Italy's Paradise E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 549

Beschreibung

'A delicious trip through the geography, history and culture of the region' – Sunday Telegraph Ever since the days of the Grand Tour, Tuscany has cast its magic spell on foreign vistiors. Attracted by the perfect combination of history, art, architecture, superb natural beauty and weather – not to mention magnificent traditions of food and drink – British visitors and residents have been at times so numerous that the local word for foreigners was simply 'gli inglesi' – 'the English'. What is it that makes this exquisite part of Italy so seductive? Alistair Moffat embarks on a journey into Tuscany's past. From the flowering of the Etruscan civilization in the seventh century bc through the rise of the powerful medieval communes of Arezzo, Luca, Pisa and Florence, and the role the area played as the birthplace of the Renaissance, he underlines both the area's regional uniqueness as well as the vital role it has played in the history of the whole of Italy. Insightful, readable and imbued with the author's own enthusiasm for Tuscany, this book includes a wealth of information not found in tourist guides. 'A sun-drenched meditation on the character of the place and its people' – The Scotsman

Leseprobe

Alistair Moffat was born and bred in the Scottish Borders. A former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Director of Programmes at Scottish Television and founder of the Borders Book Festival, he is also the author of a number of highly acclaimed books. From 2011 to 2014 he was Rector of the University of St Andrews. He is a regular visitor to Tuscany and since 2002 has owned a house in the historic town of Pitigliano.

‘A delicious trip through the geography, history and culture of the region . . . a compelling narrative . . . impressive’

Sunday Telegraph

‘A sun-drenched meditation on the character of the place and its people’

The Scotsman

‘A cavalcade across some of the most fascinating, intriguing and, yes, brutal episodes of the region’s past written in the fast-paced, involving style of an adventure novel’

Italy magazine Book of the Week

‘If you travel to the region, you’ll want to take with you Moffat’s Tuscany: A History; and if you read the book, you’ll want to travel to the region’

The Herald

‘Moffat’s book is never dull . . . like one of the region’s fine wines, it doesn’t disappoint’

Scottish Review of Books

ITALY’S PARADISE

A History of Tuscany

ALISTAIR MOFFAT

This edition published in 2024 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2009

First published in 2009 by Birlinn Limited as Tuscany: A History

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 0 85790 056 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For Tom Pow

Contents

Acknowledgements

Maps

The Dream of Tuscany

1 Pitigliano

2 Before History

3 The Tower-Builders

4 God’s Empire

5 The Communes

6 In the Name of God and of Profit

7 Cosimo and the Florentine Renaissance

8 Murder in the Cathedral

9 Botticelli’s Tears

10 Illustrious Tuscans

11 Grand Tuscany

12 La Bella Toscana

Postscript

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

In the late summer of 1971 I found myself in Rome’s main line station very early in the morning looking for the platform for trains to Florence, or Firenze, as I discovered just in time. Almost forty years ago, in what seems like another life, I was an undergraduate at St Andrews University. Astonishing now to relate in these days of student debts and huge tuition fees, the Scottish Education Department paid for everything, all fees and a maintenance grant of £300 a year. And even more astonishing to relate, St Andrews University were about to pay for my trip to Florence, or Firenze, and give me a further grant for six weeks so that I could learn Italian and look at the great buildings, paintings and sculpture of Tuscany. My travel, bed and breakfast were all paid for, there was an immersion course in Italian every weekday morning and I was to receive 1,500 lire a day for subsistence.

Astonishing, but in 1971 education was still going on in Britain – and Italy, for anyone who could pass the exams, and all of that was considered to be not a privilege but an essential part of studying the Italian Renaissance – the ability to go and see its great achievements for yourself, whoever you were. For a young man who had been raised on a council estate, with no money past what could be earned from part-time jobs, it was the only way I could ever have beheld the marvels I discovered that summer long ago. In the Scotland of the 1960s and ’70s I was lucky to receive an education for free and it is nothing less than a tragedy that very few from my background can now afford to see what I saw in the galleries, churches and streets of the great cities of Tuscany.

I had company in 1971. My oldest and dearest friend, Tom Pow, was with me and we forged a bond then which has never wavered. This book is dedicated to Tommie with much love and in memory of all the splendours we first saw together in the Tuscan sunshine. The Italian classes were a waste of time for T.P., but the Masaccios made an indelible impression.

When I left St Andrews I was extremely fortunate to be given a place as a postgraduate at London University’s Warburg Institute. Its focus was the study of the Italian Renaissance and I had the privilege of listening to and sometimes working with very great scholars such as Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. But most of all my tutor, Sir Ernst Gombrich, taught me how to look at works of art and not to fuss too much. ‘Simplify, Mr Moffat, you must always seek to simplify.’ All the time I was writing this book, I could hear his quiet voice. I hope I listened.

