VIII.xii. Hunting Down Hilltowns

"I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself."
- Pietro Aretino

With a quick run and some luck, one can board the 9:09 southbound regionale and all of Tuscany is thrown open. Technically, the train leaves from Florence's Santa Maria Novella station one minute before the Euronight express, from Bologna, arrives, but Trenitalia's non-linear approach to time helps make the connection, and an easy jaunt into the Arno valley, an enticing possibility for the car-less.
    Arezzo, a short hour south-east of Florence, has the peculiar quality of being the birthplace of a great many important people who subsequently rarely returned. Petrarch, Piero della Francesca, Pietro Aretino, and Michelangelo were all born nearby. Even Giorgio Vasari, the first great art historian, was Aretine; in his later years he even built himself a fantastically decorated house here, going so far as to include a scene of God Blessing Abraham's Seed on the bedroom ceiling. It was all for naught, though, since the childless Vasari never spent much time away from the Medici court and was impotent besides.
    A series of frescoes painted by the aforementioned Piero, a token to his hometown, are what draw crowds to Arezzo now. The poor Franciscans have the dubious honour of hosting in their church the incursive groups of mass tourists who arrive here on day trips from Florence, keen to see the three painted walls which so iconically illustrate Saint Helena's search for the buried wood of the true cross. The cult of the fresco, something in which I wholeheartedly participate, is so strange. It pits the camera-toting traveler against the musty ecclesiastical wall, and Piero is just the start of it.

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    "Nick, what the hell are you doing?" asked Marko, bewildered as I moved between pews. We were in Colle di val d'Elsa, a ridge-top town in the Chianti. I had dragged my poor atheist friend into yet another country church dark as the Nietzschean abyss.
    "I'm trying to find a light switch, man. It's gotta be around here somewhere…" I felt the dark corner of the wall, with no luck, "there are some early Sienese fragments in here, I think. If only I could find the lights…" It took a good ten minutes before I resigned myself to looking at the paltry bits of mural in the darkness.
    I think I had developed my tenacity in fresco hunting from Mr. Di Sante, my charismatic high school classics teacher. When I was thirteen, he organized a school trip to Italy, and I went along eagerly, my first time to Rome, Umbria, Ravenna. I remember him accosting an unfortunate priest in the town of Spello, exhorting him to open his parish during the hot midday hours so that we could see some Pinturrichios.

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    After Arezzo, I had to autostop to get to Cortona, as it is a hill town with the common Tuscan trait of being virtually unreachable by public transit. Circumvented by the railroad, most of these villages survived the vicissitudes of the nineteenth century unscathed, and where one hundred years ago the citadels bled while the new towns thrived, modern tourism insures the opposite is true today. The station at Camucia, the recent valley settlement, is a steep five kilometers distant. Realizing the effort it would take to climb the winding approach, I stopped by the side of the road until a local man, driving into town to help prepare the following day's pottery festival, offered me a lift.
    Cortona is a city mostly populated by well-heeled American women who have read Under the Tuscan Sun, perhaps watched the film, and have taken it upon themselves to live out a meridional fantasy in the otherwise untouched hill town. Like Arezzo, it has been heavily gentrified, dotted with shops that sell every manner of invented local specialty. Even the Diocesan museum, which owns two exquisite Fra Angelico altarpieces both spiritually and economically more valuable than the entire town, has the gall to charge a five Euro entrance fee.
    Quite a contrast, the youth hostel in Cortona was a desolate affair that occupied a somewhat severe, decidedly ungentrified stone palace. The room where I slept had twenty foot ceilings and giant, creaking Florentine windows. Il papà albergatore, the generic Italian name for the superintendent of a hostel, was an incongruous leather jacket sporting man, keen to let the twelve Euros I owed be the end of it.
    Cortona's spectacular setting, though, is its redeeming feauture. The panorama that unfolds from the very top of the ridge on which the town sits takes in the verdant sloped of the Western Appenines, the Tuscan plain, and the mirror-like Lake Trasimene to the south. As the daylight faded, I was able to enjoy the serenity of an uncharacteristically empty place, totally devoid of its diurnal visitors, calm as the black night that surrounded its walls, besieging them anew.


A picturesque street in Arezzo


An Olive tree lined path above Cortona


Fra Angelico's famous Cortona Annunciation