by John Keahey
There is a lot of dead wood scattered about from the thick forest that ends just a few dozen feet from the water and from driftwood from the Tyrrhenian Sea that piles up in great mounds. From this wood, people have crafted stick structures, including makeshift cabanas with tarps thrown over them. This quickly becomes my favorite beach of the dozens I have passed through. It is isolated, small, not crowded, and there are no entry fees. This is a place to return to—if I am with someone who wants a beach experience.
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I am a day away from moving a short distance inland, into the heart of the Tuscan Maremma, once the wildest and wooliest of Tuscany’s west. A special breed of cattle is raised here, the Maremmana, tended by cowboys, the butteri, who traditionally wore velvet jackets and black hats, and rode a local breed of horse called Maremmano. I did not see any of these cowboys. Ranching today is modern here, and the butteri ride vehicles, saving the horses and their gear for festivals and parades.
Bandits flourished throughout the Maremma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much like they did in the far south of Italy. These two areas were so remote back then that they had been largely ignored in the days after northern Italians united the peninsula. These bandits preyed on travelers along the Via Aurelia and hid out in small inland villages. Storytellers and balladeers today venerate bandits’ violent ways in the wild west of Tuscany, where they have now morphed into legend.
The people of this small area had things other than bandits to worry about. Malaria was a common malady. The Italian word maremma variously translates to “bad water,” “swamp,” and “marsh.” It comes from either the Latin maritima or the Old Castilian word marismas.
In the Middle Ages, the progressive Matilda, countess of Tuscany, launched public works to drain swamps that once dominated this low-lying coastal area and bred mosquitoes, the dreaded zanzare. A similar attempt was made in the mid-1800s. To his credit, the Italian dictator Mussolini also launched swamp-draining projects in the 1920s and 1930s to finish Matilda’s efforts. This resulted in the reclamation of vast acreage now under fields of wheat, corn, and sunflowers; vineyards; and olive groves.
At one time, beginning in the 1890s, the government had combated malaria by providing inexpensive quinine to its citizens. Mussolini’s land-reclamation projects, along with similar projects following World War II, ultimately did away with that dreaded disease in this part of the world.
Today the land, of course, is still low-lying and prone to flooding. In the fall of 2012, for example, great swaths of the coastal area around Grosseto, the major city of the Maremma located slightly inland between Piombino and the lagoon city of Orbetello, were underwater in the aftermath of heavy rains, blocking roadways and rail lines for several miles. Orbetello and the nearby town of Albinia, both along the western edge of the Maremma plain, were overwhelmed with flooding, forcing more than a thousand families to temporarily relocate. Four people died in the 2012 flooding; flooding throughout coastal Maremma returned a year later, in October 2013, killing two people.
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Before I turn east toward Pitigliano I still want to explore another town in the far south, Talamone, once a fishing village that the far-inland city of Siena had hoped to turn into a port in the Middle Ages. Instead, it is now a small, walled tourist town perched high on a massive rock outcropping that overlooks the sea. Most of its medieval buildings remain intact, and tucked away down a steep rock stairway is a tiny private beach that is sold out every July and August to repeat visitors.
Ottoman sea raiders wreaked havoc along this coast for years. With the aid of the French, they sacked Talamone in 1544. Forces led by the Ottoman-Turkish privateer Hayreddin Barbarossa (Red Beard) attacked coastal Tuscany repeatedly. He hit many of the towns and villages I have visited: twenty-four years before sacking Piombino, his forces captured a sailing vessel there in 1520. In addition to Talamone, he took over such towns as Castiglione della Pescaria, Orbetello, Porto Ercole, and the island of Giglio. And he didn’t stop there. The Ottoman navy claimed victory after victory farther south along the coasts of Sardinia, Calabria, and Sicily, allowing the Ottoman Empire to dominate the Mediterranean during this period in history.