Other voices require ready acknowledgement. The Insight Guide to Tuscany edited by Barbara Balletto is excellent, even enclyclopaedic, and I leaned heavily not only on the information in it but also on the keen observations. Dame Iris Origo wrote two very different accounts of Tuscan lives, The Merchant of Prato, about the fourteenth-century Francesco Datini, and her account of the Second World War as it swirled around her house and estate. War in the Val d’Orcia is a superb piece of reporting and I am grateful to Allison & Busby for permission to quote from it extensively. I acknowledge substantial debts to all the authors listed in the bibliography and recommend all the books to those interested in reading further.

My agent, David Godwin, has been steadfast and sensible as ever, and he managed to persuade my publisher, Birlinn, to do something different by taking on this project. Hugh Andrew, Jan Rutherford, Andrew Simmons and Nancy Norman have all been wonderfully helpful and supportive. Visits to West Newington House are always a pleasure. Many thanks to all.

Florence, showing key places featured in the text

The Dream of Tuscany

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British began to fall in love with Tuscany, its faded glories and half-forgotten heroes. At first a few pilgrims and artists bound for Rome lingered in Lucca, Florence or Siena, cities which lay on the Via Francigena, the old north road to the holy places and the shrine of St Peter. The famously reluctant traveller, Dr Samuel Johnson, was moved to remark that ‘a man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of inferiority’.

By the early nineteenth century the romance had begun to blossom. So many came that by the 1830s inglesi had become a generic term for all foreigners. A hotel porter in Livorno might tell a maid that ‘some inglesi have arrived this morning but I can’t tell if they are French or Russian’. Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Stendhal, the Brownings, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster all spent time in Tuscany. After he had seen the Giotto fresco cycle of the life of St Francis in Florence, Lord Byron declared himself dazzled, drunk with beauty. Other pleasures beckoned and his torrid affair with the Contessa Teresa Guiccioli led him into aristocratic Tuscan society so that he moved ‘amongst all classes, from the conti to the contadini’. No-one can be absolutely sure how much of a play on words the hot-blooded lord intended.

Much later, Dylan Thomas was also dazzled: ‘The pine hills are endless, the cypresses at the hilltop tell one all about the length of death, and the woods are deep as love.’ But like Byron and most of the others he spent his time in a miasma of indulgence: strawberries and mascarpone, asparagus and olive oil and Chianti at 20 lire a glass. Few writers managed to do much work in Tuscany as they bathed in its warmth and sensuality, strolling around the great churches and galleries and dozing, sated, in the long afternoons.

What was and remains the hypnotic attraction of a place that has appeared to be a paradise for so many? The art, the sheer antiquity, the food and drink, the fact that the climate and the landscape appear to be so perfectly in harmony – sunshine over a green and undulating landscape. Lying between the sheltering Apennines to the north and east and bounded by the shimmer of the Mediterranean to the west, Tuscany seems magical. And it looks old, and very beautiful, and very detailed. Punctuated by tall cypress trees, patterned by fields, olive groves and vineyards of every shape and size, crossed by dusty, winding roads and tracks, the landscape bears the marks of the men and women who have worked every corner of it for millennia. Perhaps more intensively than anywhere else in Europe, it has been cultivated and cared for. Between the rows of vines leading the eye into the distance, lavender is often planted, subtle purple beside pale green in the brick-dust soil. Ancient rose bushes sometimes flower at the end of the rows, climbing up the iron endposts. And yet, in the hazy sun the green, pillowy hills seem drowsy under the press of an immense past, even now closely resembling the still landscapes which peep out from behind the blue mantle of a Florentine Madonna or a martyred saint. But of course they are alive, made vivid with the memory of uncountable generations of contadini, the farm-workers who made them, the landowners who fought over them and the fire and smoke of war as armies and history rumbled across Tuscany.

The hilltop towns and riverside cities also seem old. Despite the suburban sprawl of shiny factories and freight depots, their hearts have often remained unchanged since the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Parasol-shaded piazzas show off the enclosing and imposing palazzos, and down narrow streets and lanes, 21stcentury shopfronts are crammed into crumbling façades once used by apothecaries or cobblers. Often these warm, comfortable and human-scale townscapes are no more than the result of conservation by default. Many Tuscan cities, including Florence, Siena, Arezzo and Pisa, slid into obscurity after the Renaissance, surviving only as torpid backwaters while Europe’s attention wandered elsewhere. But then the British began to come and to fall in love with it all, even if they did not clearly understand why. Amongst the dusty roads, the shaded groves and the narrow streets, a dream of Tuscany grew.

