Tuscany forests in the fall

The first one passed me as I had just left the road from Bologna. Next, as the mountains appeared. There I was, trying to keep one eye on the jack-knifing road, the other on the green chart to the horizontal gold, and then they were all around me: one, two, three, 20 motorcycle riders, all riding. going to see the autumn leaves.

So why not? Autumn is the best time to visit Tuscany: most of the summer is gone, the temperature has not yet dropped to the point where the sun rises, and when the sun rises, it washes away everything in gold straight from a photo from a Sienese School.

And then there are the prices. Nowadays, the well-known regions of Tuscany are well-developed – beautiful wheat fields dotted with cypress rivers – but originally, the famous mountains were forests. This, Foreste Casentinesi National Park, bordering Emilia Romagna in the northeast of the region, is probably the most scenic spot on the left. It is not as big as it used to be – the Renaissance Florentines cut it down to build a roof over their new palazzos houses and pillars of the most famous churches in the world. Nowadays, however, its 142 square miles[142 sq km]of beech, holm oak, and chestnut trees are gorgeous in Italy every summer.

I was here for one particular type: rich russet brown brown which falls to the ground in October each year. Even in English it translates as “chestnuts” and, to our untrained eyes, may look the same, the community will quickly correct you. Compared to regular and chestnuts, marroni and large, round, shiny and sweet. And while the boxes were used to describe the poverty of mountain dwellers (the chestnut tree is called the “bread tree”, to help those who could not grow crops because of its height) today, a review of marrons, including protection IGP (Geographical Protected View) the role of the “marrone del Mugello” of this region, is transformed into a religious mix.

Street vendors sell a mixture of marrone, cookies and marrone flour, the last of which has been burned from fruit for three months for smoking cashew nuts.

I came to the annual marroni festival in San Godenzo, a small town at the foot of an hourly mountain range northeast of Florence. It may be small, but it fills up the box when it comes to marroni – chestnut flour from here always rises to the top of Italy’s best tower, and for the past 50 years, sangodenzini, as they call themselves, has been celebrating the end of the harvest with a hurricane.

At Castagno d’Andrea – a mountain village located a few miles away, and it was named after the fruit – the main road was lined with shops for raw marrons, burning marble floors, almost boiled golf. There was a mixture of marrone, marrone cookies and marrone powder, the latter from fruits that were burned for three months by smoking cassava wood, to dry before grinding.

People are so friendly here that on my last visit, two locals paid for my lunch at the only restaurant in Castagno d’Andrea because of the embarrassment of not inviting me to come with them. Meanwhile, Noemi Innocenti, the 26-year-old librarian of San Godenzo, who had a doctorate in the Renaissance printed literature and knowledge of marroni, introduced me to marroni. intoxication and intoxication (“Fried liquor”): nuts soaked in sugar, added to rum, and baked to make the best fried nuts in the world. Then he took me to the forest.

The surrounding mountains of Castagno d’Andrea are teeming with salt marshes, but on top of the mountains the infinitely beech trees are the origin of nature reserves. Dante mentions Monte Falterona, a mountain just behind San Godenzo, inside Purgatory but in autumn and paradise. Mold molds wrap around matchsticks. The leaves are bright yellow acid on the branches, ocher down.

We walked slowly – the war veterans used this to go down to the shopping mall in Castagno d’Andrea, said Noemi – on rocks lined with moss and very bright trees, its color looking bright as the light dimmed, the noise alone. leaf fights.

The next day, I woke up in Castagneto, a small village on the other side of San Godenzo, to see fog in the valley, with glittering gold as the sun rose. As Hamlet’s name suggests, the small castles of Castagneto – along with Tenuta Mazzini, the stone house I live in – nestle in the middle of the chestnut groves, the streets are lined with conker mushrooms, and the chestnuts cling to the steep hills, the branches swaying in the air like. mentioned in Tolkien.

Usually at this time of year I go to Val d’Orcia, the most famous place in Tuscany, because of the blackness ribolita the soup and olive oil are so fresh that it tastes as if it were covered with chilli. But this year, after San Godenzo, I set off in search of another kind of autumn.

I found it in Radicondoli, 50 minutes west of Siena in Val di Merse, where golden trees were torn down by lush green fields and silver olive groves. Wild deer galloped across the fields in front of me while I ate breakfast at Albergo Giogliano, a farmhouse in the foothills of the mountain town.

Grass grows among the ancient Chiusdino rocks, its roads encircling the summit of the hill, along narrow paths.

From Radicondoli’s Piazza San Girolamo, views of the steep slopes reach Volterra and San Gimignano, but it is located far from the Tuscany honeycomb. For one thing, piazza is the main parking lot of the town. Also, the only tourist attraction on the two main streets is the “Radicondoli gymnastics show”: scarves, jewelry and small examples of farm machinery. Of course, guests love it in the summer, and there is a high-end pizza restaurant where Margherita spends € 17 – but come on November, with you and the only older men in the only bar left open.

And yet this is as beautiful as San Gimignano and so on. I went through old 14th-century houses, rebuilding and remodeling walls: stone, brick and stone, all piled high up higgledy-piggledy, ruddier and hotter than the strongest houses in the province of Florence. Roads nailed down to the starting rooms, interlocking one way to another; the last gate of the middle-aged city slammed straight into the fields beyond. The city’s most modern architecture dates back to the 1920’s: large puppet theaters, a single column and two terrifying barred windows battling artwork inside the original space.

Going farther, whichever way you looked, it was mountains, their broken color with the tips of what looked like smoke but became steam rising from the magma, seven miles under the ground, which is now being drilled and blown to form white energy. ; a line of incredibly beautiful power stations that traversed the mountains. Dante was inspired from this world of fumaroles for him Hell; Galgano Guidotti may object. Born in 1148 to a wealthy family in Chiusdino, 20 minutes south of Radicondoli, he settled on Mount Montesiepi in the valley. After being chosen as a legitimate, Cistercian abbey was built at the foot of the hill, before it was abandoned, and its roof was demolished in 1786.

Nowadays, visitors come from all over Italy to see the gothic (in both minds) Abbazia di San Galgano. Her flower window shattered and her wall fell down, and it was a bird instead of a monk, but its walls and pillars were still proud. I lived in Terre di San Galgano agriturismo, the only place I could go, so I went for breakfast – me and the bird, a mist that roamed the mountains in the distance. The vines on the Montesiepi plateau were yellow, but on the abbey there were grapes: their clusters, painted on top of poles, along with other flowering plants and plants. Among the ruins, it is an eternal spring.

Hiking up the hill overlooking the valley, Chiusdino is as beautiful as Radicondoli – and even more so, because he seems to be unaware of it. Grass grows between the middle ropes; rounded roads on top of the hill. Opportunities lead everywhere; stairs end in a house, or fall into very small squares. The dinky church has the skull of a saint, looking out from the modern rock-mass shelves that Galgano is said to have wrapped around his sword, leaving his old life (the church around Montesiepi is built around a mysterious sword that has fallen on a rock.)

As one of the most famous saints in Tuscany, the original image of Galgano was appropriately large: a 13th-century creature, encrusted with gold, with a full meter above the legs of lions and with 16 small portraits of his life. It is significant that Siena took over until 2015, when Chiusdino opened his own museum. And this is no longer a high-profile painting, here: a portrait of a soft-haired Galgano throwing his sword at a rock and Urbano da Cortona, a student of Donatello, is even better. She stands, folds her dress around the button as she holds the sword, her perfect hair protected from natural elements and the pergola of the evergreen shrubs.

Those Tuscan trees, again: marrone size, attracting a biker and, apparently, white protection.

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