by Iris Origo
The Val d’Orcia
We still had, however, one property upon our list: some 3,500 acres on what we were told was very poor farming-land in the south of the province of Siena, about five miles from a new little watering-place which was just springing up at Chianciano. It was from there that we drove up a stony, winding road, crossed a ford, and then, after skirting some rather unpromising-looking farm buildings, drove yet farther up a hill on a steep track through some oak coppices. From the top, we hoped to obtain a bird’s-eye view of the whole estate. The road was nothing more than a rough cart-track up which we thought no car had surely ever been before; and the woods on either side had been cut down or neglected. Up and up we climbed, our spirits sinking. Then suddenly we were at the top. We stood on a bare, windswept upland, with the whole of the Val d’Orcia at our feet.
The clay hills (crete senesi) of the Val d’Orcia
It is a wide valley, but in those days it offered no green welcome, no promise of fertile fields. The shapeless rambling riverbed held only a trickle of water, across which some mules were picking their way through a desert of stones. Long ridges of low, bare clay hills—the crete senesi—ran down towards the valley, dividing the landscape into a number of steep, dried-up little water-sheds. Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman; on that autumn evening it had the bleakness of the desert, and its fascination. To the south, the black boulders and square tower of Radicofani stood up against the sky—a formidable barrier, as many armies had found, to an invader. But it was to the west that our eyes were drawn: to the summit of the great extinct volcano which, like Fujiyama, dominated and dwarfed the whole landscape around it, and which appeared, indeed, to have been created on an entirely vaster, more majestic scale—Monte Amiata.
The history of that region went back very far. There had already been Etruscan villages and burial-grounds and health-giving springs there in the fifth century B.C.; the chestnut-woods of Monte Amiata had supplied timber for the Roman galleys during the second Punic war, while, from the eighth to the eleventh century, both Lombards and Carolingians had left their traces in the great Benedictine abbeys of S. Antimo and Abbadia San Salvatore, in the pieve of S. Quirico d’Orcia and in innumerable minor Romanesque churches and chapels—some still in use, some half-ruined or used as granaries or storehouses—and the winding road we could just see across the valley still followed almost the same track as one of the most famous mediaeval pilgrims’ roads to Rome, the via francigena, linking this desolate valley with the whole of Christian Europe. Then came the period of castle-building, of violent and truculent nobles—in particular, the Aldobrandeschi, Counts of Santa Fiora, who boasted that they could sleep in a different castle of their own on each night in the year—and who left as their legacy to the Val d’Orcia the half-ruined towers, fortresses and battlements that we could see on almost every hilltop. And just across the valley—its skyline barely visible from where we stood—lay one of the most perfect Renaissance cities, the creation of that worldly, caustic man of letters, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, the first man of taste in Italy to enjoy with equal discrimination the works of art and those of nature, who would summon, in the summer heat, his Cardinals to confer with him in the chestnut woods of Monte Amiata, ‘under one tree or another, by the sweet murmur of the stream’.
But of all this we knew nothing then, and still less could we foresee that, within our lifetime, those same woods on Monte Amiata, as well as those in which we stood, which for centuries had been a hiding-place for the outlawed and the hunted, would again be a refuge for fugitives: this time for anti-Fascist partisans and for Allied prisoners of war. We only knew at once that this vast, lonely, uncompromising landscape fascinated and compelled us. To live in the shadow of that mysterious mountain, to arrest the erosion of those steep ridges, to turn this bare clay into wheat-fields, to rebuild these farms and see prosperity return to their inhabitants, to restore the greenness of these mutilated woods—that, we were sure, was the life that we wanted.
