What a bunch of Toscanas (Tuscany)

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Tuscany
Date:	05/10/01 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely places, Good food, Excellent wine

Disadvantages: The Germans, The French, The English

After the best part of a month in Tuscany, I have seen all the frescos, drunk all the chianti and eaten all the pasta I think I can stand. I have marvelled at the amount of hair gel and hairspray that Italian men must use, wondered what it must be like to wear tight trousers, and pretended not to understand English on two separate occasions. I have seen duomos-a-go-go, watched one of the most beautiful modern buildings in the world go up in smoke on a 1970s portable television in a village miles from nowhere (only later discovering the extent of stolen innocent lives), and eaten the most outstanding service station meal I could have imagined.

I didn't take account of what the annual Tuscanistas of my acquaintance told me about the preponderance of Germans, driving the short distance in their Audis and BMWs, I didn't pay attention to the description of the Chianti region as 'Surrey in the Sun', and I forgot what happens when Mrs Lazenby gets dehydrated (she vomits like Linda Blair on a bad day).

As well as small diversions in Bologna (I confess, I sought out and ate 'Bolognaise' and damn nice it was too), the bulk of my three weeks was spent in Tuscany, first up a mountain overlooking Pisa, second in a farmhouse in the heart of Chianti country. If the purpose of travel is as much to discover things about yourself as about the world, then in Tuscany what I discovered about myself is that I am crap at doing nothing. A high proportion of villas and houses with swimming pools and lots of villages with nothing more to do than eat and drink clearly makes Tuscany a good place to do nothing in style, so if you know you can do nothing, head there today. But on those days when we decided to laze about, I got very itchy feet.

It still seems difficult to me to eat badly or expensively in Italy - there are expensive places, crap places, but Tuscany confirmed my opinion that you have to try hard to experience them. Do not eat in
a 500m radius of something famous, or anywhere with a preponderance of English people, and you're in business. I have to be honest, the chocolate box qualities of the Tuscan countryside got on my nerves after a while - I preferred the cities and the rugged bits of landscape around Volterra or in the mountains. But that's probably just me.

I can probably write worthwhile reviews about Lucca, Florence, Pisa and Siena, so I intend to try, but other things I could say about Tuscany would be…..

1) Chiantishire - there really are a lot of late-middle-aged couples in unfortunate clothes from places like Surrey and Berkshire, clutching their day-old copies of the Daily Mail and looking shit-scared whenever someone Italian approaches them. It really is dangerously easy to traverse the Chianti region speaking nothing but English, and I never want to succumb to that temptation. It was with hapless Inglese types that I pretended to be Italian and thus not understand their demands for directions. It's a measure of how incompetent they were that they could be fooled.

The countryside is glorious round here, although it gets a bit monotonous if all you do is drink red wine and potter around little villages. That said, I bought a bottle for £2 at one stage, and it was fab. The £10 stuff was fabber, but the £2 stuff was still genuinely worth drinking.

2) San Gimigiano - very famous hill town, enjoys its fame and hordes of tour parties because it has gained a reputation as the classic Tuscan hill town. This fame stems partly because it is pretty and archetypal, but mainly because it has retained its medieval towers, and has a skyline which looks bizarrely like Manhattan from a distance. Far far too many people go there for a small town, and getting a parking space is hellish. It is most assuredly worth seeing, but by day, it almost has the feel of some Italian section of Disneyland. Stay until sunset and beyond, and it changes, and
you can appreciate its atmosphere without the swarm. It should be born in mind that completely unknown places like Certaldo (which is near the Chianti region) are just as nice as San Gimigiano, but far less heralded. Certaldo (you park in the new town and ascend the hill on a funicular railway) is even less spoilt than SG and hardly anyone goes there - some diligent footwork would probably find you places yet more neglected by the tourist armies.

3) Vinci - birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci (hence his name), we only visited this place because I insisted that the lounging around the villa deal wasn't working. Nevertheless, there is a fabulous museum, where all of Leonardo's inventions have been mocked up. The museum demonstrates that Leo was a combination of genuine, jaw-dropping genius (machine guns, flying machines, looms) and nutter. However, the two guide books I had (Rough Guide and Eyewitness) were very snotty about the skis for walking on water, which I felt were just an idea whose time hadn't come yet.

4) Volterra - the perfect counterpoint to the rolling hills and pretty-prettyness of much of the rest of Tuscany, anyone who comes to the region should come here. For a start, it has quite of a lot of evidence of the Etruscan civilisation who dominated before the Romans (so if like me you like history and ruins, you'll see signs of something which isn't common in the rest of Europe), and for another, it's far less chocolate box than its fellow towns. You can take a long walk out of the town centre to a point where the town is literally tumbling away as the cliffsides gradually erode.

5) The Mountains - the other obvious contrast to the towns are the huge mountains, the Alpi Apuane, which are spectacular jagged mountains which really do remind you more of Switzerland than anything else. We went to a village called Stazzema and then walked up into the foothills from there. It was a beautiful clear afternoon, and t
he sun was shining. On the other side of the world at roughly the same time, a small group of psychotics had decided to fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre, but that's another story, and an opinion I haven't the heart to write.

More later, should a demand seem to present itself……

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