Breakfast In Tuscany

Highway Code

2012-02-03T19:34:00.001Z

Early Friday evening down at the co-op. The woman behind me in the scrum has two items to my two dozen. I smile and beckon her forward.

General description of Italian Driving

"Va avanti" (You go in front)

"Grazie mille" (Thanks a lot)

"Non sei Italiano?" (You're not Italian are you?)

"No. Sono Inghlese" (No. I'm English)

"Lo sapevo!" (I knew it!)

But what exactly did she know? Did she conflate good manners and Englishness? (A mistake that comes from watching too many Merchant/Ivory productions) Or - formal queueing being anathema here - did my actions mark me as foreign?

Of course through the prism of our own culture, the stereotype/archetype boundary is fuzzy. Statements that begin, "all English people," "all Italians," are only ever going to be partly true unless they end "are various". Perhaps there are more similarities than differences between the English and the Italians. The differences just loom larger in the mind?

A sign every ten metres

A major difference between Italy and England is the number of rules here. Rules, regulations, legislation - endlessly quoted chapter and bloody verse. Everywhere evident and everywhere ignored! And everywhere side-stepped, elided, got round. Breached a rule? Find the rule that trumps it. Trust me, there will be one.

This paradoxical love of and disregard for rules is the diffrence sui generis between us. It's the underlying impulse that expresses itself in myriad behaviours.

It's most evident when it comes to driving. Italy is the only place where I've seen a set of instructions printed under traffic lights with the relevant laws dated and numbered in small-print beneath. Instructions! For traffic lights! Apparently we haven't all worked out that red means stop. Mobile phones appear permanently glued to Italian ears too. Gotta chat "Sto facendo una telefonata!!" (I'm on the phone!!) Of course the law is the same as England where it's not so overtly flouted.

Unaware you were on
a wiggly mountain road?

Crossing the Swiss/Italian border is funny. Cars funnel from the orderly clean, green, pure and wealthy Swiss motorways into the checkpoint lanes and then, just as if someones poured poison into the ant colony they're off all willy-nilly; everyone for themselves foot to the floor. That is every car with an "I" registration.

This means: There will be weather

A friend tells me it's just the same in Spain. Perhaps it's something to do with Catholic culture? (Catholicism in Italy is social and cultural, not religious, I was told!) The rosary beads wrapped around the rearview mirror being some kind of insurance policy..... that and the intercession of saints to get you off the hook if you didn't play by the rules.

My Cultural Life

2012-01-16T17:30:00.007Z

Rehabilitated dispensa

Battling hibernation mode. Devouring novels as if books are going out of fashion; which of course they are. Trivial acts, slight mistakes, chance conversations with major repercussions, causing lives to switch tracks. That's this years recurring theme. Last winter, if memory serves, it was missing persons. Themes coalesce around seemingly random choices. Been zipping through the rapids of Anne Tyler, Carol Shields and Deborah Moggach. Lulled by the calm surface of Jon McGregor's flat monotone until pulled by an undertow. Wading through the treacly narrative of an Alan Hollinghurst. Such prolixity: why use two words when ten will do?

Reading novels is partly a substitute for writing them. Had one in gestation for about a year now. Got the structure, got the narrative, characters and tone, completed one section out of three – about thirty thousand words – but have now gone all Rimbaud. Hoped that reading others might be a way to kick-start the process, get back into the mood. I can tinker and meddle about with what's already done, but the first sentence of section two has not materialised. Anyone care to patronise me – in the archaic sense of course? Might help slough off hibernation and block out distractions like the crushing need to get on with painting the apartments and planting the junipers.

Other distractions from the real tasks at hand include renovating the old dispensa – larder cupboard. I've put some pictures of the various stages on facebook and I'm still not sure about the burnt umber finish on the cornice at the top and the bottom. It was all going so well until that point.

Hosted two rabbits at new year. Two rabbits and their vegan companions. Indeed, capodanno – new year – was an entirely vegan affair. All delightful, quirky, cosmopolitan Italians. This meant carte blanche to step out of the straight-jacket of culinary correctness and roam. A Mexican wave for the chimichanga. Raise a glass for an unapologetic mouth-watering moussaka. Sing the pleasures of cous-cous and baklava. That's the beauty of cooking for vegans, ethical vegans at least: no snobbery and no faddiness. Nobody bothered that eating a polenta dish after a risotto was eating two primi, “Due primi – come meraviglioso” Two fingers to convention! Nobody even baulked at English food! None of the usual snorts of derision, outrageous gurning or allusions to fish and chips. Good old Cranks recipe sformata di noci with roast spuds, spinach and gravy – that's nut roast if you hadn't already worked it out. Slips down with a crisp prosecco as easily as penne al'arrabiata.

Spent a lovely weekend with friends at their house, Casa Verde, in Vellano - betwixt Lucca and Florence in the hills north of Pescia. Vellano defies gravity perched on an impossibly steep incline. Civil engineers would demur from building it these days - it's seismic territory, prone to landslides. Health and safety gone mad! Casa Verde is right at the top of the village and so the views are stupendous and take in the Dieci Castelli or Ten Castles, a constellation of hamlets scattered at lower altitudes through the mountains. At night you can see the Milky Way above you and the ten towns ghostly glowing below.

The visit was opportunity to spend an afternoon in Lucca and parade around the park atop the walls. From there we witnessed municipal trucks collecting the recyclable waste bins in the streets below. A pretty unremarkable thing you might think, except that in Lucca the recycling bins are underground – they appear like a small bin on the surface - and like a scene from Thunderbirds, they rise up out of the ground. The bins are such an eyesore in most places I hope other ancient cities will their cue from Lucca.

Vellano - Altopescia

Bigger, better, best might as well be the city's motto because right outside the church of San Michele in the Piazza they've built a gargantuan presepio – nativity scene. It's the new testament myth recast as Italian contadini – subsistence farmers. There's field of vines, mature olive trees – these weigh a ton – and even traditional stone terracing. After all the effort they went to, the Brico style (think B&Q) flimsy lean-to wood store that they used as a cattle-shed and houses the figures of Mary Joseph and Jesus, let's it down somewhat. It should also be noted that one of Mary's arms seemed to be detached and caused Jesus' head to flop over her arm at such a strange angle asphyxiation could be the only result. They're usually a bit more home-spun than this, but these scenes are a feature of every town and they are inexplicably popular... a bit like the grottos that spread across England like a rash from October onwards. Somehow, they make the things they represent even less believable.

Also stretching credulity was the Cowboy Cow – outside Mercato Usato an amazing emporium just outside Lucca. (Sorry, I didn't have a camera) It stands, complete with Stetson hat, bullet belt, holster and gun, in what looks like Steptoes compound, a graveyard of rusting washing machines and fridges. Anyone got a use for Calamity Cow? I can recommend this place, because among the tat and the grey decay there are some genuinely strange novelties and the odd thing of beauty. Gorgeous old armoires, dusty Persian rugs, doors, windows, hinges and locks and a hundred gaudy statues of the revered Padre Pio.

Finished the weekend by popping into the Uffizi in Florence to see the ironically titled I Mai Visti – The Never Seen. Surprised to learn that the Uffizi has another museums worth of stuff in the vaults and this particular exhibition hadn't seen the light of day since the eighteenth century. It was mostly a collection of Roman busts and paintings and sketches that were either records or incidental depictions of the busts.

The tour was conducted in English with an entertaining American guide who brought it to life with a good mix of fact and irreverence. Good crowd too – we guffawed our way around the exhibits drawing the attention of the more staid museum goers. By the time we were ready to go a group of museum staff were gathered at the entrance drawing lots to determine which poor soul should ask us to leave.

The Full Monti

2011-12-22T16:55:00.000Z

From this frozen mountain

The ancient wood burner, vats of hot lentil broth and radio 4 pod casts down-loaded in clusters at Punto Com the local internet hub (home connection at yokel speeds) provide sustenance during the long winter evenings. Europop Italian radio doesn't cut it and my unsophisticated Italian can't cope with serious discussions so for a bit of depth and analysis it's radio 4 all the way.
I recently caught a pod cast entitled The Young Italians about what motivated hundreds of Italians under 30 to leave home and move to London each year. Graduates of all disciplines told the same stories of being 'locked out' of jobs, careers and even self-employment by arcane closed-shop rules, exorbitant licence fees or just by simply not having the right connections. Access to higher degrees, research and thus into teaching were guarded by a sort of academic Godfather. The figure of the 'Barone' exists in all Italian universities. He's (it's nearly always a man) usually a late middle-aged professor long since bored by his subject, and he's the guy you've got to suck up to if you want to get on. Talented? Who cares? It's not what you know, but who you know that counts.

