Today we visited the Val d’Orcia Region in Tuscany, filled with ancient villages and roads lined with cypress trees. Jackie, our tour director, told us that cypress trees were so plentiful here because they were planted whenever new communities were started, or in this region of Italy hundreds of years ago. They were a symbol of immortality and are central to the iconic scenery of Tuscany.
Our first stop was the ancient city of Siena, where in medieval times the Black Death reduced the population from 60,000 to 8,000. Jackie gave us a very vivid account of how the Plague had devasted not just Italy but all of Europe. She reminded us of something I had heard once before, that the nursery rhyme "Ring around the rosie" is believed to refer to the symptoms of the Plague, with the "ring around the rosie" representing the distinctive rash that appeared on Plague victims, and the "pocket full of posies" symbolizing the herbs people carried to try and ward off the disease. The final line "we all fall down" signifies the fatal nature of the Plague, and I will never hear that nursery rhyme again without shuddering.
We began a walking tour with a stop at the Basilica of San
Domenico, which contains many relics of St. Catherine, including her mummified head
and a finger. I think I took a photo of
these relics but then deleted it.
The worship of relics in many of these churches, as all over Europe, seemed truly morbid, but I learned that such reliquaries attracted pilgrims, which in turn attracted money. I can understand the Shroud of Turin, but a mummified finger seemed a little strange.
Siena is known for the famous Palio horse races held each year in this square, and our tour director showed us a short film on the race. The entire central piazza, the Piazza di Campo, is filled with dirt for the race, and horses make many laps around the perimeter in what looked like a very dangerous sport. It seemed way too small for a horse race, and on this sunny day we instead enjoyed a lunch there, sitting cross-legged on the stones as many others were doing, enjoying fresh paninis from one of the many cafés bordering the piazza.
These old cities are just beautiful, with very narrow stone-paved avenues curving between buildings that are hundreds of years old. I tried to imagine how many feet had walked here before, how many primitive horse-drawn carts.
We had plenty of time on our own, and after lunch we visited some shops and ended up opposite the beautifully ornate cathedral, or duomo, in Siena. Every city we visited in Italy had a cathedral as beautiful as this one.
We stopped at a little café across from the cathedral - cafés are everywhere in Italy, and like the restaurants, once you are sitting there you can stay as long as you like (and also use the toilette). As in France, gratuities are not expected at all. Some fellow-travelers on our tour who sat down at a nearby table at the same café (and took this picture) told us later that as soon as we paid our bill (il conto), a group of pigeons descended on the remains of the complimentary chips and olives and devoured them within seconds.
After we left Siena, we boarded the coach and visited Donatello, an all-women owned winery in Montalcino, followed by a Pecorino cheese tasting at Prima Donne farm, where we enjoyed an interesting dinner featuring wine paired with music. We were told that the owner enjoyed a wide variety of music, and she had selected music that she thought paired well with the wines we were sampling. We were asked to see if we could identify what the music was: some opera, a classical piece, and a song I had not heard in at least 50 years and was the only person to identify it, We Are the Other People, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. That was a long time ago!
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