Tuscany North Untour, Fall of 2003
by Sandra Kohler, Selinsgrove, PA
Getting There – From Selinsgrove, PA to Calci; September 9-11: When, in the Munich airport on the morning of September 10th we learned that our flight from Munich to Pisa was cancelled because of "technical difficulties" and that we were to arrive some nine hours later than scheduled via a flight to Milan, I said to my husband that here was the first test of whether going to Italy as Untourists rather than on our own was worth it. We were able to phone Franco di Liguori, our North Tuscany contact person, and sure enough, when we arrived at the Pisa airport, somewhat the worse for wear, at 10:30 p.m. he was there to meet us, guide us through the car rental arrangements, lead us to Calci and make sure we were comfortably settled at the Villa Rosselmini.
Signor di Liguori was a gracious and competent contact person. The orientation luncheon to which we went on September 11th was very helpful (and one of the best meals we had on the trip) and as a final service above and beyond the call, when we emerged from the luncheon to discover we’d left the car lights on and our batteries were dead, he was equipped with jumper cables and had us on the road shortly. He must have wondered a little after the flight delay and dead battery whether we were going to be in need of his services daily; happily that was not the case.
Being There: Calci, the Villa Rosselmini, September 11 - 24:
For my husband and me, the most rewarding aspect of our trip was the experience of being in Calci, being able to walk to its center in five minutes from the Villa, beginning to get to be known a little by the neighbors who greeted us on our walks, or the people we dealt with in stores and restaurants, to sit at a cafe or in the square people-watching and feel that we were getting at least some small sense of what it is like to live in that different world.
There were other delights and high points, but this was special and is something that Untours’ arrangements and set-up makes uniquely possible. We remember with pleasure the woman who lived just up the alley from the Villa, where it met the street, who keeps chickens in her backyard, and greeted us each time we strolled past; Alessandro and Cecilia, the delightful proprietors of the MEC Market, he struggling with English as I did with Italian, as we taught each other a few words in each interchange, Cecilia a bit more fluent, their warmth and friendliness. One day when we came in Alessandro excitedly declared "My father!" and proceeded to show us the Tuscan bread soup his father had made that day for the market; we took it home for a wonderful supper that night and the night after. The proprietor of the tabachi across from the town square proudly told us that the elegant little leather change purses we bought there are made in Calci, and are unique. We had enjoyable conversations (in my small fund of Italian and their English) with waiters in all three restaurants we went to, Il Pozzo, Il Barrino, and Il Vecchio Pieve, in each of which we enjoyed the food and wine. Another pleasure in visiting these local restaurants was people-watching there too: we especially enjoyed the big Sunday dinner family parties at Il Pozzo, three or four generations arranged in a formal order (men, women, babies, older children) at a long table. There were other small encounters, too: like that with the old woman who in late afternoon or early evening could be found sitting in her doorway on the Via XX Settembre, and who admired my husband’s pink hat: "capellotto rosso."
We stayed in the Caminetto apartment at the Villa, and found it comfortable and well equipped for the most part. We didn’t do much cooking, but enjoyed the coffee we made at various times of day and being able to have breakfasts and occasional suppers "at home." We didn’t make use of the Villa’s swimming pool, which is available to Untourists, not being particular fans of the activity (and not having brought along bathing suits), but we enjoyed spending time in the late afternoon in the Villa’s garden, reading or writing a journal or postcards, getting some down time after the day’s activities before going off to dinner. (The only drawback to this was the feast we provided to mosquitoes in doing so). We saw some wonderful sunsets doing this, too.
It was in Calci too that we began to adjust to what it’s like to be a pedestrian and a driver in Italy, to cope with cyclists, moped riders, cars, walkers all sharing the same narrow streets. (A footnote about the cyclists: watching them on the mountain roads (described below) wearing elegant gear, with their incredible legs racing up and down mountains: one way exhausting even to think about, the other terrifying.)We began to notice how many houses or apartments were draped with fading banners proclaiming "PACE"; how ubiquitous cats are in Italy, even in cities; to get used to the numerical system in which commas and periods are reversed; to notice that the war memorials are all for World War I; that there are bell towers everywhere, also cranes; that every house or apartment has shutters of some kind, that utility poles are cement, that there aren’t any frame buildings. We watched children and parents, and though we can’t claim that our experiences are necessarily representative, we were struck by how warm, accepting, and child-centered the style of parenting seems to be. (Children are never "shushed" here; everyone lives out loud in Italy, even the bambini.) Everywhere too, the old: men and women, frail, walking with limps, with sticks, on uncertain legs, but walking. Or riding bikes, or mopeds, old men wearing slippers, old women stockings and heels. We found, not surprisingly, that our (mostly my) attempts at communicating in Italian and our expressions of pleasure at being in Italy or at what we were experiencing at the moment were met with friendliness and pleasure by the Italians with whom we were speaking. We drank more wine than we were accustomed to at dinner, with no ill effects, and we ate gelato every day, as well as hearty meals, meanwhile noticing that our clothes were if anything looser not tighter, as we walked constantly.