The Ottoman control lasted until their 1571 defeat at the Battle of Lepanto, just off the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth in western Greece. Orchestrated by southern Mediterranean maritime states, this battle allowed places like Talamone to reclaim their roles as significant fishing ports. The battle flags of Lepanto’s defeated still hang high on the walls of the church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri in Pisa.
Talamone is a great place to take a few days simply to relax or, perhaps, to set up a comfortable base from which to explore the Maremma region. The road to the village takes drivers through sweeping fields. Vistas of medieval grandeur sitting high on the town’s outcropping over the sea come into view, growing bigger and bigger as the village draws nearer. The small marina is port for pleasure craft and fishing boats of all sizes, and the small, privately owned beach, jammed to capacity under dozens of red umbrellas during July and August, offers a shallow inlet for swimmers.
I walked the two or three narrow streets of the town, ate an early lunch of swordfish and pasta, and before the afternoon siesta took hold, sat in the shade of a medieval building that was likely seven hundred years old. There, looking out onto a small piazza, I passed time watching villagers come and go. I allowed myself a fantasy or two about buying an apartment or stone house here and escaping the heavy winter snows and cold of my hometown. As usual with these thoughts, the fantasy slipped away as quickly as it came when I remembered the crushing reality of Italian bureaucracy dealing with foreigners buying property in Italy.
Just five miles to the south of Talamone is Orbetello. It is a small Maremma town on a long, narrow peninsula that shoots out from the coastline. The Romans constructed a land bridge at its western tip to tie the mainland to the island of Monte Argentario. Two other nearly parallel land bridges on the other sides of the Orbetello peninsula were built on top of sandbars, deposited naturally by Tyrrhenian currents, between the mainland and the island.
I had been here once before, on my way to Porto Santo Stefano for that quick ferry ride to the tiny island of Giglio. Now, I could pause a bit and take in the town that has passed, like so many other parts of Italy, from one “owner” to another. The Aldobrandeschi, a family thought to have origins in Lombardy—that region of northern Italy once dominated by Germanic tribes—owned it for a time in the Middle Ages. In the 1400s, an Umbrian town far to the east, Orvieto, took possession, followed by Siena taking over for a few hundred years. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish, who at the time dominated much of Tuscany, took control. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany then managed it through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—until Italy was unified in 1870.
During a slow drive through the town, I could see the remnants of an ancient wall. The guidebook I carried for the detail of its maps said the wall dated back to the time of the Etruscans. That statement seemed wrong. I had read elsewhere that archaeologists widely believe Populonia was the only Etruscan port, while all other Etruria sites were located farther inland. Etruscans certainly had tombs in the area around Orbetello, but an Etruscan wall on the peninsula was unlikely.
I tend to believe the nineteenth-century British explorer George Dennis, who wrote that predecessors to the Etruscans put these walls along the town’s edge, perhaps an early people known as the Pelasgians. Ancient Greek writers believed Pelasgians were ancestors to the Greeks and perhaps the oldest people on earth. Of course, we know they were not the earth’s oldest people, but archaeologists today give them credit for being among the earliest peoples to colonize this section of Italy.
I sit for a while, looking at these remnants of prehistoric walls still protruding here and there and topped in more modern times with stone slabs to keep the walls from crumbling. Archaeologists believe they were constructed from a porous volcanic stone and clay
. Their design is unlike the designs of Etruscan-built walls crafted centuries, perhaps millennia, later. Orbetello’s walls could have been built anytime between the third and first millennia BC.
Spaniards, in the late 1600s, designed the city’s main gate, the Medina Coeli, with its three narrow entrances for people, horses, and donkey carts. It provides a tight squeeze for buses, trucks, and cars entering the town. I am headed to Porto Ercole, on the island of Monte Argentario, considered to be one of the most heavily touristed areas along this coast.
At the end of the causeway, the road to Porto Ercole heads south. I reach the village that in modern times has spread up into two small valleys above the original village, which is laid out in a narrow strip along the marina. I find jammed streets and no parking. I should have been here in the spring.
