Tuscany
Toscana, Italy — where the ground steams, the bread has no salt, and a cyclist once kept a secret that saved hundreds of lives
The Shape of the Place
A region that smokes, sinks, and occasionally resurfaces
Tuscany is roughly the size of Switzerland, which is worth knowing because people tend to think of it as a painting rather than a place with edges. Its coastline faces the Tyrrhenian Sea; to the north the Apuan Alps rear up white, not with snow but with the marble that has been quarried there since Roman times. The same stone went into Trajan's Column, the Pantheon, Michelangelo's David, and London's Marble Arch at the top of Park Lane — though the arch has been moved around so many times that mentioning it may be doing the marble a disservice.
South of Siena, where the Val d'Orcia rolls out in long, unhurried waves of clay and pale stubble, lies the Accona desert — not a brochure word, an actual semi-arid zone where little grows and the earth turns grey-white in the summer heat. Most visitors drive straight through it without realising what they're looking at. The region also contains the Maremma, a coastal lowland that was malarial and largely ungovernable for centuries, drained only seriously in the nineteenth century. The butteri, horsemen who still work cattle across the Maremma in the traditional way, are one of those things that tourists from certain countries treat as a performance and locals treat as Tuesday.
The Tuscan archipelago — Elba, Giglio, Capraia, Montecristo, Pianosa, Giannutri, Gorgona — lies off the western coast. The legend holds that Aphrodite lost seven pearls from her necklace into the sea and they became these seven islands. The more prosaic version is that they are the exposed peaks of a submerged Apennine ridge. Napoleon spent ten months on Elba after his first abdication in 1814, before escaping and resuming the career that ended at Waterloo. The island still sells this association reasonably hard. He has been gone for two centuries, but interest has not quite dried up.
Then there is the north-western corner, near Pomarance, that the locals have always called Valle del Diavolo — the Devil's Valley. The name comes from the jets of superheated steam that force themselves through fissures in the ground at temperatures above 200°C, smelling strongly of sulphur. Dante is said to have drawn on this landscape when describing the Inferno in the Divine Comedy. The steam has been used industrially since the early 1800s, first to extract boric acid, then — in 1913, in the village of Larderello — to generate electricity. This was the world's first geothermal power station. For forty-five years it was the only one: New Zealand's plant at Wairakei did not open until 1958. The test in 1904 that proved the principle worked was modest enough: Prince Piero Ginori Conti's apparatus lit five light bulbs in his boric acid factory. The thirty-four plants that operate there now power around a million Italian households. The valley still smokes. It still smells of eggs.
In the province of Lucca, in a fold of the Apuan Alps, there is a lake called Lago di Vagli that holds a secret at its bottom. The village of Fabbriche di Careggine — settled in the thirteenth century by blacksmiths from Brescia who had found an ideal combination of wood, water, and iron ore — was flooded in 1947 to create a hydroelectric reservoir. Its 146 residents were moved to a new village built to resemble the old one, and the original, with its stone houses, three-arched bridge, church of San Teodoro, and graveyard, sank beneath thirty-four million cubic metres of water. The lake is drained for maintenance only very occasionally: four times since the flooding, most recently in 1994, when a million people came to walk the streets. Each time, the ruins re-emerge exactly as they went under, roofless but standing. The next draining is expected sometime around 2026, though this has been announced before and not delivered.
The Tongue
Where the dialect is the language — more or less
Every Italian dialect is descended from Latin. Tuscan became Italian. The process was not administrative but literary: Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy in the Florentine vernacular in the early fourteenth century, and the poem was so widely imitated that his dialect became the model for educated writing across the whole peninsula. There is some irony in the fact that a man exiled from Florence should have done more for its language than any of his city's statesmen.
In 1583, a group of Florentine scholars formalised this authority by founding the Accademia della Crusca — the Academy of the Bran. The name was a metaphor: their job was to sift language as a mill sifts wheat, separating the good flour from the chaff. Their emblem is a sieve. Their motto is a line from Petrarch: Il più bel fior ne coglie — "She gathers the fairest flower." In 1612 they published the world's first major dictionary of a modern vernacular language. The Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1636, was explicitly modelled on it. The Accademia della Crusca still exists, still meets, still rules on the Italian language, and still operates from a Medici villa on the edge of Florence. In 2016, it formally accepted a word proposed by an eight-year-old boy: petaloso, meaning "full of petals." The Academy noted that it was well-formed but not yet in common use. The boy seemed satisfied.
