Saturday 17 June 2023
Today had everything.
We started the morning with one final bit of sight-seeing in Florence (yes, I know I said we’d had enough of art but this was booked in advance ‘cos you have to). The Brancacci Chapel is a small chapel that contains possibly the greatest early Renaissance fresco cycle, by Massacio, a young artist who didn’t live much into his 30’s but was full of ground-breaking ideas. The reason for the booking was because the frescos are being restored, which means the whole chapel is full of scaffolding but only 10 people can visit at once. On the plus side… the scaffolding gets you so much closer to the frescos than you’d ever be if you were on the chapel floor. And Massacio was clearly and deliberately (and, I feel, with great excitement) painting naturalistic poses, faces, scenery and scenes in the face of hundreds of years of standardised religious art formula and iconography. Getting up close made it easy to spot where later artists – Lippi in particular – had touched up or repainted parts.
Anyway, next we had to see if the car was where we left it! So after failing to catch a bus we took a taxi back to Galuzzo and celebrated saving £50-odd on parking fees in central Florence. The car was there, and the gear stick and seats were already almost too hot to touch at 11 in the morning!
Heading south into the Tuscan countryside we stopped in Siena, to see another great Renaissance city. The townscape is such a contrast (and, as usual, being on a hill such an advantage to beauty!). Here are the winding lanes, cobbled hills, grand vistas and glorious piazzas that flat Florence is missing. We found a great lunch of picci and ribollita in a random osteria (although picci cooked in red wine look like blood worms!) and then roamed our way to Il Campo to sit at a cafe and watch students having their graduation ceremony in the square. The Campo square of Siena is unphotographably impressive.
But the day is not done! We dive back in the car and drive south into the Val d’Orcia, the most famous bit of cypress-dotted golden-green hued Tuscan countryside and where we are staying for a couple of nights. What they don’t tell you is that the roads are insanely bad and insanely wiggly. I mean, seriously, these are hills not mountains. Why does it take ten miles of road to go three miles as the crow flies?! Still, all pretty.
And so we came to our castle. Called Spedaletto, it’s actually in the flat bottom of the Val d’Orcia and was built to protect this nice easy route through rich farmland. And we have a lordly suite! There are two bathrooms (weird, right?), both with walk-in showers, one with two wash basins, and a freestanding clawfoot bath in the bedroom. It’s all just generally grand.
Dinner was an osteria a bit like Zeb (i.e. trying to elevate their cooking above the ordinary but not having the skill) but it did have good red wines and a beautiful outside terrace where we ate looking out at dusk settling over the valley and the pretty town of Pienza in the distance. Nice.
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