We're used to seeing such shenanigans in the upper echelons of government and business in the UK and Italy. The bizarre antics of Signor. Berlusconi and cronies have been plastered all over the news for the best part of a decade. In the UK revelations of the revolving door for ex-government ministers and senior civil servants between the ministries and private business, are found first in the pages of Private Eye, filtering down to the broadsheets only when they've been scrutinised to make sure that none of the dirt is going to rub off. But these are examples from the stratosphere. At least some semblance of equal opportunities culture exists in the UK. Italy you are pissing away your talent – sveglia e sente il caffè!

Berlusconi has gone off to hawk his new CD - oh the hubris! - and the unelected Mario Monti has taken over. The British press have characterised him as an administrator, an EU stooge to do Frau Merkel's bidding. The sharp contrast with Berlusconi's inebriated style is partly to blame. Like mild Major to malevolent Margaret he's sober, greyer and altogether blander. But like Major, who drew Britain back from Thatcherite excesses like the Poll Tax, it looks like Monti wants to remove the excesses that stifle creativity - the culture of patronage, clientelism, nepotism and the dense strata of esoteric rules that create inertia and have no place in a modern economy. He seems to know what some of the problems are at least! I only hope that he wants the focus of government to be ordinary Italians and not just something that oils the wheels of the corporate juggernauts, which is the way it's been in the UK for the past three decades. It will be a monumental struggle against vested interests and a culture which says, 'What sort of person is it who wouldn't help their son/daughter/niece/nephew?' Tell that to those whose daughters and sons are in London.

November blog

The Landscape in winter

The November post on Bob Dylan in Firenze produced the highest number of hits on the blog ever – almost a thousand on the first day alone and another five thousand unique visitors have followed since then. Thanks everyone for your emails and comments; I'm very grateful anyone's reading it at all! I don't know if the fault was in my transmitter, or your receivers but I want to reassure the fifty percent who thought that anything less than fulsome praise was dissing the diety I really enjoyed that gig. I couldn't find any clips from the Firenze concert to demonstrate what I mean, but a clip from Rome the following night demonstrates what I liked about it.
Forgetful Heart, Roma; 12.11.11

Things Have Changed ~ Bob Dylan in Florence

2011-11-13T17:15:00.004Z

Bob Dylan Nelson Mandela Forum, Firenze 11th November 2011.

Anticipation heightened after my sister pronounced the Nottingham, England gig "bloody brilliant". A Dylan afficianado from an early age, she's not an uncritical fan. I remember her take on an early 90s gig, "chronic" - the Black Country equivalent of pretty awful. Dylan on a bad night can be like watching a car crash in slo-mo, but on a good night he can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. So which Dylan did we get?

Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat opened the proceedings. Stripped of sardonic humour, reduced to a bar-room boogie warm up and not even bothering to bark the title line - clearly, he was phoning it in. Muted applause followed and the twenty-something Italians around me, here to witness a legend, scratched their heads. Next up Girl From The North Country was executed (in both senses!) at a brisk pace ill-suited to the sentiments. Seemingly unable to carry the melody, Dylan spoke the lyric and still managed to sound like a seal with laryngitis. Mark Knopfler's incongruously crunchy Les Paul meanderings were like taking a machete to marshmallow. Oh dear.

Then, just as things were about to tip into the realm of 'chronic' something happened. Things Have Changed - and from this point they literally did. Sans guitar, centre stage and displaying a vocal range nowhere in evidence on the first two songs, Dylan rose like Lazarus from the dead and I kid you not - began to dance. He crouched, almost knelt and, sent assertive, sustained, piercing harmonica assaults reverberating around the cavernous venue. I've never seen Dylan so manically animated, so wild-eyed in his delivery. The peanut crunching crowd were brought to attention.

From this point Dylan took control and rolled out a whole repertoire of tricks that define 'dylanesque'. Tricks of phrasing and timing and improvised lyric variations like the “doctors and lawyers wives” that tonight replace the “carpenters wives” in Tangled Up In Blue and somehow ring truer as “all the people I used to know”. Sorry, they bring out the Dylan anorak in me! Again the harmonica breaks were a delight, audacious, melodious and spine tingling.

Best of the evening was Forgetful Heart which began with a solo plaintive harmonica from Dylan with his back to the audience conducting his ensemble as each instrumentalist joined until a melody slowly gathered itself together. Against a mournful double bass, bowed skilfully by Tony Garnier, Dylan sang – really sang – his heart out and played the best harmonica solos I've ever heard him play. In a sort of musical deliquescence each instrumentalist faded out leaving Dylan alone with the harmonica which gradually retreated until the song disappeared like smoke. A magical goose bump moment.

Occasionally there were some pedestrian moments. I could've done without the twelve bar stodge of Highway 61 Revisited, Thunder On The Mountain and the egregiously long Levees Gonna Break. On the latter Dylan compounded the error with unremittingly dull instrumental breaks – endless repetition of the same musical figure on the carnival organ. Like the worst jazz jamming, it might be interesting for the musicians, but it signals refreshment time for the listener. I don't object to the carnival organ per se as some do. It was entirely appropriate to Desolation Row with its cast of freak circus characters. It was almost a complete version too. Only Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, the fishermen with flowers and the calypso dancers were given the night off. Vocally it was terrific with Bob vacillating with ease between the high nasal whine at the start of lines going down to a sonorous bass at the end.

Towards the end Ballad of A Thin Man was a tour de force a demonstration of dylanesque phrasing and timing sui generis. The “tax deeeeductable cha-ri-teeee ooorganisaaation” of the middle eight stretched phonemes out like bubblegum across several bars of music. Dylan grinning with delight strutted around the stage with one hand waving free and the mic in the other. In his black suit and black hat I half expected Ginger Rodgers to come out. Even that old curmudgeon Larry Adler would've loved Dylan's harmonica on this one.

All Along The Watchtower and Like A Rolling Stone wrapped up the show – crowd-pleasers for the casual attendee.

“The poet laureate of rock'n'roll, the man who forced folk into bed with rock, the voice of the sixties counter-culture who disappeared into a haze of substance abuse and emerged to find Jesus, who was written off as a has been in the eighties and shifted gears in the nineties....” This was the announcement heralding his arrival on stage. Sardonically delivered cliches from newspaper cuttings - but they do show how many different things Dylan means to people. He called himself a song and dance man whose songs were “exercises in tonal breath control”. Tonights exercises were pretty good.

Wild Mood Swings

2011-10-31T16:05:00.000Z

Grapes at Falciano Vineyard

It's quarter to seven. The sun is sinking and an amber halo silhouettes the forested hills around Tenuta Savorgnano. An oily blue jay hectors from the stand of elms between the house and the pool. It's cool; very cool. The mercury struggles to reach fifteen degrees and cold blasts of tramontana – literally, 'among mountains' – wind, have the hanging geraniums on the first floor window ledges tugging at their roots.

Lately, the Savora – the river that cuts around the promontory on which the houses are perched – is beginning to sing again. Somewhere, deeper into this wilderness they call the Casentino it must be bucketing down. Clouds cluster and cling to the tips of pines atop the looming Alpe di Catenaia way above the tenuta. The winter is tuning up.

It seems indecently early, but the garden lights flicker on all along the boundary fence, past the pool -now dressed for winter - and curl around the edge of the car park to a huge pile of branches and twigs. We've cut a swathe through the foliage that obscures the long valley views to the north east towards Anghiari. Now we can see the serried ranks of mountains recede, one behind the other in ever paler shades of grey, beyond Umbria and into the milky twilight. By the light of the iron lanterns at each corner of the main house bats perform their crepuscular acrobatics.

Old Rugged Cross at La Verna

A couple of weeks ago it seemed like summer wouldn't end. Vendemmia – the grape harvest - was in full swing and we even witnessed grapes being pressed just across the road from a local vineyard. Not quite as one might imagine - underfoot in a wooden barrel - but in gleaming aseptic stainless steel machines. Now, crops are safely gathered in, fields are fallow, garden furniture has been snatched indoors, foreign registered cars have vanished, cafés have retreated from the pavements and half the population have battened down the hatches and the other half have returned to their real lives. Forty quintale – 4,000 kilos – of winter wood was delivered yesterday which is definitely a signifier of impending cold weather. In a few days time the clocks change. Melancholy - my default position - is unmasked as the distractions of the summer fade. The internal weather is as turbulent as the sky today.