Suddenly, the back-up lights on a car parked along the side of the main street pop on and it pulls out of a cherished spot. I pull in, beating a driver heading in the opposite direction who intended to jockey his larger vehicle into the narrow slot. Thank heavens for tiny Fiat Puntos.
Porto Ercole makes for a pleasant walk, even with the blasting August sun and intense humidity. I did not explore the newer sections of the town that push up into the two valleys, but instead braved the crowds of tourists who congregate along a couple of streets at the harbor. High on the hill above the marina area is a Spanish-era fortress, left over from the mostly peaceful days in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Spain controlled this part of Tuscany. Nearby Orbetello was the headquarters for its military enclave. A narrow but high stone gate leads to a ramp that carries walkers to the Spanish fort and the church, Sant’Erasmo, where some believe the great late-Renaissance painter Michelangelo Caravaggio was entombed.
The church, a creamy soft white with a hint of Mediterranean yellow, has a wonderful view of the harbor below and the sea beyond. Its doors were shuttered.
Caravaggio’s life is fascinating and was my impetus to visit Porto Ercole. Some older histories indicate that Caravaggio died of malaria in a tavern here, or maybe he died while walking along a beach on his way to the town in 1609. These early histories say he was buried in a grave with thirty others, and the jumble of bones were later unearthed and placed in Sant’Erasmo. But recent biographies dispute this version of his death.
First, the year of his death is wrong. It likely is 1610, on July 18 or 19. Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of Caravaggio’s foremost modern biographers, tells a different story. He said that Caravaggio’s tragic end began in Naples, where he experienced severe injuries during a fight in late 1609. Disfigured by a series of facial cuts, he was nearly blinded in one eye. Despite these injuries and in great discomfort, he painted his last two works of art—The Denial of St. Peter and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula.
The badly injured Caravaggio left Naples for Rome in mid-1610 aboard a small, two-masted ship bound for Porto Ercole. The ship pulled into Rome’s Spanish-run port. Caravaggio had planned to head into the city. But for reasons unknown, the Spanish detained Caravaggio for a couple of days. The ship, without him and with all of his possessions still on board, left for Porto Ercole, fifty miles away and a two-day sea journey. Caravaggio eventually was able to leave, and Graham-Dixon believes he rode horseback north up the coast, desperate to reclaim the paintings he had with him and his other possessions. Rome would have to wait.
It was a trip he could make in less than a day, and he arrived in Porto Ercole ahead of the ship. But the journey was too much. He quickly succumbed, either to his wounds or his ill health—perhaps malaria or a heart condition.
Whatever the circumstances, his body was tossed with others into that unmarked grave, and the local Catholic priest never recorded his death. Ironically, the priest, for unknown reasons, was “on strike” during this period, and no deaths were recorded in Porto Ercole during that entire year.
In 2001, an Italian researcher reportedly discovered a death certificate that said Caravaggio died in a hospital, but it has since been deemed a forgery.
Meanwhile, in late 2009, other more credible researchers removed from a church ossuary a collection of bones belonging to at least thirty people who died in the early seventeenth century. They studied the DNA from those bones, compared them to Caravaggio’s siblings’ descendants, and proclaimed a year later they were 85 percent sure that some of the remains belonged to the artist. Many historians have yet to be convinced.
ELEVEN
Colli di Maremma
These sulfuric springs, which gush out of the earth at [99 degrees F°], were famous even in Roman times for their curative properties. On windy days the smell of sulfur carries all the way up to the village of Saturnia, said to be the oldest in all of Italy. It was to these springs that injured Roman soldiers were sent to be healed after battle.
