Tuscany Quotes

I didn't get to stop missing her. Ever. It was the thing that my life had handed me, and no matter how heavy it was, I was never going to be able to set it down. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to be okay. Or even happy. I couldn't imagine it yet exactly, but maybe a day would come when the hole inside me wouldn't ache quite so badly and I could think about her, and remember, and it would be all right. That day felt light-years away, but right at this moment I was standing on a tower in the middle of Tuscany and the sunrise was so beautiful that it hurt. And that was something.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

To me, love is more like a lending library. To keep it, we must continually renew it. Otherwise we pay a hefty fine.

The rolled toile slowly climbed up the bathroom wall. Tearing the chewed gum into pieces, the little green arms and hands secured the toile to the wall. Soon, the two-foot by five-foot, green and yellow, Tuscany toile was displayed for view. Now, the toile just had to wait for the boy to wake and step a little closer.

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

Although I am a person who expected to be rooted in one spot forever, as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.

Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional.

Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass.

Being lost is where the beauty lies. Lost in a book. Lost in someone’s eyes. Lost in a symphony so sweet it brings you to tears.” She smiles. “Lost in a beautiful floating city on a starry night. This is magical, yes? It’s being found that’s the disappointment.

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.

Those who cannot win hearts with love often control people with fear.

I’ve found life much sweeter when I choose to believe the best of others, rather than the worst.

In America, one must be something, but in Italy one can simply be.

Life is better measured in friendships than years, don’t you think?

This golden field covered in stars above - the empty night and the feeling of love.

Make it riveting! Make every scene sizzle! When it comes time to watch the movie of your life, may tears run down your face, may you scream with laughter and cringe with embarrassment. But for Goddess’s sake, do not let your life story be one that’s so dull you fall asleep during the viewing.

You will find, Emilia, life is not always a circle. More often, it’s a tangled knot of detours and dead ends, false starts and broken hearts. An exasperating, dizzying maze, impossible to navigate and useless to map.” She squeezes my hand. “But not a single corner nor curve should ever, ever be missed.

You... You're dying?" "Aren't we all? [...] I much prefer to say I'm living, don't you?

Love, in any of its forms, takes the world from a bleak pencil sketch to a magnificent oil painting.

If you deconstruct Italy, you will in the end see a grapevine, a tomato and a small boy hammering a shard of marble.

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

I know this,” Sisi said, ignoring the noblewoman’s censorious stare. “It is: Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary and Bohemia; King of Lombardy and Venice; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lorraine; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, and Parma, and Piacenza—

Each time you love—be it a man or a child, a cat or a horse—you add color to this world. When you fail to love, you erase color.” She smiles. “Love, in any of its forms, is what takes this journey from a bleak black-and-white pencil sketch to a magnificent oil painting.” She touches my cheek. “It’s the sweet fruit that paints the field and wakes our senses. I’m not saying you must be on a constant quest for it, but please, if love comes to you, if you find it within your grasp, promise me you’ll pluck it from the vine and give it a good looking-over, won’t you?

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time. I am a vampire. My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.

Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is.

Hiraeth!” Poppy cries, and claps her hands. “Do you know this Welsh word? It’s a feeling not easily translated into words. A deep longing for home, a nostalgia—a yearning—for the place that calls to your soul.

The Tuscan countryside whizzed by in a kaleidoscopic whirl of shapes and colors. Green grass and trees melded with blue sky, purple and yellow wildflowers, peachy-orange villas, brown-and-gray farmhouses, and the occasional red-and-white Autogrill, Italy's (delicious) answer to fast food.

They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

We had never before been to Italy in May, and it is truly the most wonderful month. The Lucchese countryside is a riot of colour and scent. Every road, even the busy autostrada, is lined with brilliant red poppies, making the most mundane street look picturesque. The olive trees dotting the hills are covered with silvery green and the pale cream of new buds, while the grass is tall and soft, every patch threaded with wildflowers.

They look so relaxed, so happily engaged in the present moment, these four women drinking cappuccinos and savoring the creamy cannolis.

