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The semi-Buddhists of Monte Amiata

Writer's picture: Charles PitherCharles Pither

Monte Amiata is an extinct volcano in the spine of Italy, that shares its heritance with its more famous cousins Vesuvius and Etna. Situated right at the southern end of Toscana almost in Lazio, the summit at 1700metres hosts a few ski runs, while the lower slopes are swathed in a luxuriant cloak of Mediterranean vegetation. In the middle, from 600 to 900 metres, is a spectacular beech forest, cool under the green canopy and carpeted by a mulch of leaves and nuts, it is peaceful treasure chest for walkers and porcini hunters.


But it is the peaceful beauty of the gentler lower hills that became home to the Dzogchen Buddhist followers of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu who founded a centre for study and meditation in 1981. The centre grew and attracted, not surprisingly, the type of people who are attracted to things Buddhist.


The landscape is marvellous. Completely different from the open vistas and vales to the north and west around Sienna, here the hills are steeper, densely forested and closely packed together. It is a bit like Devon but squished, so that the hills are higher and steeper, the valleys deeper, the streams are convincing torrents, running through gorges of water-polished granite. Like Devon it’s green and verdant but because its 25 degrees and never frosty things just grow and grow. Chestnuts are a key crop, but so are lavender and olives. Plant a veg patch and in weeks you have a trug full of delectation. Plant a few trees and you have figs, apricots, peaches to give away. Carolyn finds it the most beautiful landscape in Italy and I cant disagree, but i am bullshitting as I havent visited all the places that she has. It is the combination of climate, geography, vegetation and the hand of man that make is so special. The hand of man because the vernacular architecture wears a heartwarming melange of form and function, and atop every hill is another village, the ochre houses glued to the vertiginous summits with an entropy unplanned but harmonious. And this is where the semi-Buddhists hang out.

We got there from Greece via the ferry from Patras to Ancona. We scuttled through Attica along the south side of the Gulf of Corinth and into Archaea, a very different landscape from the barren Cyclades. Here are needle-sharp Cypress trees and pan-tiled homesteads set against the distant mountains. It is still and very hot. We passed signs to Epidaurus which was the ancient site of the first and most famous Asclepeion where the sick and the lame came for a cure. I like it because it was truly an interdisciplinary affair; you got your herbs, your mineral baths and trips to the gymnasium, but crucially slept in the enkoimateria for a drug induced sleep or incubatio. On awakening you reported your dreams to the staff who interpreted them and came up with a therapeutic plan - you know, all the usual stuff - diet, lifestyle, exercise, cleansing baths and purgations, perhaps a tonguing from the temple snakes, nothing that you wouldn’t find advertised in the pages of the Tatler Spa Guide, and all in the third century BC. Nobody mentions how much is cost? I bet a pretty Drachma.

Then onto an empty boat, Lupetto a tiny Jonah lost in the huge belly of the ferry. There cant have been more than 100 people on board, mostly truckdrivers identifying themselves by their mantle of unhealthy behaviours. We stood on deck as the wake scribed a pencil line across a sea as flat as slate watching a molten sun disappear beneath the horizon, glad finally to be free of its frazzling blaze.



From there it was three hours to Castel del Piano along roads best described as frightful. The surface of motorways was third world, with undulations that had Lupetto airborne, and then we were on steep twisting lanes in southern Tuscany. Beautiful for sure, but punishing, and once again a white knuckle ride for Caro.

We were to stay with Veronique Motte, a sculptress (although perhaps like actress this term is now inexplicably offensive and woke and I should say sculptor) a very old friend of Carolyn’s, who lives in a new old house in the shadow of the beautiful village of Montegiovi surrounded by Semi-Buddhists.

I am sure the Semi-Buddhists first came here because he, she, or unclear, had visited the temple or had dabbled in Buddhist ideas, or had friends who had, and while not commiting to the monastery found much that they liked in the generality. They would be from somewhere in Europe, perhaps even the UK, cared for the Earth, had liberal ideals, were vegetarian and non-political and wanted a greener lifestyle. They found they could stay in a barn for the summer for almost nothing and do whatever they did, like mend things or pick chestnuts, or write, or paint, or perhaps something grander or more important. They would drive a dilapidated van, in which they sometimes slept, and got most of what they needed in Castel del Piano where there some ethnic bars and cafes, a tattooist and a Coop. Then they would try to buy a little patch for themselves and build an extension on the old stone shed and put in an earth closet and an outside shower fed from the spring, and pretty much all summer they could cook outside and quoff the simple vino robusto and live an enviable and conscience free lifestyle. It is all very appealing.




Barbara is a Hungarian architect brought up in Germany, who lives with Milan a Serbian who studied fine art, but is working as a plumber and loving it. Between them they have six languages but like many of these Euro-relationships, they communicate in English. After all the chances of a young Serbian dude being able to say ‘Hey Babe - would you like to come back to my place,’ in Hungarian is slender. English is the lingua franca nova! How ridiculous is that! They are building an eco-house in an olive grove on a steep west facing slope, hoping to live off grid, with their own water supply, and grow things. You don’t need much cash on this ticket.













