Early morning view of our vineyard from the mountain

A corner of Montisi

It was about a 45-minute drive to Montisi, where we had a 12:30 reservation for lunch at Da Roberto, the local holy grail for slow and healthy food.  Word on the street was that if Roberto didn’t like you he would kick you out of his restaurant.  We arrived in town early.  As we walked past the restaurant, Maurice spotted Roberto on his terrace and, since we wanted to stay in his good graces, immediately made friends with him. 

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Abbadia San Salvatore

I had made a list of all the places we still might like to go and Maurice finally said Pitigliano, where some of the group was headed today—P-town, they call it, since no one can pronounce it (and the “g” only makes it worse).  I had thought we needed an 8:30 start but that didn’t happen.  Maurice had forgotten he agreed to it the night before.  Rain was predicted all afternoon.  We started off anyway.

“Let’s stop at Abbadia San Salvatore right on the way while the weather’s still nice,” I said.  It turned out to be a good plan.  No tourists, and we got a parking place at the tiny lot behind the park in front of the abbey.  The Romanesque church, important to pilgrims along the Via Francigena, was a light-filled building with ninth century foundations.  Steep steps led from the entry up to the main nave. 

A large wooden twelfth-century crucifix hung over the altar.  A man in the front row was saying his rosary and an organist was practicing at the instrument in the right transept. 

Beneath the elevated area a few steps descended into the crypt, an 11th-century forest of white stone columns topped with carved capitals.   It was even better when the people who came in behind me knew where the switch was and turned on the lights.  While I took my time Maurice went outside to draw.

On a nearby street I saw a sign for the borgo medievale so we headed that way.  A gateway led into a stone warren of curving narrow streets glowing in the noonday sun.  There was not a soul around but us. 

Eventually we ducked through a tunnel to a main street to get a quick lunch at the only place open, a panetteria where we got a slab of something masquerading as pizza, a drink and two fogliate pastries for later.  We wended our way back through the borgo medievale, exited where we came in and stopped to take a picture of a quaint shop where a sign outside advertised stamps for the Via Francigena.

Shades of the Camino!  We weren’t walking the Francigena but how about a stamp for your drawing of the abbey church, I suggested to Maurice.  We wandered inside.  It was hard to move past the trinkets, antiques and local products spilling off the shelves and into the narrow aisles; it was hard among the surfeit of vendibles to even know where to look.  Out of the profusion appeared a small middle-aged woman, delicate and faded, with a wispy voice. 

Yes, certainly, she could give us a stamp, it was under here somewhere—on the drawing?—oh, what a lovely drawing!—how beautiful it is—oh, if only you would sell it to me!  Well, it’s not finished, said Maurice, but he could send her a copy of it later.  Oh, she would love that, and how much would it cost?  No charge, said Maurice, he would be happy to send it.  Oh, please, isn’t there something she could give us in exchange from her shop?  No need, we said.  But we must take something—and she reached into the plenitude and withdrew a bottle of wine from her family’s farm, and, yes, take the spice mix too, she insisted when she saw me eyeing it.

It wasn’t raining yet.  Maybe we could still get a couple dry hours in Pitigliano.  But right nearby was Monte Amiata, the remaining dome of an ancient volcano.  Let’s check that out first, I said. The road twisted through the countryside and soon we were climbing.  Higher and higher we went into the cool air of a misty fairytale forest with tree trunks that looked like elephant feet. 

