A Tuscan tower

While in lockdown my thoughts turned to travel. Being unable to go anywhere other than my immediate neighbourhood when doing my permitted daily exercise or running errands for people who can’t get out of their homes, I found myself looking at photos from old trips. I never did get around to writing about trips abroad over the last couple of years, which is not good for someone who once aspired to be a travel writer! Now seems as good a time as any to remedy that.

In late April of last year, we went to Montepulciano – a lovely old hilltop town in southern Tuscany. The house we rented out was actually in the old town itself, located in the narrow streets that are a short walk downhill from the central piazza. 

There were some lovely wine bars within very easy walking distance from our front door which was a great way to try the local wines, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and Rosso di Montepulciano – the main difference being that the former must be aged in a barrel for three years while the latter only has to be aged for one year (rather like the difference between Brunello di Montalcino and Rosso di Montalcino). On warm days, these wine bars are very useful as they often make use of the cellars where the temperature is much cooler, as if we needed an excuse for visiting them! 

Neither of the Montepulciano wines, of course, are to be confused with Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a wine with which I am very familiar thanks to it having been included in the ‘two bottles for a fiver’ deal that used to be a major reason for shopping in the small grocery that Allison and I used to live above.

The high point of Montepulciano – the wine aside – is Piazza Grande, the central square/piazza on which are to be found the cathedral and the town hall. The cathedral – the duomo – is striking for its unfinished façade which makes it look very different from most Italian churches and cathedrals (inside, the must-see thing that the guidebooks all mention is an ornate triptych behind the altar, although when I had a look inside there was merely a screen showing what I presume to be a representation of said ornate triptych which was presumably covering up some restoration work).

Both the cathedral and the town hall have bell towers, and this interested me a lot because I am always interested in the prospect of climbing towers. The cathedral’s bell tower, alas, is not open to the public. However, you can walk up the tower of the nearby Palazzo Communale, the medieval town hall which still performs its original function! It looked slightly familiar, which I found odd given that I’d never been to Montepulciano before, but then I realised that that’s because it looks like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

For five euros I jumped at the chance. Funnily enough, none of my travelling-companions – Allison, my parents and my mother-in-law – fancied coming along too. My guidebook (Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany) stated that there were “67 narrow stairs” following which I could enjoy “extraordinary views” of the town and the surrounding countryside.

What the guidebook hadn’t mentioned was that in order to get to the narrow stairs I had to go through the council offices – up the main staircase and through what looked like the civic archives! Quite what the people who work for the council make of this I do not know (the way to the tower clearly goes right past someone’s desk) but I guess they must be used to it, or maybe not as I did not encounter anyone else on this particular tower adventure.

These stairs led onto the main roof, from which I could look out over the Piazza Grande, and from there I could access the tower itself with its narrow wooden steps leading up to the big bell.

Fantastic! The views from the top are truly stunning; from there, tiled rooftops of Montepulciano simply fall away down the hill, and on a clear day there are wide views of the southern Tuscan countryside to be had. Lucky me, with a tower to myself and clear blue skies...

The cathedral bell tower opposite (slightly lower than my new look-out point, I smugly noted while wondering what this said about relations between the church and the civic authorities) had what appeared to be a couple of plastic chairs which led me to wonder who might be able to access and use these – junior priests sneaking off for a smoke-break was my guess, although they could have been using the tower as a means of getting away from the numbers for more spiritual purposes.

Back down, it was time, I felt, for something red and refreshing in one of those wine bars...

Florence - in, up and under the Duomo

When in Florence, the first thing that jumps out at you is the cathedral, known as the Duomo. Yes, there are many famous pieces of art as well, but when you look out onto the city from a vantage-point like the car park at the Piazzale Michelangelo (the location of one of several Davids) on the hill to the south of the Arno, it is the Duomo with its red-tiled dome, bell tower and marble façade is what grabs the eye. That is what dominates any view of the city, one of Italy’s finest.

Strictly speaking, it is the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Flore (the Cathedral of St Mary of the Flower); built to replace an old church on the same site, work began on it in 1296 and it took around 150 years to complete, although the neo-Gothic marble façade on the western end was added in the nineteenth century. The famous dome was built by Filippo Brunelleschi, one of the key figures of Renaissance architecture, between 1420 and 1436; he modelled it on the Pantheon in Rome, and used over four million bricks to build both the inner and outer octagonal domes. Glimpses of his great work can be spotted throughout the city.