Adrian is having a party to which we are invited. He lives around the corner in a stone shed with a tent, a girlfriend, a daughter, a dog and a nice firepit. He is setting up a Steiner school and has invited Chris over from the UK to help him. Chris was a teacher in Dudley before taking a job as a game warden in Botswana. He didn’t like my joke that the one was good training for the other. The plan for the school is to provide an education for the Semi Buddhist children that suits the lifestyle; how to grow radishes, make earth closets, learn chanting, salute the sun and make rafia pasta. You know the kind of thing.

The party is charming. Everyone is interesting, their backgrounds make Cluedo look like a board game; ‘Oh, yes of course, I’ve been told about you. So you’re the French Oboeist, brought up in Malawi who lives with the Portuguese Ethnographer from Beirut with the adopted Uzbek twins, in the parlour with the candlestick’. There is food and wine aplenty and someone starts the kids singing and we all have cake. Toni the bookbinder from Bolzano brings some excellent sheep’s cheese which he serves with honey. I try to demonstrate my bird song identification app that tells me the chirping in the tree is 90% a European greenfinch. Benjamin is swaying a bit after several bottles of Belgian beer and wont stop talking during the demo which with the inclusion of his voice thinks it’s 60% a turtle dove.

It is time to wander the 100 metres home, although by now it is dark with no moon and we stumble a bit on the unmade path. The fireflies blink and then vanish. It is a clear night and I suddenly remember the comet. There it is, visible the naked eye just under the plough, confirmed by the binoculars. Wondrous.




We spend a delightful couple of days with Veronique speaking a weird melange of Italian, French and English all the while glugging Vermentino, and swimming with her insistent collie Bobette. While our dogs get restless and drag us out of the house to walk in the meadow, Bobette drags you to the pool to swim with her. She’s actually old and very stiff in the hips now, but likes nothing more than paddling up and down besides her mistress or her guests. I suspect she would be pretty immobile without the daily hydrotherapy.




Veronique’s house is about shapes and form. Everywhere are her sculptures and shapes and objets trouvé.  Her inspiration comes from shape and texture, mass and form.  Here is a piece of driftwood that has become a forest creature, there are a host of troll like figures on a plate. The garden has numerous of her older pieces; Beryl Cook figures gazing heavenward or wrestlers circling. Although now in her seventies, recently for the first time she has been drawn to making portrait busts, choosing subjects from amongst the local semi-Buddhists heads that inspire her. And the choice and end product is captivating, her work finding interest and beauty in heads not classically appealing. Fascinating.


But it’s time to go and we have four days to get home in a slow smelly bus. Smelly because in the back of Lupetto we have Silvio’s Vespa.  Silvio, (the English trained, multilingual semi-Buddhist manque, Italian restaurateur from Andros - with the rope in the conservatory) has not has his lease renewed on the restaurant, and with understandable bitterness has had to decamp, and we have been persuaded to take scooter to Milan. So we wave farewell to the lovely semi-Buddhists and hit the road. Because we can't hug, Veronique stands with her arms raised in a virtual farewell embrace. In the moment she has become her own sculpture.





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5 commenti


carole.pither
29 lug 2020

My son and his girlfriend are definitely semi-buddhists - you know, the dive-instructor from Indonesia who gave up counting turtles in French Guiana to become a carpenter in the Pyrenees and the medical student with a Dutch father and Swiss/French mother currently vegetarian, not having used soap for over a year...?... Not that that has anything to do with your wonderful account of the party on Mount Amiata. Thanks for the traveller's tales - I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the blog. So what are you going to write next?!

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louisa.highhouse
25 lug 2020

How wonderful Reg, that sounds a highlight within your amazing adventure.

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Graham Smelt
24 lug 2020

Wonderful read thanks. Just to show I really have read it: there’s an NMV(no main verb) between the “hand of man”s! Maybe a colon? Is the castle quiet, calm or flat at the Castel del piano? Presumably has a piano bar. I heard a lecture from a Canadian oncologist who spent his non-medical life in the U.K. visiting Ancient Roman remains and their hospitals in particular. He told us the snakes in the aesculapean temples were to catch the vermin so keeping the place hygienic while the patients were prepared for their operations/rituals which occurred a month after arrival! Hence the snakes on the staff on all those logos. Looking forward to the next instalment as you retrace the allied armies!

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Charles Pither
Charles Pither
23 lug 2020

I know you are right Robin, but when we were students for some reason what we did was quoffing. It may have been spelt wrong but it was great fun and tasted good!

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gasballoon
23 lug 2020

Again, a wonderful erudite picture of far flung people and places - but how come you spell quoff with an "o" and I with an "a" ?

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Charles Pither and Carolyn Horton live in as much sin as possible in a windy house on a hill in Buckinghamshire with two dogs, a peculiar cat and lots of old cars.

 

 

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