Tuscany is the only region of Italy where the local dialect is effectively identical to standard Italian — which means Tuscans have no dialect in the way that Venetians or Sicilians do, but they do have a pronounced accent and a selection of words that are entirely their own.
One further quirk of the Florentine calendar deserves a note here, since it affected every date and document the city produced for centuries. Florence began its year not on the first of January but on the twenty-fifth of March — the Feast of the Annunciation. This meant that January and February in Florence belonged to the previous year by everyone else's reckoning. When the Gregorian calendar arrived in 1582 and set the new year on January 1st, Florence simply ignored it and continued as before. The city maintained its own temporal system until 1749, when Grand Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine finally decreed that Tuscany would join the rest of the continent. Historians working with Florentine documents still have to account for the discrepancy. March 24, 1491, was followed the next day by March 25, 1492.
People
The famous and the almost-forgotten
Tuscany's contribution to the list of well-known names is substantial enough that repeating it risks sounding like a museum label. Leonardo da Vinci was from the village of Vinci, in the hills west of Florence. Michelangelo was from Caprese. Dante was from Florence. Galileo was from Pisa. So was Fibonacci, who introduced Europe to the decimal number system in the early thirteenth century, though Europe took its time absorbing the lesson. Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Boccaccio, Amerigo Vespucci — the man who gave the Americas his name — all Tuscans. The region produced an improbable concentration of consequential people in a short historical window. What followed has been somewhat quieter, which is perhaps the region's right.
Bartali won the Tour de France in 1938 and again in 1948 — the largest gap between victories in the race's history. He was one of the most celebrated athletes in Italy, his name everywhere, his face known at every checkpoint. He used this. During the German occupation from 1943, he carried falsified identity documents for Jewish families hidden in the handlebars and frame of his racing bicycle, cycling hundreds of kilometres between Florence, Assisi, Genoa and other cities under the cover of training rides. When stopped and searched, he asked the guards not to touch his machine: the components were calibrated precisely for his racing position, he explained. He hid a Jewish family in his cellar. He said nothing about any of this until near the end of his life, and told his son only: "These are things that are meant to be hidden." Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations in 2013, thirteen years after his death. The song his country sang about him — Paolo Conte's Bartali from 1975 — mentions none of it, because nobody knew.
A dissolute Sienese knight who, according to both legend and the formal record of his canonisation process, experienced a vision of the Archangel Michael on Christmas Day 1180 and was urged to renounce the world. He protested that giving up his pleasures would be as difficult as splitting stone with a sword — and then drove his blade into the rock to demonstrate the impossibility. The sword did not break. It went in. He left it there, built a hut, became a hermit, and died the following year. The round chapel of Montesiepi was built over the spot, and the sword is there still, wedged to the hilt in stone that has been examined and dated. It is consistent with the twelfth century. The story of Arthur and Excalibur appears in print for the first time decades after Galgano's canonisation, which was itself the first formally conducted canonisation in the history of the Roman Church. Scholars note the timing. Nobody can prove the connection, but nobody can rule it out.
On 30 November 1786, Pietro Leopoldo signed the Leopoldine Code, which abolished the death penalty and the practice of torture throughout the Grand Duchy. Tuscany became the first state in the world to do so formally. The gallows and instruments of torture were burned in front of the Bargello in Florence. The date is still marked annually in Tuscany as the Festa della Toscana. Pietro Leopoldo later became Holy Roman Emperor and quietly reinstated capital punishment elsewhere. Tuscany itself held the abolition. What a state manages to keep matters as much as what it briefly achieves.
Place Names
Strange, pointed, occasionally forensic
Pitigliano (province of Grosseto) — A hill-town of extraordinary strangeness, built directly out of the tufa rock so that the lower courses of the medieval buildings and the cliff face are the same continuous stone. Known for centuries as Piccola Gerusalemme — Little Jerusalem — after the Sephardic Jewish community that settled here following the 1492 expulsions from Spain and found unusual tolerance under the Orsini lords. The synagogue dates to the sixteenth century. The wine is also good, which locals will mention first.
Valle del Diavolo (between Pisa and Siena) — The Devil's Valley, named for its boiling springs, sulphur jets and general atmosphere of geological ill temper. Dante knew it and used it. It now generates enough electricity for a million homes. The devil, if consulted, would probably find this either satisfying or insulting.