In the next few days, as we examined the situation more closely, we were brought down to earth again. The estate was then of about 3,500 acres, of which the larger part was then woodland (mostly scrub-oak, although there was one fine beech-wood at the top of the hill) or rather poor grass, while only a small part consisted of good land. Even of this, only a fraction was already planted with vineyards or olive-groves, while much of the arable land also still lay fallow. The buildings were not many: besides the villa itself and the central farm-buildings around it, there were twenty-five outlying farms, some very inaccessible and all in a state of great disrepair and, about a mile away, a small castle called Castelluccio Bifolchi. This was originally the site of one of the Etruscan settlements belonging to the great lucomony of Clusium (as is testified by the fine Etruscan vases found in the necropolis close to the castle, and which now lie in the museum of Chiusi), but the first mention of it in the Middle Ages as a ‘fortified place’ dates only from the tenth century, and we then hear no more about it until the sixteenth, when it played a small part in the long drawn-out war between Siena and Florence for the possession of the Sienese territory—a war which gradually reduced the Val d’Orcia to the state of desolation and solitude in which we found it. In this war Siena was supported by the troops of Charles V and Florence by those of François I of France, and Pope Clement VII (who was secretly allied with the French) made his way one day by a secondary road from the Val d’Orcia to Montepulciano and, on arriving at the Castelluccio, expressed a wish to lunch there. But the owner of the castle, a staunch Ghibelline, refused him admittance, ‘so that the Pope was obliged, with much inconvenience and hunger, to ride on to Montepulciano’.2
This castle, which held within its walls our parish church, dedicated to San Bernardino of Siena, and which owned some 2,150 acres, had once formed a single estate with La Foce; when we first saw it it was still inhabited by an old lady who (even if we had had the money) did not wish to sell. It was not until 1934 that we were able to buy it and thus bring the whole property together again.
As for the villa of La Foce itself, it is believed to have served as a post-house on the road up which Papa Clemente passed, but this is unconfirmed, and the only thing certain is that in 1557 its lands, together with those of the Castelluccio, were handed over to the Sienese hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, as is testified by a shield on the villa and on the older farms, bearing this date, with the stone ladder surmounted by a cross which is the hospital’s emblem. The home itself was certainly not the beautiful villa I had hoped for, but merely a medium-sized country house of quite pleasant proportions, adorned by a loggia on the ground floor, with arches of red brick and a façade with windows framed in the same material. Indoors it had no especial character or charm. A steep stone staircase led straight into a dark central room, lit only by red and blue panes of Victorian glass inserted in the doors, and the smaller rooms leading out of it were papered in dingy, faded colours. The doors were of deal or yellow pitch-pine, the floors of unwaxed, half-broken bricks, and there was a general aroma of must, dust, and decay. There was no garden, since the well was only sufficient for drinking-water, and of course no bathroom. There was no electric light, central heating or telephone.
Beneath the house stood deep wine-cellars, with enormous vats of seasoned oak, some of them large enough to hold 2,200 gallons, and a wing connected the villa with the fattoria (the house inhabited by the agent or fattore and his assistants) while just beyond stood the building in which the olives were pressed and the oil made and stored, the granaries and laundry-shed and wood-shed and, a little further off, the carpenter’s shop, the blacksmith’s and the stables. The small, dark room which served for a school stood next to our kitchen; the ox-carts which carried the wheat, wine, and grapes from the various scattered farms were unloaded in the yard. Thus villa and fattoria formed, according to old Tuscan tradition, a single, closely-connected little
world.
Old crumbling farmhouse, which was later taken down and rebuilt
When, however, we came to ask the advice of the farming experts of our acquaintance, they were not encouraging. To farm in the Sienese crete, they said, was an arduous and heart-breaking enterprise: we would need patience, energy—and capital. The soilerosion of centuries must first be arrested, and then we would at once have to turn to re-afforestation, road-building, and planting. The woods, as we had already seen, had been ruthlessly cut down, with no attempt to establish a regular rotation; the olive-trees were ill-pruned, the fields ill-ploughed or fallow, the cattle underfed. For thirty years practically nothing had been spent on any farm implements, fertilisers or repairs. In the half-ruined farms the roofs leaked, the stairs were worn away, many windows were boarded up or stuffed with rags, and the poverty-stricken families (often consisting of more than twenty souls) were huddled together in dark, airless little rooms. In one of these, a few months later, we found, in the same bed, an old man dying and a woman giving birth to a child. There was only the single school in the fattoria, and in many cases the distances were so great and the tracks so bad in winter, that only a few children could attend regularly. The only two roads—to Chianciano and Montepulciano—converged at our house (which stood on the watershed between the Val d’Orcia and Val di Chiana, and thence derived its name), and also ended there. The more remote farms could only be reached by rough cart-tracks and, if we wished to attempt intensive farming, their number should at least be doubled. We would need government subsidies, and also the collaboration of our neighbours, in a district where few landowners had either capital to invest, or any wish to adopt newfangled methods, and we would certainly also meet with opposition from the peasants themselves—illiterate, stubborn, suspicious, and rooted, like countrymen all the world over, in their own ways. We had no lack of warnings. Was it courage, ignorance or mere youth that swept them all away? Five days after our first glimpse of the Val d’Orcia, in November 1923, we had signed the deed of purchase of La Foce. In the following March we were married and, immediately after our honeymoon, we returned to the Val d’Orcia to start our new life.
