The Tuscan Hills

A hollow like a great amphitheatre, full of terraced steps and misty olives

E M Forster, A Room with a View

It felt something of a scrappy get-out this morning, scrambling around to get dressed in the dark so as not to wake our Belgian dormitory companions, and the usual dancing around sharing bathroom facilities with a large number of people all trying to get ready at the same time. Although I had woken very early, I couldn’t put the photographs into the blog without getting up, because where we were down in the depths of the hostel with thick walls the Wi-Fi signal did not reach, so I had quite a bit to do in the kitchen where there was good signal, before we were able to leave.

And we wanted to get out amongst it all!

Both of us kept darting out to appreciate the view as the sun came up from behind the hills, infusing the valleys and receding lines of hills with early morning mist, and emphasising the essentially Tuscan skyline.

There were many dog walkers out in the town, but none with such an extraordinary creature as Gigia. It was unclear what kind of breed she was, so heavily dreadlocked was she. I have never seen anything quite quite like it.

Coming down into the more residential quarter of the old city to the bar named after Napoleon Bonaparte who overnighted here, we passed several garages seemingly painted with portraits of the owners. We couldn’t decide whether this was supposed to portray a loving couple, or one of those famously lascivious Italian men who won’t take no for an answer.

Most people had managed to get away before us, so we had the road to ourselves, down from the hilltop town,

finding it hard to get going because we needed to stop frequently to drink in the subtly-changing views.

Somewhere a donkey was braying, and a cockerel crowing. We turned back at a bend in the road to look back up to the walled town, where we could just make out the brick parapet which was the wall of our pilgrim hostel.

We stuck on the road for a good while, which made it easy to gaze about us. This felt like the Italy we had had a dream of walking through.

The roadside was edged with wild fennel just turning to seed, and the low beams of the rising sun filtered white through veils of cloud to create from the branches of the loaded olive trees a white-tipped silvery grey haze above the ancient trunks, standing in their beds of dry hay.

Our road took us for the first hour along the ridge of a hill with scenes on either side from every single Renaissance painting ever.

Slowly, little by little, we passed all the other pilgrims. The group of South Koreans, dressed in thick tights with shorts over them, at least two layers on top plus wind or waterproof jackets, hats and in some cases, gloves and face protectors. The Dutch girls, sitting at a table and very sensibly pausing to really, really enjoy the view.

The road carried on pretty much straight, sometimes white chalk underfoot, sometimes loose, yellow fine-grained sand, and sometimes packed earth.

Some of the vineyards appeared to have been unharvested.

We wondered whether this was because the grape harvest had effectively been ruined by lack of rain, or whether the usual practice was to harvest later when the grapes were even more intensely flavoured and full of sugar.

We passed farm houses, some absolutely top of the range villas, with one tempting offer to taste tbe new season’s oil production,

And as ever, some completely gone to ruin.

We passed Sylvia and Bruno, and were overtaken in our turn by various groups of cyclists,

including a bombastic group of Germans who kept getting their route wrong, pelting past us and then pelting back in the other direction, raising clouds of dust each time (there were puffs of dust coming off the laces of our shoes as we undid them later — and so much sandy grit in the shower tray this evening).

We were walking through a very sandy set of outcropped rocks, through which the track had been deeply cut,

revealing the secret underground life of plants in the ochre sandstone.

Over the next hill, we suddenly transitioned into a completely different kind of landscape: bare, undulating slopes which at a different time of year might be green or golden with wheat. The geological transition to clay had with a snap of the fingers meant that grapevines could not be grown.

Against the ploughed clay the lines of cypress trees stood out even more.

Some of the weed-filled fields which looked as though they had been set aside were having their dry vegetation turned into the ground with a caterpillar-tracked vehicle and a disk harrow. Stephen commented that these steep slopes would be pretty technical to plough, and the caterpillar tracks would be absolutely essential. Later on we stopped to admire a top-of-the-range Lamborghini version.

We met the lovely Belgian couple whom we had first seen in Lucca sitting on a bench eating their lunch. They like us had been delighted with the walking today,

And the sequence of views opening up, one after the other.

We wondered what it must be like for people living on the route, seeing a river of pilgrims flow past every day, in all weathers. And in all conditions too: in the bar yesterday we had seen a sign advertising luggage transfer services, one name that I was familiar with from the Francigena Facebook site, and another who offered a service for ‘pilgrims in difficulty’.

A woman in her garden was bundling up olive prunings to put into the garden waste recycling. She had painted an iris on her letterbox. We discussed recycling and I said how impressed I had been with the systematic organisation in Italy.

We found a place to sit down to eat our lunch and just as we had finished the Belgian couple caught up with us, and we were delighted to walk with them for a while. Sibyl and François are charming people and spoke excellent English, which was a relief but also made me feel a little bad because I was quite tired and couldn’t call up much French from the depths.

Stephen and Sibyl went in front and I spoke lengths with François who told me that a few weeks ago he had been stung by a hornet and was fine for 15 minutes or so and walked on, but then collapsed and lost consciousness for a quarter of an hour. They were in the middle of nowhere, but Sibyl was able to call an ambulance, and they gave him a massive dose of cortisone in the hospital. Very frightening.

Chatting to them made the last few kilometres an enormous pleasure. We were back on the sandstone again, walking through well-to-do vineyards now, agriturismi and other high-end businesses.

In the middle of this sea of Tuscan success rose the ancient warm yellow ochre sandstone church of the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta, in Chianni, just outside Gambassi Terme. The church dates from 1200, and the plain and graceful façade in the Pisan Romanesque style projected a sense of harmony, even in the rain that had started to spit.

We were about an hour early for our arrival as check-in didn’t begin until 2:30. Sibyl and François walked on, as their accommodation was in the town itself, while we sat on a bench under a sessile oak and whiled away the time.

The Ostello Sigeric was created within the church complex and glowed with that same warm ochre light that is loved in the Cotswolds. There was a beautifully proportioned courtyard with welcoming plants in pots, and comfortable seating areas dotted around.

There were quite a few of us, including Laura, but also many we do not know, as people have begun their journey to Rome in Lucca, or even later. Many are using one of the baggage transfer firms.

There is currently an orange weather alert for this part of the world, so we have decided to rejig our rest day plans a little. We were due to be arriving tomorrow in Colle di Val D’Elsa and resting on Friday, but we’ll be bussing there tomorrow instead, to stay with our friends Marco and David, and bussing back on Friday to enjoy the by-all-accounts beautiful walk to Colle from
Gambassi on Friday instead of trudging through it in tomorrow’s downpours. Though quite how it could be lovelier than today I can scarce imagine.

We have been extraordinary lucky to have had rest day opportunities coincide perfectly with the very little rain that there has been over the past five weeks!

Stats for the Day
Distance: 23.88
Time: 5hrs 17
Speed: 4.5km/h

Room with a View moments: ALL DAY