Recession, unemployment, repossession, social unrest. News of England comes courtesy of Radio 4 podcasts. Millionaire George Osborne is tightening everyone's belt and letting out his own. This fixation with Euro-turmoil neatly elides the crisis of Sterling. How ironic that the great hope of the Europhobes (not Eurosceptics – that would be a rational position!) find themselves thrashing about to make sure the Euro currency holds, while ardent Europhiles, the Lib Dems, are toning down the federalist rhetoric! I can hear great chunks of masonry crashing off the edifice of the coalition from here. Meanwhile, the huddled masses amass on the doorstep of the square mile and clerics resign in solidarity. The Friday Night Comedy, Front Row, Saturday Live and Thinking Allowed lift the spirits – thank you BBC! A tenner a month for the licence fee is excellent value – a Sky or a Virgin subscription costs about five times as much.

Unfathomably, my last post received more feedback than any other. Even snail mail from England! It seems most were hoping for a more personal and less statistical annual report. Some were congratulatory, but I think it's a little premature for a pat on the back. We simply can't tell how it it will pan out yet. We've got by this year, but there's no room in the budget for improvement and that's a disappointment.

That's probably offended those who wrote to caution giving out commercially sensitive information. I can live with the schadenfreude of those who've done a bit better and wish them even greater success. It's not like I published the profit and loss account! Actually, there's a courageous bloke at Organic Heaven in Chesterfield who publishes his results – warts 'n' all – on his website. It's a different view of business I suppose – about co-operation and stake-holding. Here in Italy Slow Food convivia refer to “co-producers” rather than consumers and has a similar impetus. Tell the truth and shame the Devil about the difficulties facing small business. The customer doesn't really always know best. Informed choice – a mantra we hear so much these days.

What's your strangest request? That's an easy one to answer. “Where is the nearest water park?” “I think you may be on the wrong holiday”, I replied. What do I miss most from England? Punctuality and reliability – of people and services! Oh the foot stomping frustration of dealing with Telecom Italia!! Most difficult guest? I couldn't possibly be so indiscreet! However, we did have an enquiry in person (after several email exchanges) quite early in the season from someone who had been in Italy for a couple of months on a “spiritual journey” and who needed somewhere to stay for her final three weeks here. No space was big enough for Yoga; the pool isn't heated?; we'd never cope with her food intolerances. However, it turned out in the end that her biggest spiritual need was an hyper-fast broadband connection. Not possible when you're 22 kilometres from the telephone exchange and reliant on dodgy copper cables. The rest she could've put up with. It was a narrow escape.
It's a public holiday here at the moment for Ogni Santi or All Saints. The B&B and the apartments are full for the weekend. We've just had a week without guests and had fallen into maintenance mode, when we forget what it is we do. We managed to wing breakfast this morning for the largest number we've ever catered for – eighteen! Now pulling that off deserves a pat on the back. Most of the Italians eschewed the stereotype (archetype?) and exchanged cappuccino for tea. That was a turn up for the books. Yorkshire Tea to boot! One of our American guests has inexplicably been to Selby on holiday. “Selby, East Yorkshire?” I clarified.

Basilica allo Santuario - La Verna

The pictures on this blog are from the Sanctuary at La Verna, close to here. St Francis knew a good spot for a monastery. It's a great place for quiet contemplation and wistful meanderings - perfectly suited to golden autumn afternoons.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness - Italo Calvino

Summer Of Love

2011-09-18T17:12:00.000+01:00

When some guests leave, it feels like to holiday is over for me as well as for them. This best describes the odd sense of loss that's repeated over and over as we've said goodbye to some remarkable people over the summer. Tidying and cleaning empty rooms almost becomes a ritual to exorcise the emotions, and as I scrub and polish I think of pleasantly memorable times - a convivial meal sharing stories, or the sound of satisfied guests chatting and laughing together as we wash up. And the memories linger, triggered by little reminders: a note in a guest book, a silver bangle left behind, donated novels or particular brands of soap and cologne, gifts of paintings and plants and even a florescent pink inflatable Pegasus which has hung for most of the summer under the pergola.

Trailers to this post mentioned an annual report to mark the anniversary of our arrival here. I gathered together some statistics for it, but they only tell part of the story. Here goes.

From March 18th until now a total of 453 nights (64 weeks) have been booked. This represents 73 individual bookings (29 for apartments/44 for B&B) with 154 people staying. Most people came as couples, but a handful travelled as family groups. Seventeen nationalities have passed through these doors so far: American, Brazilian, Danish, Dutch, English, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Quebecois, Scottish, Slovakian, Spanish, Swiss, Belgian, Welsh, Luxembourgish (this is really what people from Luxembourg call themselves in English!) Over all the average stay was 6.2 days, but this is skewed by the fact that apartment bookings are usually for longer periods than B&B bookings and I didn't feel like trawling through the diary again to work them out individually! A slight digression, but it is worth noting that the shortest stays were for one night and the longest for sixteen.

Assuming a (conservatively estimated) 22 week season, this gives us a 48% occupancy rate. Is that okay for the first year? I'm afraid I don't really have a clue. I vaguely remember Ruth Wilson of Hotel Inspector fame (I know it's Channel Five and not Business Weekly!) saying that confidence in sustainability comes at about 70% occupancy. It would be nice to be able to make some of the changes we want to make a bit faster, but at the moment we'll settle for paying the bills.

The problem with figures is that they say nothing about the really memorable moments that cause us to refer to this season as our Summer of Love. Just for the pleasure of remembering, here are a few.

The couple from Kent who got engaged here during a glorious week weather wise, at the beginning of April.
Melvyn & Jana who dropped in unexpectedly at breakfast one May morning while returning to England from Slovakia (are we really on the way?) and who re-scheduled ferry crossings in order to stay longer. Lots of laughs over vegan dinners and a special thanks to Mel who enthusiastically rodded blocked drains! Future guests please note, he wanted to do it, we didn't make him.
The Muslim couple from Wales who wasted no time in making aubergine & potato curry with dahl and roti cooked in the wood oven when we made doe eyes and said we missed Indian & Pakistani food. We couldn't get all the spices, so we had to improvise a bit, but the result was fantastic.
Polish couple Igor & Radek who supplied the limoncello for some lovely evenings putting the world rights under the pergola and who climbed through the windows after locking themselves out. I'm glad we weren't there to witness that!
Pete & Marie of Bristol who along with Anne & Graham of Ripon helped to bail out our flooded living quarters having just returned from an evening out in their best bib and tucker. The sight of Marie with her lovely evening dress knotted at the front to keep it clear of the water made me wish I'd had a camera. Marie left us a gift of three original paintings (See Marie's art here) and Anne & Graham left us the florescent pink inflatable Pegasus that adorns the pergola, even as I write.
Critter crazy Django, 9 years old who really appreciated the unappreciated things about Tuscany like scorpions, venomous snakes, wolves and wild boar. Django, if you're reading, I am still sceptical about your sightings of Big Foot.
Our Italian guests who patiently corrected our Italian and helped it along enormously. We are sorry we descended into Eurobabble at times when we reached the limits of expression. Chanteuse Elisa & Sporty Roberto from Padua you will forever be Betty and Bob to us. Poalo & Maria-Luisa from Verona, the ornamental pepper plants you gave us are still going strong. Nicole & Federico from Genova swapped recipes over vegan dinners. Take a look at Nicole's recipes at Ricette Vegan. Giusy from Milan - we feel like we got to know you very well in only a couple of days. Such a big heart.
Betty, Bob, Colin & Jen
Honeymooners Sarah & Steve added some true Northern English grit to the proceedings and we wish you a wonderful life together. Hamid & Paula from Amsterdam were our quickest repeat guests. They left at 10am to go south but rang at 2pm to book another week and were back by 5. Thank you both and thank you Paula for the marvellous job you did of dead-heading the geraniums. Colin & Jen from Belfast: so cheeky! Some of Jen's stories were mildly disturbing to say the least! You began a trend of drawing in the guest book! Given the Belfast accent, perhaps it was the best way to communicate?

Robi and Corrine from Luxembourg your company for dinner every night was such a pleasure. You increased our knowledge of Luxembourg by thousands of percentage points and you allowed me to get away with playing Bob Dylan at dinner. Click to see Robi's art.
Thanks to Kati & Al our new friends in Seattle for all the entertaining internet links. And to everyone else along the way who has shared food, wine and conversation
Finally, Pete & Jo who chose this little corner of the universe to celebrate 50 years of marriage. Thanks to you and to everyone who made this summer so special.

Colin & Jen's Guestbook page

Confessions from a B&B

2011-06-28T16:00:00.000+01:00

Pienza entrance - apropos of nothing.

When did people become so attached to their i-thingy electronic notebooks? Broadband isn't an option so far from the exchange I explain; and explain again. We even tried very hi-tech but the surrounding hills block the satellite signal. Thanks to our dodgy dongle 3G connection we'll get by at mere kilobytes per second when the wind is blowing in the right direction. Meanwhile fibre optic cables are inching towards us and as I write they are about 6.5km down the long and winding road. Perhaps before they arrive we might have launched our own satellite. There's bound to be an internet guide to DIY space hardware. If only we had a better connection!

