I woke early, which almost never happens to me, and I think it was the hills that did it. They had spent all of yesterday resting on their ridges in the distance, patient as cats, and sometime during the night they had stopped being something I was looking at and become somewhere I wanted to be. So I made a coffee I actually drank this time, and set off to meet them.
The road to a Tuscan hill town is half the pleasure of arriving. It climbs and folds back on itself, and every bend offers the same valley from a slightly kinder angle, until suddenly the town is there above you, the colour of toasted stone, wearing its bell tower like a hat. You leave the car below, because places like this were built long before anyone imagined arriving by one, and you walk the rest of the way on your own two feet, exactly as you should.
Inside, the streets are barely wide enough for the light. They twist and climb between tall stone houses with green shutters and window boxes spilling over with geraniums, and every so often they open unexpectedly into a little piazza where a fountain has been running for centuries without ever seeming to grow tired. I did what you are supposed to do in a place like this, which is to become pleasantly lost. I followed the smell of fresh bread down one lane and the sound of a radio up another. An old woman watched me from her doorway with the calm, uncomplicated curiosity of someone who has seen countless summers come and go and was not especially surprised by one more visitor.
I found lunch the way you usually find the best of it in Italy, by accident. A narrow little shop, cool and dim, its shelves crowded with dusty bottles and its counter occupied almost entirely by a wheel of pecorino the size of a cartwheel. The man behind it spoke very little English and I speak very little Italian, so we managed perfectly well by letting the cheese do most of the conversation. He cut me one sliver after another, and I answered each one with increasingly ridiculous noises of approval. I left carrying warm bread, a generous wedge of pecorino and a bottle of red made barely nine miles away. I ate most of it sitting on a stone wall with my feet swinging in the afternoon sun, which remains one of my favourite ways to have lunch anywhere in the world.
Later I made my way to the place I had been quietly looking forward to all day. Somewhere among these rolling hills the earth gives up warm water, and has done so since long before anyone thought to write it down. You leave the villages behind and follow roads that grow narrower and quieter until they almost disappear altogether, and there, rising gently through the open countryside, is a pool of pale green water the temperature of a held breath. I lowered myself into it slowly and then simply stopped moving. There is something wonderfully unfair about finding warm water in the middle of a wild landscape: the mineral scent of it, the softness, the way it persuades every tight muscle to let go without asking permission. I stayed until my fingertips wrinkled and the light began to soften, thinking about absolutely nothing, which is far more difficult than it sounds and infinitely more valuable than most of the thoughts I usually carry around instead.
By evening I had found my way to a villa perched on the shoulder of a hill, and I admit I let myself be thoroughly spoiled by it. There was a long pool the exact shade of blue swimming pools only seem to become in dreams, set into an old brick terrace where rosemary pushed up between the cracks, and beyond its edge the whole valley simply disappeared into distance. I swam two slow lengths and then stretched out on the warm stone at the edge, watching the hills perform their evening ritual. The greens deepened. The gold arrived. Somewhere far below, a single farmhouse announced itself by lighting one small window.
That is the view they print on the postcards, and now I understand why. A solitary stone house, a white road curling lazily over the hills, cypress trees standing to attention along a ridge, and every inch of it turning to honey as the sun slipped lower. It is almost embarrassing how perfect it is. You keep expecting to discover the flaw, a pylon, a car park, something ordinary that lets you stop feeling quite so much, but it never appears.
Later, because I was not yet ready for the day to finish, I drove back down into one of the towns for dinner and found it transformed. The stone that had been pale beneath the afternoon sun had become amber beneath the lamps. The piazza filled with little tables and the easy murmur of people who were also in no hurry, and a waiter placed a spritz before me the same colour as the last of the evening sky. I sat with it for a long while. A church bell counted an hour I had completely stopped keeping. Somewhere a scooter wandered past, and then the silence returned, and the town quietly became its own again.
There are three dresses drying over a chair tonight, warm water still lingering in my hair, and the taste of that impossible pecorino refusing to leave me. Tomorrow I think I want to give the day to the landscape itself, to the roads between the towns rather than the towns themselves, and watch the light travel across the hills from the first hour of morning until the last.
But that is tomorrow.
Tonight the piazza is still warm beneath my feet.
The spritz is nearly gone.
And I think I could stay here for a very long time.
V.
Planning a Tuscan trip of your own? See Victoria’s Complete Guide to Tuscany.
Read also: Where the Hills Begin and The Long Way Round.