In E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, the heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, visits the great Franciscan church in Florence, Santa Croce, but having forgotten to bring her guidebook, begins to panic. She would become lost, not understand anything of the frescoes, the strange, frozen episodes in the story of the Franciscans and their great saint. And then, ‘the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy’.

1

Pitigliano

The town is asleep, fast asleep under the dark blanket of the night. It is long past midnight and in the Piazza Petruccioli only a handful of yellow streetlights twinkle. No-one is about and the silence seems deepened by the fluttering of umbrellas outside the shuttered cafés. Over the parapet by the arched entrance to the town, the ravines plunge down into fathomless blackness. And the high ramparts of the massive bastion disappear into the night sky. On the gentle breeze the warmth of the day still lingers, and there is no need to hurry, head down, through the silent streets. History waits in the shadows of Pitigliano, the story of Tuscany waits to whisper its secrets.

Many of them are to be found in Pitigliano, a spectacular hill-town built on a tongue of rock with sheer cliffs on three sides. In the southernmost quarter of Tuscany, only 140 kilometres north of Rome, it is one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements anywhere in Italy. The cliffs of tufa, a soft volcanic rock, make Pitigliano easy to defend and the fertile countryside around it has nourished its people for a thousand generations and more. The stones of its streets and houses are steeped in Tuscany’s history, and on dark, silent nights the ghosts of an immense past murmur in the gloaming.

Through the arch under the bastion is the Piazza Garibaldi and the Municipio, the Town Hall. They cower below the brutal mass of the Orsini Fortress, its hundred-foot walls pierced only by a scatter of tiny windows. The citadel sits astride the eastern approach to Pitigliano, the only one not guarded by the sheer tufa cliffs. Recognising its ancient strength, a division of the Wehrmacht set up its headquarters in the fortress in 1944. Part of the Gothic Line, the brilliant fighting retreat which slowed the Allied advance up through Italy, Pitigliano became a key centre of operations. The grey uniforms of German grenadiers were seen patrolling the ramparts, their binoculars searching the horizon for enemy movement, and below them armoured cars rumbled through the archway under the bastion, past the Medici aqueduct and into the Piazza della Repubblica. Blood-red banners bearing the black swastika were tumbled out of the high windows above the gateway to the fortress, and Pitigliano waited for the attack that would surely come.

On the morning of 7 June 1944 the townspeople heard the fighters before anyone saw them. Screaming out of the cloudless sky, they strafed the walls of the fortress and the buildings close by. Circled stars on their wings, American bombers droned over the summer countryside, the engine noise growing ever louder, and they scored direct and devastating hits on Pitigliano. They completely missed the Orsini Fortress and the German headquarters but destroyed most of the houses on the western side of the Piazza della Repubblica. Eighty-eight were killed, many of them women and children. Even in the darkness and silence after midnight, the only modern buildings in the town loom up across the deserted piazza like new tombstones in an old graveyard.

Piercing them like a sunken road, the Via Roma burrows into the maze of medieval lanes, narrow and shadowy, winding its way back into the past. Stray cats sidle warily along the street – and suddenly swim under the ancient oak doorways of storehouses and stairways. On each side dark alleyways open, running away downhill towards the houses which perch on Pitigliano’s cliffs. Five hundred years ago all of Tuscany’s towns were like this. In Florence, Pisa, Lucca and Siena people lived piled on top of each other, densely packed, constantly in contact. Gossip, news, argument and laughter left only the wealthy and the pious with anything like privacy or quiet. And unobserved under the cover of the night conspirators met and muttered behind their hands.

Just as the canyon of the Via Roma seems to crowd in overhead, it suddenly opens upon an apparition. The ghostly white marble façade of a cathedral rears up, and an ancient medieval bell-tower soars away into the night above it. St Peter and St Paul look down from their niches, the pillars of Holy Mother Church, its rock and its founding theologian. But the telling dedication, what explains this startling building, is to be found on a discreet street sign. Beyond the shadows of the Via Roma is the Piazza San Gregorio VII and it commemorates the greatest of medieval popes. Born into the Aldobrandeschi family, the lords of Pitigliano, and known as Ildebrando before he was crowned with the tiara, Gregory VII achieved political miracles.

Elected in 1073 by the College of Cardinals, he promulgated a remarkable document, the Dictatus Papae, the ‘Supremacy of the Pope’. For the first time it elevated the doctrines of papal infallibility, of the right of popes to nominate all bishops and established that God’s Vicar on Earth was supreme over all other rulers. And despite the fact that Gregory had no army to back his huge claims, he forced their adoption.