Perhaps we should make a virtue of our unplugged status. (We recently astounded a nine year old who simply couldn't believe we don't have a telly. Clearly, he's never seen Italian TV!). Ditch the hand held devices folks and really get away from it all.

We've been receiving guests since mid-March and, at varying levels, there are guests from now until the end of September. We've worked out that only about 10% of enquiries result in a booking. This is probably down to the internet with folks firing off half a dozen speculative emails at a time. You couldn't do that in the days of snail mail or usuriously expensive international calls. We've also noticed that the likelihood of booking decreases as the number of questions increases. You can get quite pally corresponding with some people - and then suddenly, nothing. Nobody has yet asked about WiFi access by email. However, it's a popular first question when people first arrive. Is it just taken for granted now?

Based on queries I have to confess that if you're looking for sandy lagoons, nightclubs or theme parks then you're probably barking up the wrong tree. If you want clean air, the sound of birds, deer and wild boar, the sight of a big pink moon, and crystal clear night skies, then it might fit the bill. That with a bit of art, culture, Italian food and conviviality thrown in. In actual fact – believe it or not – there are those who come to Italy for the first time who think the 50 miles to Florence is a bit much. Others want to do it all – Rome, Venice, Verona, Milan, Guarda, Como, Maggiore and Pompeii! Good luck with that unless you can teleport. To those who want a private terrace and pool & a cookery course I have to say gently; you need to up your budget quite a bit. And sorry, but you can't stay B&B but self-cater using the outdoor wood oven.
It's been a long dry season with the mercury reaching 40ºC (104ºF old money) yesterday. The lawn has gone beige and a bit crispy. We must be due a good storm I would have thought which should see us right... but please not until we've repaired the lawnmower after it's encounter with a big stone. With a lot of watering our tomatoes, chill-peppers, aubergines, courgettes, rhubarb, beetroot, sunflowers and corn are bearing up. The scent of the sage, thyme and basil seems only intensified by the heat.

Our third apartment – La Luna – is finished I'm happy to relate. It's painted the lovely clotted cream colour that complements the chestnut beams. We've built a patio off the bedroom . We've rehabilitated an old wardrobe and an old bed (new mattress, don't fret!) and installed some new hand-made bedside tables which are attached to the wall so there's nothing to dust underneath or behind. Wish all the rooms had these. One day! The bathroom is cleverly tucked in under the stone staircase that leads up to the loggia of Il Sole. Intrepid motorbiking Brits arrive today – it's first occupants.

La Luna bedroom

Four finches have finally flown the nest which was on the loggia of the B&B house. It was lovely to see, but the mess made the loggia unusable. As soon as they'd gone other birds began to bring nesting materials. In an effort to prevent it I've hung little mirror ball Christmas decorations and placed a soft toy near where they nest. It seems to have done the trick. Another bird repeatedly attacks its own reflection in the windows leaving little marks of wagtail spit that require daily cleaning. Mirror balls have done the business there too. Now, shards of light dance all around the dining room. I wonder if our night fever 70s disco breakfasts might compensate in the promotional stakes for the lack of WiFi.

Real Tuscany

2011-05-27T16:59:00.000+01:00

The mercury has nudged 30°c on several occasions over the last couple of weeks of unremitting blue sky and sunshine. The lawn remains green under shade, but the exposed areas are parched and turning beige.

The Pool

Good job we finally got the pool filled at the beginning of May. Eight huge tankers of water just about brought the level up to the skimmers, with a blast from the tap completing the job. Some pool guys came to give us maintenance lessons which have added new tasks to our daily routine such as skimming off the flotsam at frequent intervals and randomly rescuing insects ! I was surprised to learn you have to 'hoover' the bottom! Nowadays you can get robots that spend the day crawling around looking like a cross between an armadillo and a mini-Dyson. Perhaps, one day we'll be able to afford one of these.

This month also saw us get our old 1500 litre gas 'bombola' replaced with a 3000 litre capacity tank. Sorry to mix metaphors, but it's like burying a 1 megaton submarine in your back garden with the conning tower just breaking soil. Huge craters made the landscape look disturbingly like the Somme for a while. A few flicks of the JCB bucket smoothed it all out though, while the caterpillar tracks helpfully chewed up and trampled brambles, which up to this point had refused to die. I am in awe of the digger. I never wanted one as a little boy, but I do now! The old tank looms like a giant vacuum flask on the carpark awaiting collection.

Bedside table

The rennovation of 'La Luna' - the third apartment - is almost complete. Bathroom and kitchen tiled, stone sealed, doors planed and waterproofed, kichen re-installed. There are some bathroom and kitchen fittings yet to add, then we are painting it the same shade of clotted cream that we painted La Margherita in the B&B house. A patio area of reclaimed stone, will complete the job, but it is a daunting task unless the weather breaks. Serendipitously we found some bedside tables for La Luna at an artisan & antique fair in Cortona. Following the William Morris dictum, the design is both beautiful and practical – they fit to the wall so you don't have to clean underneath them or behind them. We bartered a bit and got them for a reasonable price from the guy who made them. We were lucky, most things at the fair have two prices – stratospheric and astronomical.

Cortona: Note - No fountain

Cortona is such a tourist trap partly because it's heart-achingly beautiful, but largely because of Frances Mayes memoirs Under The Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. The saccharine hollywood version includes scenes of a fountain in Cortona's main piazza which doesn't exist in reality – it's entertaining to watch droves of tourists looking for it. There's a bit of a Frances Mayes industry these days – some publisher has even persuaded her to put her name to a Tuscan interiors book! It's reached it's tacky apotheosis when cafés are touting “Tuscan sun salads” in a desperate bid for reflected glory. Better to read Too Much Tuscan Sun by an Italian tour guide that satirizes the genre and has some marvellous tales of tourists who swallowed hollywood's Tuscany but couldn't cope with the real one.

Call Off The Dogs

2011-04-30T14:25:00.000+01:00

“If your life is all sipping cool white wine in sun-drenched mediaeval piazzas, I am going to have to kill you”, so went the commentary on the last blog entry. I thought I'd better issue a corrective.

Easter Bread from the Forno

First off, bloggery is - partially at least - a publicity exercise. I want to let everyone know about the historical towns, art, culture and superb produce in this little corner of the world. Oops, there I go again! A friend - also in hospitality - told me it's commercial suicide to write anything that might suggest that life here is less than perfection, but everyone knows that nobody, except perhaps the filthy rich, is entirely shielded from quotidian reality.

There's nothing remotely romantic about emptying a septic tank, or cleaning the pool lining inch by inch with pan scrubbers in 35 degree heat. Neither are we exempt from ironing, or paying the bills. It's a big house with large grounds - mowing the lawn, pruning the trees, protecting the woodwork, polishing the windows, repairing the fences, watering the plants, cutting wood, turning the compost, stabilising the terraces and getting revenge on the brambles – I could go on - keep us busy round the clock. And there has never been so much dusting to do! Making beds, cleaning bathrooms, washing, making bread & granola, squeezing oranges, cooking dinners, more dusting!

We do it for the guests who are the compensation. Not just because they pay to stay either! We delight in hospitality and meeting people of many nationalities and walks of life. We enjoy the conviviality of breakfasts and dinners and get a lot of pleasure when guests like the food or share our enthusiasm for a town or a restaurant we recommended. We genuinely want to make being here a memorable experience.

Of course, anyone with a new business will tell you how anxious the outset can be. Every time there's a lull in bookings, pessimism rules. Imagine you put on a big party that you'd planned for ages, you sent out the invitations, but nobody turns up; you get close to the feeling! The flood of bookings we got for Easter was gratifying though, even if it did have us running around like headless chickens for a while. As long as you're cool on the surface, nobody notices.

There, I got all that off my chest without mentioning the perplexing labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy which drives me nuts. I'll save that treat for another blog. You can call off the dogs now.

Click the Trip Advisor badge to the right to see some new reviews of Tenuta Savorgnano.

Rag Bag of Tales

2011-04-08T15:54:00.007+01:00

Piazza del Duomo, Orvieto

This post will be a bit of a rag-bag of tales as it's a month since the last entry. Time flies. A piece about a visit to the splendid cities of Orvieto and Montepulciano has been gestating for a couple of weeks, so it makes sense to begin there.

Orvieto

Lower rungs of hell - God loves you!