No one ever does notice the lives of others unless they affect their own lives, Sofia reflected.

Melancholy skies and empty fields of gold grey clouds and emeralds days our love in pieces captured only by poems (of mine).

Not just a recipe book, but a genuine overview of Tuscany's culinary history and culture, a journey in images through photographs taken specifically by expert photographers.

I tear the edge from the crust and nod toward the church’s tower. “Check out that old clock,” I say. “Don’t set your watch to it,” Poppy says, dabbing her lips with her napkin. She turns to Lucy. “Like many things in life, it’s attractive and flashy, but notoriously unreliable.

I run down to meet Floriana who is breathless from her hike. She stops in the road, the last light at her back. Prickles of rain cling to her unkerchiefed, loosened hair, capturing in her the flickering russet frame of it. Topaz almonds are her eyes, lit tonight from some new, old place, from some exquisitely secret oubliette, which she must often forget she possesses. We talk for a minute and Barlozzo passes us by like a boy too shy to speak to two girls at once.

He's already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I'd like to run off with, if I already hadn't.

Pilgrims Tuscan reds and ochre hues Olive greens and skies of blue Sunlit valleys full of charm Secluded homestead and hilltop farm Over hills skim birds in flight Aromas whet the appetite Autumn rustle fills the air Revealing grace of trees laid bare Pathways meander through the vale Inviting travelers its height to scale Sunset rewards as evening ends And pilgrims to the night descend

When Gabriel returned, he eagerly opened the wine, smiling to himself wickedly. He was in for a treat, and he knew it. He knew how Julianne looked when she tasted wine, and now he would have a repeat of her erotic performance from the other night. He felt himself twitch more than once in anticipation and wished that he had a video camera secretly placed in his condo somewhere. It would probably be too obvious to pull his camera out and take snapshots of her. He showed her the bottle first, noting with approval the impressed expression that passed across her face when she read the label. He’d brought this special vintage back from Tuscany, and it would have pained him to waste it on an undiscerning palate. He poured a little into her glass and stood back, watching, and trying very hard not to grin. Just as before, Julia swirled the wine slowly. She examined it in the halogen light. She closed her eyes and sniffed. Then she wrapped her kissable lips around the rim of the goblet and tasted it slowly, holding the wine in her mouth for a moment or two before swallowing. Gabriel sighed, watching her as the wine traveled down her long and elegant throat.

His unstoppable curiosity triumphed, and Leonardo went into the cave. There he discovered, embedded in the wall, a fossil whale. “Oh mighty and once-living instrument of nature,” he wrote, “your vast strength was to no avail.”26 Some scholars have assumed that he was describing a fantasy hike or riffing on some verses by Seneca. But his notebook page and those surrounding it are filled with descriptions of layers of fossil shells, and many fossilized whale bones have in fact been discovered in Tuscany.27 The whale fossil triggered

Unlike Japan, Italy's cuisine has long centered on meat dishes. In their home province of Tuscany, duck, rabbit, and even boar would be served in the right season. I suspect that is how they learned how to butcher and dress a duck. The breast meat was glazed with a mixture of soy sauce, Japanese mustard, black pepper and honey to give it a strong, spicy fragrance... the perfect complement to the sauce. Duck and salsa verde. They found and enhanced the Japanese essence of both... ... to create an impressive and thoroughly Japanese dish!

To say that Siena and Florence have always been competitive is an understatement. In medieval times, a statue of Venus stood on Il Campo. After the plague hit Siena, the monks blamed the pagan statue. The people cut it to pieces and buried it along the walls of Florence.

More wine is poured. Voices overlap. Stars collect in the sky. The breeze carries the scent of grapes and lavender and smoke from the fire. I soak in the sweet scene, knowing this day . . . this moment . . . is one I shall re-create many times, both in memory and on paper.

