TUSCANY TIME

           

I now understand why there are a million books about Tuscany:  its history, its art, its natural beauty, its food.  How many places are there where you can be brought to the edge of tears by your dinner entre on the same day you were moist-eyed at the sight of a sun-warmed medieval stone building?  “Not enough” is the answer, not bloody enough.  The savoring of the moment extends to the food and drink, the angle of the sun on a hillside, the curve of a white marble column carved by an artist seven hundred years dead. 

            We hadn’t planned on spending time in Tuscany.  It evolved during the first few weeks of this trip.  One of the challenges of traveling for four months is figuring out how to pace yourself.  You can’t go, go, go every day or you risk physical collapse, or one of those hideous, “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” travel experiences where it all becomes an endless blur of strange restaurants and towns glimpsed through windows while the touristic heavy hitters are ticked off one by one.  Did you “do” Rome yet; seen the David in Florence; had a pint in a gen-you-ine English bar them folks over there call a pub?  You betcha, ain’t it old and furreign??

            On the other hand, the mantle of “TRIP OF A LIFETIME” is draped above this journey and so there’s a certain urgency about not wasting time.  I don’t want to miss Stonehenge because I spent a day hanging out in the garden of the cottage, watching the sun glinting off the top of the trees and drinking coffee and reading.  On the other hand . . . .  what’s a vacation for if not having time in the garden? 

The formula for achieving a good trip is further complicated when the travelers are different ages, different genders and in very different places in their lives.  While visiting Admiral Nelson’s ship in Portsmouth may make Max swoon with delight, it’s not something I can do for more than an hour or so; and while Jeff could spend a day inside the Duomo of Siena, contemplating the frescoes and marble columns and blue-painted ceiling, it’s not something Max can do for more than an hour, and I find myself getting cross-eyed from pious Madonnas and crucified Christs after a while.

A few weeks into our trip when we were still in London, I looked at the itinerary for the next few months and blanched.  Here is what I saw for just the first month-and-a-half of travel:  A fortnight in London, followed by two weeks traveling around England bopping from place to place; then the cross-continental rail journey and a week in Slovenia; then Venice; and then, hiking the five towns of Cinque Terre.  I started to feel overwhelmed by the details of it all.  Pray tell, what would we do with our enormous backpacks while hiking from village to village in Cinque Terre, how would we handle the logistics of leaving them in one town and hiking to another, then returning to get them . . . .  it sounded Sisyphisian.  I looked at that part of our trip and thought, this feels like work.  Then we got an email from a potential house exchange partner asking if we’d like their apartment in Bonn for a week at the same time we were scheduled to be in Cinque Terre.  My eyes lit up:  I hadn’t been able to finangle a trip to Germany and I wanted to go there badly, so I looked up train times and airfares and figured we could do it if we absolutely busted our butts and made seven hundred close connections and maybe, for good measure, made burnt offerings to the gods.  So then I thought:  how about instead of schlepping our packs along the Italian coast or dragging ourselves to Germany we found a nice place for a week with a pool?  Yes, a pool, because nothing makes Max happier than a pool.  And a place with history for Jeff and me?  But where could that be?  And the answer was Tuscany.  A little apartment in a clutch of 18^th century farm buildings tucked into a valley about a mile outside of Castellini in Chianti, which is a medieval walled town between Florence and Siena.  It will be nice, I reasoned, we can swim, visit Siena, drive around to a bunch of hill towns, see art, see history, maybe drive up to Florence, too, and maybe find some hiking tours and  . . . . and there I was, go go go again, the same thing just with a pool added.

            But then this lovely area took hold.  Our apartment is built from local stone and enormous old beams, and from its terrace you look out onto rolling, tree-covered hills.  There’s a big lawn with soccer goals, a badminton net and a ping pong table, and a lovely pool surrounded by a stone patio and edged with folding chairs.  The spring flowers are in bloom, and along the terrace and lining the steps down to the pool are pots of blossoms, dotted with white butterflies.  Little green-jeweled lizards sun themselves on the wall, appropriately named Italian Wall Lizards.  Nothin’ fancy in the nomenclature department, ma’am, just the facts.

            Sitting on the terrace our first morning, I heard a bird call I’ve never heard before.  Yet I knew instantly what it was.  I’d like to claim some sort of Audubon expertise but the simple fact was that the bird’s call, repeated again and again, was “cuckoo, cuckoo.”  It was an instance of life imitating art, or in this case, life imitating schmaltzy German clocks that in turn imitate life.  Cuckoo, cuckoo it calls and I realize why all those German woodcarvers chose this sweet call to mark time:  it’s a lovely way to chart the passage of the hours.

            Periodically, we hear the clanging of cowbells or actually, goat bells.  A small herd of eight or nine tan goats, overseen by a very bossy billy goat, graze up and down the hill.  They will be working their way over a particularly juicy patch of grass when all of a sudden, billy goat (who does, in fact, look quite gruff) barks a command, and they immediately form a single file and march to their little wooden shed.  There they’ll linger until billy issues another curt command, and they’ll sprint up the hill, or sprint down the hill, up and down they go, several times a day, evidently the Jack LaLanes of goat land.  I half expect to see them get down and give ol’ billy five or ten good push-ups before they race, single file, back up the incline.  Maybe they’re very smart goats and this is their way of avoiding the butcher block by staying lean and sinewy.

            Between the birds and the bell-ringing goats and the warm sun and cool pool, my go-see-do agenda fades away.  We go out for dinner and have the best cannelloni I’ve ever had, so good that I wanted to fly home, train to become a restaurant critic, get a job reviewing restaurants and then fly back so I could give this place the bazillion gold dining-out stars it so deserves.  When we don’t eat out, we cook simple meals and have them on the terrace.  Everything tastes divine. Is it because it’s inherently better, or the ingredients are fresher, or we buy the food from local shops, or we are just so damn relaxed that we could chew gravel and be happy about it?  I don’t know.  I buy fresh baked bread in DC; I shop at Eastern Market and get imported cheese and free range chicken, but I do it all with the sound of a thudding clock -- and not one where time’s passage is warbled by a cuckoo but one where time is marked by quick glances at my watch, and school schedules and work assignments and squeezing in a trip to the gym.  The food I buy in DC could be as good as Tuscan fare but tension and tight schedules and to-do lists flavors it, not goat bells and the feel of sun-warmed medieval stones beneath my feet.

            So I am reveling in this.  We play badminton after dinner with rackets whose mesh heads are worn thin, requiring Jeff to play with a fistful of rackets in order to cover the various holes, whacking at the birdie to the great amusement of Max and me.  I mix an Italian cocktail in the afternoon made with Aperol and white wine and seltzer water, a delightful refreshing drink, and we have bread and cheese on the terrace and drink strong Italian coffee.  And at night, I lay in bed and listen to the silence, the silence of no cars, no sidewalk conversations, no people.  In the morning the cuckoo calls.  We will go to a lovely medieval town perched on a nearby hilltop, overlooking vineyards and olive groves, and wander sun-warmed streets but leave early so that we can return to this place, which has reminded me that traveling includes being still as well as moving.