Vintage Tuscany John
After braving the crowds and seas of selfie-sticks, Carter laps up the region’s matchless views (and wine)
AMAN who has not been i n Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from not having seen what it is expected a man should see. So said Samuel Johnson, who was forever ready with a suitable aphorism.
Suitable, that is, if you were living in the 18th Century, when the rich and titled minority wafted around Florence and Rome as part of their Grand Tour, allowing travel to broaden their minds before bringing back new ideas to influence our architecture, landscape and gardening.
The cities they visited overflowed with statues and art, some of which they bought on the cheap, or pinched when the Italians were looking the other way.
Johnson would be surprised to see how popular Italian cities have become nowadays: visitors are well advised to arrive outside the summer peak when sightseeing can be hard (and sometimes positively dangerous given the rise of the selfie-stick – the ultimate stupidity of modernday tourism).
E.M. Forster took a wry look at the early days of mass tourism to Italy at the end of the 19th Century in A Room With A View. When the young heroine Lucy Honeychurch finds herself in the church of Santa Croce without her Baedeker guidebook, Forster is expressing the horror of the intellectual at the worrying rise of the ‘uneducated’ tourist.
He went so far as to wonder whether there ought to be some sort of intelligence test imposed at Dover to weed out the truly stupid traveller.
But today’s tourists don’t come to Tuscany so much to learn as to ‘experience’. The treasures of the Uffizi or an up-close sight of David in Florence’s Accademia Gallery are stirring in their own right – you don’t really need to know their place in the history of Renaissance art in order to enjoy them.
In Florence you can assimilate the art and savour it, just as you might imbibe a glass of fine Ital- ian wine. The problem is that at busy times, it’s hard to find the space to enjoy either the art or the wine.
But though Tuscany can sometimes seem overcrowded, it’s still possible to return with plenty of treasured memories. Mine are of a pleasant three-star hotel in a place named Chianciano Terme, about 50 miles south-east of Siena, which was our base.
The Romans called it Fontes Clusinae, and made use of its thermal springs, as visitors still do.
I have good memories, too, of the Tuscan landscape, with its well-tended fields and vineyards, its olive groves and cypress trees. I like being in a countryside that has not been neglected, or turned into a theme park for townies. In this regard, Tuscany is rewarding.
The ‘Chianti Classico’ area,