His name was Paul Eluard, and he said this thing once: There is another world, but it is in this one. Ruprecht looked baffled. It's about how -- she could feel herself going red, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember what Mr Scott had told them -- like, how people are always going somewhere? Like everybody's always trying to be not where they are? Like they want to be in Stanford, or in Tuscany, or in Heaven, or in a bigger house on a fancier street? Or they want to be different, like thinner or smarter or richer or with cooler friends (or dead, she did not say). They're so busy trying to find their way somewhere else they don't see the world they're actually in. So this guy's saying, instead of searching for ways out of our lives, what we should be searching for are ways in. Because if you really look at the world, it's like ... it's like ... It's like, you know, inside every stove there's a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there's a grass blade, that's just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there's a tree, and inside every person there's a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there's a totally amazing magical beautiful world. And anything you would want to know, or anything you would want to happen, all the answers are right there where you are right now. In your life. She opened her eyes. Do you know what I mean?

Sitting up, Jocelyn rolled her head from side to side. “Been better.” “Heard you’re a doctor now.” She grabbed the thermometer. “Yes, a veterinarian.” Placing her fist on her ample hip, Mia scoffed, “You go to that fancy school in Washington State and now you don’t eat meat?” “Good Lord! I’m not a vegetarian—

Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew.

Julie went to her hotel room window to check that the Campo, the central square of Siena, Italy, was still out there.

People who hate often do very foolish things.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how, when someone tells us something about ourselves—good or bad—we try so desperately to prove them right.

we prefer to see life as it should be, not as it is

I was a plain child. But you see, planted in the right spot, we blossom. You’ll find it happens to you, too, once you find your home.

- I have the impression that we are the last people on Earth. - It wouldn't be so bad. We would have all the wine of the world to ourselves.

One who demands respect will never command it.

People who work alone know the beauty of solitude. The perhaps greater beauty of loneliness

Festina lente. Make haste slowly.

Nothing squandered, nothing cloaked.

All of Venice is tattered, resewn, achingly lovely, and like an enchantress, she disarms me, making off with the very breath of me.

Faith is a deep and great mystery. To tell her that I have faith in Jesus will not convince her that she too must have faith, that she must believe.

We make concessions. To get along with others. To make life go more smoothly. Even when we’d rather not.” “But that’s when life begins to lose some of its shine, don’t you think?

… dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime.

To me, spirituality is less about Sunday mass than it is about love. It’s that simple. When you treat others with love, consistently and fully, you honor your god or goddess. Some of the holiest people I know have never stepped foot in a church. And I’ve met many churchgoing, self-righteous born-again Christians that God himself probably wishes had never been born the first time.

Now we wanted to sample all that life had to offer, and we were off to a pretty good start. I’d danced under the moonlight in Tuscany, dined on escargot in a French village, and risked my life climbing into the back of a motorbike taxi in Budapest. I’d seen world-famous landmarks and met local people. The one thing I hadn’t done was achieve a non-self-assisted orgasm. Awkward, I know.

He poured, properly this time, even a little heavy. The dark liquid looked black in the glass, and she had to restrain herself from gulping it. Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew. It reminded her of somewhere else too, a place she’d never seen, let alone smelled—someplace green and unspoiled and far away, which she knew well even though she’d never been there, just as it knew her well. She felt its pull on her, as she always had. But for the moment she let its name escape her.

When Marguerite (Marguerite-Louise of France, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), caught malaria, she claimed the royal family of Tuscany was trying to murder her, but that she would, in fact, rather die than return to her husband. Louis XIV asked the pope to threaten excommunication if Marguerite persisted, and the pontiff sent her a harsh letter. She didn't fear hell, she replied she was already living in it.

