Italy

I am currently heading into work. I’m trying a new route which involves a bus and a tube instead of three tube trains. When you get above or below central London, it’s very hard to travel in a west-east direction, which means it takes me an hour and twenty minute to make a journey which would take thirty minutes to drive. And, of course, because I’m working conventional office hours, I’m travelling on packed tubes during the rush hour which invariably make me want to cry!

Just before the mayhem of High Holy Days in the synagogue, I managed to get a long weekend in Italy with Michael. Again, I wrote several blogs about it, but didn’t post them for the reasons listed in my previous entry. That said, we had a brilliant time, and because I’ve already written the majority of content, I’m going to reclaim a bit of joy and take you all back to the end of September..

We stayed in a villa in the hills above the town of Pescia, which is not a million miles from the ancient city of Lucca. Artists and creatives tend to bang on about the glorious light in Tuscany and the more I visit the place, the more I realise it has a unique and very beautiful light. I’m not sure I yet have the words to quantify this statement. Certainly, at the beginning and ends of the day, colours seem super-saturated and clear. But at other times, everything takes on a sort of soft-focussed, somewhat impressionistic straw-coloured haze. Or maybe I’m romanticising.

The villa we stayed in is surrounded by dark cedar trees and spearmint-green olive groves. From the balcony, you can see for miles, all the way to the lilac misty peaks of the mountains which rise from the sea plains between Pisa and Lucca.

In the middle-distance, ancient villages with their skyscraper-esque churches, cling perilously to the hillsides. Sound travels in curious ways in that particular location. The noise of a woman whistling for her cat, maybe half a mile away, feels like it’s happening right next to you. At one point, I heard the drumming and cheers of a festival in Pescia, carried on the breeze, direct to my ears. And of course, every morning and evening, the romantic clangle of church bells is delivered fresh to your ears.

It is, of course, astonishing how quickly us Brits can get to a place as beautiful and serene as Tuscany. Pisa airport is so un-busy, that you’re off the plane and through passport control in a heartbeat. We were swimming in the pool at our villa by the middle of the afternoon and eating in the most glorious little restaurant in a valley beyond Pescia by 8pm.

There is, of course, nothing better than properly-cooked, rustic Italian food. Weeks after our trip to Da Sandrino in Sorana, my mouth still waters when I think about what we ate there: spaghetti with tomato sauce, spaghetti with garlic and chilli, fried potatoes, a bowl of the glorious local delicacy, Fagioli Di Sorana (white beans), and fried mushrooms in a batter so light, and crisp, I have no idea how they were made.

The restaurant is in a tiny, wood-smoke-scented village, next to a river which gushes through a deep ravine. Does it get any better than that, I wonder?

We went for a trek on our second day; up the side of the rather steep hill from the villa where we’re staying, to a hillside town called Monte a Pescia. The air up there is incredibly pure, and filled with the scent of wild flowers, mint and wonderful Italian herbs. It’s the sort of air which is so rich with oxygen that a single gulp makes you feel alive. The views drifting down towards Pescia are glorious: farmhouses, with terracotta roofs, scattered across dark, tree-lined, hills. The odd wisp of smoke.

From Monte a Pescia, we followed an ancient stone-paved footpath back down into Pescia itself. This was the ancient road which linked the main town to its baby sister in the hills and it’s steeped in terrific atmosphere. You get the most astonishing sense of how hard life must have been for people in those Tuscan hills before the invention of the car. I imagined old women walking alongside donkey carts up the vertiginous slopes every market day.

We met a horrible cat with bright yellow eyes whom I made the mistake of stopping to stroke. It turns out it was utterly deranged and it went at me with its nasty claws, drawing so much blood that I had to go and see a pharmacist! Cats are freaks. They see my leonine energy and go on the attack or skittishly run in the opposite direction. Slags.

We swam in the villa’s pool that afternoon, which was a real treat. It’s a salt water pool, which I think is better for the environment, and, on a day where scores of young people across the world were marching against climate change, it was nice to know that some people were doing their bit. (Says the man who’d just jumped on a plane for a three day holiday in Tuscany!) I guess I’m just making the most of my beloved Mainland Europe whilst I’m allowed to feel a part of it.

In the late afternoon, we drove to Lucca, a Medieval, entirely-walled, circular city where cars are not allowed. We went to a little shop there where they sell lovely-looking formal men’s clothes at very reasonable prices and I bought a couple of suits and some ties, which I was excited to wear until I realised that the more expensive of the two had a small amount of wool in it, which makes it pretty much unwearable, particularly when it’s hot.

I’ve never been able to wear wool, much to the chagrin of my knitting-guru husband! I see knitters holding gloriously colourful yarns up to their cheeks and revelling in their softness, and simply imagine how sweaty and itchy they would make me feel.

We had a quick sit down in a cafe in the market square where, for reasons best known to themselves, they were playing an instrumental version of My Heart Will Go On. On a loop. Round and round. To make matters even more surreal, the tune was being played on a recorder - incredibly badly. It had plainly been recorded as a joke and the giggling waiter obviously found it very amusing, which it was - the FIRST time he played it!