* * *
How can I recapture the flavour of our first year? After a place has become one’s home, one’s freshness of vision becomes dimmed; the dust of daily life, of plans and complications and disappointments, slowly and inexorably clogs the wheels. But sometimes, even now, some sudden trick of light or unexpected sound will wipe out the intervening years and take me back to those first months of expectation and hope, when each day brought with it some new small achievement, and when we were awaiting, too, the birth of our first child.
For the first time, in that year, I learned what every country child knows: what it is to live among people whose life is not regulated by artificial dates, but by the procession of the seasons: the early spring ploughing before sowing the Indian corn and clover; the lambs in March and April and then the making of the delicious sheep’s-milk cheese, pecorino, which is a speciality of this region, partly because the pasture is rich in thyme, called timo sermillo or popolino. (‘Chi vuol buono il caciolino’, goes a popular saying, ‘mandi le pecore al sermolino.’)3 Then came the hay-making in May, and in June the harvest and the threshing; the vintage in October, the autumn ploughing and sowing; and finally, to conclude the farmer’s year, the gathering of the olives in December, and the making of the oil. The weather became something to be considered, not according to one’s own convenience but the farmer’s needs: each rain-cloud eagerly watched in April and May as it scudded across the sky and rarely fell, in the hope of a kindly wet day to swell the wheat and give a second crop of fodder for the cattle before the long summer’s drought. The nip of late frosts in spring became a menace as great as that of the hot, dry summer wind, or, worse, of the summer hail-storm which would lay low the wheat and destroy the grapes. And in the autumn, after the sowing, our prayers were for soft sweet rain. ‘Il gran freddo di gennaio’, said an old proverb, ‘il mal tempo di febbraio, il vento di marzo, le dolci acque di aprile, le guazze di maggio, il buon mietere di giugno, il buon battere di luglio, e le tre acque di agosto, con la buona stagione, valgon più che il tron di Salmone.’4
Making haystacks
Some of the farming methods which we saw in those first years became obsolete in Tuscany a long time ago. Then, the reaping was still done by hand and in the wheat-fields, from dawn to sunset, the long rows of reapers moved slowly forwards, chanting rhythmically to follow the rise and fall of the sickle, while behind the binders and gleaners followed, bending low in a gesture as old as Ruth’s. The wine and water, with which at intervals the men freshened their parched throats, were kept in leather gourds in a shady ditch, and several times in the day, besides, the women brought down baskets of bread and cheese and home-cured ham (these snacks were called spuntini) from the farms, and at midday steaming dishes of pastasciutta and meat. A few weeks ago, one of the oldest contadini still left at La Foce, a man of ninety—laudator temporis acti—was reminiscing with my husband about those days. “We worked from dawn to dusk, and sang as we worked. Now the machines do the work—but who feels like singing?”
Lunch in the fields
An even greater occasion than the reaping, was the threshing—the crowning feast-day of the farmer’s year. Threshing, until very recently, had been done by hand with wooden flails on the grass or brick threshing-floor beside each farm, but in our time there was already a threshing-machine worked by steam, and all the neighbouring farmers came to lend a hand and to help in the fine art of building the tall straw ricks, so tightly packed that, later on, slices could be cut out of them, as from a piece of cake. The air was heavy with fine gold dust, shimmering in the sunlight, the wine-flasks were passed from mouth to mouth, the children climbed on to the carts and stacks, and at noon, beside the threshing-floor, there was a banquet. First came soup and smokecured hams, then piled-up dishes of spaghetti, then two kinds of meat—one of which was generally a great gander, l’ocio, fattened for weeks beforehand—and then platters of sheep’s-cheese, made by the massaia herself, followed by the dolce, and an abundance of red wine. These were occasions I shall never forget—the handsome country girls bearing in the stacks of yellow pasta and flask upon flask of wine; the banter and the laughter; the hot sun beating down over the pale valley, now despoiled of its riches; the sense of fulfilment after the long year’s toil.
