Touring in Tuscany

Bob McNeil took time out from his TV3 news job to relax in Italy, enjoy the vino and try his hand at driving Tuscany’s sunburnt hills.
Story: Bob McNeil

Plenty magazine: Summer 2007

We love driving in Europe and for our most recent road adventure, my wife, Jeanette, and I rented a villa in a hilltop village in Tuscany called San Sano. The only way to find a place like that is by car along narrow mountain roads – that’s if you don’t want to spend up to a week trying to get there by bus – so we rented a self-drive Peugeot.

Hill roads in Tuscany can be intimidating. Most are narrow, making it hard to avoid vehicles hogging your side of the centerline. Then there are tight stone walls that seem to slide by just a whisker from your wing mirror. The only way to survive is to keep your speed down.

San Sano is small enough that it wasn’t long before we knew everyone. The man who owned our villa lived in a big house next door. Ferdinando Anichini was a retired headmaster, and everyone called him “maestro”. He knew English, but stubbornly refused to speak it. However, that never hindered the wonderful conversations we had, involving our limited Italian and his arm-waving sign language. He made his own wine –after all, this was the Chianti region – though his was sour and horrible! But he loved it, and would cradle the bottle in his arms and sing to it.

Chianti has a host of wonderfully named villages: Poggibonsi, Monteriggioni, Radda, Gaiole, Greve, and perhaps the most popular, San Gimignano (often dubbed “San Jimmy” by tourists). The only way to get to these places is by car. You can park just a short walk away from smaller hamlets, but may have to fight a tide of pedestrians to get into the larger ones.

San Gimignano is worth the walk. It’s a town of towers, built in medieval times as a sign of prosperity and power. I counted about 10 in view at any one time, but there were 72 of them many centuries ago. Its narrow streets just begged to be explored and we loved surprises like finding a piazza where a man sat playing a harp.

Back in San Sano, Ferdinando decided he would take us to a wine festival in a village called Vagliagli, where he used to run the school. So off we went and, of course, everyone knew him and wanted to talk. We were greeted by a brass band leading a parade of old tractors and horse-drawn wagons draped with vines and ripe grapes. Young people in vivid costume danced before a wagon carrying a model of a giant black rooster – the “Gallo Nero”, which is trademark of the best wines in Chianti.

Leaving Chianti, we headed north to the medieval town of Lucca, north-west of Florence, taking it steady on a motorway where cars loomed as a speck on your mirror and then flashed by at 150 kph. You soon learn to keep right, leaving the left to the boy racers.

Lucca is surrounded by a wondrous wall that was built to discourage invaders and now excludes motorists. Most cars are banned and we had to park outside and carry our baggage in.
Our hotel room had a shuttered window that looked out over the main square. We pulled our table over to the window and had many lunches of bread, cheese, salami and wine as we watched everything that went on in the cobbled streets.

The wall around Lucca is four kilometres long, and we hired bicycles to ride around the top of it every day. One day we went in search of Saint Zita. She died in the 13th century and now lies in a glass coffin in one of Lucca’s churches. They say her body was not embalmed, and yet skin still covers the bones of her hands and her facial features are still visible. Saint Zita’s not looking too bad for someone who died 700 years ago.

Another time we came across a contest between Lucca and another village. Everyone was in medieval costume, and from the wall we watched juggling, ribbon throwing, and, most exciting of all, archery. Using an ancient crossbow over a range of 100 metres, the first archer scored a bullseye. The second archer split the shaft of the first arrow down the middle! I had only ever seen that in a Robin Hood movie when I was a kid.

Sadly, like the movie, our holiday had to end. Our last drive was from Lucca to Florence, to catch the train to Rome, and then the plane back home.

Reprinted by permission. Copyright 2007 Plenty magazine Summer 2007 published for Hanover Group. Subscribe to Plenty today.

print