That said, I do think that Peter Moore is onto something when he points out (in the excellent Vroom with a View) that it, and Florence in general, has space issues:

“There’s just no sense of space. Take the Duomo, for example … smack bang in the centre of town and topped by the red-tiled dome that is to Florence what the Opera House is to Sydney. Here we have one of the most amazing buildings of the Renaissance, clad in white, green and pink Tuscan marble. It was designed by Brunelleschi to dwarf even the great buildings of ancient Rome and Greece, but you only have to walk 10 metres before you hit another building. The dome is the largest of its time built without scaffolding, but there’s just no room to appreciate its size. And what little room that’s there is filled with thousands of people trying to get into the cathedral and just as many Senegalese hawkers trying to sell them fake Louis Vuitton handbags.”

Rather than consider such matters, though, we wanted to explore the Duomo itself, along with everyone else who was visiting Florence on a hot day in June. Getting into the cathedral itself is free (all you have to do is queue), but the rest – the bell tower, the baptistry (separate buildings, as is the case with several other Italian cathedrals), the crypt and the top of that famous dome – are places you have to pay to get in, up or down to. A €15 ticket, valid for 48 hours, covers the lot.

After paying my €15 and acknowledging that climbing the dome was out because it was already fully booked (not that I minded, as I’d done the dome of the Duomo before, on a previous trip), I made my way up the campanile, as the bell tower is known. Designed in the mid-fourteenth century by the architect Giotto di Bondone (usually known simply as Giotto, just like his fellow-Florentine Dante Alighieri is usually just known by his first name), this slender square tower is slightly shorter than the cathedral dome (Giotto’s plans had included a spire which was to have made it 400 feet tall, but he died before his great work could be completed and his successors decided against the spire, leaving the tower just under 280 feet tall). It has 414 stairs. I am not usually one to turn down the chance to climb a tower, and despite the heat (the mercury was over 30°C for most of our short trip to Tuscany, an unusual occurrence for June which has the wine-growers rather worried about how their 2017 vintage is going to turn out) I was up for this one.

I climbed up the steep stone steps, sometimes stopping to let people coming down go through (unlike the dome, which as I recall has separate ways up and down, it’s just the one staircase for the bell tower). Yes it was warm but it could be worse – ten years ago I went up the one at Pisa, which was a precarious experience not because it leans but because the steps of that one are made of marble, and it was raining at the time. Climbing the Florence campanile, there were occasional views out of the small windows – not just the cathedral dome, once again putting in an enticing appearance, but also the similar (albeit smaller) dome of the nearby church of San Lorenzo. 

I was grateful for the stops at the various levels. One had a view up through which you could see the people two levels above us standing on a metal grate; when I got to that level I naturally made sure to stand on said grate – which, I’m happy to report, has no problems with supporting 13-odd stone of English tourist.

Up top, I was not surprised to not that us successful climbers were encased in a metal cage through which we could look out over the city – most high towers have cage-like structures on the top. 

I could see across to the dome, which in my opinion makes the view from the bell tower a nicer one than the view from the dome, because by looking out over Florence from the dome you’re seeing Florence without its most famous landmark (rather like seeing Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, when you think about it). There was also the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce (the big representation of the Star of David on the front of that church has a theological message – a six-point star formed of two interlocking triangles is an old symbol of creation, expressing the eternal nature of the Holy Trinity which is itself sometimes represented by an equilateral triangle), San Lorenzo and all those red-tiled roofs of Florence stretching out to where the city ends and the hills begin.

After making my way down, I joined the queue to get into the cattedrale itself.

A church or a cathedral is usually a good place to visit on a hot day as it’s usually fairly cool inside, and it looked as though quite a few others had had the same idea. It seemed fairly spartan inside, with any effect the high altar might have being off-set by the construction work going on behind it. 

The crowning glory of the Duomo’s interior, of course, is seen by looking up to the inside of Brunelleschi’s dome with its large depiction of the Last Judgement; Brunelleschi, apparently, envisaged it as being gold in colour, but after he died it was simply whitewashed and it fell to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of the Medici dynasty who ruled Medieval Florence, to decree that it be painted with a very big representation of the Last Judgement, a project that took 11 years to complete (it was started by two artists, Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, but after the former died six years into the project the latter got help from several others).