I had read in some travel info that Monte Amiata was a special part of Tuscany with art, mining history, natural beauty and hiking.  Maybe there would be a visitor center, or an informative sign, or a mapboard showing trails.  Silly me—this is Italy!  There was no information whatsoever.  We passed a ramshackle block building with a homey front porch and smoke curling from a chimney, the Primo Refugio Amiatino, and I poked my head in to see if there might be any local info.  It was a restaurant.  We drove further.  The only point of interest we found was a ski lift.  The sky was threatening and we knew we couldn’t outdrive the approaching storm.  “Let’s go back to that refugio,” I said to Maurice.  “It looked so cozy inside.”  We could get a drink while it rained.  We went back, parked and got out just as the rain started.  It was downright cold out, but a fire in the fireplace made the tiny refugio toasty inside.  It looked just like a mountain refuge should look, with glowing hearth, stuffed critters, shelves holding victuals and libations, a cuckoo clock and lace curtains at the windows.  The server/chef/manager welcomed us warmly.  We sat in a booth by a window; there was one other couple at a table in front of the fireplace.  “We’ll just have a drink and maybe some dessert,” we told the chef.  His English was better than my Italian.  That’s all? he inquired.  Didn’t we want lunch?  What would we like?  He described some of the possibilities he could prepare.  In the end we ordered real food:  a bowl of homemade pici alla carbonara for Maurice and a plate of escargots with a homemade sauce for me.  Plus wine, of course, which our host accompanied with a little plate of antipasti.  We’d already had a light lunch and it wasn’t quite three o’clock so I asked for just a half portion of my order.  The half portion turned out to be eight fat mollusks.  (Maurice doesn’t know how I can eat the things, and I can’t explain it; they don’t have much taste on their own and they usually come with garlic and butter which pretty much makes anything yummy.  And they look no more disgusting than steamed crabs.)  We dug into our hearty gastronomic delights and sipped our wine while outside thunder rolled and rain poured down in opaque sheets.  Maurice was pleased that the white roads of Tuscany were being washed from our black car.  As we were scooping up final slurps of sauce with our bread crusts, the California couple at the next table, who had figured out we were American, started a conversation with us.  They live near Anzio and had come just to eat at the refugio well-known for its delicious cuisine, where on weekends it is often hard to get a reservation (clueless but lucky us!).  They have friends who lived in El Salvador for three years.  The husband works for Chevron.  The wife had an armored car and a driver who took her all around to do shopping; she was sorry to return to the US.  (When I relayed this story to Chris later, he noted that the Navy is unlikely to provide an armored car with driver.)  We finished with some rich and creamy desserts (because that’s what we came in for).  When we left about 4:00 in our shiny black car the sun was shining again.

Our hosts at Il Primo Refugio Amiatino

So much for P-town.  We drove along back roads (that’s all there were) toward our farm and detoured to the abbey of Sant’Antimo, founded in the ninth century, restored in the nineteenth and set serenely in a valley among the green and gold of olive groves and wheat fields not far from Montalcino.

Sant’Antimo returned to monastic use in 1992 and is currently occupied by Benedictine monks who sell various products to support themselves and may or may not sing Gregorian chant.  The Romanesque church, high and bright, was lined with columns bearing intricately carved capitals.  I had a lovely visit while Maurice slept in the car.  Then with Maurice’s blessing I stayed for mass while he went back to sleep.  There were only six congregants—a young family, an older couple with backpacks and me—and no chanting monks, yet the body of Christ was still broken for us.

Buonconvento

I was going to go to the museum of sacred art in Buonconvento while Maurice did some sketching but the museum had an irregular schedule and was closed (so Italian).  So we sat on the piazza for a while, Maurice drawing outside the old city walls and me sitting on a bench in the shade under a line of trees with sweet-smelling little white flowers that must be related to ginestra.  On our walk into town the flower scent morphed into a restaurant’s aroma of garlic and olive oil.  I don’t know which is better. Keep reading

Montalcino

It was a day to check out Montalcino, the town straight up the mountain beyond our grapevines.  All was quiet.  The 19th-century cathedral was open and light-filled but the well in the park next to it was dark and cheerless; some sort of colorful mosaic is supposed to be visible when you open the portholes on top of the well but there was nothing but the faint glint of a soda can in the dimness.  The fourteenth-century church St. Egidio has been (sadly) remodeled but it still has a certain charm.