You know when you reach our sleepier neighbour Umbria, because as soon as you pass the border sign the roads are narrower, pock-marked and pot-holed. Infrastructure maintenance isn't a priority there probably because they invest a lot in maintaining some magnificent towns and cities. Living in Eastern Tuscany we are only twenty minutes from the border making gems like Assisi, Gubbio, Perugia and Orvieto very accessible.

Orvieto is laid out on a 325m high plateau of volcanic tufa. This makes the entrance to the city quite extraordinary. You ascend from the car parks through tunnels in the porous rock on a series of escalators or else take the funicular at the eastern end of the town. Heaven knows what they did in the days of yore! There are several routes up all around the city and the buildings at the top are identical so make a careful note of where you emerge. If you don't you might find yourself wandering around trying to find the way back to the car or the station. The streets are narrow, which makes GPS navigation unreliable. This is experience talking!

It's position between Rome and Florence means Orvieto is very firmly on the tourist trail. It's lively and bustling, morning, noon and night in a way that many Umbrian towns are not. Shops, cafés and restaurants are aimed at the tourist as you would expect, but there are some good artisan shops and a couple of high class stationery shops, where they sell those gorgeous bottles of coloured inks with wax seals and books of handmade paper. It's lovely just to wander the ordinary residential streets and soak up the atmosphere. It's impossible to get lost as all roads eventually lead back to the very Gallic Piazza del Duomo.

If it's a fine day it's do as we did and sit in one of the pavement cafés with a glass of the local crisp white wine and marvel at the Duomo.

Mosaic

The monumental façade of the Duomo is spectacular – the best I have ever seen here. 52m high and recently spruced up it's resplendent with columns, spires, bas-reliefs, sculptures and dazzling colours. We stood at the top of the steps admiring the helical columns with their quasi-Islamic mosaic patterns – vivid golds, blues, greens and reds. Then on turning 'round and looking down the steps, I noticed the Star of David inlaid in the marble pavement. This bringing together of the three dominant monothestic religions made me think that Dan Brown might have a field day here spinning it into a barmy theory probably involving an ancient soroptomist conspiracy. No sooner had the thought occurred than we were accosted by an elderly Italian gentleman. The conversation started off quite reasonably as he made the point that the Duomo didn't belong to the Catholic Church but to the commune. He told us how the harvests were bartered for stone and how the masons were paid in produce and then suddenly took a Dan Brown turn throwing in demons, dragons and papal conspiracies. He continued to regale us with the one true path to Jesus as we retreated muttering, “Non capisciamo” (We don't understand). He moved on to his next victim.

Montepulciano at Dusk

We left Orvieto and returned to Tuscany taking the back roads and swinging past the renaissance perfection of Pienza. It was built by Pope Pius II who thought his birthplace of Corsignano was a bit too modest so it replaced it with Pienza. Today the town is practically wall-to-wall Pecorino. There must be a dozen cheese shops here all selling the same sheeps cheese in various stages of maturity with the older ones on the highest shelves looking quite sooty. The town actually smells of cheese – no kidding. We arrived in Montepulciano at sunset, just in time to get a couple of photos of castellations against the reddening sky.

The euro-breakfast

Guests have been trickling in since mid-march. So far we've had folks from Brazil, Germany and England. We thought it might be very tricky to get breakfast right for such a diverse audience. We make our own fresh juices, wholemeal bread, fruit bread, fruit puree, and granola. We also have local organic yoghurt on offer, butter, vegetable spreads and fruit spreads. People always seem to drink the fresh juice and will also usually have coffee or tea, but nobody has yet taken everything on offer. A little perturbed we asked if anything was wrong and it seems that just like me, nobody eats very much breakfast at all. One thing is clear though, for Italians breakfast might be short but it is always very sweet!

Jodie & Andy after their big day out

Wedding bells

Two of our guests – still here at the time of writing – went to Rome for the day on Wednesday where, at the Trevi fountain, Andy got down on one knee and asked Jodie to marry him to thunderous applause from on-lookers. Fortunately she said yes. I dread to think what the rest of the holiday would've been like if she'd said no! Congratulations to them.

Florence, Florentines & the Dalek invasion.

2011-03-08T21:45:00.001Z

We decided to mark my birthday with an excursion to Florence. We travelled from Arezzo by rail getting the slow train by mistake. There must've been a station every 200 yards - or so it seemed - the fifty minute journey expanded into an hour and a half. It was nice to look past the industrial sprawl that litters the Arno Valley (fair enough, you can't put your factories in the mountains) and out to the hills, the fortified towns and villages and the lines of cypress trees thought of as classically Tuscan.

Having gorged on ancient art already, museums and the galleries were off the agenda. On the agenda was a visit to BM Books which bills itself as the original Florence outlet for literature in English. I was hoping to find some new titles I'd seen reviewed. I've read a fair bit of fiction lately which is unusual for me, but it was really only to substitute for the politics, polemics and philosophy I normally prefer. I read my first Italian novella recently Citta di Fango (City of Mud) set in Kabul, Afghanistan. It didn't present too much of a challenge and I think it was possibly written for the teenage/young adult market. I have no idea how it came into my possession. Anyhow, we were also going to have lunch at Dolce Vegan - a vegan pasticceria (patisserie) as I was thinking about reviewing it for The Tuscan magazine.

The usual queues for the Uffizzi and the Duomo snaked around the block - nobody it seemed, put off by the cold. The best entertainment was listening to visitors, especially the youngsters. The Ponte Vecchio was "rammed", as a young Australian satisyingly noted, the modern language and the old bridge making an interesting juxtaposition. An American girl holding court with her friends said, "I've been like studying and shit. I so like forgot what that was." She must've been all of 16! Another young American meeting her mother off the train, cheerily introduced her to Florence thus, "You'll love it here. Everything's like so renaissance", with "renaissance" stressed in the peculiar way that Americans do, exaggerating it's Francophone origins. By the way, did the young insert "so like" into every sentence before Friends blighted the airwaves?

BM Books was a delightful little place. Crammed to the rafters with English titles. I looked in vain for The Rational Optimist, Zombie Economics and The Worldly Philosophers. I suppose they are just too recent or too minority interest to have made it to these parts. Please feel free to send your old copies! The average Brit, would consider books here to be expensive. Since I'd just read Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, I settled on his Four Stories which is a slimmish volume for €16. Some of the difference is no doubt accounted for by import costs, but it's also because Italians insist that authors, publishers and distributors get properly paid. They take their literary culture seriously. http://www.bmbookshop.it/

I wonder if this is why book shops thrive in Italy? They are often open long hours and it is not unusual in the bigger towns and cities for them to open until midnight. I heard on Radio 4 Book Programme that Waterstones had closed 11 branches this year. Waterstones has dumbed down in recent years with the smaller branches adopting sections titled 'Celebrity Chef' and 'Richard & Judy Bookclub' instead of 'Politics', 'Medicine' etc. But in my old home town of Harrogate, it was the only choice. I suppose most people look no further than Amazon these days and the pleasure of a good book shop, run by people who actually read books and know their stuff is destined to become an anachronism. It doesn't look like book shops will go that way here. If I could just understand even a tenth of the stuff in them!

Dolce Vegan - Dogs Welcome

Dolce Vegan turned out to be fantastic. It would have given a Vienna patisserie a run for it's money. The display of cakes was simply amazing and I wouldn't mind betting that anyone who stumbled off the street wouldn't even realise that all it's wares are vegan. The Florentines looked gorgeous. The woman who runs it was chatty and welcoming and we noticed they were displaying our leaflets. It's in the old part of Florence, north of the centre. Ethnic food shops, young clothes designers, artisans and all manner of experimental businesses give the place buzz. I love this part of Florence. http://www.dolcevegan.it/

The last blog entry was all about linguistic clangers so I must mention that it's important to distinguish carefully in one's mind between 'cinghiale' and 'ciliegia'. It's another instance of two words I mentally mix up. If one wants the torta ciliegia (cherry pie) don't ask for the wild boar, particularly not in a vegan establishment. A slight digression I know, but I wanted to share a technique I've developed to deal with these faux pas. Just completely deny speaking Italian in the first place! Even better, used successfully, the method leaves your interlocutor feeling steeped in lingusitic ignorance. Of course you must do this in Italian. "Sto parlando Esperanto" - I am speaking Esperanto. A word of warning - it's not 100% foolproof. Freakishly, the person on whom I tried it was a competant Esperanto speaker. What are the chances? It only occurred to me after I'd slunk away (steeped in moral turpitude) that it might have been a double bluff.

Swifly back to Florence and the florentines. Around here it's take for granted that sufficient explanation for anyone's foibles or oddities is that "they are from Florence". However, I recently discovered that one such person is in fact Neapolitan! Then the penny dropped. It's a remnant of old rivalries when many of tuscan hill-towns passed backwards and forwards between the city states. For example, Castiglion Fiorentino, a little way south of Arezzo, was once known as Castiglion Aretino. Apparently the inhabitants of such places took regime change in their stride and one can imagine the exchange across the yard, "What are we today Maria, Florentines or Sienese." Italy may have ben unified about one hundred and fifty years ago, but obviously old habits die hard.

