Toscana by Nash . . .

A gentle tour of the wonders of Tuscany and Umbria in Frazer Nashes.

It is ploughing time in Lombardia. The flat landscape of the Po valley is scattered with the giant machines that are the today’s tractors, with names like Landini, Kubota and Deutz, groaning with the effort needed to turn the heavy clay. I am surprised, as I thought we had given up ploughing and this grey sod looks dull and lifeless. We are on small agricultural roads on the outskirts of Piacenza, empty until we meet one of these agrarian behemoths, who force us to take cover in side turnings as the pass. It is warm and sunny, and we are excited to be starting our cultural journey. We sweep into the pedestrianised centre of the city, ignoring the incomprehensible hieroglyphics that possibly inform whether we can park, load, take a bus in lent or go to mass on a moped.  We park – almost certainly illegally – just off the Piazza Cavalli and walk.

Caro has done a little guide for us, listing the landmark sites and pieces of art that we must see in the towns we will visit, and I find myself being whisked off to view the duomo and the palace and Basilica of San Antonio and the equestrian statue of Alessandro Farnese pretending to be a Roman general. The atmosphere is relaxed and cool with no bustle and minimal traffic. We stroll, have a coffee, gawp in the cathedral museum and head for the Palazzo Farnese. ‘Here it is’, she says leading me into a dark turret room of the Palazzo, ‘the Botticelli’. Beautiful, but not that wonderful in its dingy setting.

Afterwards we drive a few kilometres to our hotel, a well converted farmstead and one time monastery. Out host converses in in perfect English – well American English – as he’d spent fifteen years in the States before coming home to convert the family home into a small hotel and wedding venue. I notice that the sign on the road mentioned ‘Agroturismo’, a label we will see frequently, and I would imagine comes with tax breaks or local government support. But the conversion had been done well, and the owner was sympathetic to the weird requirements of Frazer Nash owners and their need to take bits off their cars and fiddle with them, and he fed us a good meal.  

And this sets the routine for the next ten days or so; driving through magical Tuscan countryside to a remarkable city, stopping at an equally remarkable town for a bite of lunch en route. At the end of the day an hotel of variable quirkiness, a beer or two, a trawl through dinnertime menu choices in an attempt to find a fresh vegetable and avoid cured pig, good natured banter about the sights of the day and the latest issues with the cars, soothed by wines that we have mostly never heard of. It’s all very relaxed. This is a fine group of people, all happy to be together and apart. We have an idea of where we are going and make our own choice of routes but often find we meet along the way.

And what wonders there are to be seen.

Our route takes us to Lucca, with its magnificent city walls, leafy squares and chic shopping. Like most of the places we visit the city is a layer cake: under the renaissance walls are medieval walls, beneath them Roman ruins, built atop of an Etruscan settlement. But I am struck for the first time the manpower needed for these formidable constructions.  Navvies built our railways in the 19th century. Where did the manpower come from to build these monuments with such skill and artistry? I am doing some reading . . .

Next another City State: Siena. Walking down the hill through the bustle of the ancient town and then turning the corner into the Piazza del Campo must be one of the most dazzling reveals in any city. The Torre del Mangia – all 102 metres of it – built in 1340, assertive but harmonious and scaled perfectly. 

On to the papal town of Pienza, small but perfectly formed, on a bluff with perfect Tuscan views of vineyards and cipressi, the horizon dominated by the extinct volcano of Mont Amiata. Nearby a hotel in an ex-nunnery managed by a tiny half-Mexican primary school teacher, who served us a delicious pasta meal at exorbitant cost, bursting into tears when challenged about the price.

Then into Umbria and the memorable hospitality of the Boswells, along with a chance to race the Castellana Hill Climb, having left the women folk to explore the retail options in Orvieto. Not before we had all gazed, captivated, at the Signorelli’s frescoes in the cathedral. I have to say that I am not lured by the promise of a fresco. Often, they are faded, chunks are missing, and one can find neither artistic merit nor compositional worthiness in the tatty remnants. Not here. These are by any measure extraordinary: brilliant colours, striking and unique compositions, tangible allegory and perfectly preserved. Like the Isenheim alter-piece in Colmar, this is medieval spin at its most powerful. An illiterate penitent would have got the message loud and clear. I was on the lookout for the much-vaunted homoerotic undertones – but came away unconvinced - just a few guys with prominent buttocks. I suspect the ‘undertone’ is in the eye of the beholder.

After the hill-climb we lunch at a terrace restaurant in the hilltop village of Castigliano, the cars parked just above the sheer drop to the lake below. This was the apotheosis of what this trip was all about: beauty in abundance, warm sunshine, marvellous company, super food, loads of spritely vino bianco, and the Nashes basking in showers of accolades.  

We are halfway. Now it is the Etruscan town of Savona, well off the main tourist drag and the better for it, a chance to fettle the cars, relax and walk to the Etruscan sites. Seb and Richard both have their cars in bits. Seb dared to overtake Julian on the hill-climb and upset Dynamos (my suggestion for the Roman god of generators) who vengefully removed all power from his dynamo, leaving behind his calling card of frazzled wires and the smell of burning. This was not going to be fixable, leaving Seb having to charge his battery every evening until home. But he is a Yorkshireman and a stoic and persistent fettler, and he just got on with it . . . and the oil leak . . . and the dodgy brake lights . . . and the wobbly steering. The other cars were mostly behaving themselves save for the odd misfire.

