Tuscany

In which I learn about the Palio of Siena, hide from the rain in Cortona and San Gimigniano and Spoleto and eat more ricciarelli than one would think humanly possible.

One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness…one comes for life.

-E.M Forster

{Siena, Italy}

Regular readers of my letters will know that I like the travel writing of Henry James very much. Part of it, I think, is the idealized version of travel at the end of the 19th century that he portrays. Our friend Henry is always traveling by carriage, arriving in unfamiliar cities by moonlight, and sitting down to warm suppers in cozy inns. Although the reality was likely less romantic than it seems, it’s hard not to be drawn in, for example, by his arrival in the Tuscan city of Siena. He writes:

“I arrived late in the evening, by the light of a magnificent moon…”

Of course he did. After checking into his cozy inn, James walks to the heart of the city, the wedge-shaped Piazza del Campo, which, he writes, “…was void of any human presence that could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, I had half-an-hour’s infinite vision of medieval Italy.”