tuscany # 30 ~ RIP

A cemetery in Cortona, Tuscany • click to embiggenOverlooking a cemetery from the old village of Cortona.

tuscany # 29 ~ say cheese

Antica Bottega Tuscana ~ Arezzo, Tuscany • click to embiggenThe wife buys cheese in Arezzo.

tuscany # 24 ~ they are, quite literally, everywhere

The venerable Adirondack Chair ~ Cortona, Tuscany • click to embiggenIt was kind of weirdly comforting or something like that to stumble upon, all the way across an ocean and so far from home, a familiar image from home.

tuscany ~ the wife strikes back

Picturing Italy • click to embiggenIntentionally or not, it would seem that the wife decided to pursue a picturing theme of her own while we were in Italy.

tuscany # 19 ~ Italian weather # 2

Piazza Grande ~ Arezzo, Tuscany • click to embiggenWhile the wives were back at the ranch taking an Italian cooking class from our il Bacio hostess, my brother and I hung out at Piazza Grande in Arezzo. We were enjoying a light late morning breakfast - for me, a flat torta peach thing with a Compari soda - and watching a thunderstorm roll in.

Roll in it did and within nano-seconds of the first falling raindrop, a bevy of vendors, theretofore invisible, appeared toting baskets full of umbrellas for sale. It seemed that they had just dropped out of the sky along with the rain.

tuscany # 18 ~ Italian weather

View of morning fog from the door at il Bacio ~ Tuscany • click to embiggenWe had weather while we were in Tuscany.

tuscany # 17 ~ on the road to find out

The north end of Greve ~ Chianti region of Tuscany • click to embiggenRelative to the following entry, tuscany # 16, this picture depicts a very typical Tuscan landscape. A landscape that is not all that dissimilar to those found here in the Finger Lakes region of NY State or, for that matter, in the nearby (to me) Champlain Valley of the Adirondacks.

I mean, other than all those Italians, Italian cars and Italian drivers, Italian houses with Italian laundry on the line, Italian piazzas with Italian sidewalk cafes with fine Italian food and fine Italian wine, the Italian language, everything measured in metrics, Italian hilltop Renaissance-era villages, what's the difference? At this point, I was still looking for Tuscany.

tuscany # 16 ~ the final destination point

Val d'Orcia region of Tuscany • click to embiggenThanks to the wife's delightful screw up with our connecting flight reservations from Paris to Florence we had the pleasure of a wonderful day in Paris. The net effect on our travel plans was to delay our arrival in Florence from daylight hours to after dark.

As it turned out, this was good thing because (aside from our time in Paris), quite obviously, our drive down the Autostrada (A1) was accomplished in the dark thereby delaying the onset of my every-repeating question, "Where the hell is Tuscany?" The answer was always the same, "We're in Tuscany." To which my response was always the same, "No we're not. It doesn't look like Tuscany."

This little litany - remember, we were in Catholic Italy - was repeated endlessly (just ask the wife) for several days. This mini-drama finally got to the point were I had to proclaim that I was indeed having a good time despite the fact that I still wanted to know "where the hell is Tuscany".

Now, having been in the tourism marketing biz for a number of years, I should have been the first to realize that I was the victim of the marketing scheme known as Great Tourism Lie. One of the tenets of this scheme is to create a picture - or more commonly, a stream of variants on that one picture - of one small element of your "product" and use it endlessly to define the whole of your "product".

Say like, here in the Adirondacks - did you know that it never rains in the Adirondacks and everyday is a blue-sky sunny day?

Well, that said, what eventually became obvious to me was that I had fallen - hook, line, & sinker - for the notion that Tuscany was an endless landscape characterized by gentle, carefully-cultivated hills occasionally broken by gullies and by picturesque towns and villages. That notion was, of course, aided and abetted by - in fact, 100% attributable to - the ubiquitous Tuscan landscape picture much like the one pictured here.

The truth of the matter is rather different - not that I'm complaining dear (the wife), I had a great time - in as much as the scene depicted here is representative of a small region of Tuscany known as Val d'Orcia or Valdorcia.

Val d'Orcia was about 70-80 km away from where we stayed in Arezzo and I'm here to tell you, emphatically, that it is not a typical Tuscan landscape. It is, in fact, a quite unique Tuscan landscape. So unique that the entire Val d'Orcia region is listed (since 2004) as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We did not "discover" Val d'Orcia until last Thursday and only then because I purchased a few "typical" Tuscan landscape postcards, showed them to our il Bacio hosts, and asked "Where the hell is this Tuscany?" (by this time I had refined my question to include the word "this" because I had reluctantly accepted the fact that we were, indeed, in [the real?] Tuscany.) We were instructed to head south toward the town of Pienza if we wanted to see "that kind of thing".

So we did and now I can say that I've been to Tuscany. And, I got a number of "typical" Tuscan landscape pictures, almost all of which (like this one) were made from the back balcony of Pope Pius II's (1458-1464) summer villa in the hilltop town of Pienza.