Where We Went From There: Cinque Terre Overnight and Day Trips from Calci, September 13th through 23rd:
Calci was our base for several day trips, and we also took one overnight trip to Cinque Terre during our stay. We tended to alternate days in cities (where we did lots of walking, including some churches and museums) with days when we primarily drove and enjoyed the drama of landscape, with some shorter stops in small towns or villages.
In Calci itself, the Certosa (Charterhouse) is an attraction worth seeing: we were guided around the church and the cloisters by a mostly Italian speaking guide, managing to understand some of what he said. The elaborate decoration, the symbolism everywhere is fascinating; so too, we found, was the contrast of the relative sumptuousness of the Certosa di Calci with the austere convent of San Marco in Florence, which we visited later. A footnote of sorts: it was only after we got home that I looked up "Charterhouse" and found out that it’s a monastery for Carthusian monks; this explained, among other things, why the potent liqueur "Fraticello" sold at Il Barrino in Calci, and produced by the Carthusian brothers, has such a resemblance to the more famous Chartreuse produced at their "motherhouse" in France.
Our overnight trip to Cinque Terre was successful in some ways, disappointing in others. We stayed at La Caribana in Rio Maggiore, a b&b suggested by another Untourist. It was fairly comfortable, served a good breakfast, and had the great advantage of providing parking. However we could have used an elevator to get down to the harbor and back. I’m joking, more or less. We did find the terrain very demanding, and were able to do less hiking than we thought we would. This, and the degree to which the towns were full of tourists, were the disappointments. The sea was beautiful, the rocks, the ludicrously perched towns, the foliage: cacti, succulents, dry clinging plants. We walked from Rio Maggiore to Corniglia, took the train from there to Vernazza, and then a boat back to Rio Maggiore. We sat in the town square in Rio Maggiore waiting to go out to dinner and watched a nanny entertaining toddler twins, just about two years old, in the center of the square, while two little boys raced around on bikes, and a group of older boys and girls played soccer, intrigued by the interplay and the way each group managed not to get in the way of the others.
On the way back from Cinque Terre the following day, just south of La Spezia, we take a side road off SS1, and make one of the discoveries of the trip: a tiny town called Fosdinovo, high in the Apuan Alps. The drive up is exquisite, the stone-walled town empty of tourists, though there are signs that indicate that tourists are expected, with a castle in process of restoration, a colorful maze of narrow streets, a piazza with views over the mountains where we find a tiny bar and eat lunch. The countryside here is absolutely Edenic, and an amazing contrast to the fairly industrial stretch that SS1 traverses between Pisa and La Spezia.
Calci is situated between Lucca and Pisa, as you know, and our experiences in those two cities were not what we expected given our reading of guidebooks (Rick Steves is not infallible, we learned) and comments we’d heard before our trip. We were somewhat disappointed in Lucca, which we visited on our first full day (after the day of the orientation) in Calci. This probably had more to do with our still being jet-lagged and our unfamiliarity with how to best negotiate city traffic and parking lots than with the city itself. (One important note here: there’s a traffic sign not mentioned in any guidebooks we saw, "Tutti le direzione" (accompanied by an arrow) which is worth knowing: it means essentially that all routes need to follow it, unless you’re going to some local destination that you know is close at hand.) We found Lucca very crowded and were a bit overwhelmed by the crowds in the streets. But we did thoroughly enjoy climbing the stairs to the top of the Guinigi Tower (one of the remaining tree-topped towers in Lucca), stopping in the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro for a cappucino, and visiting the beautiful Duomo, San Michele.
We’d been told that Pisa was tacky and touristy; fortunately, my husband said that as a retired physics teacher he had to climb the Leaning Tower and stand where Galileo did when he dropped that ball. Also, our Untourist neighbors in Calci told us they’d visited the Piazza dei Miracoli early in the morning and it wasn’t terribly crowded at all. By the time we went to explore Pisa we were more comfortable with the road signs and parking; we managed an early start with a whole day ahead of us without worries about the car. We climbed the Tower, fascinated by the stairs’ tilt (it felt a bit like walking on a rolling ship), and impressed by its beauty, which is seldom talked about. Because the Duomo was still closed, we left the Piazza dei Miracoli and walked through the town, struck by the beauty of buildings like the Scuola Normale and some of the University of Pisa buildings we came across, the Piazza dei Cavalieri, Borgo Stretto with its market and shops (Walt, my husband, enjoyed photographing the people at street markets not the wares: especially old men and women on bicycles), down to the Arno. We walked along the Arno to the Museo di Matteo where I found to my pleasure that I had its wonderful paintings and sculptures almost to myself. After that visit, we crossed the Arno, explored a public park where concerts are given, found a restaurant for lunch on a busy piazza not far from the train station (which we were reconnoitering for our contemplated trip to Florence the next day), and then meandered back across one of the bridges and through the city back to the Piazza dei Miracoli again, where we visited the Duomo with its beautiful brass doors and fine paintings, and headed for our car.
