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. 

We arrived at the golden Renaissance planned town of Pienza before the crowds. 

Two views of Pienza’s main piazza

While Maurice scouted painting spots I visited two churches and their art before thinking it was time for a breakfast pastry.  There must be a dozen shops on the main drag selling the local products—pici, herb mixtures, salami, pecorino—but no one thinks tourists would like a pastry?  This tourist would.  I got directions to a nearby Co-op, half the size of a gas station 7-11.  There was not a fresh baked good in sight.  I got a packaged crostata di albicocca and a cold coke for Maurice.  But we had no knife and Maurice thought the pie was too messy to break.  We weren’t having any pastry right now.  Here I was in Tuscany, yet this morning all I’d had was a small bowl of stale Mini-Wheats I found hiding in my backpack for who knows how long.  “Stop in a bar and order something,” Maurice said.  “They have pastries.”  Why am I so averse to this?  Italian bars are different from American bars.  But the bar on the corner outside the Church of San Francisco had a small pastry display next to the panini, and I bought an apricot tart to go.

Artists at work:  Bob, Janet, Jenelle and Dewey (who’s always the first one done)

Right around the corner from the main piazza was the Palazzo Borgia Museo Diocesano, full of beautiful art ripped from local churches.  I’ve seen the state of some of the countryside pieves, though, so maybe this is the best way to preserve the art and allow more people to appreciate it.  Now the paintings and other treasures are not high on a wall in scattered churches dark and damp but right at eye level in a comfortable museum where, though of course you’re not supposed to touch, you can practically bump them with your nose while examining the details.  And such lovely details they are—delicate brush strokes, transparent veils, intricate designs of minutely applied flecks of gold leaf.  I was partial to the glowing fourteenth-century madonna and child paintings, Mary solemnly holding on her left her plump mini-man baby Jesus with rosy cheeks and curly hair, brown-eyed all.  My favorite was the Madonna col Bambino by Pietro Lorenzetti (1310-20, Siena) from the Pieve Santi Leonardo e Cristoforo at Montichiello, letting us in on an adoring moment between mother and child.

Many of the later paintings were not as appealing to me, though I did like the fifteenth-century altarpiece (Lorenzo di Pietro detto il Vecchietta, Madonna col Bambino in trono tra i Santi Biagio, Giovanni Battista, Nicola e Floriano, [1460 -62]) with a laughing baby Jesus looking to heaven and Mary gazing down with a look that says, “I love you, baby, but you have a life to get through before you go home.”

Beside paintings, the museum also contained reliquaries and miscellaneous gold and silver work, tapestries composed of millions of tiny stitches, illuminated books and a bit of stonework.  (No pictures were allowed and there were no postcards but I found the above at palazzoborgia.it).

I made friends with Antonio in one of the local product shops as I got Maurice a panino of awful-looking local salami and stinky pecorino with hot sauce.  Ugh. 

“Go get yourself a pizza,” Maurice told me when I delivered the sandwich trying not to inhale.  At the nearby pizzeria just inside another town gate I had a quiet lunch of an entire wood-fired thin-crusted pizza margherita at an outside table.  I couldn’t quite decipher the pizzeria’s slogan so my waiter translated it for me: “Anybody can make a pizza but not everybody can cook one.”

My museum ticket also got me into the crypt under the church on the main piazza.  Its light and airiness belied the name but the first exhibit explained how the apse of the church was poorly supported by the underlying geology of the hill.  I couldn’t follow all the many diagrams explaining in Italian how this was (perhaps) being rectified but I did wonder if I really wanted to be there.  Before I left I enjoyed a display of exquisite illuminated manuscript pages from the partial recovery of a cache of stolen liturgical books.

St. Mark about to write his gospel (above); Michael the archangel slaying the dragon (below)

Many of the other ladies had been doing heavy-duty shopping so I wandered into some of the boutiques to see what all the fuss was about.  Italian fashion, shoes (not that any would even fit me), purses, statement jewelry—dazzling, just not my style, though I did buy some scarves for Christmas presents.

I should have used the pizzeria loo but I didn’t. Maurice told me where a pay one was, which I generally try not to patronize (tourists are pouring money into your town and you can’t even give them a place to go to the bathroom?) but I had no choice.  A line of four or five cubicles had coin-operated doors that did not operate (what a surprise), so an officious woman was collecting euros and assigning rooms.  It was not particularly clean, which I should not have to deal with when I have to pay, the hand dryer did not work and there were no paper towels.  What did I get for my fifty euro-cents?  I came out with my wet hands asking the woman where I was supposed to dry them.  The line had built up and she pretended not to understand.  “Asciugare,” I finally remembered.  She said something about the machine on the wall.  “Non va,” I told her.  I wanted a towel.  I wanted my money back.  But she was busy taking other people’s money and directing them to booths.  This is the trouble with tourist towns.  The public restroom in quiet Castelmuzio was a rare find and fading memory.

When I finished my wandering I met Maurice on the main piazza.  He was talking with Rinaldo, a local 87-year-old who remembered when the Americans came to town in World War Two.  He liked to go “camping” with the soldiers.  They taught him a little English and gave him candy.

On our way home we found the chapel on the hill that is in many iconic Tuscan pictures, the Capella de Vitaleta.  It was only a short drive down a white road, then a half mile hike through a field, where we took our own iconic pictures.

There was not a sign of Wilma tonight.  “Maybe her family kept her in,” Maurice suggested.  “Maybe they noticed the spaghetti sauce on her nose,” I answered.  “Maybe she got butter all over her face.”  We laughed.  No, she couldn’t possibly have gotten in…could she?  I went up the stairs to look out the window.  The cantina roof was well within jumping distance.  But she couldn’t have jumped high enough to get on the roof.  I went outside and looked around.  The clotheslines between our capella and the cantina were strung on thick wooden posts, the kind a sharp-clawed cat could climb right up, and the posts were only a foot or two below the level of the cantina roof.  Nighttime skulking was certainly possible.  Sneaky cat.