It may come as something of a surprise, but a visit to Tuscany can be a shock to the system, especially if you drive through various other parts of Italy first. The best way to describe it, I guess, is to call it a “tourism boutique”; a place you go when you want to experience the country without having to put up with the graffiti, the trash, the brutalist apartment buildings, and the grime that sadly seems to define many of the cities and towns where Italians live their modern lives.
In Tuscany all the buildings are so old they make your head swim. But they’re generally scrubbed and mortared and re-plastered to the point they seem like a designer’s take on what it means to be medieval Italian.
And although there are plenty of Italians tending the shops and sweeping the streets, the streets themselves are full of overseas tourists, while the countryside appears to have been bought up by the British and well-heeled Americans.
The real estate agents don’t even pretend they’re selling to Italians. The signs in the windows are all in English, and some of the companies sport evocative and romantic Tuscan names like “Frank Knight Realty”.
The Tuscans, whose ancestors lived a hard-scrabble existence on land that produced grapes and olives, and whose main source of income was a wine (Chianti) that for some strange reason still has the taint of cheapness in the rest of the world, must be laughing all the way to the bank. They’ve managed to trade old sheds and crumbled down houses for a well-earned retirement on the Italian Riviera and one of those little motor-boats for fishing out in the bay.
ooOOoo
Rural Tuscany itself, I hasten to add, is just as it’s depicted in Under the Tuscan Sun, all those coffee table pictorial books, and the endless stream of cooking shows on TV – unquestionably gorgeous, and one of the very special landscapes anywhere on this earth.
I was more or less prepared for the grapevines snaking up the hillsides; the tall, thin Italian cypress casting long shadows in the hot afternoon sun; and the olive groves, all gnarled and grey-leaved against the hard brown earth. What I hadn’t envisioned, however, was how much of what Kiwis call “bush” there is as well.
Tuscany from the top of any of the highest peaks (helped always by a prominent church tower belonging to a castello), looks to be an especially bumpy place, as if it were a giant blanket bunched up and then thrown on the ground. And when you look down on it, everywhere except certain cultivated hillsides and the few places where people have chosen to live seems to be completely covered with an attractive combination of deciduous and evergreen forest.
It’s the sort of environment that invites you to take a walk, since there often doesn’t appear to be much understory, and I kept wondering what sort of edible treasures (walnuts, blackberries, wild mushrooms, and even truffles) you might find there. Sadly, we were so much on the move that a stroll didn’t seem on the cards.
As it turned out, however, we did have one of those serendipities while in Tuscany that you sometimes dream of when you travel (and probably even more so when you don’t). It began when we decided to simply take whatever small road presented itself, having found all those folds in the Tuscan blanket to be connected by some of the loveliest, meandering, and more-or-less sane and safe routes you could ever hope for in this part of the world.
We made our way up one hillside, past a group of pickers who were beginning the harvest of this year’s Sangiovese grape crop, and ended up at what looked like a severe narrowing of the road leading into a little hamlet. Luckily (and uniquely for rural Italy), there was a big blue “P” parking sign, and so we pulled in, mostly to see by walking if we might be able to take the campervan on through to the other side.
We soon forgot all about the driving, however, because the hamlet, called Volpaia, was another pristine example of a medieval settlement. Only in this case it was absolutely tiny, and instead of catering to thousands of tourists every day, it was the centre of processing and bottling for a wine-making concern.
So as we walked Volpaia’s little lanes, looking at all the stone buildings and ancient doors, periodically we’d have to squeeze ourselves over to one side as a Lamborghini tractor rumbled past pulling a stainless steel trailer filled with grapes.
It didn’t take long, given the size of Volpaia and the smell of fresh grape juice, to find our way to the processing area, and several of the staff happily let us “nose” around as the tractors emptied their loads, and the grapes were churned down a hopper, under the lane, and finally into the crushing “shed”. Quotes are definitely necessary here, since the “shed” was actually the converted remains of a church built sometime around the end of the first millennium!
The Winery Shed Door
After walking all around Volpaia, it became obvious that there wasn’t anything to speak of in the village as far as groceries and other provisions was concerned. Everyone drove down the hill to a servicing town called Radda for that. But there was at least what appeared to be a patio restaurant, called La Bottega, (“The Store”), with a smaller sign that said “dal (since) 1777”.
So after we’d spent sufficient time watching the beginnings of this year’s vintage, we decided to have a couple of glasses of a previous one at the restaurant, and enjoy the sweeping/panoramic/words-fail-me view.
During the very long time we took polishing off our drinks (it was definitely that sort of place), we enquired jokingly of the waiter whether anyone ever camped in the parking lot down below. His reply sealed the deal – we would come back for a meal that evening, and not worry for once about how much of the Chianti Classico we consumed in the process.
And thus we found ourselves eating the best meal we had on our entire trip. What made it so was the fact that it was so simple, honest and fresh. The tomatoes in my caprese (tomato, buffalo mozzarella and basil salad) were the sweetest and most flavoursome I’ve tasted since I grew them myself in a market garden decades ago in Canada. They were picked about 15 minutes before they were served.
The wild boar was so tender it melted in the mouth, and it was seasoned with bay from the hedgerow next to the restaurant, rosemary from a nearby side-hill, and capers that grew right out of the wall of the nearby church.
The deserts (semifreddo – a partially frozen ice cream; and pana cotta – a custard) were just as good, and the fruit that accompanied them just as home-grown.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, what really seemed impossible was the price. By the time we finished we couldn’t have cared less, but dish for dish the meal was the cheapest we’d had in the three weeks we’d been in Italy.
For me the meal at La Bottega was what I always hope for – no plummy culinary pretension, no silver service and outrageous prices to match. It was what is was, and it couldn’t have been better no matter where in the world we’d eaten it, or what sort of fancy chef was behind the stove.
The next morning proved to be no less wonderful (apart from a certain sort of “headache” on my part). The restaurant wasn’t open yet, having closed very late the previous night. But a tiny café seemed to be operating only about 100m up the road. So my wife kindly walked over in the hope of fetching me a take-away coffee (which in Italy always seems to be in a real china cup and saucer – they just expect you to bring it back).
Outside, watering all the pot plants surrounding the café, and the hamlet piazza besides, was Gina Barucci, 80-something year old mother of Carla (who runs the restaurant), and Volpaia’s most important person (since she seemed to be the head gardener, local news source, keeper of the church door keys, and maintainer of the cleanest public toilet this side of traveller’s paradise).
She and my wife had a great old chat, given that neither knew the other’s language, and before long I joined them to have second coffees, munch on Gina’s hand-made biscotti, and pet the Barucci’s assorted collection of dogs.
The sky was vividly blue and cloudless, the air smelled of autumn oak leaves and freshly pressed grapes, and the little piazza echoed with Gina’s voice as she sang out “buon-GIOR-no” to the winery employees as they passed by on their way to work. It was all so perfect, it hardly seemed real…
~originally composed in August, 2011~