It's not you it's me' she couldn't use that line. Even though it really was her and not him, everyone thought that line really meant, 'it's not me. It's definitely you.'  There was still a part of her that thought perhaps she shouldn't do it at all. In Andrew she had all the raw ingredients for a perfect life. Here was a grown-up, good-looking, solvent, generous, warm-hearted man who adored her. A man who adored her even when she looked like the loch ness monsters little sister and had a terrible temper to match. It didn't take a huge leap of imagination to see Andrew standing at the top of the aisle, looking back at lou walking towards him with a grin as wide as the English channel. She could see him painting the nursery yellow; pushing a pram that contained two lovely brown haired twins (one boy, one girl); presenting her woth an eternity ring on their tenth anniversary, taking the twins to school, teaching them how to play football on long, summer holidays in Tuscany, giving the daughter away at her own wedding, cosying up to Lou on the veranda of their perfect house as their retirement stretched ahead of them- a long straight road of well-planned for, financially comfortable and perpetually sunny days.  'oh god' Lou poured herself a vodka.

It was March in the Napa Valley, just under sixty miles north of San Francisco, and Joy Lammenais’s favorite time of year. The rolling hills were a brilliant emerald green, which would fade once the weather grew warmer, and get dry and brittle in the summer heat. But for now, everything was fresh and new, and the vineyards stretched for miles across the Valley. Visitors compared it to Tuscany in Italy, and some to France

In 1891, Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Fredrick Augustus, the heir to to the Saxon throne. The Prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, 'Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams an Ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood's dreams.

St. Galgano was a 12th-century saint who renounced his past as a knight to become a hermit. Lacking a cross to display, he created his own by miraculously burying his sword up to its hilt in a stone, à la King Arthur, but in reverse. After his death, a large Cistercian monastery complex grew. Today, all you’ll see is the roofless, ruined abbey and, on a nearby hill, the Chapel of San Galgano with its fascinating dome and sword in the stone.

Spending money for things we don't need also makes us think we can't afford to pay a fair price for things of precious value- like healthful food, great art, and inspired entertainment that celebrates mankind's creative spirit.

Via Banchi di Sopra and Via Banchi di Sotto These main drags in town are named “upper row of banks” and “lower row of banks.” They were once lined with market tables (banchi), and rents were paid to the city for a table’s position along the street. If the owner of a banco neglected to pay the rent for his space, thugs came along and literally broke (rotto) his table. It is from this practice—banco rotto, broken table—that we get the English word “bankrupt.

Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they had endured long hours in the grey English winter or freezing American climes, for this that they had worked and planned and worked extra hours/ The horrible feelings of stress, tension, anger and frustration that coursed through their veins every day almost unnoticed began to fade.

When it comes time to watch the movie of your life, may tears run down your face, may you scream with laughter and cringe with embarrassment. But for Goddess’s sake, do not let your life story be one that’s so dull you fall asleep during the viewing.

Caleb looked at her lips. “Your eyes are incredible.” “O-kay.” Jocelyn had to concentrate not to lean forward to touch her mouth to his. “Really amazing.” He’s right there and his lips are so full, so luscious, so close. And far too tempting to pass up.

It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. (198)

It's mostly readers of my books who come to be with us. The tours become an extension of the books. Guests want to see the places I write about. They want to be where we are. I guess they want also to feel what I feel. They want to step through a magic door.

You rob time, Fernando. How arrogant you are, taking an evening like this one as though it were some sour cherry, spitting half its flesh into the dirt. Every time you pitch yourself back into the past, you lose time. Have you so much of it to spare, my love?

And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle. Bookish people.

I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house's recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, the fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for thousand years.

We walk into the olive grove and sit in the dry grass on the bluff. The monastery and the whole world lie before us. Purples, yellows, pinks and blues but all washed, hazy, indefinite, dreamy. The world was dissolving, vanishing. And if you half-closed your eyes, you could see yourself from afar, dissolving in the haze. You could see yourself turning into light.

I wonder how it is that we go along year after year never questioning the routines we’ve set for ourselves, never wondering if it could be different. I feel as if I’ve opened a door and discovered a way of life that makes so much more sense to me. A slower pace that allows me to actually see the beauty around me. Hear the song in the sounds and feel appreciation for it all.

Reading a newspaper account of one young woman's fatal accident on a midsummer morning a few years ago got me thinking about how I would have liked to have departed before my time if that had been my destiny. If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen. She was twenty-two, the story disclosed, bright, talented, beautiful, her future spread before her like a brilliant, textured tapestry. She'd just graduated from a prestigious eastern university, had accepted a communications position with a New York television network, and would depart the following day on a four-week holiday in Europe before embarking on her promising career and the rest of her exciting life. On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have. It was then that the train hit her. Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete.

