Tuscany - unplanned

Our distributor (Alison) needed to have a package dropped to a customer in Tuscany so at the 11^th hour (eg Friday morning), we volunteered to go and hastily packed and planned a vague route. The navigation has been transformed by Satnav and finding a particular building a couple of hundred kilometres away, is simply a matter of plugging in the (right) address. This time I managed some of the driving for the first time since arriving in Italy and it went well.  

 After dropping the package we headed for a town called Cararra. It is at the base of some mountains which have been spectacularly hacked into to mine the marble in them. Rory tells me there is evidence they have been mined for marble since around 200 BC. They make an impressive sight. Not much resource consent going on when they started clearly. But it does explain how the Italians managed to make so many enormous marble structures.

We found some accommodation and then headed on up into the hills (the surrounding hills are part of a national park) to poke around. You can go on marble cave tours – but we arrived in true Jones style, after most of the people had left, the sun was low and it was spectacularly beautiful and quiet, other than a jumpy mother ordering the boys not to coat themselves and everything else in white marble dust/paste.

 From here we headed further up the hill and as per usual found a stunningly beautiful little village (well truth be know, we haven’t found many butt-ugly little mountain villages) perched at the top of the road over-looking the nearby mountains, mines and lower villages. We found a great place to scramble at the top on lovely rock as the sun was busy setting. 

Village of Colonnata

Also as per usual, all the best places you find are always when you go poking around, off the tourist maps, after talking to the locals. It is so hard to get the right balance with planning and not planning. Not planning seems to work well for us although I live with more tension than Rory about finding a bed, finding food, getting lost, missing out. Getting the balance right is a dance I am mastering.

Back at the B and B we ate bread and cheese on the patio for a simple dinner (marble of course) and started to piece together the story of the house. The house is owned by a Japanese lady who has lovingly restored and added onto an old farmhouse. The project took four years and her husband obviously helped until his recent death. He was a famous Japanese sculptor and the house is surrounded by his modern and beautiful sculptures. His wife had some of them bought back from Japan to their house after he died. The house was lovely and like the Japanese are well known for, everything was beautifully simple and elegant but understated. I couldn’t help feeling the burden of sadness though at the thought of this woman without her husband, living in a large house by herself in Tuscany and surrounded by constant reminders of what she has lost.  The view was lovely – out over the nearby mountains of marble. The following morning, after a blissful breakfast in the open air (the temperature is perfect at the moment – enough cool to be pleasant, enough heat to make being outside lovely) we enjoyed a little walk up to a hilltop in the morning sun and started to wonder why we were punishing ourselves on a whistle stop tour of the sights when our little family seems to be happiest on a hillside.
see: http://www.g-arsapua.com/ebb.html

But duty calls and it would be rude not to so it was off to PISA (the leaning tower, that is) – just to say we have done it. Yes – we have done it. That’s about all. We hit our first lot of serious numbers of camera wielding tourists since arriving in Italia and Rory didn’t even want to buy tickets to go into the church so we just looked and left. Relatively painless and awesome but kind of crazy. Not just the angle of the building but the industry. Ship ‘em in, get the photo – move ‘em out. We followed all the rules.

Silas and Gwilym find more interesting things on the ground than the massive church behind them

 All the churches here are so hard to reconcile as places of worship or gathering because of the scale they are on. They are simply overwhelming and it is so hard to imagine gatherings in them other than grand celebrations, sumptuous ceremonies, showy services. There was nothing in Jesus’ life that seemed to attract this amount of opulence or welcome it – even if the old Testament has some exceptions to this. Jesus taught on hillsides, outside villages, sometimes in the old temple but stuffy religion made him angry. I know many churches were supposedly built as ‘acts of worship’ themselves, but they also allowed slavery and injustice, poverty and suffering to get the job done. I guess I can’t talk to the people who built them and question their motives or their relationship to God, so I will never know.

Next stop was Lucca - described in our guide as the 'most grateful of Tuscany's provincial capitals set inside a ring of Renaissance walls' – so wide that you can walk/bike on top of them like a road. After a takeaway pizza, some wandering the cobbled streets, we found a bike hire place and managed to hire bikes for us all: one with a kids seat, a small bike for Silas and a ladies bike with a basket for me. So we circumnavigated the city (central area) on our bikes which was lovely. It was uncrowded, Silas was in his element and it felt more purposeful than wandering. Lucca was readying itself for a buskers festival and were expecting about 13,000 people to turn up over the coming week. There was a groovy market of antiques and bric a brac in progress and a great selection of shops where I managed to buy a new top.

Silas on city walls looking down into Lucca

In a Piazza in Lucca on the bikes

We finished the day about 40 kms outside of Florence since we decided to stay in the country (considering the cost of accommodation and parking in Florence). Again, Rory’s call was a good one and we found an agriturismo (accommodation on a farm..??) busy harvesting their olives. The boys were so happy – busily picking olives and running to put their small, fat handfuls in the huge buckets, sincerely believing they were being a big help. They literally skipped around like lambs and I worked hard at enjoying the moment, the evening Tuscan sun dipping over the olive groves while also making sure the boys were not a nuisance to the serious work of harvesting. Rory ran to the supermarket and we ate a simple dinner (as we do a lot over here: pasta sauce out of a jar, pasta…’basta’ (that’s enough, finish in Italian!). Rory enquired after a local wine and managed to buy one produced a hundred metres from the supermarket!

Following dinner, the farmer had recommended we check out the central piazza in Pistoia. As Rory says, Italian cities are almost always better by night when dirt becomes dark and the moody street lighting makes it magical. Though our evening was ending, the restaurants were just starting and the shops just shutting. We enjoyed gelato in an alleyway and admired a bride and groom posing in the piazza beside another spectacular church.

The workers

Nets laid on the ground to catch the olives once they are shaken off the tree

We spent the evening (my choice) dutifully reading our Lonely plant, trying to work out where to park and educating ourselves on a few hundred years of art history in a couple of paragraphs to brace ourselves for the onslaught of the Uffizi. Pearls before Swine…pearls before swine.

The next day was Florence and I will am going to write a separate blog for Florence simply because it was a tradgedy/comedy and so different from the rest of the weekend.