The Enchantment of Tuscany

While we landed in the melting pot that was Rome at a simmering 42 degrees celsius, it was to Tuscany we went to spend our first bit of time. Tuscany is one of those somewhat shimmery fairytale places- just the word conjures up cedars and starlit nights, and olives and lemons cascading down hillsides. Tuscany is one of those places of which we expect much. Well, Tuscany did not disappoint.

We stayed in a villa suspended in the hills above Siena. It was private and beautiful and the views were breathtaking, the food amazing and the hosts gracious. At night I would open the window to the balcony, feeling a little like Juliet awaiting Romeo. It was hot, hot, hot there, which made for amazing skies, strewn by an extravagant hand with the dust of diamonds.

Tuscany is wine and poetry, basilicas and lavender hip high and food that warms your blood and tongue like pepper. It is cypresses that sing in the night wind, and cicadas humming in the evenings. It’s sugar-dusted croissants eaten in the morning sun. It’s winding cobblestone streets in medieval towns and it is fields rolling in the distilled gold of sunflowers. It’s cobalt and golden pottery that dazzles the eye and oil-soaked truffles and wine that miraculously does not give you a headache.

It is 15th generation vintners, that extoll the virtues of wine and oil and vinegar until your head spins with the poetry of it. It is tour guides named Aeoli, whose name I’m certain must mean fierce wind- for he drove the hills of Tuscany like he was exactly that. It is groups of teenagers seated eating platters of pasta in the dipping closes of cobbled streets singing old Italian songs at the top of their lungs.

Tuscany, as you might have guessed, was one of my favourite parts of Italy. I would, like the lovely American couple we met at the villa, return every summer for thirty years, if I had my druthers.