Via Abbi Pazienza (Pistoia) — "Have Patience Street." The name derives from a period of fierce factional violence between the Panciatichi and Cancellieri families. At some point, someone killed the wrong person in this street. The name stuck as a kind of civic wince — a street that remembers being the scene of a mistake and asks you to make allowances.
Le Vie Cave (Pitigliano, Sovana, Sorano) — Not a single place but a network of them: ancient roads cut vertically into the soft tufa rock to depths of up to twenty metres, some a kilometre long, their walls so high and close that they function more as tunnels than roads. They were made by the Etruscans, probably, though when and for what exact purpose remains genuinely unclear. Possible answers proposed by archaeologists include: trade routes, funeral processions to necropolises, drainage channels, defensive structures, and sacred paths. They may have been all of these at different times. The chisel marks of whoever cut them are still visible in the walls. The Via Cava di San Rocco, near Sorano, was the only road between Sorano and Sovana for more than six centuries — the last paved alternative was not built until 1940.
Larderello (province of Pisa) — Named after François Jacques de Larderel, a Frenchman who arrived in the early nineteenth century and developed a method for extracting boric acid from the geothermal brine using steam. He founded a company; the town grew up around it; the town was named after him. The entire town is now owned by Enel, Italy's largest power company. A town owned by a utility company, named after a French industrial entrepreneur, sitting on top of a natural phenomenon that the Romans bathed in and Dante described as Hell. Tuscany contains multitudes.
Food and Drink
Honest, particular, occasionally confronting
Tuscan food operates on a principle that might be summarised as: use everything, hide nothing, apologise for nothing. This produces some of the most celebrated dishes in Italy and some of the most challenging, occasionally in the same sitting.
The bread is the first thing to know. Pane sciocco — literally "stupid bread," or "foolish bread" — is the unsalted loaf that has been baked here since at least the twelfth century. The word sciocco means both "unsalted" and "stupid" in Tuscan, and this double meaning is not an accident: the bread is called foolish because it lacks something obvious. The leading theory for its origin is that salt was heavily taxed in medieval Florence, and bakers stopped using it. The more colourful version holds that during a twelfth-century trade dispute, Pisa — controlling the mouth of the Arno — cut off Florence's salt supply, and Florentine bakers refused to capitulate by making do without. When the tax was lifted and the dispute resolved, nobody went back to salting the bread. They had grown attached to its particular absence. Dante, exiled from Florence, used the bread as a metaphor for the bitterness of living elsewhere: "Thou shalt have proof how salt the savour is / Of others' bread." The bread has no salt. The exile contains it.
In Florence, the pre-eminent street food is lampredotto: the fourth and final stomach of a cow, slow-cooked in a vegetable broth with herbs, chopped, and served in a soft bread roll that has been dipped in the cooking liquid. The name comes from lampreda, the lamprey eel, whose texture the dish is said to resemble. It has been sold from carts and stands — trippai — in Florence since the Renaissance, when it was food for market workers and craftsmen who needed something substantial and cheap. The Ponte Vecchio was once lined with butchers' shops whose offal went straight into the Arno; Ferdinand I had the butchers replaced with goldsmiths in 1593 to improve the smell of the bridge. The lampredotto tradition survived the eviction. Florentines still queue for it, standing up, at mid-morning. Visitors who try it expecting to be disgusted are often surprised. Those who expect to enjoy it are rarely disappointed.
Then there is ribollita — a soup, or something approaching a soup, built from cannellini beans, cavolo nero, and stale pane sciocco. The name means "reboiled," because traditionally it was made in quantity and reheated over several days, thickening each time. It is a dish that gets better for being left alone, which is a quality not much celebrated in the contemporary world but which the Tuscans have always trusted.
The wine requires less introduction. Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano — these are the canonical names. Less discussed is the Supertuscan movement of the 1970s and 1980s, when a group of producers around Bolgheri began violating the official Chianti regulations — using Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot where only Sangiovese was permitted — and were downgraded to the humblest table-wine classification as a result. The wines they produced turned out to be some of the finest in Italy. Sassicaia, Ornellaia, Tignanello: the names eventually outran the regulations, which were quietly adjusted to accommodate them.
