A walk in the Tuscan countryside
When Nina and I travel together, I walk around a lot by myself. Today I decided to get out to la campagna. This is no easy matter when you start in the heart of Arezzo. Like many old European cities, Arezzo has expanded well beyond its walls and is surrounded on most sides by apartment blocks.
When Nina and I were up on the walls of the old fortress at the “top” of town (not far from the cathedral) yesterday or the day before, I could see that on that side of the city, the fields didn’t seem so far away, just beyond the large cemetery on a hill below the walls, so I decided to head out in that direction today. Today was a good day to tackle it because it was relatively cool.
I went out through the gate below the cathedral and immediately made two or three wrong choices, following roads that dead-ended or ended with private roads. I had to double back and stick to an unpleasant and busy road longer than I wanted to. Eventually I discovered a beautiful country road that followed a valley among hills covered in olive trees and grape vines. I didn’t manage the trifecta: I didn’t see any sunflower fields, although I saw lots of wildflowers growing around the olive trees. As I looked back I could see the walls of the fortress and the cathedral and nothing else of Arezzo. The rest of the city slopes down the other side. I walked out some distance and thought I should stop, rest, and get ready to head back. I read my book, The Dark Heart of Italy (which I’ll talk about another time), for a while at the base of a little Madonna shrine at the junction of two narrow roads on the top of a hill. At one point I saw a truck go by me and disappear down the hill only to reappear a little while later traveling in reverse. The driver had encountered a truck traveling in the other direction and the two trucks could not maneuver by each other except in this little intersection.
When I turned back, I found a way to avoid the unpleasant road I had taken by walking to the back of a large public park onto a road that led me to the back end of the cemetery I had noticed from the fortress walls. That road “ended” in a roadblock, but I found a footpath around the roadblock. (I have this in common with many Italians: I’m reluctant to let a sign or a rule stand in my way.) I managed to get all the way to the base of the fortress walls only to discover that there was no way up from there, so had to walk a long way around.