Composter

Last few days.

The last few days have been bright and sunny but cool, perfect for landworks. Pruning and chopping, slicing and lopping. We deconstructed an old shed and recycled it into a compost store. We had a bramble bonfire. They burn fiercely like fine wire wool. It feels like revenge for the cuts and scratches I have endured. Brambles won't give up without a fight and I am still pulling thorns from various parts of my body. Moreover, everyone's at it. The hills are alive with the sound of chainsaws and the clanking of logs dragged by tractors. They have all the right gear. We've got secateurs. We had lunch outside on the swing seat today. A gargantuan salad with lollo rosso, ruccola, carrot, beetroot, olives, capers, white beans, toasted almonds, sweetcorn, bottled artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes. A creature not unlike a teradactyl flew overhead - it's shadow on the ground drawing our attention upwards. A low-flying military helicopter emerged noisly from behind a hill, it's rotars pummelled the air - thud, thud, thud. Hope it doesn't presage the Dalek invasion of Savorgnano. We took our mugs of tea and headed indoors.

Mumbo Italiana

2011-02-13T21:45:00.000Z

My Penne

I thought I could speak Italian before I arrived, but now I'm worried I might sound a bit like a Tarzan and look like Grommit. You know, sentences stripped of prepositions and conjunctives, randomly in the appropriate tense. I'm saying this because however much forethought I've given to my utterances, sometimes, the locals look at me 'gone out' (the current idiom I believe).

So much depends on the correct articulation of vowels, the scope for error is enormous. Pizza is singular, Pizze the plural - for feminine nouns. Simply substitute "o" for an "i" to pluralize a masculine noun. Well in most cases, but not absolutely every one annoyingly! So you see a slight mistake might come across like this, "We would like two coffee." It gets the request over the net, but it doesn't sound right. Anyhow, in the effort to sound the vowel, from this side of my face I think my mouth moves like Grommits does. Perhaps this is what distracts the shopkeepers. They're tranfixed by the visuals and paying scant attention to what I'm actually saying.

     Sometimes the wrong word gets lodged in the brain. "Volpe" for example instantly translates in my head as "Wolf". It's like word association. If someone says "black" automatically "white" pops out of the subconcious. Same with "rough" and "smooth". Except "volpe" actually means "fox". Somehow it approximates to Wolf in my head. The conversation with the sweet ninety-year old neighbour of a friend thus went:

Neighbour: I used to keep ducks and hens but the volpi (meaning foxes) ate them all.
Me: What there are volpi (mental image of wolves) around here?
Neighbour (puzzled): Of course there are, they are everywhere.
Me: (sounding sceptical) Are you sure?
Neighbour: (impatiently) Of course I am sure.
Me: (sounding more sceptical) Let me get this right, volpi (mental image of wolves) ate your chickens.
Neighbour: (looking at me gone out): Yes, they ate my chickens.

I could've got into a zoological argument here but my Italian wasn't up to it and anyhow, I was in a hurry. By the way, I do know there are wolves in Tuscany but they are few in number and rarely go near human habitation.
     You won't believe this, but sometimes it pays to imitate a Scots accent when speaking Italian. The rolled "r" can be vital to meaning as a friend once found out when informing the waiter (who looked at her gone out), "I don't eat dog". "Carne" you see is meat, and "cane", dog. Mind you, the English menu she was looking at did have an intriguing dish of Tepid Hypocrites!
     Which brings me very neatly to a faux pas I've worried about all week. I asked the waiter at my favourite Anghiari Pizzeria if the Penne was without meat. He looked at me gone out. Did I linger over that double "nn" long enough or did I say "Pene", which unfortunately means penis.

Signs & Wonders

2011-01-31T20:00:00.000Z

We finished a feverish bout of sign making yesterday evening. All hand cut in wood and painstakingly painted. There's a sign for each apartment, signs to direct folks to the house and the car park, and little boundary defining signs that read 'Privato'. No translation required! I tried several times to get a decent photo of them, but none reflect exactly what the eye sees. The picture here was the best of a bad bunch!

Tell Tale Signs

Gradually, inroads into the schedule of little jobs that need doing are being made. Having earthed every fitting and appliance around Christmas time (see previous bloggery) we've completed the electrical section by installing better lighting in the main kitchen and fixing new lamps over the mirrors in the guest bathrooms. The lamps are modern but the opaque white glass shades add a touch of the traditional and remind me of those you saw over gas mantles way back when.

White walls and chestnut beams are heavenly, but if you eat too much candy you're gonna get sick. Today we've been mixing coloured pigments into cauldrons of white tempera. Not to be mistaken for the mouth-watering crispy batter in Thai establishments, most urban Brits and a good many others aren't familiar with this material. It's the stuff your great-granny used to whitewash the coal house with. A simple water based suspension of pigments, breathable, superb chalky finish and ecologically sound. You can buy a vat of it for a handful of beans here.

Tempera

A slight digression, but those renaissance masterpieces in the Uffizi were painted with similar stuff but stabilized with egg albumen. (I never missed an Open University broadcast as a kid!)

We were aiming for the yellowy colour of real vanilla ice-cream. At first it looked a disturbingly psychedelic acid yellow. Thankfully, a few hours later it settled back to a shade slightly more yellow than Devon clotted cream, but we can live with that. We only used about 50ml of the pigment to 14 litres of tempera. The lessons of life aren't learned in a day!

Long nights and short grey days clearly get some Brits thinking about holidays. We've had lots of enquiries and we've sold about 50 nights so far. At the moment it looks like our season kicks off right at the start of April. Unless you come sooner.

A Place In The Sun

2011-01-14T16:05:00.001Z

TV programmes would have you believe that after you've found your place in the sun you bask on the patio with a glass of Chianti. Wrong! It's true we've had some fine and warm weather already and the year's barely two weeks old. For us that's meant a bit of a switch from internal maintenance - Tenuta Savorgnano is 300 years old after all - to getting out and working on the land. Apart from things that always need attention like clearing leaves, pruning back unstoppable laurels and chopping wood, we've been hacking back the flora generally and opening up some superb views of the surrounding hills. Clearer definition of the contours of the terrain revealed south facing terraces which must once have been cultivated. We intend to gradually reinstate the terraces with their supporting stone walls for horticulture as well as aesthetics.

Today the smaller house of Tenuta Savorgnano is split into three apartments but in the past it was as a shop known as "La Botteghina" - the little shop. It served a collection of disparate hamlets scattered over a wide area but connected by 'vicinale' - narrow unmade roads and foot lanes. Recently we discovered an old foot lane between our car park and the old church leading down to a wider vicinale which criss-crosses a beck and joins with lots of old lanes. It's over-grown now and a bit of a precarious route as evidenced when we emerged from it covered in sticky-buds and spiked with thorns. We'll open it up at some point as it would be a great place for the guests to start a walk.

For a break from work we took a walk along some of the old lanes and discovered long abandoned cultivation - intact terraces with old woody vines. We also found off-the-beaten-track hamlets with tumbledown houses and barns and just occasionally the odd restored house. We felt nostalgic for the old ways of the contadini (subsistence farmers) - but it must have been a very hard life. Occasionally, you meet older locals and snippets of information about this life emerge. It feels like an obligation now to think of some way to preserve their story. The pictures here are of a little bridge that crosses the beck near Savorgnano and the hamlet of Monticello which someone is attempting to revive.

Happy mid-winter festival

2010-12-25T18:43:00.000Z

I just couldn't bring myself to write "happy holidays" like they do in North America out of some strange 'culturally sensitive' notion that it avoids the elephant in the room which is Christmas. There I've said it! But let's be clear, Joseph, Mary & the baby Jesus, the shepherds, three wise men, lowing cattle and Seraphim stretches credulity a bit. It's as likely as say, Santa Claus. However, like anyone else enduring the geographical inconvenience of being in the Northern hemisphere, I welcome a bit of tinsel and few fairy lights to illuminate the long nights. From here on in the days will lengthen and lighten.

I keep hearing about the 'terrible' weather in the UK - we've had our share of snow too. We took ourselves off on a walk to Ponte alla Piera a few kilometres down the lane in forty centimetres of snow. Even the wintry days can be luminous as I hope the photos will attest.

Actually It's Easy Being Green.