Words and Songs
What the place has said, in its own voice
On the wall of Siena's cathedral, carved in stone, is a SATOR square — a palindrome in five Latin words arranged in a five-by-five grid that reads the same in every direction, horizontally, vertically, and backwards:
S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S
The words can be translated roughly as "The sower Arepo holds the wheels at work" — though what it means, who carved it, and why remain genuinely open questions. The square appears across the Roman world, from Pompeii to England, and has been interpreted as a charm, a cipher, an early Christian symbol, and a Roman military puzzle. In Siena it has been there long enough that it is simply part of the wall.
In 1975, the Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte released a song called Bartali. It is a portrait of postwar Italian life — Sunday afternoons, cinema queues, a sense of smallness — with Gino Bartali's cycling victories as a kind of background warmth. The song became one of the most famous in Italian popular music. At the time of its release, and for decades afterwards, nobody knew about the forged documents in the bicycle frame. The song celebrates the man entirely on the basis of his sporting achievement. It is one of those pieces of cultural record that turns out to have been unknowingly more accurate than it appeared: it caught the man's modesty without knowing the source of it.
come una carezza di sole
di Bartali
And Dante, in the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso, speaking to his ancestor Cacciaguida about the exile he knows is coming:
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.
Did You Know?
Supplementary facts for the genuinely curious
- The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not the only leaning tower in Pisa. The bell towers of San Nicola and San Michele degli Scalzi also lean, on a more modest scale. The word "Pisa" derives from a Greek term for marshy ground, which the architects of the twelfth century apparently did not look up before proceeding.
- Florence began its New Year on 25 March — the Feast of the Annunciation — until 1749, when a Grand Duke finally imposed the Gregorian calendar. The city had ignored the reform of 1582 for 167 years. A document dated January 15, 1450 in the Florentine style actually fell in the year that the rest of Europe called 1451.
- The Camerata de' Bardi, a circle of Florentine intellectuals meeting in the late sixteenth century, invented opera. They were attempting to reconstruct ancient Greek theatrical practice, which they misunderstood. The misunderstanding produced one of the major art forms in Western history.
- The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was the first state in the world to formally abolish both the death penalty and torture, in 1786. The instruments of torture were burned publicly in front of the Bargello. The date — 30 November — is now the Festa della Toscana, observed annually across the region.
- Larderello, the world's first geothermal power station, was the only commercial plant of its kind for forty-five years. Its output in 1904, when Prince Piero Ginori Conti demonstrated the principle, was enough to light five bulbs. It now powers approximately one million homes.
- The sword in the chapel of Montesiepi, near Chiusdino, has been examined by metallurgists from the University of Pavia and confirmed to date from the twelfth century. The first written Arthurian legend involving a sword in a stone appears in print roughly forty years after Galgano Guidotti's canonisation in 1185. Ground-penetrating radar has identified a cavity beneath the sword, possibly containing the saint's body. The sword has not moved.
- Pitigliano was known as Piccola Gerusalemme, Little Jerusalem, because of its substantial Sephardic Jewish community, established after the expulsions from Spain in 1492. The sixteenth-century synagogue has been restored and is open to visitors. The wine the area produces — a crisp white called Bianco di Pitigliano — has been made in those tufa cellars since before the community arrived.
- Fabbriche di Careggine has been underwater since 1953. During the four times the lake has been drained for maintenance — 1958, 1974, 1983, 1994 — the buildings have re-emerged standing, with their walls intact. The next draining is overdue. When it happens, the crowds will come. They always do.
- The Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1583, is the oldest linguistic academy in the world. The Académie Française, founded in 1636, was modelled on it. In 2016, the Crusca formally evaluated a word submitted by an eight-year-old: petaloso (full of petals). They found it well-formed and correctly derived from Italian roots, but noted it was not yet in common usage. The boy seemed to take this in his stride.
- The Ponte Vecchio was lined with butchers' shops until 1593, when Ferdinand I had them removed and replaced with goldsmiths on the grounds that the smell was intolerable. The butchers' waste had been going into the Arno. The goldsmiths remain. The Florentines ate the offal anyway, and still do.
- Stendhal visited Florence in 1817 and was so overcome by the density of art in the city — the frescoes, the statues, the sheer accumulated beauty — that he experienced what he described as palpitations, dizziness, and a feeling of being consumed. Later psychiatrists named this "Stendhal syndrome." The Florentines are largely unimpressed by it.