The sun still beats down warmly over the Sienese countryside in September, and the stubble left by harvest covers the fields with a sort of animal fur. It is one of the most beautiful countrysides in the world: God has drawn the curve of its hills with an exquisite freedom, and has given it a rich and varied vegetation among which the cypresses stand out like lords. Man has worked this earth to advantage and has spread his dwellings over it; but from the most princely villa to the humbles cottage they all have a similar grace and harmony with their ochre walls and curved tiles. The road is never monotonous; it winds and rises, only to descend into another valley between terraced fields and age-old olive groves. Both God and man have shown their genius at Siena.

POMMAROLA Tomato Sauce ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 small onion, minced 1 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes, or 6–8 firm fresh tomatoes, peeled ½ cup basil leaves, chopped Salt and pepper Heat oil and add onion. After 5 minutes over medium heat, add tomatoes and break them up with a spoon. Add basil and salt and pepper to taste. Cook for 10 minutes on high heat, uncovered, to reduce it. Makes 3 cups.

The University of Pisa, whose scientific reputation throughout Italy was second only to that of Padua, was informed by official decree: 'His Highness [Cosimo III] will allow no professor ... to read or teach, in public or private, by writing or by voice, the philosophy of Democritus, or of atoms, or any saving that of Aristotle.' There was no avoiding this educational censorship, for at the same time a decree was issued forbidding citizens of Tuscany from attending any university beyond its borders, while philosophers and intellectuals who disobeyed this decree were liable to punitive fines or even imprisonment. Gone were the days when the Medici were the patrons of poets and scientists; Florence, once one of the great intellectual and cultural centres of Europe, now sank into repression and ignorance.

Down every aisle a single thought follows me like a shadow: Brand Italy is strong. When it comes to cultural currency, there is no brand more valuable than this one. From lipstick-red sports cars to svelte runway figures to enigmatic opera singers, Italian culture means something to everyone in the world. But nowhere does the name Italy mean more than in and around the kitchen. Peruse a pantry in London, Osaka, or Kalamazoo, and you're likely to find it spilling over with the fruits of this country: dried pasta, San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, jars of pesto, Nutella. Tucked into the northwest corner of Italy, sharing a border with France and Switzerland, Piedmont may be as far from the country's political and geographical center as possible, but it is ground zero for Brand Italy. This is the land of Slow Food. Of white truffles. Barolo. Vermouth. Campari. Breadsticks. Nutella. Fittingly, it's also the home of Eataly, the supermarket juggernaut delivering a taste of the entire country to domestic and international shoppers alike. This is the Eataly mother ship, the first and most symbolically important store for a company with plans for covering the globe in peppery Umbrian oil, and shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano Vacche Rosse. We start with the essentials: bottle opener, mini wooden cutting board, hard-plastic wineglasses. From there, we move on to more exciting terrain: a wild-boar sausage from Tuscany. A semiaged goat's-milk cheese from Molise. A tray of lacy, pistachio-pocked mortadella. Some soft, spicy spreadable 'nduja from Calabria. A jar of gianduja, the hazelnut-chocolate spread that inspired Nutella- just in case we have any sudden blood sugar crashes on the trail.

On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have. It was then that the train hit her. Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete. If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts,” he says. “The weather, which, as they’re farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat—this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we’re planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in a life but we usually do it while we’re talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It’s the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