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We were not going to a town to paint so I planned to sleep late.  Ha.  At 6:25 music started playing somewhere.  I recognized St. Andrews Strings.  It must be my music, but why was it playing?  I wanted to go back to sleep.  I listened to every note, exhaling thankfully at the end, then the piece started again.  Stop!  “Why is that music on?” I mumbled to Maurice.  He got up to check it out.  The music was in the main room, still playing.  And playing.  “I can’t figure it out,” called Maurice.  How hard could this be?  Just turn it off.  Soon he brought in the ipad, scrolling through the playlist, to see if I could figure it out.  Uh huh.  “It’s not the ipad playing,” I told him.  It was my phone, still drawing the bows over the strings in the other room.  I hadn’t actually turned off the alarm the morning before. Keep reading

Capella di Vitaleta

Artists arriving in Pienza

This morning Maurice found the butter dish on the floor.  He said the butter looked like it had been…licked.  Surely it wasn’t knocked off the counter by the giant bug I found in the bathroom, which must have gotten in because we forgot to close the big stairway window after we tried to let more air in last night.  Did Wilma get in here?  She couldn’t possibly have jumped in the second story window.  I heard her meowing plaintively in the middle of the night and thought she must be just outside our bedroom window.  Keep reading

I hadn’t set the alarm because I had been waking up before it, but this morning when a new fly kept landing on me, I asked Maurice to look at the clock.  It was almost eight.  Allora!  In between gathering our supplies and getting dressed we each had about a quarter cup of cereal and a fried egg.  Dewey and Jenelle graciously waited for us and we headed to our town of the day San Quirico d’Orcia.  It was quiet and we sat on the porch of the only place open, the Bar Centrale in the piazza just inside one of the town’s big brick gateways, to supplement our brekky and wait for the others. 

The Bar Centrale on the left

Flags were flying, the sun was shining and the town livened up quickly.  The painters spread out amid the gathering throngs.  Maurice quickly found his spot near a well in the small thirteenth-century courtyard of the Ospedale della Scala.  I spent the day exploring, enjoying the town and returning to check on Maurice and bring him snacks. 

The well Maurice painted; Dewey under an arbor; Vee spotted via long lens from the third floor palace window

At the lovely Romanesque church at the end of the flag-bedecked street, the Collegiata dei Santi Quirico e Giulitta, a service was in progress; I knew this by the gathering of men, small children and several smartly-dressed young women outside the west door.  (I don’t know why they stand outside instead of going in but they do.) 

When the service ended, white-robed boys and girls walked out holding candles.  First communion?  They walked around the corner, followed by the priest holding the ciborium aloft under a canopy borne by four men.

A band that had assembled in the street began to play, leading the procession of children and priest, followed by a long line of congregants and families.  They marched and wound their way through all the streets of town.  Ken, another painter’s spouse, and I kept guessing where they would appear next and zipping ahead to meet them for more photos.  When they started toward Maurice’s end of town I dashed to his courtyard and alerted him to the impending procession so he could enjoy it too.  The whole thing ended in the piazza where we had started the morning, with the band assembling practically on top of Dewey and his painting supplies as he sat under a jasmine-lined archway, painting the medieval brick gateway.

Dewey and the band

The day was warm but the churches and the palace with the exhibit of Alberto Flammia’s dramatically dreamy Tuscany photos were cool and inviting.  Two long hallways in the palace were painted with landscape murals; the birds flying across the high ceiling reminded me of last year’s Carrieres de Lumiere.  At the end of the hall the town council meets under a ceiling mural of a racing chariot.

Below:  painters’ spouses and men-about-town Dick (in doorway) and Ken (on bench with some locals)

At day’s end we gathered with some of the group at the Bar Centrale to chill and chat and try the bar’s homemade lemonade.  We did not take a shortcut home.  After salad and ravioli, the last of our supplies (and breakfast will be even sparser tomorrow), we spent another pleasant evening sitting outside, Maurice in the “internet cafe” by the olive tree where the signal is strong, with a view of the Tuscan landscape in one direction and Montalcino’s mountain in the other.  I sat outside our door on Maurice’s folding chair that we take with us during the day and move in and out of our apartment in the evening.  Though it’s squeaky, I love the chair and wish we could take it home.  Wilma came to visit, meowing and generally making a pest of herself.  At one point Maurice found Wilma on our kitchen stove.  That cat’s going to end up with toasted feet.  When we shooed her out for good and closed the door, she had tomato sauce on her nose.