2010-12-16T14:10:00.000Z

When we got an electrician to remove a socket and a light switch from a shower cubicle a few months ago it was clear the original installer wasn't exactly thinking clearly. The electrician joked that one could dry one's hair whilst taking a shower! Now the evidence accumulates that earth wiring is anathema to Italian electricians. We've been putting up new light fittings and discovered earth wires tucked back into the cable ducts in every case. Our forensic forays beneath the plaster also reveal a fondness for electrical tape over connecting blocks. Anyhow, we've corrected the most egregious misdeeds and the modern wall lights and chandeliers look great in a rustic context.

Winter of course means maintenance and we've been clearing the land of dead leaves and gathering up branches and twigs to use as kindling for the wood burner. And what a boon the wood burner has turned out to be. Not only does it keep the place at a comfortable 21 degrees or thereabouts, but it's carbon neutral. All the CO2 it produces is happily guzzled by the forests around here and turned into more wood. Furthermore, you can cook on it! We've done hotpots, soups and stewed fruit. This lunchtime we re-heated pizza made last night and it was bubbling hot!

I've been reading a lot lately about eco-gadgetry to aid low-impact living. Ground source heat pumps, combined heat and power systems, wind turbines, triple glazing, photo-voltaics and passive solar panels. You could spend a fortune to save the planet and a few bob. But installing low energy bulbs, using the wood-burner, one-pot cooking and refining the art of the two minute shower made me think about how easy being greener is. It doesn't have to involve buying yet more stuff or developing complex skills. Don't let any TV entertainment or sales people make you think otherwise.

Food Glorious Food

2010-11-17T15:59:00.000Z

Ortobono - San Leo di Anghiari

When Tuscans aren't thinking and talking about food usually it's because they're eating it. The lanes around us have been full of foragers for the last few weeks indulging their passion for berries, funghi and chestnuts. A succession of festivals celebrate this bounty. Indeed, our last set of guests at the end of October came specifically for 'Festa della Castagne' - the festival of chestnuts, just a few miles away from us at Caprese Michelangelo. This series of little festivals culminates in the 'Enogastronomia' which takes place in Anghiari late October/early November. Many local producers literally set up shop in cellars around the town for the best part of a week and the steep narrow lanes and alleys buzz with convivial chatter.

You don't often see chutney in Italy, but we came across a local organic producer turning their fresh produce into relishes. Only the day before they returned from the BBC Good Food Show in Glasgow. We had bemoaned the lack of a fresh pasta shop in Anghiari, but clearly we hadn't looked hard enough because it turns out there is one. Even better, it's on the way to what's become our favourite Organic Grocery, Ortobono at San Leo di Anghairi. The people who run it are lovely and generous and stuff our bags with freebies everytime we visit. You have to agree that's much better marketing than a nectar card!

Gradually, we're finding our tribe here in our little corner of Tuscany: the folks who are committed to small individual enterprise, to fairly produced, clean foods and to keeping money circulating in the local economy for local benefit.

Finestate - End of Summer

2010-10-03T10:17:00.000+01:00

Since the last blog post we have had to switch from lumberjack and maintenance into host mode with a succession of guests. Thanks - Carol-Anne, Jenny & Julie from Leeds, Bradford and Burley-in-Wharfedale, Sue from Leeds, Jim & Sharn and Bee & Tony from our old stomping ground of Knaresborough and Malcolm & Darren who have their own Bed and Breakfast in Vellano near Pescia - for a very convivial September.

The end of summer is marked by myriad festivals and celebrations in towns and villages across Tuscany. Thematically food looms large with festivals of Porcini, Wine and Grapes, Tomatoes, Olives and even sometimes specific dishes like the festival of Potato Ravioli! Serendipitously we came across a slightly different festival in Lucignano last weekend: The Festival of Days Gone By. We wanted to show a couple of our guests this picturesque little backwater whose thunder is usually stolen by the neighbouring tourist magnet of Monte San Savino. We also wanted to visit the BioCafe – an Organic not-for-profit concern – which I am reviewing for the next edition of Tuscan Living Magazine. Streets were decorated with piles of pumpkins and lined with stalls selling foods and crafts and all through town locals were dressed in Victorian costume and giving demonstrations of old trades ands ways of life. Wood turning, cane weaving, grape pressing, pottery, spinning and knitting and pasta making were all represented to name a few. Music was provided by accordians and home spun percussion instruments.

Festivities continue later in the month with a whole slew of Chestnut celebrations and believe it or not, we have a couple of guests from Yorkshire coming all this way for those! Marvellous.

Lumberjacking

2010-09-06T16:37:00.002+01:00

We are lumberjacks and we're okay.... We spent our weekend on the war against disorder - trying to whip this unruly landscape into shape. Cut to ribbons clearing thickets of brambles & roses which took revenge, springing out like razor wire with chunky thorns which tore my lip and Pauls nose. You couldn't tell the blood from the blackberry juice!

To preserve the weekend peace we used handsaws to cut down self-seeded oak and ash trees. The sheer physicality of the effort was exhausting, and although we began early to take advantage of the cooler morning, we still ended up soaked in perspiration and plagued by muscle tremors. For a while it looked like hurricane devastation with twigs and leaves scattered widely. We tidied up sawing and salvaging trunks for fuel, and gathering the rest of the debris into a high pile to make a habitat for all manner of wildlife.

We uncovered old vine canes & twine, brooms made from bundles of twigs and ancient makeshift shovels. There are some colossal wooden barrels in the woods and the side lanes and we discovered hand blown green glass demijohns a few weeks ago: all evidence of viniculture. Indeed, vineyards are often edged with roses since they are vulnerable to the same diseases as vines, which are manifest in the roses first enabling early treatment of the vines. I should add that we also found productive vines growing up oaks and birches but this means the grapes are suspended about thirty feet up!

Usefully we found that we need never buy roof tiles again, both kinds needed for the Roman cotto style were in the undergrowth in large numbers. We will “harvest” them in neat piles on pallets. Less welcome finds included: an old inflatable lilo mysteriously with cyrillic script on it, half a football filled with cement, wide bore plastic tubing, paint tin lids, some old blankets, partially degraded plastic sheeting, and a perfectly clean and legible address label for an architect in Modena.

Even in September the afternoons are too hot for toil & on Sunday we took ourselves to The Bio Cafe at Lucignano a gorgeous hilltown about 20 kilometres south east close to Monte San Sovino. As the name suggests, the cafe is organic and acts as a retail point for local organic producers. We're in a similar market so we thought it was time for apple juice and introductions. Our host was charming, plying us with Italian cider which was delightfully crisp and, as it was served in a flute, hardly distinguishable from Prosecco. No bad thing in my book! He was so full of infectious enthusiasm for the produce that we bought cider, vegan pesto, green tea & cantuccini. The cafe is not-for-profit and deserves support and encouragement have a look at http://www.biocafe.it/ for more information. Also consider Lucignano if you're in the area, it's nicer than nearby Monte San Savino which inexplicably gets all the plaudits.

Whilst at the cafe we amended our website http://www.vegetarianbandbtuscany.com/ & were thrilled to discover a very enthusiastic trip advisor review from a guest who stayed in the middle of August. She especially liked the food and referred to us as “chefs” which thankfully is not a legal title! Have a look at http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ under Tenuta Savorgnano.

We returned at about six which allowed us a couple of hours work before sundown. We took out half a dozen more trees and simply laid them out on the car park for stripping later. Earlier we'd made a cauldron of wholewheat pasta, bean & vegetable soup with herbs and garlic which we poured over day-old bread and consumed in a trice. A night-cap of local dry Vin Santo rounded off the day.

Message to the Planet

2010-08-24T16:04:00.000+01:00

Scientists at CERN you can relax now. We've found the missing dark matter – It was in our swimming pool. If you need it for anything (like a Unified Theory of Everything, for example) we've put it on the compost heap.

Geno Junior, one of our resident toads was bold last night. He sat by the kitchen door in a little depression in the ground and posed for photos.

All this science & nature is going to be so useful if my interest in Trivial Pursuit ever revives.

Ferragosto & Lorenza's Birthday

2010-08-18T15:52:00.000+01:00

A great tradition here in La Bel Paese is the August hiatus. Just as the flow of tourists reaches it's peak and they can't land planes fast enough at Pisa, Firenze & Perugia, a good seventy-five per cent of businesses owners pull down the shutters for two or three weeks! This is a double-edged sword. On the one had it signals that a few weeks down-time isn't commercial suicide. Anglo-american culture might take a lesson from that. On the other hand it's a time when it's impossible to get anything done. Indeed, it's prolonging our lack-of-internet predicament as the telecom transnationals aren't even answering the phones at the moment.

In Italy, if nobody is putting on the entertainment we make our own. Right in the middle of the month comes Ferragosto, a national day of celebration, on August 15th. This year it coincided with Lorenza's (pictured) 50th birthday and about 50 of us gathered at the Priest house for another party.