So often have I studied the views of Florence, that I was familiar with the city before I ever set foot within its walls; I found that I could thread my way through the streets without a guide. Turning to the left I passed before a bookseller's shop, where I bought a couple of descriptive surveys of the city (guide). Twice only was I forced to inquire my way of passers by, who answered me with politeness which was wholly French and with a most singular accent; and at last I found myself before the facade of Santa Croce. Within, upon the right of the doorway, rises the tomb of Michelangelo; lo! There stands Canova's effigy of Alfieri; I needed no cicerone to recognise the features of the great Italian writer. Further still, I discovered the tomb of Machiavelli; while facing Michelangelo lies Galileo. What a race of men! And to these already named, Tuscany might further add Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. What a fantastic gathering! The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious awe. The mystic dimness which filled the church, its plain, timbered roof, its unfinished facade – all these things spoke volumes to my soul. Ah! Could I but forget...! A Friar moved silently towards me; and I, in the place of that sense of revulsion all but bordering on physical horror which usually possesses me in such circumstances, discovered in my heart a feeling which was almost friendship. Was not he likewise a Friar, Fra Bartolomeo di San Marco, that great painter who invented the art of chiaroscuro, and showed it to Raphael, and was the forefather of Correggio? I spoke to my tonsured acquaintance, and found in him an exquisite degree of politeness. Indeed, he was delighted to meet a Frenchman. I begged him to unlock for me the chapel in the north-east corner of the church, where are preserved the frescoes of Volterrano. He introduced me to the place, then left me to my own devices. There, seated upon the step of a folds tool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling, I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano's Sybills, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter's art. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitations of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. I sat down on one of the benches which line the piazza di Santa Croce; in my wallet, I discovered the following lines by Ugo Foscolo, which I re-read now with a great surge of pleasure; I could find no fault with such poetry; I desperately needed to hear the voice of a friend who shared my own emotion (…)

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us— of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons— a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer's part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.

As Giotto’s fame grew, the pope sent a representative to Tuscany to learn more about the artist and his work. When asked for a sample to take to the pontiff, Giotto dipped a brush in red, pressed his arm to his side to make a compass of it, and with a turn of his hand made an impeccable circle on a piece of paper. “Am I to have no other drawing than this one?” the flummoxed courtier asked. “It’s more than sufficient,” answered Giotto. As soon as the pope learned how Giotto had created the sample, he immediately realized that the artist did indeed surpass all other painters of his time. As this tale spread, it gave rise to the expression “più tondo dell’O di Giotto” (“rounder than Giotto’s O”), for someone slow or dense.

I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher's looping knot and was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. I told Elisa about my achievement. “I tied up everything,” I said. “A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. My wife came home, and I tied up her too.” Elisa shook her head. “Get a life,” she said and returned to her task.

The oldest district of Massa is Rocca, with very narrow streets (but few old houses) and the church of San Rocco, which has an interesting 16th-century Crucifix attributed to the local sculptor Felice Palma. It is at the foot of the hill crowned with Massa’s most important building, the Rocca or Castello Malaspina, first built in the 11th–12th centuries. The Renaissance palace of the Malaspina family was enlarged in the 16th–17th centuries, and is of the highest architectural interest (open summer every day except Mon 9.30–12.30 & 4.30–7.30, or until 11pm on summer weekends; other periods usually only at weekends; T: 0587 44774). The Renaissance rooms are shown on guided tours every hour, as well as the medieval and defensive portions, and the walkways on the battlements.

There is a wide variety of good meat available, often simply grilled or roasted on the spit, and the preference is for farmyard animals, such as rabbit, lamb, chicken, duck and wood pigeons. The famous bistecca alla fiorentina, a T-bone steak, is always cooked over charcoal, and rosticciana is grilled spare ribs. In Tuscany, meat dishes are often stewed slowly in a tomato sauce, called in umido (stracotto is beef cooked in this way or in red wine). In the Maremma, wild boar (cinghiale) is sometimes prepared alla cacciatora, marinated in red wine, with parsley, bay leaves, garlic, rosemary, onion, carrot, celery, sage and wild fennel. It is then cooked slowly at a low heat in a terracotta pot with oil, lard, hot spicy pepper, and a little tomato sauce.

In the 16th century, after a period of decline and corrupt administration, the abbot sold the lead from the church roof, which later collapsed as a result.

It is the house of my dreams. My Tuscan dream! [Every Italophile's dream]

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