In the last week of last year we walked in a place we couldn’t quite believe we’d never been to before. We knew Pitigliano, our point of departure. We’re intimate with so many of the Etruscan places of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany. So why had we never been to the vie Cave? They’re marvels and they’re mysteries, with a very strange magic.
Why the Etruscans (who inhabited these lands long before the ancient Romans subdued them) dug these long winding trails through the tufa stone, nobody really knows. It’s not difficult terrain around there: in gently undulating territory, channels through the rock – which in places reach 20m deep – aren’t at all necessary for getting from A to B. Some scholars have suggested that they’re defensive, but quite honestly, you’d more likely bottle yourself into the perfect ambush in these narrow ravines than escape from approaching marauders, so that argument doesn’t wash.
The energy with which the Catholic church in subsequent ages dotted these strange chasms with shrines and insignia of its own suggests that they were anxious to impose their sacredness on the vie Cave. Is this a sign of wary awareness of pagan magic? Coupled with an inability to summon the courage to obliterate a link to a powerful pre-existing divine? The early Church was always hedging its bets.
All up the towering walls of the paths you can see the pick blows which created the marvel. Underfoot it’s deeply rutted – a reminder of pack-animal hooves and passing carts one presumes, though you have to hope that there was some kind of one-way system because there’s little in the way of passing places. In the constant penumbra some beautiful mosses have taken hold of the rock faces. I’m not even going to try to identify the emerald base layer, though I can say that the velvety surface is dotted with Umbilicus rupestris (navalwort), Adiantum capillus-veneris (maidenhair fern), an Asplenium of some kind, a fern which may or may not be Polypodium vulgare (I’m way out of my comfort zone with these varieties).
It wasn’t what you’d call a sunny day, but it wasn’t too gloomy nor too cold. There was a pack of us. We stopped for a picnic in a spot where (at least) two Etruscan tombs lay right below our feet. All in all, a very good day-after-Boxing Day. And a good start to bidding farewell to 2023.
We did the official send-off to the year at the Castello di Reschio which is far from our kind of thing but it was an invite we couldn’t really refuse. Neither did we want to, for various reasons – curiosity in particular. It was this plush hotel’s first attempt at a big (expensive) New Year’s bash. The result was a curate’s egg of an extravaganza.
There were two nights of excellent jazz with Veronica Swift who has an extraordinary voice, backed up by selections of jazzy musicians and orchestras. (All organized by an enterprising young Brit musician and impresario called Max Fane whose Raucous Rossini project we first witnessed many years ago, perhaps at Castello Sonnino in Montespertoli, perhaps in 2013… when he must have been around 16.) There was much dressing up in 1920s costume or approximations thereof (the event was themed) and there was of course a lot of bubbly flowing.
I’m not sure how many of the participants were hotel guests. We were, of the press kind.
Some were owner-inhabitants of the houses scattered around the estate (beyond the hotel, Reschio is a kind of elite condominium) and others had houses along the Niccone valley which Reschio occupies so much of. For this demographic, the castle and its restaurants are their local: there’s little fine dining competition out in this agricultural neck of the woods.
And then there was the Gilded Youth – the scions of the Bolza and Corsini families, their relations and friends and lovers and a host of younger people having a glitzy wild time while the outliers were in some ways relegated to the status of audience. All of which was charming in its way, but were I asked to give my opinion for next year’s edition (and I’m sure I won’t be) I’d be grasping for ways of making it feel more like a party – a participative party, rather than a host of small satellites circling around a rather nebulous centre. I’d suggest croquet and charades and events to make people feel involved.
We had a fun time in our little bubble though… and spent much time laying our own much less ambitious plans for a New Year at home in 2024/5, with far-flung friends staying and local friends joining and a true feeling of belonging.
And so on to 2024 and the resolutions I rarely make and never keep.
This afternoon we raked up the last of the leaves from our big oak trees – the ones we bought 21 years ago with a house attached.