There are various spas in this area based around natural hot springs. Carolyn remembered visiting Saturnia in the seventies with a bunch of friends, on a frigid day in February. They were young and had their kit off in a jiff, cosy in the sulphurous water gushing from the earth at 37 degrees. It is a popular site, worth the visit, and must surely, be good for some aspect of health.

The places less popular were without doubt the most memorable. Pitigliano, intimate and charming, but sleepy and private. C remarked that there was not a right-angle in the whole town. Everything was higgledy-piggledy – and the more interesting on account. It also (like many of the towns we visited) seemed lived in. All the little houses, crammed down narrow passages or up worn stone steps, had colourful flowers outside, and the bright doors looked used. So different from the average French village where there is often not a sign of life anywhere.

Todi and Gubbio: who would know of their charms? But both totally sumptuous. Eating breakfast in the monastic refectory at the Annunzio hotel in Todi, such fun. The walk up the steep hill to the main Piazza truly rewarding, yet another unpretentious medieval masterpiece. We found a bar full of locals and celebrated the harvest moon with a negroni, while the indigenes smoked and prattled, Carolina an inkling of their anguish, me only guessing.

Perugia is a much bigger city, bustling and purposeful despite the tourists. The museum there, beautifully lit, spacious and stylish, with terrific English translations of all the labels, has the best collection of early Christian art I can remember. Not much else mind, but it doesn’t matter. Next to it another cattedrale. I was fascinated to try to find commonalities in the architecture of the many Duomo we visited but failed. English (and northern French) cathedrals have many architectural similarities even if they are all delightfully different. Not so here. In Perugia the nave is supported by massive round columns, but the aisles are the same height, giving the impression of one large open space. Different in Gubbio where the nave is supported by massive stone crucks without aisles, or Orvieto where conventional pillars are evident but with no clerestory. I need to read some more.

I hadn’t bargained for the scrum of Assisi. Of course, the painted cathedral of St Francis is memorable, but it is sad when the bright colours of the frescoes are down-toned by the aniline Lycra and polyester dazzle of coachloads of grockles.

Was Urbino my favourite?

Possibly. Walking up to the old fort behind the town provides a postcard view of the towers and walls, basking in later afternoon sunlight. The city is mostly made of brick, but of a soft sandy colour, which gives the ensemble a soft, roseate hue. We arrived on a Friday afternoon, and the centre was abuzz with students doing studenty things, like drinking in cafes and eating slices of pizza, hanging around and chatting. Glimpses of Fellini in the beauty of space and people. In another life I would be a student here like a shot. Not sure I would have ended up with a degree mind, more probably a half-finished volume of love poetry and urethritis.

Carolyn had brazenly asked the lady in the museum shop whether we could park the Nashes in the main square and after several phone calls the answer was yes. We swept in, all noise and bluster, to line up on the cobbles under Montefalco’s palace, now the museum, choosing a spot where the oil spots from our incontinent cars would least be noticed.

We were on the trail of the Barocci’s which Francoise had insisted we find, but first the museum, which is truly an embarrasse de riches, its setting in the grand rooms of the ducal palace the perfect place to house the extensive collection.

We found the Barocci in the next-door Duomo, grateful to the other couple in attendance, who had coins enough to feed the meter required to illuminate the masterpiece. I knew nothing of Barocci, but as always Francoise was right. Later I saw his self-portrait, and it made sense. Given the challenge of matching self-portraits by Rembrandt and Barocci to their work, even a naïve would get them right, independent of their different styles. Barocci, all piety and worry, a pinched tense face, perfectionism always leaving him short of self-belief. Rembrandt rounded and fulsome, confident, assured and generous. Thankfully we have them both.

The museum is stuffed with embellishment and decoration amongst which the marquetry stands out. The door on the left isnt open it is entirely flat. Extraordinary craftsmanship.

Our last stop is another city state: Bologna. We find it heaving on a Sunday night, but mostly with locals making passeggiata, enhanced by the weekend car ban, and the chaos of a city installing a tramline. Time only to get a sense of its grandeur and worth, and another chance to ponder the biggest question from the trip: how did they do it?

How was it that medieval northern Italy produced so many extraordinary towns and cities with magnificent secular buildings? This is not the Italian renaissance proper which came along  two hundred years later. So many of the unforgettable places that knocked me over were 13^th and 14^th century. What was the northern European equivalent during the same period? Building castles I guess – not much else in the secular domain, no world heritage sites of medieval grandeur in Colchester.

The answers I gleaned are complex. The absence of a single nation state, wealth from wool and textiles, abundant food allowing the population to explode, urbanisation with people moving into burgeoning cities, the invention of banking, trade with others near and far, and the value put upon artistry and craftsmanship. By 1300 the population of Tuscany was more than two million with both Florence and Venice being home to more than 100,000, less than London. England’s total population at the time was perhaps four million.  Surely it is also important the various city states were not constantly warring and knocking the stuffing out of each other, rather trading, steeling the best artists and doing Italianate things like having lunch and taking a stroll in fancy shoes.

Robin has booked us dinner in a completely authentic Bolognese restaurant in a basement near the centre. It is busy and buzzy, stuffed with locals, the menu laden with oddities that most of us avoid save for Adam and Anita who order tripe. Quite extraordinary how seemingly well balanced, successful, charming people can . . .

As captain, Robin announced that Bologna was the end of ‘The Raid’, and now we have to get home, four days of driving, but we will be all together for another night in Lecco and then Gutannen and Langres.

Carolina heads off early to the airport, I am picking up JP the day after to co-pilot the Nash home. What a hero to volunteer for the task, by any measure a strange and unusual punishment.