Down below next, for entry to the crypt was included in the €15 ticket. The crypt was excavated during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and contains remains going back to Roman times although for the most part it has the remains of the previous church that stood on the site of the Duomo, a (smaller) fifth-century church dedicated to St Reparata (a third-century Christian martyr) which was, apparently, in a somewhat parlous state by the time the Florentines decided to build the present-day Duomo. The old church was apparently where two eleventh-century popes were buried. A look around yielded several slabs from old tombs as well as the grave of Brunelleschi himself, buried (like Wren) underneath his greatest achievement. In a roped-off section there was also a recess in one of the walls containing what I took to be a saint’s relic of some sort, although there was nothing to indicate which saint; St Reparata, perhaps?

Back outside, there was one more thing to do and that was the baptistry. The Battistero di San Giovanni (Baptistry of St John) dates back to the eleventh century although bits of it are thought to be much older than that – there are Roman columns inside and it’s thought to have been built on the site of a Roman temple. The first thing to marvel at, before you even enter it, are the three sets of bronze-relief doors, the most famous of which are the eastern ones which were the work of one Lorenzo Ghiberti who won a competition to design them in 1401 (actually, he won it jointly with the afore-mentioned Brunelleschi, although the latter withdrew in a fit of pique because he hadn’t won outright). Michaelangelo was so impressed with the east doors, which depict scenes from the Old Testament, that he dubbed them the Porti del Paradiso (‘gates of paradise’) although the ones we see today are replicas, the originals being in a museum; Ghiberti, by the way, also did the north doors which have scenes from the Gospels as well as depictions of eight saints.

What’s truly impressive about it once you get inside is the glittering dome mosaics, the oldest of which are from the mid-thirteenth century. Even more impressive is the fact that pews are provided so weary, sweaty visitors (what can I say? It was a hot day and I’d already climbed the campanile!) can take a load off and look up at the mosaics without leaning back too far and falling over. I marvelled at the big depiction of the Last Judgement before trying to figure out passages from the Bible the other panels depicted (there was a fair bit from Genesis before the artists decided to skip to Jesus, the Virgin Mary and – appropriately enough, given the building’s dedication – John the Baptist). 

Then I looked around the rest of the building, and wondered why it is that the font is tucked away to one side, almost as an afterthought; given that this was a building constructed specifically for the purpose of baptism, I found that odd.

Another oddity, or at least something I perceived to be an oddity, is that the Baptistry has a tomb. While the crypt is believed to have been the place where two eleventh-century popes were buried, the Baptistry is most definitely the final resting-place of a fifteenth-century antipope. Baldassare Cossa is known to history as John XXIII, although he is not to be confused with the actual, twentieth-century pope of the same name and number. Although he was elected as pope in 1410, history does not regard him as a real pope because his (sort-of) papacy occurred at a time when there were three popes, each claiming to be the one true pope and each being recognised by different countries! This unholy mess was known as the Western Schism, and it was eventually sorted out at the Council of Constance, which declared that all three popes should abdicate so that a new, single pope could be elected. John’s lasting contribution to papal history, and the reason for his burial in Florence, is that it was he who enabled the Medici family – those Medieval rulers of Florence – to get into papal banking, which was what made them very rich indeed. Burying him in the Baptistry after his death in 1419, and getting Donatello to sculpt his tomb, was probably the least they could do as a posthumous thank-you.

And on that note, it was time to leave the baptistry and go off in search of some gelato. Well, we were in Florence, and it was a hot day.

The swifts overhead

As I write, I have a sunny view over a valley in the heart of that part of Tuscany which is sometimes called ‘Chiantishire’. The village we are staying in is called Panzano-in-Chianti, and it is located on the road known as the Chiantigiana (although on the maps it goes by its numerical designation, route 222, which runs from Florence to Siena). Lunch later today will be courtesy of the local butcher, and there are no prizes for guessing what the wine will be. For now, though, the principal sounds are the bells of the church (Santa Maria, located at the top of the hill), the cicadas and the shrill calls of the swifts circling overhead.

There are a lot of swifts, and they do a lot of flying. From a superficial perspective these dark-coloured yet fascinating summer visitors look a little bit like swallows and martins but they are in fact more closely related to hummingbirds. Their wings are much bigger in proportion to their bodies, which is appropriate as they spend most of their lives in flight – so much so that the ancients believed that they didn’t have any feet (actually they do – they have very short legs with which they can cling to vertical surfaces – although their Latin name, apus, derives from the Ancient Greek a pous, meaning ‘without feet’).

