Florence - Here I am in a stone house in the Tuscan hills, watching through a wooden-framed window as the rain pours down on the green hillsides, red-tiled roofs, fields of spring flowers, and a seemingly endless vista of white-blossomed acacia trees.
Fifty people live in Guzzano, one of 21 mountain villages near the small spa town of Bagni di Lucca in the Lima valley, where the Romans came to take the waters as long ago as 180BC.
Many of Guzzano’s inhabitants are English expatriates, looking for sunshine, spaghetti and a lifestyle far removed from their home towns of Liverpool or London.
Suddenly I get to meet the whole village. As the rain stops, a large, yellow helicopter appears noisily overhead, an ambulance rushes along the tiny rutted street and we all troop down to a stone house where an old woman has thrown herself off her balcony after drinking too much grappa.
Wrapped like a parcel in red and yellow cladding, the patient is winched up into the helicopter, sedated and not too badly hurt. The carabineri take off, the ambulance men leave, and we all go back into our respective dwellings.
Not quite the stuff of your usual Tuscan holiday. It seems that anybody who has ever visited Tuscany gets a misty look in the eye, goes all atremble and droopy, and sighs deeply as they picture the age-old red-tiled Tuscan villages in the green hills, the carpets of wild flowers in spring, the best pizza in the world at that little town café, and all the romantic images for which this part of Italy is world-famous.
Even if you haven’t been to Tuscany, you feel like that – just from watching movies of repressed English women finding themselves and their sexuality in a rented villa drenched in sunshine, romantic ambience, lush gardens, plus an Italian gardener or two in the offing. (Remember Enchanted April?)
I last visited Tuscany 25 years ago on a tour bus – one of those trips where you see 54 countries in three days (not really, but you know what I mean).
This time I’m staying with a friend at his house in Guzzano. He bought it 15 years ago and comes to stay for three months every spring and early summer.
But first we spend a couple of nights in that most enchanted of cities, Florence. It really does live up to its reputation – a glorious combination of art and architecture, which ranges from medieval times to the great richness of the Renaissance.
Here you find some of the world’s greatest artworks – Giotto, Piera dello Francesco, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and some of humanity’s greatest architectural achievements such as the Duomo, the great cathedral which dwarfs onlookers and boggles the imagination with its size and multi-coloured marble cladding. Of course, I have to stand on one of the most famous bridges in the world, the 14th-century Ponte Vecchio.
A highlight (along with all the antique wonders) is when my friend John takes me to visit the English Cemetery, where, among other famous English poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried.
Sister Julia Bolton Holloway, custodian, librarian, distinguished scholar, ex-Princeton university professor, extols the delights and distinctions of the Victorian poet – whom I must admit has never been one of my favourites.
I prefer her husband, Robert Browning. However, I’m now reading Elizabeth’s Aurora with a new eye (but still prefer My Last Duchess).
After Florence, with hilltop eyrie in Guzzano as the base, we visit Pietrasanta, which dates from 1255, driving past the hump-backed 12th-century bridge of Ponte della Maddalena, where the locals did a deal with the devil to build it, and then bested him.
Pietrasanta is famous for its highly skilled marble workers and bronze foundries. Up, up into the hills again (you need a very small car to navigate these narrow medieval roads that are little more than mule tracks) to meet Kyle Ann Smith, an award-winning American sculptor, who has a workshop full of marble and stone and a crane to hoist it all with.
When you consider Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia in Florence is 5m high and weighs six tons, sculpted when he was only 29, you get some idea of the vision needed to sculpt in stone. Today, sculpture is still a thriving business, which continues to produce works of art, plus over-the-top bathrooms for rich Arabs.
As this is a seaside town, I have to put my toes in the Mediterranean. Wrong. The beaches are sandy, boring and flat, with every bit “owned” by somebody or some establishment.
You pay a lot to sit on a tiny patch of sand with hundreds of others. Don’t come to this part of the world for a seaside holiday – compared to the Wild Coast, Durban and Cape Town, it’s horrible.
Then, on another day, we visit Lucca. This gorgeous, completely walled city has some of the best-preserved Renaissance defences in Europe. Once inside its high walls, through one of its six massive gates, there is a grid of narrow streets and lanes that the Romans laid out in 180BC.
A huge church, San Michel in Foro, dominates the square where the Roman forum once stood. Inside is a famous medieval wooden statue of a Madonna, cradling her infant in her stiff arms as she has done for 500 years.
On to Lucca’s extraordinary cathedral dedicated to St Martin – he who smote his cloak in half with his sword to clothe a beggar. (I think it was easier in those days to become a saint.) The cathedral is extraordinary because a medieval architect chose to attach the ancient bell tower to the body of the kirk, which now rather incongruously abuts the main façade.
Inside, is one of Italy’s most beautiful marble statues. It’s the tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, the youthful bride of a local nobleman who died in childbirth.
Sculpted in marble, she lies serene and lovely, just the hint of a rueful smile around her full lips.
But of course Tuscany is not just superb art, sublime architecture and stunning views. It’s also a shopping mecca. High fashion, quality antiques, leather bags, shoes and jackets, ceramics, hand-made perfumes and lotions from ancient recipes by nuns and monks, Tuscan delicacies such as olive oils, artichoke hearts, antipasti, honey, wine, grappa.
I think, finally, my lasting impressions are of a timeless Tuscany. Even in Florence, where there are thousands of tourists, because you are surrounded by history everywhere you go and look, you feel that not much has changed for centuries.
Perhaps even more so in the villages, where people grow their own vegetables, make their own wine, cook their own pasta and tend their own flocks. Here you feel that life continues as it has done for thousands of years.
Governments come and go. Corruption exists as it did in the time of the Borgias. Probes may go to Mars. But Tuscany drifts along its own self-contained way. Long may it continue. - Sunday Tribune