I’m hopeless with tools, in the sense that I never give enough thought to them and just muddle through with whatever lurks in the shed. After many months of listening to me cursing my stupid, ever-rattlier rake with the head that threatened to detach itself with each sweep, L did lengthy research and ordered another. Who knew that special leaf-gathering rakes exist, ones which don’t leave a trail of leafy mayhem and don’t reduce your shoulder to a quivering wreck of cramp and muscle strain? Our new Fiskars leaf rake looks so flimsy it shouldn’t stand a single lawn (hahaha) sweep, but it’s a thing of genius. My gardening is transformed. Resolution: think about what you’re using to get things done. A bad workwoman blames her tools. What she should blame in the sheer laziness of not making sure she has the right ones. And I’m not only talking about gardening.
I’m just looking back over the penultimate paragraph, and my assertion that we bought a house (with oaks) 21 years ago. Today I was reminded how, yes, we think it’s ours – but how for other people it remains suspended in a misty past. For Christmas we gave each other a new cooker, a whizz-bang one with an electric oven to replace the gas one which didn’t provide the kind of even cooking which L had long been craving for his therapy-baking. Resolution: go back over my recipes because this electric oven which heats to the temperature it says on the dial (unlike our gas one which just did its own idiosyncratic thing) throws many of them into disarray. And hey, I could add some new ones as well.
The old cooker is good. It works. So I went to Caritas and asked if they knew of anyone who might like it: free to anyone who will take it away I said, in the hearing of a rotund, elderly and slightly shabby local I’ve seen around frequently, and who on this occasion was lurking conversationally outside the Caritas door. “I’ll have it!” he said and immediately snatched the slip of paper I’d written my name and phone number on.
Yesterday he called. Today he came to pick it up, but only after getting as far as our neighbour’s gate on the parallel track, and having to turn back and drop down to us. As the cellphone signal dropped in and out, I tried to describe the location to him, but he wasn’t latching on. So I said “la vecchia casa del frate” – the old house of the monk. Now, no monk has ever lived here, but that’s the name that a whole generation of pievesi knew Mario by. “Ah,” he said, “la casa di Mario!”
Mario was the contadino we bought this house from. And for those who have always known it as such this house is, of course, Mario’s house: not his former house, but his house. Within seconds the cooker man was here. To explain, you just have to give things their proper names. And the proper name of this house involves attribution to the person who sold it 21 years ago.
I’d been slightly regretting that this character had claimed my cooker because I had imagined it going to some hard-up family, swarming with offspring, for whom this piece of hardware would make a real difference. He seemed too slippery: I suspected (and I might well be right) that he’d be selling it off to the highest bidder the moment he got his hands on it. But as I propped up the back hatch door of his disheveled car because the broomstick he usually uses for the purpose was getting in the way of the cooker manoeuvring, I thought… in his way, he clearly needs it too.
Before he drove off, he stopped for a quick muse. “I took so many antiques from this house,” he said. What? In 2001 this house had no mains water, no bathrooms, no phone line and only 110V electricity: it was the last place you’d expect to find antiques. In his prime, he explained, he was an antique dealer and restorer. I’m thinking that his concept of “antique” might encompass “any old rubbish”. But perhaps I’m wrong. Yes, he said: when Mario and his sister Fernanda moved up the track to the house we still call “the ugliest house in the world”, they got rid of all the old furniture they had in this house, where they had both suffered through extreme hardship and which they both cordially hated. Now I’m intrigued about what they might have had in here. Had they somehow inherited some beautiful pieces which were tarred for them with the same brush of resentment and memories of semi-starvation? Naturally I’ll never know.
This morning a family checked into the Garden Suite at Pieve Suites. They had been staying somewhere else in town, but had to shift to extend their stay by two days. I waived my “no children” rule for their five-year-old who did an exploratory stomp around the room then declared “this is much more beautiful than the other place. I’m staying here!”
One contented customer. Resolution: keep tweaking details at Pieve Suites. And shall I move on to the new half? Who knows what 2024 will bring…
La Verzura 