Then came the vintage. The custom of treading the grapes beneath the peasants’ bare feet—often pictured by northern writers, perhaps on the evidence of Etruscan frescoes, as a gay Bacchanalian scene—was already then a thing of the past. At that time, the bunches of grapes were brought by ox-cart to the fattoria in tall wooden tubs (called bigonci) in which they were vigorously squashed with stout wooden poles, and the mixture of stems, pulp and juice was left to ferment in open vats for a couple of weeks, before being put into barrels, to complete the fermentation during the winter. Now, the stems are separated from the grapes by a machine (called a diraspatrice), before the pressing, and then the juice flows directly into the vats, while for the pale white wine called ‘virgin’ the grapes are skinned before the fermentation (since it is the skin that gives the red wine its colour).
Last, in the farmer’s calendar, came the making of the oil. Unlike Greece and Spain, and some parts of southern Italy, where the olives are allowed to ripen until they fall to the ground (thus producing a much fatter and more acid oil) olives in Tuscany are stripped by hand from the boughs as soon as they reach the right degree of ripeness. Then, when the olives have been brought in by ox-cart to the fattoria and placed on long flat trays, so as not to press upon each other, the oil-making takes place with feverish speed, going on all day and night. When first we arrived, we found that the olives were being ground by a large circular millstone, about two metres in diameter, which was worked by a patient blindfold donkey, walking round and round. The pulp which was left over was then placed into rope baskets and put
beneath heavy presses, worked by four strong men pushing at a wooden bar. This produced the first oil, of the finest quality. Then again the whole process was repeated, with a second and stronger press, and the oil was then stored in huge earthenware jars, large enough to contain Ali Baba’s thieves, while the pulp (for nothing is wasted on a Tuscan farm) was sold for the ten per cent of oil which it still contained. (During the war, we even used the kernels for fuel.) The men worked day and night, in shifts of eight hours, naked to the waist, glistening with sweat. At night, by the light of oil lamps, the scene—the men’s dark glistening torsos, their taut muscles, the big grey millstone, the toiling beast, the smell of sweat and oil—had a primeval, Michelangelesque grandeur. Now, in a white-tiled room, electric presses and separators do the same work in a tenth of the time, with far greater efficiency and less human labour, and clients bring their olives to us to be pressed from all over the district. One can hardly deplore the change; yet it is perhaps at least worth while to record it.
Maremmano oxen
One other sight, too, has already almost disappeared from the Val d’Orcia: the big grey maremmano oxen, first brought from the Hungarian steppes to northern Italy, according to tradition, by Attila, and thence to the plains of the Maremma. In our first years in the Val d’Orcia, it was they that were used for ploughing the heavy soil, but then the day came when we bought our first tractor. Never shall I forget escorting it down the valley with a little crowd of admirers, Antonio at their head, to watch it plough its first furrow in a field near the river. Deep, deep went the shining blade into the rich black earth, deeper than a plough had ever sunk before. The children ran behind, laughing and shouting; the pigs followed, thrusting their long black snouts deep into the moist earth. It was an exciting day—but it was, for the oxen (and though we could not then foresee it, for a whole way of life) the beginning of a great change. The first tractor was followed by others, then by a reaper-and-binder and a combine, and after the war, by two bulldozers, to bring under cultivation the parts of the property which still lay fallow. Some oxen continued to be used for ploughing the steeper hillsides, but gradually they were interbred with the finer white oxen from the Val di Chiana, the chianini, while after the war Antonio imported, for beef, the brown and white Simmenthal cattle. You may still sometimes meet a pair of chianini—‘gentle as evening moths’—drawing an ox-cart up a road or driving a plough on a steep hillside; but if you wish to see the grey oxen you must go to those remote hills of the Maremma (and very few are left) where tractors have not yet arrived, or to the few plains by the sea on which they still roam in their pristine freedom or stand on summer days in the deep shade of spreading cork-trees. When all those plains, too, have been handed over to the tractors—and this is swiftly happening—we shall have to go to zoos to find the kings of the Maremma.