They eat, mate and even sleep on the wing. They fly higher than swallows and martins, and for great distances in a matter of days – once, a bird ringed in England was found in Spain four days later. They are fast, too; the hobby, another summer visitor, is one of few birds of prey that can catch them. They do land to nest (usually in tall buildings nowadays, although holes in trees and cliffs are also used), but unlike swallows and martins you’ll never see them perched on telephone wires.

These airborne symbols of summer can be seen in towns and rural areas all over Europe and Asia between April (May in places as far north as Britain) and August; they winter down in sub-Saharan Africa. It is most likely because of their association with summer that I find it pretty hard not to smile when I look up and see the swifts.

Inferno

Professor Langdon’s back! This time he’s in Florence, although thanks to a bullet-wound in his head he has no idea why he’s there or what he’s been doing for the last couple of days. So begins Inferno, the third cinematic adventure (based on the fourth novel) of Dan Brown’s academic hero who’s played by Tom Hanks. If symbology were a real academic discipline, it would surely never have been this much fun.

Aided by a genius doctor called Sienna (Felicity Jones), Langdon has to deal with his temporary amnesiac state while deciphering clues about the work of the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) while also running through Florence pursued by the bad guys, or perhaps they might actually be good guys (given that the World Health Organisation as depicted in this movie is armed and very dangerous, who knows what side they may be on?), and an assassin dressed as an Italian policewoman. This includes a trip through the Vasari Corridor, a tour of the various secret passages of the Palazzo Vecchio (from which Langdon has, it transpires, already nicked Dante’s death mask) and a spot of breaking and entering when it comes to the Baptistry next to the Duomo. The main villain (Ben Foster; the actor, not the former Watford goalkeeper) is already dead when the fun starts, and it’s his Dante-inspired trail that Langdon must follow through Florence, Venice and Istanbul in order to stop a deadly plague of the baddie’s devising from being released and killing most of the world’s population (this being his solution to the problem of global overpopulation).

Perhaps because it’s a Dan Brown adaptation, this movie has evidently got a lot of critics riled. Having thoroughly enjoyed myself watching this in the cinema, I can’t help but think that they’ve missed the point. This is a fun caper of a movie set in touristy locations – some of which I’ve visited (although the Vasari Corridor remains a part of Florence I have yet to experience), others which I would very much like to visit – that is rather reminiscent of the Roger Moore-era Bond films in its desire not to take itself too seriously.

This can also be seen in the books – remember when The Da Vinci Code came out? There was a lot of fuss back then over Dan Brown playing fast and loose with certain historical details and conspiracy theories even though that book was never marketed as anything other than a work of fiction (and by no means the first one to kick off with a set of ‘facts’ that weren’t actually real facts) but I must say that I loved it (quite literally couldn’t put it down, to the extent that I was up reading it until dawn the following morning). I liked the film too, and the follow-up Angels & Demons adaptation – although I still for the life of me cannot figure out what accent Ewan MacGregor was trying to do there. I read Inferno a year or so ago, and liked that too; I say this as someone who enjoys reading thrillers that make the reader think a bit. At one point, you have to turn the book (Inferno, that is) upside-down several times in order to read a cryptic poem written in the form of a spiral. To any observer, this makes you look faintly ridiculous. In a way, this sums up the appeal of Dan Brown books rather well – they don’t take themselves too seriously, and while they’re very engaging books you shouldn’t take them too seriously either (they’re perfect holiday, tea-break or commute reading, in other words), a point that Brown himself seems to acknowledge by giving Professor Langdon a Mickey Mouse watch to wear. This is meant to be a bit of fun.

As well as Felicity Jones, Hanks – on good form, as he usually is – has some strong support from Omar Sy and Sidse Babett Knudsen (quite the international cast, this) although the show is almost stolen by Irffan Khan (the man from The Lunchbox) who gets to play the well-dressed, knife-wielding head of a secretive organisation called The Consortium which is based on a boat in the Adriatic and which may or may not be gunning – literally so – for Langdon. Surely a role as the next Bond villain must be beckoning for him after this?

As a film, this is an entertaining couple of hours; I really enjoyed it, and I would therefore recommend it.

Birrifico!

When we first thought of going to Turin for a few days, the first thing I thought of was that classic 1969 heist film The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine and a trio of Mini-Coopers that are driven around said Italian city with their boots stuffed full of gold bars.

To Allison, meanwhile, Turin is synonymous with Salone del Gusto, the biannual foodie festival that she attended several years ago when she was travelling through Europe. Italy is the home of the Slow Food movement and with Salone due to be held in late October we were both looking forward to sampling some artisanal Italian food (which, by the way, was the second thing I thought of).

