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.

tuscany # 15 ~ trompe l'oeil (ok, shoot me; that's French - I don't know the Italian phrase)

River Arno ~ Firenze, Tuscany • click to embiggenThis fresco of the River Arno, which was painted on the wall in an arch on Ponte Vecchio - the oldest of Florence's six bridges - was one of nicest I saw while we were in Firenze (Florence).

tuscany # 14 ~ a time machine

Butcher shop ~ Pienza, Tuscany • click to embiggenThe wife buys pork for dinner. The butcher seems to be a bit worn out from the effort of slicing the pig for us. But, then again, it was rather late in the day.

On the subject of pictures series (see the following 2 entries), I ended up, although with no intent on my part, with a mini series of pictures like the one posted here - peering into small shops from across an alleyway. I couldn't help wondering about what was being sold in these very same places 600/700 years ago.

tuscany # 12-13 ~ if I were to return .... pt. 2

Altar ~ Viliano / Tuscany • click to embiggen
Side altar ~ Arezzo / Tuscany • click to embiggenOnce again, if I were to return to Italy / Tuscany with specific intent to picture, another of the things I would seriously consider is a series of small Italian churches as found in the walled, hilltop Renaissance-era villages.

Without a doubt, the big churches (Duomos - aka, Cathedrals) are very impressive edifices in a very over-the-top display of adornment, majesty, and imposing size and scope kind of way. And, in many cases wherein their construction spanned 100s of years, they must have been the Catholic Church equivalent of the US depression era public works projects. When standing around (in or out) one of these Duomos, it is very difficult indeed to not appreciate how central, if not the center, they must have been - both literally and figuratively - to the lives of so many in that era.

That said, it's the small churches that push my buttons - unlike their bigger brethren, they have a sense of intimacy and, dare I say, a rather proletarian sensibility and utility.

In a very real sense, the big churches are all about looking up to the heavens (my neck got sore) and feeling as small as a pimple on an elephants ass. In those places, God's voice is large and booming. Pageantry and majesty rein.

The small churches, on the other hand, seem much more about simply getting right with the Lord - you feel like you could sit down with him and have a simple conversation. No pomp and circumstance, posers need not apply.

That said, the small churches churches give little or nothing way to their bigger counterparts when it comes to Art - the statuary / sculpture, frescoes, paintings and the like are of the first order, many created by some of the Renaissance masters and/or their students. In fact, many of those masters were toiling in the small towns of central and southern Tuscany before they were discovered and recruited into the big leagues by the Medici clan and relocated to Florence.

And here's the other thing I like about these churches - at least at the time of the year when we visited, which was not exactly off-season but certainly not peak season, we had these places all to ourselves. It was quiet and peaceful with plenty of time to stop, stare, and contemplate without the hustle and crowds of the big joints. One could sit (or kneel if one is overwhelmed by feelings of Catholicism lives past) and connect to the past and present zeitgeist that seems to seep from the walls.

FYI, the picture of the majestic side altar - I'll leave the main altar to your imagination - with the wedding ceremony is in the Duomo of Arezzo. The small church is in the tiny hilltop village of Viliano.

tuscany # 11 ~ not at all like home

Fill 'er up • click to embiggenif I were to return to Italy / Tuscany with the specific intent to picture, one of the things I would seriously consider is a series about Italians and their various vehicles at gas stations. Speaking from the POV of a stranger in a strange land, there were some very interesting and most often seemingly unlikely combinations of people and their machines to be found there.

tuscany/firenze # 10 ~ just like home

A ceiling in Firenze (Florence) • click to embiggenSo we're thinking of having our livingroom ceiling painted. Anyone know where I can get this guy's number?

tuscany # 9 ~ barking on command

In a church in Cortona • click to embiggenDid I mention that Italy is a very Catholic place?

Talk all you want about a Pavlovian response, but the former choirboy / altarboy / solemn high mass altarboy captain in me was just jumping and squirming to get out and do something ... anything ... genuflect, knee on something 'til my knees ached, smell incense, light altar candles, kiss someone's ring, sneak a sip of the sacramental wine, whatever.

It was, in a word, disconcerting, to say the very least.

All of which brings this question to mind - with just about everything worth seeing in Italy (seemingly, only a slight exaggeration) somehow connected to the Roman Catholic Church, do you have to be Catholic (I am Catholic, just not a practicing one) to appreciate it?

Update on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 05:10PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: David Adam Edelstein wrote: "I'm Jewish, my wife is a lapsed Baptist, and we both enjoyed all of the art. Some of it we didn't have a reference point for ("what the heck is going on here? Oh, it's St. so-and-so who was killed by being pelted with pigeons") but it was still beautiful."

click to embiggenmy response: relative to a reference point: about the only reference you need is that usually somebody is getting killed, maimed, punished, suffering or the other big one - roasting in hell for all eternity.

Although, true be told, every once in awhile, there's some gliding around with angels.

tuscany # 7-8 ~ you pick your tools and you make your choices

Montefioralle, Tuscany • click to embiggen
Tuscan soil ~ on a road to Pienza • click to embiggenWith only a few exceptions my picturing pattern, lens-wise, was to use a wide-angle lens in villages / cities and a telephoto lens in the countryside. This picturing MO was not really a conscious decision so much as one that was dictated by my sense of selectivity re: the referent.

To be perfectly frank, the Tuscan countryside is not at all like the Italian tourism picture postcard industry presents it to be - color-drenched rolling hills dotted with Italian cyprus trees. To be sure, those scenes are there to be found and pictured (by engaging in the medium's act/art of selection), but, once again to be perfectly frank, one could much more frequently engage in picturing those hills dotted with utility poles and high-tension electricity towers / power lines.

Consequently, on those occasions and at those locations where the Tuscan countryside presented itself picture postcard style, I was inclined to be very selective by using a telephoto lens - 300-400mm - in order to isolate the more picturesque elements in the overall scene.

In the many hilltop Renaissance-era villages we visited, I found picturing them to be more along the order of get-as-much-as-you-can-no-matter-what-the-hell-it-is into the picture. To my eye and sensibilities, those scenes are a magnificent visual jumble of angles, textures, surfaces, light, activity - all of which must be seen together in order to convey the character of the place. Consequently, a wide-angle lens seemed to be the tool of choice.

All of that said, I did, in fact, make a fair number of pictures employing the exact opposite of that picturing MO - wide angle lens in the countryside / telephoto lens in village location.

PS - relative to picturing with a telephoto lens: thanks be to the gods of technology for all that Image Stabilization stuff - in my case, in-camera IS - because I did not take a tripod on our trip. I did bring a mono-pod but for some reason it always seemed to be back at il Bacio.