s commercial life was thus in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods when most of the cities in southern Etruria were on the decline. Her continued prosperity was undoubtedly due to the life of her port and the working of the iron ore which took place there. Her wealth during these years is reflected in her gold and silver coinage which is the oldest and richest in Etruria. While we know of no great art manufactured in this predominantly industrial city, ships could easily bring imported work to her shores.

  Today, this park is wide open for the ramblings of tourists. If the traveler has time for only one Etruscan site out of the dozens preserved throughout what was ancient Etruria, this should be the one.

  My goal on this trip was to spend time at Populonia’s port area. A few months earlier, friends from Pietrasanta had taken me to the necropolis, a few miles away, where the ancients buried their dead. We got there late in the day—too late to also tour the ruins in the port area before the site closed for the day.

  We drove into the parking area for the Necropoli di San Cerbone and began a day of walking amongst Etruscan and, perhaps, a few Roman-era tombs. Seven tombs are spread out in an area close to the parking lot, and each is worthy of inspection. Entrances are blocked, but visitors can roam around them at will, touching the limestone blocks that were handled by Etruscan builders and put into place between three and four thousand years ago. I did not see any of the hand-carved stone caskets where bodies were placed—they have long since been removed and taken to museums—but I remembered looking at them many years ago at the Etruscan museum in Tarquinia, just north of Rome. The reclining carved figures of men and women, propped up on one elbow atop ancient, pre-Roman caskets, have always captivated me. All are wide-eyed, complete with smiles, with goblets of wine in their hands, and perhaps with one of their favorite pets carved in stone at their sides as well.

  These Etruscan caskets are so different from Christian-era stone repositories with the deceased represented in a prone position, eyes closed, hands crossed over their chests. Etruscans, it seems, were all about this life, not the afterlife so valued by their Christian successors.

  The challenging walk—to the Necropoli delle Grotte—begins just beyond the visitor center. The path stretches across a flat, humid plain and then heads up into a heavily oak-forested hill, where tombs were chipped out of the hill’s limestone interior. Steep steps drop down from the trail into tomb after tomb, each closed off. The trail, also steep at times with weathered, slick stones underfoot, winds up and down through heavy undergrowth. One side of the hill drops down an incline and offers a panoramic view of a handful of tombs in a small valley below. Eventually, the loop led us back to where we started at the top of the hill. There, at a junction, was a different route back to the visitor center. It avoided the flat plain and took us up another series of small hills, but there were not many tombs to see during the first part of that second slog.

  As we got closer to the center, more tombs came into view. And just before the final home stretch, a new trail branched off to the west, that would take us a few miles to the ruins of the ancient town, the Etrusci Acropoli. But the day was growing short, and none in my party was eager to make that long walk to the acropolis and then back again to the parking lot. Exploring it would have to wait until another time.

  Now, a few months later, I returned to Populonia, this time alone, and spent a short time skirting the ground-level ruins of the acropolis. Not much remains here, however, and it is obvious that the tombs are the most enduring structures the Etruscans left behind.

  Just below the ruins and hard by the Tyrrhenian Sea, the modern village of Baratti and its marina are in a cove just seven miles north of the modern port city of Piombino. This cove is one of the most beautiful along Tuscany’s 180-mile coastline. Private boats and seagoing yachts are moored here, and a short beach area, showing evidence of ancient industrialization from deposits of iron ore and slag still found there, looks out over the glistening sea. Ironically, some of those two-thousand-year-old deposits were harvested and reprocessed to make badly needed iron for rebuilding bombed-out Piombino in the days after World War II.

  Wanting to reach Piombino before late evening took away the last vestige of that marvelous sunset, I drove back up on that slim coastal road and made it there before darkness. Piombino is a major departure point for numerous ferries making forty-five-minute trips to Elba, just a few miles off the coast. The town has little appeal for a traveler wanting to experience medieval Tuscany. The port area, now a modern collection of ferry terminals, a train station, and docks for ferries and other large commercial ships, has been mostly reconstructed from the rubble of World War II.

  Some parts of the town itself harken back to medieval times, but the site as a village is significantly older than the Middle Ages. Some think the name Piombino is a derivation of the Italian word Populino, which means “small Populonia.” The Etruscans and Romans had villages near Piombino as well as at the larger Populonia, just a few miles to the north.