Our journey to Turin was via the Eurostar and an express from Paris – a pleasant and relaxing contrast to flying out to Italy with Ryanair. As was the case when we went to Paris earlier this year, we were staying not in a hotel but in someone’s flat, found via Airbnb. Our host even met us at the station – a nice touch, especially as we’d never have found the flat otherwise!

When we asked her if there were any local bars that she could recommend, I naturally assumed – this being Italy – that we would be having a couple of glasses of Peroni or Birra Moretti before calling it a night. When we reached the bar and found that its name included what I assumed to be the name ‘birrifico’ – well, I assumed that to be a cute-sounding hybrid of birra and magnifico. What it actually was was birrificio, which is Italian for ‘brewery’. Yes, we had been directed to a brewpub. As if that wasn’t disorientating enough, there was a band playing Irish folk-songs to a cosmopolitan crowd, many of whom were like us in town for Salone.

The beers on offer included a wheat beer, an American pale ale, a stout (which I didn’t opt for) and a bitter – all brewed on the premises. Not what I had expected of Italy – and it was really, really good. Frankly, had it not been for the fact that I had been on the go since 5:30am, I could’ve happily stayed for a few more. By the way, should beer-loving readers of this blog find themselves in Turin, the bar is called Birrificio la Piazza and is located on Via Durandi.

I did not dwell on this too much the following morning as our pre-Salone Turin sight-seeing took in the Duomo where, like many a pilgrim, we didn’t actually get to see the Shroud (our guidebook made it clear that the one on display is a replica, and even that is covered by a special altar-cloth), and the Lingotto. The old FIAT factory is still standing despite the fact that not a car has rolled out of the place since the 1980s – it’s now a large shopping centre among other things. That said, the legendary rooftop test-track, used for part of the chase sequence in The Italian Job, is still there, accessible via the Pinacoteca art gallery, which houses a small collection of Canalettos, Matisses and a Picasso that were owned by the FIAT-founding Agnelli family. I am sure that we were not the first people who took in some high culture purely as a means of being able to walk out onto the test-track.

FIAT, by the way, stands for Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili di Torino – not, as is sometimes assumed, ‘Fix It Again, Tony’.

And so to Salone. We tried some great food, including samples of artisanal cheeses from all over Italy, cooked meats and a delicious Mac ‘d Bra. Should you ever get the chance to have one of these, I would recommend that you do. It’s a bread roll containing Bra cheese, lettuce and a special veal salsice, all of which are produced in and around the Piedmontese town of Bra, some thirty-odd miles south of Turin and the home of the Slow Food movement. In the wine section, we sampled fine Italian wines including a ’99 Brunello di Montalcino, which sells for over £60 a bottle.

As we were making our way towards the exit, we chanced across a beer stand and opted to see what they had to offer. What we found shouldn’t have come as a surprise following the brewpub experience the night before, but surprised we were. The very helpful man explained that as well as importing more quality beers than ever before from countries like Britain and Belgium (Chimay had a stand nearby) than ever before, Italy is now home to many an artisanal birrificio.

Beer, it seems, is the new ‘in’ drink among discerning Italians – and when it comes to food and drink, is there any other kind of Italian? The really surprising thing here, though, is not that they like the decent Belgian and British brands (I’d say that would be a given for any beer-loving country) but that some of them have established their own craft breweries. Plenty of this was on offer at Salone – we tried a craft Belgian-style beer called Birra Roma, the more English-style Re Ale and a few samples from the Birrificio L’Olmaia. I consider myself to be something of a beer aficionado and I was seriously impressed by the range and the quality.

Our friend on the stall wasn’t convinced that the Italian beer boom would last, but what was clear is that this is no flash in the pan. Good quality Italian beers are here to stay.

An interesting parallel can perhaps be drawn with the rise of the English wine industry; a nation famous for producing one kind of alcoholic beverage is now trying its hand at another.

A short while later, as we browsed around the nearby quality food-market that is Eataly, I noted that a wide range of quality imported beers were on offer in addition to the many decent Italian wines and the two-litre bottles that can be filled with table wine straight from the barrel (for four euros). As far as the Italian-brewed beers were concerned, though, what surprised me was that Birra Moretti now does its own grand-cru Belgian-style beer. So it’s not just newly-established breweries that are catering to a growing market.

The Italians have not only discovered good beer, they’ve figured out how to brew very good beer.

Salute!