—David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany (2011)
THE SS74 road to Pitigliano, along a gentle, curving stretch through the low-lying hills of the Maremma, starts at the coast. The first small town it passes through is Marsiliana, where, in 1915, a seventh century BC Etruscan tablet was uncovered. This tablet gave archaeologists a broader hint at the composition of the Etruscan alphabet, the bulk of which remains a mystery.
An area at Tuscany’s southern end, Maremma is peppered with Etruscan sites, ranging from city/village ruins now barely perceptible on the rolling landscape, to tomb areas and other ruins where ovens and kilns are located along with the remains of cisterns for water storage.
The first two-thirds of this relatively short fifty-mile drive inland to Pitigliano takes us through an area known locally as the Albegna River Valley. It holds perhaps fifteen sites tied to four different historical periods. The first is prehistoric, from which no written record exists. This is followed by the protohistoric period, which refers to people who left no written record but whom ancient writers wrote about. Without those early writings, prehistoric peoples would be unknown to us except through scant archaeological ruins and rough-hewn pottery and tools. The Etruscans, for example, left no extensive writings, except for those few chiseled words on a stone slab. But the ancient Romans who followed wrote about them extensively. Then there is the Roman period when people left vast numbers of documents. Finally, we have the medieval period and all the extensive evidence it left us, including still-standing buildings, art, and writings. Many sites, in and around various modern villages built next to or on top of them, also can claim beginnings in the prehistoric, Etruscan, Roman, or medieval periods. Many, like Pitigliano, claim occupancy by all four.
The Maremma is a land ripe for exploration by travelers interested in Etruscan/Roman history. After making Pitigliano my base for the next six days, I wandered in and around some of these sites. This was in mid-August, the height of the tourist season, but I noticed there were few visitors prowling among the stones. The sign-in registers at some of the small museums often listed two months’ worth of visitors on a single page, with room for more names. As I flipped through these pages, occasionally I would come across a name with an American city as home, but it was rare.
Heading inland for the first time, I had been ignorant of all this Etruscan treasure. That would come during various forays from Pitigliano. All I knew at the beginning was that I was going to a medieval city that had been recommended to me by a friend in Pietrasanta. “It’s a must-see,” he said. By declining to add details about what to expect there, he encouraged me to make my own discoveries.
Pitigliano hits the unsuspecting motorist like pie in the eye: suddenly and without warning for the first-timer. The village dramatically comes into focus when you swing around a sharp curve far below the town, near the Madonna delle Grazie church. Pitigliano looks much the same today as it must have to a medieval traveler riding a mule or horse around that same curve six hundred years ago.
There it is, rising out of a spur of tufa carved through geologic time by wind and water. The town and its soft-yellow and reddish stone houses a
nd buildings piled alongside and over one another look like they are part of the mountain itself rather than built on top.
Etruscans settled at this high spot and dug tombs out of the soft tufa that rings the base of the plateau. Now those tombs, with large wooden doors and modern heavy locks, are used to store items like olive oil, casks of wine, household goods. This village, under the Etruscans, was along a commercial route that connected it with Vulci, another major center just to the north of Rome.
A nicely detailed book written by a local historian reports that the Etruscan name for Pitigliano could have been “Statnes.” Under the Romans, it was called Statonia. The final name for Pitigliano, and the names of a handful of villages throughout Italy, evolved from the name of a distinguished Roman family, the “gens Petilia.”
My arrival in Pitigliano was timed well. Within an hour, as I sat across from my hotel at a small bar’s outside table near the medieval town gate, drums sounded in the distance, cars in the narrow square in front of the hotel were chased away, and a procession of townsfolk in full medieval garb flowed into the newly cleared space to mark the beginning of a medieval festival.
For the next several days, a series of musical events and dance performances filled the evening hours. Still, the town was not full of tourists. An article in The New York Times reported that Pitigliano has only twenty-five thousand visitors a year. Like small festivals I have attended in Sicily and southern Italy, this was purely a local affair, with residents and perhaps visitors from nearby towns. Its charm has not yet been compromised by mass tourism.