  By now it is dark and time to head back north to my hotel at Donoratico. I would be taking a longer drive south the next day to explore the coastal area of the Tuscan Maremma, a truly wild west part of Tuscany. This would be the farthest south I would go.

  * * *

  The next morning, I once again made my way toward Piombino. Instead of continuing straight toward the port, I take a narrow secondary road that heads east along the northern edge of the Gulf of Follonica. Just past a large electricity-generating plant with red-and-white-striped smokestacks, I pass beach clubs, situated one after the other, along a long band of white sand known as Carbonifera Beach. This stretch of beach is broken up by a series of cabanas and coffee shops.

  The first beach area within the greater Carbonifera complex is called Spiaggia Cani, or Dog Beach. The road into it follows a canal lined with a few fishermen and boats loading customers in scuba gear. These folks obviously are preparing to head out to a tiny island off the coast, Cerboli, with its piled-high landmass resembling a delicious dollop of tiramisu. Twentieth-century Italian writer and essayist Carlo Cassola, who died in 1987 at age sixty-nine, once owned it.

  A bit farther to the west of Cerboli is the much smaller island of Palmaiola, and beyond that is the northeastern tip of the largest island of the Tuscan archipelago, Elba—its grayish bulk dominating the western horizon.

  By nine o’clock and with the August heat building toward eighty degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity making it feel more like a hundred, the parking lot has more than two hundred cars. The beach is full of mothers and their children, older men in Speedos, and teens in long shorts and bikinis. It is a happy scene where I spent a couple of hours, shoes in hand, walking barefoot along the beach and feeling the warm tiny waves as they drift onto the sand, taking in the view of Elba, and wishing I had been able to make it there. By late morning, it is time to go. I want to move on to Follonica, just a few miles away along the crescent of the Gulf of Follonica and where the small provincial road to these beach areas rejoins north–south SS1.

  Follonica is a pleasant city, certainly more modern in appearance than most of the villages and towns along coastal Tuscany. A friend in Pietrasanta wrinkled her nose when I told her I might go there during my trip south. “It is so ordinary; it has no character,” she said. Driving through it and toward its beach area along the gulf, I had to disagree. For a casual visitor, it offers a tastefully done, more modern city—a change of pace.

  Why not spend some time in a place like Follonica? It has a wide, clean, white-sand public beach and a long line of private clubs with names like Bagno Orchidea and Bagno Roma; enough shops to satisfy the most retail-oriented tourist; nice two-, three-, and four-star hotels lined up along a comfortable, shaded pedestrian walkway. It could almost pass for a
Southern California beach community, but without the surfers and plastic surgery.

  If, like me, you are not a beach person but someone who enjoys magnificent views of the sea, then go into a bar on the beach, sit on a shaded veranda, and order a coffee or beer. It is high season while I’m here, but prices remain reasonable: two euros for a caffè and a cream-filled cornetto, my favorite snack. And you can sit there as long as you want. This is so typically Italian: no one is trying to get you to buy more or to make room for new customers. As long as you buy something when you first sit down, you own that table, and the view, until you are ready to leave. There are plenty of such places in Follonica, bordered by tall shrubs with sweet-smelling pink and white flowers.

  As if to confirm what my friend in Pietrasanta told me, but with a different spin, a middle-aged woman who served my coffee described Follonica as “very new.” “It wasn’t a town until 1823,” she said. The concept of “old” is very different in Italy than in the United States.

  Later that afternoon, after three or four pleasant hours taken up with a double espresso at a bar table with a view, a long, leisurely lunch of pasta with pancetta and Parmesan cheese mixed in, and some time spent wandering along the mile-long promenade in this “not old” nineteenth-century town, I continued down the coast, passing through Principina a Mare and its stunning cypress forest. It has two private bagni with a fine public beach in between. A few miles later, I came to Marina di Alberese, which offers a unique experience for beachgoers. To get to the beach, a visitor must drive through a forest dense with cypress and coastal pines. Here, the buzzing of the cicadas was at its height, with the translucent creatures scattered along tree trunks or high on the branches above. A parking warden saw me looking closely at the embedded creatures. “Essi sono innocui [They are harmless],” she said, adding with a smile, “You get used to the noise!”