• Unesco by bike

Val d'Orcia’s suggestions

We take a look closely at the effects of the renaissance "good government". We are enchanted by the landscapes and by the stories of his peasants. We have a "Last Supper", too.

Val d'Orcia’s suggestions
THROUGH THE VAL D'ORCIA COUNTRYSIDE

We leave the campsite at the foot of San Gimignano to head towards the Val D’Orcia. We postpone the visit to Siena, that is blocked by the July 2nd Palio. The close departure of Marco Menestrina and the temporary absence, always because of the thesis, of Michele, involve a plans’ change. So we load the bikes on the camper and we postpone the passage through Siena by bike a couple of days, for the conclusion of the visit in Tuscany.

We arrive in the medieval village of San Quirico, where we meet Mario and Raffaella, director and guide of the Val D'Orcia Park. In front of us lies the valley, modified over the centuries by the constant human intervention, which softened its forms to improve its cultivability and aesthetic impact, following the ideal of the so called "good governance", model of city and countryside’s management during Renaissance.

After the meeting we find the place for the camper, near the town of Pienza, our next stage, that is together Renaissance village, UNESCO since 1996, and a municipality of the Val D'Orcia, included in the list in 2004. The camp is hidden in the hills of the countryside: we get there through an intricate and insidious dirt road path. The hamlet, where are parked some campers from all over Europe, is a farm where they breed sheeps, goats, pigs, chickens and peacocks: after admiring the rural landscape, now we have been swallowed by it.

In the afternoon we visit the nearby farm of Marco Capitoni, a local farmer, who with his wife welcomes us in the cellar, telling the story of the Val D'Orcia, passed in the last century from isolation and emigration to be a popular destination for tourists from all over the world. In the cool of the cellar we can enjoy a glass of Marco’s wine, among the abundant talk, with him and his wife turned into history professors.

We go back to the camper with the sunset on the warm and fragrant Val D’Orcia countryside, walking through cypress trees on a gravel road, as in a painting. Once at the rural-camping an unexpected dinner is waiting us: an exhausting series of dishes and tasting of farm’s products, at the end of the dinner we are very full. Tomorrow we will visit the valley looking for new views in this living painting.

THROUGH THE VAL D'ORCIA COUNTRYSIDE
LIKE A PAINTING...

This valley, where everything seems to get its perfect location, is not the result of a fortuitous combination of factors. It is due to the constant work of men and women who never get tired of love their land so viscerally and they take care of it with an intelligence and a devotion, whose roots can be traced back many centuries.

In the first half of 1300 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, one of the most important artists of the time, painted an allegory of the good and the bad government. The fresco, which occupies three of the four walls of the “Hall of the Nine” in the Public Palace in Siena, through human figures represents virtues and vices respectively of the good and the bad government. On the right wall there are the effects of the good government in cities and in the countryside, and looking at the painting seems to see the gorgeous scenery of the Val D’Orcia.

Realizing his composition, Lorenzetti must have been inspired by these areas, only a few kilometers away from Siena. Here the fields on the soft hills that are green, blondes or brunettes depending on the season in which you are in, look like paintings themselves, born from the brush of some talented landscape architect; and also the small medieval villages or the isolated farms linked by long rows of slender cypress trees are part of the fresco.

Seeing this, since we are fascinated travelers, we feel that the talent and vocation for beauty are not exclusive qualities of artists, architects and writers, but flow in the blood of farmers, wine makers, administrators and, more generally, of all ordinary people who inhabit this valley.

In the evening, after having been everywhere around Val D’Orcia looking for images and suggestions, we have dinner with pork chops and the wine bottle of Marco Capitoni, our guide in Val D’Orcia, to celebrate the Last Supper, not Leonardo’s, but Marco Menestrina’s.

Tomorrow he will leave us to go back to London, with a heavy heart, with many thoughts for the new job and the bitterness to leave this project more and more beautiful. He will join us in September, on the Dolomites, for the grand finale.

 

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LIKE A PAINTING...
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