It reminded me of being a student and my mate Ellie and me playing California Dreaming 18 times in a row on the juke box in Vanbrugh Bar to see if anyone would notice. They didn’t seem to. How we laughed!

We drove up to the top of a mountain for an evening meal in a remote trattoria. Heaven knows how a place like that survives. It was a Friday night and there were only four people eating there. I can’t think how the owner even covers the costs of his chef. We ordered a starter and then two plates of pasta, which, for the Italians, is a confusing choice. Pasta is only really a dish which you eat between a starter and a meaty main. We’d ordered a side of roast potatoes, because, well you can never eat too many carbs. We assumed it would come with the rest of the meal, but it actually arrived after our pasta plates had been cleared away as a sort of triumphant “and now here’s your roast potato main course. Ta-da!” It was really very strange. Nice potatoes though.

Annoyingly, I managed to lose my wallet at some point that night. It probably slipped out of my pocket as I got out of the car. I lost about €80 and taught myself once and for all that I’m just not a wallet person. I lose wallets at an almost frightening rate of knots whilst some people manage to keep theirs for a lifetime. I learned at my Uncle John’s funeral on Thursday that he’d kept the first love letter he wrote to his wife in his wallet for the best part of 60 years. A hugely romantic story, but I was slightly more impressed that he’d kept the same wallet all that time!

We left for Florence, rather early on the Saturday, after a glorious breakfast in the garden of the villa. They do the most wonderful spread of cheeses, home-made jams and marmalades, breads, pastries and hard-boiled eggs. To eat in the sunshine, with a light, Tuscan morning breeze ruffling your hair is definitely one of the things you need to do before you die! It’s right up there with seeing an eclipse or meeting a member of ABBA! (Or maybe not...)

We were in Florence early enough to attend a Shabbat service at the Great Synagogue there, which is a stunning, domed, ancient building. It’s got an almost impossible acoustic, however, certainly when it comes to understanding spoken words, and because it’s a Sephardi service, not a great deal of it felt familiar. What seems very clear is that the building and the service screamed out for a choir. Acoustics, where the sounds spin in circles into the ether, are always rather lovely for nice, slow, contrapuntal choral pieces by composers like Rossi.

We met my old, dear friend, Tammy for lunch. It’s become a tradition to meet her there every time I’m in Tuscany and it’s always wonderful to see her. We laugh almost constantly.

We went for a stroll through the old town, which, probably because it was a Saturday in the late summer, was utterly rammed with tourists. Isn’t it funny how you never quite see yourself as a tourist?! The Ponte Vecchio was nothing but a sea of faces bobbing up and down. After a while, the experience of walking about in a place so crowded starts to feel claustrophobic and exhausting. The inherent beauty of Florence is considerably diminished by its popularity. Beauty draws crowds. Crowds destroy beauty.

My Mum tells the tale of weeping when she saw Florence for the first time in the 1950s. I feel it’s important she never returns to the city, as it will almost certainly not be the place in her memory with which she fell in love:

We knew Sunday was going to be a day of bad weather and the likelihood was that we’d need to hunker down, read some books, eat food and snooze. As it turned out, the weather wasn’t quite as bad as promised, so we took ourselves on a drive to Bagni Di Lucca, a sleepy spa town, deep in the mountains. It’s a rather charming spot which has an air of faded grandeur. At some point in the early twentieth century, it was obviously THE place to visit. These days, it feels very down-at-heel - a forgotten time capsule which is charming precisely because so many of its shops and cafes are exactly as they were in the 1950s and 60s, right down to the signs which hang above the doors. The whole experience regularly transported me to those old 1960s slide projections we used to look at in German lessons, featuring Hans, Lieselotte and Lumpi the dog in the Bavarian town of Cadolzburg.

A beautifully clear river charges its way through the middle of the town and the whole place smells of damp vegetation.

On our last day in Tuscany, the mists rolled in, and turned the hilltop villages around Pescia into film sets.

The valley out towards Serana is as verdant and tropical as I’ve always imagined Hawaii. It is so unlike the scorched, sunflower-filled world one might expect to find in Tuscany. Tall ferns line the sides of the roads. The river batters the rocks with force. Many of the buildings in those parts are paper factories both ruined and fully operational. I assume that decent paper is somehow made from lots of trees and very fast flowing water.

We drove up to Vellano, marvelling at the fact that we couldn’t see more than five meters in front of us. We knew there were vertiginous drops into dark tree-filled valleys in all directions, but everything was protectively wrapped in a soft, white, hugely eerie blanket, as though nature were trying to lull us into a false sense of security to encourage us to leap into the unknown.

Under the mist, all sounds are amplified and held in. The trickle of water in a town fountain becomes almost deafening. The sound of rock music screeching in a local teenager’s bedroom might as well have been on headphones, just for a moment of course, before the fog blanks the sound out again. Distant thunder rolled, cracked and echoed. And there we were, walking in the whiteness, unaware of what was going to suddenly appear in front of us. It was magical, surreal and a little bit unnerving. You

By the time we’d driven onto the plains around Pisa towards the airport, the mists had lifted and Tuscany was bathed in sunshine once again. It was as though we’d just awoken from a dream...