I woke up too early this morning when last night’s fly kept landing on my face.  We have no internet, but there are ripe cherries on the trees to put on our cereal and a little cat that sneaks in every time the door is open and makes itself at home.

The shortcut to Jerry’s that Maurice sussed out on the map turned out to be a longcut through the white roads of Tuscany, leading us right back to the road we started out on, making us even later than we already were with Maurice trying to capture the nonexistent internet and me being my usual self with a poor grasp on how long it really takes me to do things.  Dewey and Jenelle were even later, having lost track of time in a morning painting session at their kitchen table.  When Jenelle got out of the car at the gas station to tuck her shirt in and put her belt on, she said, “I’m never like this;” it must be the delightful Tuscan atmosphere.

It wasn’t long before we were in Castelmuzio.  I hadn’t been able to look anything up about the town because Jerry, hardworking as he is at herding us cats, is vague on names (and pronunciation and spelling).  As far as I could tell, the town had no bakery, no grocery store (the Co-op sign led to a dead end), no tourist info and not even a map board with local features, but it also had few tourists and was unusually quiet for a town that was supposed to have a fest in progress; in the Italian manner activites ramp up later, with birra e panini on sale at 7:30 and a rock concert at 9:15.

I wandered the streets, took pictures and serendipitously noticed a sign for Pieve Santo Stefano.  In spite of yesterday’s disastrous expedition I set off hopefully.  First of course I had to leave town—i.e., descend the hill—but it wasn’t far until I saw the sign pointing down a poppy-lined, stone-walled lane among olive trees.  Even if the church was closed, this would be worth it.

The church, its original Romanesque apse somewhat worn with years but glowing in the sun, was not closed. 

Though remaining decorations were few and it seemed to be under refurbishment, I soaked up the atmosphere in and out, inhaled the scents of a thick line of white roses and a tall patch of lavender, watched and listened to the buzz of the bees and the bells clanging noon, and walked back happy.  I got my lunch out of the car, found Maurice ready to head to the cafe for a salad and visited the stunning one-seater free public restroom (better than most in public facilities) generously provided by the citizenry.

Castelmuzio is bigger than Murlo, but size is relative.  Several streets circle around the old hilltop borgo, the intertwining buildings a mish-mash of vermillion brick and summer-wheat stone, opening out to views, a little park by the gate and a delightful outdoor salotto under the trees—a patio on the hillside—where I ate my lunch and stayed for the afternoon overlooking the flowing green landscape.  A sign in poetic Italian described the salotto as a place to connect with one another or be yourself or be “sweetly shipwrecked in the green sea of the hills.”  Dewey and Jenelle were settled there painting.

 Penny worked at her easel under another tree.

A young woman at the table in the sun between the trees was underlining a four-inch-thick textbook, her phone and other accessories at her elbow.  A man behind me in the street was doing tai chi.

Visitors wandered by to take pictures over the railing.  A streak of swallows swooped low from behind, veering right over the valley and disappearing behind the shuttered and ivied wall.  A clutch of expressive Italians had been coming and going from Penny’s bench until only a young family was left enjoying riposo together, the baby eventually working itself into a vigorous cry; Papa talked to it sweetly and Mama stuck it on her chest occasionally but I think it needed a nap (at home), and soon its parents packed up the baby and the toddler and the supplies and the double stroller and ambled away.  All was quiet at the edge of the village in the leafy shade under the blue Tuscan sky.  In the warm stillness I heard the the amiable chirping of happy birds, bits of conversation and the clinking of pranzo dishes through an overhead balcony window, and Dewey, who had declared his painting done, munching an apple.  A gentle breeze floated past, then butterflies and more swallows, and the hilly sea of green wrapped itself around our restful salotto in the summer afternoon.  For sweet and fleeting moments it was the anteroom of heaven.