Our trip to Florence was definitely a mixed experience, but one that was caused by our particular circumstances. I had visited Florence alone many years ago and spent ten days exploring the city and its art, which I loved. I wanted to share "my Florence" with my husband: a goal that was an impossible one to achieve in a single day trip. We had trouble with the busses, trying to use them as a quick way of getting from the Piazza San Marco up to the Piazzale Michelangelo, with the result that we spent precious Florence time riding or walking through parts of the city in which we had little interest. But we did get to visit the convent of San Marco, where we also were able to make a reservation for just an hour later to enter the Accademia (sweeping past the huge line as if we were dignitaries) to see the David among other things. My husband did enjoy the view from the Piazzale Michelangelo, where he photographed a panorama of the city. We took a bus back to the area around the train station, had an excellent lunch in a restaurant recommended by Rick Steves (to give him credit), and then went to visit Santa Maria Novella, where the only disappointment was that the Spanish Chapel and the Green Cloister, my favorite parts of the church, were closed. Advice to day trippers to Florence: don’t try to do too much and plan in advance, though your plans may be disrupted by unforeseen contingencies like restorations, etc.
Perhaps the most completely satisfying "city" day trip we took was the one to Volterra, a city founded by the Etruscans, then part of Rome’s empire. Standing beneath an arch built 2500 years ago is an experience neither of us will easily forget. Volterra is relatively small, walkable, and beautiful: a gem of a walled city with a history that is as long as any in Italy. We walked the narrow streets with their wonderful buildings, climbed up from one entrance to the walls to the center of town and back down again to see its other gates, and serendipitously discovered the ruins of the Roman theatre that is being excavated. In the old center of the town, we were moved by the beauty of the Baptistery (which didn’t even rate notice in the Green Guide) and enjoyed buying some alabaster boxes to bring home as gifts (as you can probably can tell from this narrative, shopping was not one of our priorities, but here the uniqueness and beauty of the product prevailed). The drive to and from Volterra was also beautiful, even though the place where the road signs direct you to go to view the famous "balze", (crags) that can be seen from the city was a distinctly shabby parking lot with wire fencing. The landscape around Volterra seemed so classically Tuscan, with its geometry of differing curves and crops, angles and sections, hillsides studded with small trees or shrubs like cloves on the outside of a ham.
Which brings me to the other kind of day trip we took: the mostly driving days to enjoy the landscape. We spent one of these in the Pisan Hills, lunching on wonderful Tuscan bread soup in a restaurant we came across in the village of Lari, ending up high above Castellina Maritima where we could just barely glimpse the sea, puzzling over what a Buddhist monument was doing here. Closer at hand in Calci, we drove up and over Monte Serra, astonished at the spectacular views from the winding road, and the way that road wound through villages where there was scarcely enough room for two cars to pass each other in their respective transits up and down. My husband says that the scariest driving moment for him was on this trip: we were heading up and encountered a bus heading down, with stone walls on either side of the road. Nothing for it but to back down to a place where the road widened slightly. But at the top of the mountain, we were rewarded with the views, and then, going down the other side, the discovery of the tiny town of Buti with its brilliantly colored houses, narrow streets, flowers, a maze of color and architectural detail. It’s hard to convey what a visual feast Italian towns and cities present: the variety of colors, of shapes, the extraordinary smorgasbord of architectural details on buildings with their ornamented doors, windows, walls: the eye moves from one to another, in a kind of trance of pleasure.
We spent a long day touring the Garfagna, recommended by Franco di Liguori, our Untours contact person. It was a combination of wonderful scenery and some beautiful towns. The description of Buti, above, would serve well for Borgo a Mozzano, a larger town, to which we detoured in order to see and photograph the famous Devil’s Bridge. We found Castelnuovo di Garfagna, the "capital" of the Garfagna somewhat ordinary, but were charmed by the smaller and more "medieval" Castiglione di Garfagna a short distance away. We managed to not find the center of Barga, where I’d wanted to see the Duomo (parking and traffic problems) but in the countryside around that town found ourselves again, as on our detour to Fosdinovo and in the southern reaches of the Pisan hills, scaling green mountainous terrain that seemed utterly pristine, Edenic, trying to imagine what it would be like to live perched in these heights, these remote and lovely places.
Leaving Calci, September 24th: We had made arrangements with Untours to stay in Italy for an extra week, keeping our rental car, and flying home from Venice rather than Pisa. So on September 24th, we left the Villa Rosselmini and drove north on SS12 out of Lucca, heading for the small town near Mantua where we’d made reservations at an "Agriturismo" bed and breakfast for the final week of our stay. Since this was not an Untour, I will end this account here, noting only that the drive from Calci to Castiglione di Stiviere (our destination) was both a treat and an ordeal. We drove over the Apuan Alps, a route that seemed an endless switchback, but again were treated, especially in the stretch from Abettone – a ski resort high in the Alps – to Modena, to scenery that was entrancing (especially for the passenger – the driver didn’t dare look away from the road). We’d never heard about this area of Italy or the beauty of its terrain – another indication of how inexhaustible the pleasures and possibilities of Italy are.