This time they were prepared for our strange dietary requirements and we had starved all day having learned from the previous experience. Vegetables in tempura batter, roasted onion foccacia, crostini with funghi,/tapenade/ pomodoro secco, panzanella, a lorry load of salad and delicious white beans cooked with sage and smothered in a very intensely flavoured olive oil... After which the pasta course arrived!! Various aperitifs, digestifs (an excuse!), home made vino rosso and an excellent vin santo. We feasted and ended up feeling like fois gras geese.

Well past dark everyone sang “Auguri Compleanni a te”. The tune is Happy Birthday To You so it wasn't too much of a stretch. Then we all stood in a semi-circle around Lorenza while she opened the gifts and read the greetings. During the proceedings Elio, who's only two and a half, excitedly helped unwrap the parcels all the time pleading for one of them to be a 'trattore' – a tractor. Lorenza must have received at least four watches amongst other stuff. At the end of the proceedings Elio finally got to open a parcel by himself which turned out to be a scooter. He quickly forgot about the tractor.

Cake for breakfast

2010-08-07T16:12:00.001+01:00

Just for interest I thought I'd add a couple of pictures of the large house before it's conversion in 1993. Our living accommodation is actually made from the old animal pens. We wouldn't have been brave enough to take it on in such a state. It's amazing what you can make out of a pile of old stones. So far in the grounds we have found old keys, scythe blades, a hand blown demijohn, a sort of dolly tub that folks used to do the washing in, a lawn roller - but sadly no gold. What are fragments of mediaeval pottery worth?

We have a couple of Italian guests in at the moment. This morning we enquired if they'd like a herby mushroom bruschetta for a special Sunday breakfast. They replied, "That would be weird!" They prefer to stick to jam tarts it seems. We're going to have to get to grips with this and come up with some sort of internationally acceptable breakfast. We were once given cucumber for breakfast in Turkey. It was alright really!

Ready at last!

2010-08-02T18:29:00.000+01:00

An update is long overdue but we've been up to our eyes and ears cleaning, painting, polishing, varnishing and trying to whip the unruly landscape into some semblance of order with the help of family and friends. Amidst the chaos we had a couple of real paying guests from Knaresbrough. They were cheating really because they're spending the summer couple of hours away from us but came to check us out anyway. We hadn't had time to hone our hospitality skills, but we somehow managed to produce something that passed for breakfast and dinner on both days they stayed. Fortunately, they thought the place was all rustic charm and the Knaresborough connection meant they were willing to forgive a bit of amateurishness. Thanks Rich & Rosi!

Not having an internet connection out here in the wilderness has severly hampered our blogging efforts, but more importnantly, it's holding up the launch of our website on which everything depends. We're too far from the telephone exchange to have a decent cable service and so we're pinning our hopes on satellite broadband and praying that next week this too will be sorted out. We have however, had a trickle of bookings from Italians who stayed here when the place last took guests – nearly four years ago!

Unhappily I cannot claim that our language skills are improving all that much. All this in-house activity has left us little time for mixing. We can cope with ordinary situations without too much trouble, but talking on the phone to Telecom Italia stretched me to the limits. Tell them to slow down and they set off talking again at mega velocity. All is not gloom though – Last Sunday a couple of ladies and a dog dropped by on the pretext of needing some sage (it's abundant in our garden). Before they left they invited us to lunch down the lane at the priests house. When we arrived at the appointed time three tables were set and we had lunch with 24 members of the extended family! Even though they had cooked rabbit for lunch they didn't let on if they thought our vegetarian requirements odd and produced a feast for us – much more than we could possibly eat. We were full after the first course and I think they thought we were real lightweights as they put away mounds of food at lunch time. The alcohol flowed freely too... Paul moderated his intake, but I drank several glasses of local red wine, a huge glass of Vin Santo, a cherry grappa and a herbal liqueur. This improved the language skills no end and there was much mirth, merriment and leg pulling with the head of the household asking me if I'd have to go home and take tea in bed all afternoon. I may have been tipsy, but drink or not, I can still recognise a sleight on the British character! Glad to say we now have a standing invite every Sunday for the summer. It was heart warming to feel welcomed.

Contacts

Tenuta Savorgnano,
Località Savorgnano I Marzi 5

Subbiano, AR 5-52010

Italia

Phone: 00 39 0575 422010

Web: http://www.vegetarianbandbtuscany.com/

Tenuta Savorgnano Website II

2010-06-17T20:33:00.001+01:00

Finally we have put up a holding page while the website is being perfected. We hope you'll put the link on your website or profile (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al) and help us with search engine rankings. You'll find it below.

Our contact details are:

Tenuta Savorgnano

Loc. Savorgnano 5

Subbiano AR 52010

Italia

+39 0575 422010

The phone is not yet operational but should be sorted with a couple of weeks. A mobile number can be found on the website.

www.vegetarianbandbtuscany.com

Tenuta Savorgnano Website I

2010-06-09T18:33:00.003+01:00

We're currently working on the website for Tenuta Savorgnano. It's going to have an online availability and booking feature so that you can check and book instantly. I'll post the address here as soon as we have our first draft on line.

We'll also be appearing on all the major accommodation portals & vegetarian & vegan websites of several European countries.

We have been told that we can take over the old telephone number for the property and as soon as this is confirmed to us in writing I'll publish the number on this blog.

The rooms and apartments now have names:

Rooms
La Margherita (Margarite) - Twin beds, en suite shower room & access to the guest kitchen for light refreshments.

La Violetta (Violet) - Double bed, en suite shower room & access to the guest kitchen.

Il Giglio (Lily) - Double bed, en suite bathroom with shower and jacuzzi - extra single bed possible, access to guest kitchen.

Apartments
Il Sole (The Sun) - First floor apartment. Well equipped kitchen/diner, Double bedroom, en suite shower room.
La Luna (The Moon) Ground floor apartment. Well equipped kitchen/diner, Double bedroom, en suite shower room, Access to garden from bedroom.

Le Stelle (The Stars). Apartment on two floors. French doors to patio, Well equipped kitchen/diner, en suite shower room, Very large double bedroom.

The pictures here show the setting of Tenuta Savorgnano - the dramatic beauty of the Casentino National Park.

Anghiari our nearest metropolis

2010-05-23T15:55:00.001+01:00

We'll soon be ensconced in Tenuta Savorgnano & then the really hard work will begin to pull things together ready for the first guests.

We'll be offering 3 en suite rooms on a B&B basis and 3 independent apartments. Our independent guests can opt into breakfast if they wish & we can provide basic essentials - bread, milk pasta etc - on arrival by arrangement. Vegetarian evening supper with wine will be available to order.

Our food and drink will be from organic production & we'll use what's available locally and seasonally mixing Tuscan cuisine with international flavours. We'll have offerings for vegans and gluten-free options.

The pictures in this post were taken on Friday evening & Saturday morning at Anghiari - our nearest metropolis. It's a classically Tuscan hilltop fortified town with steep narrow streets. The town hosts many festivals including music and antiques and has an extensive weekly market in the summer months. The famous Bussati fabrics are still manufactured in the town and many traditional crafts still survive here.

Contact: tenutasavorgnano@googlemail.com

Welcome to Tenuta Savorgnano

2010-05-10T12:12:00.000+01:00

Having ascertained that we can legally call the business anything we want we've settled on Tenuta Savorgnano. A 'Tenuta' is simply a small farm or small-holding and 'Savorgnano' is the name of the adjacent hamlet. It's set in quite dramatic terrain - just google 'Savorgnano + Arezzo' on google maps then take a look at the satellite view. Our place is on a little worm of road that dangles from the extreme loop in the main road. I tried to paste the link in here but it was having none of it!

Time by car from airports and attractions:

Pisa airport (Ryanair or Jet2) - about 2hrs
Florence airport (Swiss/Air France/Lufthansa) - about 1hr
Perugia airport - about 1hr
Florence - 1hr
Arezzo - 20mins
Pisa - 2hrs
Lucca - 2hrs
Siena - 1hr
San Gimignano - 1hr 15mins
Anghiari - 10mins
Gubbio & Assisi - about 1hr
'Chianti' - 45mins

Of course I'd recommend other less prominent places too - Montalcino & Pienza, although a bit further afield, are heartachingly beautiful.

The picture here is of the beautiful hill top town of Anghiari which, being a mere ten minutes away, is our local metropolis.

Website and booking details coming soon.

Inside the houses

2010-04-27T11:04:00.000+01:00

Here's a couple of internal shots. The first is of the kitchen in one of the apartments and the second is a bedroom in the large house. We're in trouble if you can't tell which is which!