I took Janice up on her quick creativity challenge but instead of painting I made up couplets:

My luggage is missing.  I’ve clothes not a one.  But still I am dancing in Tuscany sun.

Socks, clothes and undies we wash in the basin.  Oh, suitcases straying, to Tuscan hasten!

No curlers, no sunscreen—it’s not what I planned—but Jesus walks with me through Tuscany land.

The wayward returned—a sartorial fest!  I’m halving my packing for Tuscany next.

Artists Maurice, Bob and Kay taking a break

Home at Le Chiuse I visited our landlord Lorenzo working in his vegetable garden.  We reviewed the names of all the plants in English and Italian.  I asked him if the cat had a name.  Wilma, he said.  Wilma likes to visit us, I told him.  Yes, she wants company and food, but she has food at home.  Aha.  I had dropped my hunk of cheese on the ground at lunch, shaved off the outer portions and saved them for Wilma, and Maurice gave them to her in spite of her sneakiness.  Then he made us bruschetta.  By the time we went out the grocery store was closed; according to the sign it had been closed all day.  A lot of stores were closed today.  Breakfast will be thin.

Dinner pickings in Buonconvento were slim too.  We ate at the Ristorante Roma on the old town’s quiet main drag.  Maurice’s pici was OK but my verdura alla griglia was lacking something and my pizza—well, my pizza was on a fat prefabricated crust!  I could have done better at home.  From the next table the young mother of two little boys said to us, “We are brothers and sisters in the Lord.”  What?  Such an unexpected comment.  But she had seen us pray before dinner.  They were a Dutch family on holiday in Tuscany for 3 1/2 weeks.  Koos had lived in the US for two short periods growing up and he spoke better English than his wife Carliene.  His hometown was near Nijmegen in the Dutch Bible belt (which I’d never heard of).  We met again at the ice cream shop down the street and exchanged emails.  Come visit us when you come to the US, we said.  Maybe they will.

Koos mentioned today was a holiday.  Aha—National Day!  Maurice suddenly remembered that when he worked at NGA this was the day he and his colleagues (and spouses) were invited to a celebration at the Italian embassy.  Yes, I remember it well, especially the huge wheels of parmigiana scooped out and filled with chunks of the perfect hard cheese.  And mozzarella and real verdura alla griglia and gelato….

When we got home I closed myself in the bathroom with the irritating fly until I whacked it dead.

The medieval village of Murlo

The overpriced hair supplies I bought are all worthless.  As I was getting ready for the day I kept thinking, “I brought something for that,” then remembered, “but it’s in my suitcase.”

In my morning devotions I read the story of the man born blind (John 9).  After he healed the blind man, Jesus heard that they’d thrown the man out of the synagogue.  Jesus sought out the man, approached him with compassion and gave him something much better than synagogue membership:  a relationship with himself forever.  We haven’t seen our luggage since we checked in four days ago in Washington, and we’ve managed, but now we’ve had enough of it.  Jesus says, “You’ve still got me.”  Yes.  Jesus is better than luggage.  He is providing for us and I will keep trusting him.

Murlo is a tiny hilltop ring of stone houses around a sloping piazza bisected by the Palazzone and Palazzina, now the Etruscan museum.  The village is populated by two dozen residents and a coterie of cats.  It was a beautiful and quiet place for the painters.

The painters doing a quick painting of the scene behind them from memory Keep reading

Fresco at Monte Oliveto Maggiore

Our little square shower is the kind you can hardly bend over in, and since there is no place to put your supplies other than on the floor (assuming you have luggage from which to remove your supplies), you have to bend over anyway.

The Untours group assembled at the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore for a meet and greet, info session and a fine lunch at their restaurant on the terrace.  Keep reading