After Charlemagne had been crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800, and had revived and reinvented the Holy Roman Empire, the ancient title had been held by a succession of powerful German kings. When the challenge of Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae became clear, the Emperor Henry IV threatened war, mustered armies and planned an invasion of Italy. The impertinent pope would be deposed. But what became known as the Investiture Contest eventually degenerated into a humiliating defeat for the German emperor.

When Gregory VII excommunicated him, casting Henry and his family out of the Church, denying them the sacraments and condemning them to eternal damnation, the emperor’s authority began to crumble. The winter of 1077 was more severe than anyone could remember, but Henry and a small imperial party were forced to make a dangerous journey across the Alps. At the end of January they reached the castle at Canossa in the mountains on the northern borders of Tuscany. There Pope Gregory was under the protection of the powerful Countess Matilda, and when news of the Holy Roman Emperor’s journey to Italy became known, an attack on the fortress was expected. But behind its walls the Holy Father would be safe.

To the astonishment of Gregory and his supporters, no attack came and instead an extraordinary sequence of events took place. Without attendants, having put aside his royal robes, Henry IV walked barefoot through the snow, and below the gates of Canossa he begged the pope for forgiveness. For three days, dressed in rags, the greatest prince in Europe stood alone and pleaded to be taken back into the arms of Holy Mother Church. And on the fourth day, triumphant, Gregory relented. Absolving the emperor of his sins, accepting his penitence, he received Henry once more into communion with the Church. The amazing story of Canossa spread like wildfire. The papacy was now a European power, able to humiliate emperors and bend them to its will and the will of God.

The cathedral at Pitigliano is an unexpected monument to the events of the winter of 1077, almost buried amongst the jumble of medieval houses and winding lanes, but it is no more unexpected than Ildebrando’s invention of the modern papacy. In a gloriously Italian version of respect, his name is often seen in the trattorias of the town, on the labels of an excellent local white wine.

Beyond the Piazza San Gregorio VII runs the street named after his family, the Via Aldobrandeschi. It descends to the oldest part of Pitigliano, the Capisotto, which lies at the very tip of the tongue of tufa rock. The lanes on either side are wider and tumbling out of terracotta pots and tin pails, small flower gardens line the walls and in the balmy summer night their scents float in the soft air. Below the steps up to the church of San Rocco, a spout spills ice-cold water into an ancient cistern. At the end of the street is an open space, the Piazza Becherini, but it is no larger than a courtyard. In the darkness the drop below its parapet can only be guessed at.

The sheer cliffs conceal more secrets. They are hollow with tunnels, old passageways chiselled out of the soft tufa rock which honeycomb under the streets. Sometimes entered from the base of the cliffs, often from openings under Pitigliano’s houses, this cool subterranean maze is now used to store wine, cheeses and hams. But once it had another, darker purpose. Some of the oldest tunnels were originally sepulchres, the last resting-places of a mysterious people.

Two thousand years ago the brilliant civilisation of the Etruscans was slowly flickering to a close. For seven or eight centuries this rich and gorgeous society had extended all over Tuscany. It gave the place its name. Etruschi is derived from Tusci and it is cognate to the Latin turris, and it seems that the Etruscans were first known as the tower-builders. Versions of them still stand. Famously in San Gimignano, in Florence, soaring in Siena, in Volterra and most appropriately at Tuscania and Tarquinia, not far north of Rome, the towers of the old cities punctuate the horizon. And on the Capisotto, at the western tip of Pitigliano, there was an Etruscan citadel. Built from massive blocks of tufa, it serves as the foundations of the medieval houses and some of its lower walls still stand at the foot of the cliffs below the parapet at the Piazza Becherini.

Around Pitigliano and the nearby village of Sovana many Etruscan tombs, temples and sunken ceremonial roads have been found. Eighty kilometres to the north-west, near the Tuscan coast, a discovery was made which brought history full circle. Etruscan tombs can be fatally obvious in the landscape. Around the sleepy town of Vetulonia, north of Grosseto, the largest grave-mounds were robbed out very early, in the fourth century BC, when Rome began to gain mastery over the Italian peninsula. Other tombs remained hidden from sight. In secluded, wooded groves, large sepulchres were easily cut out of the tufa, and their small entrances blocked and quickly overgrown.

Close to the centre of Vetulonia one such forgotten tomb accidentally came to light in the 1980s. Gold grave-goods, beautiful miniature sculptures of chariots and horses dating to the sixth century BC and gorgeous ceramics were found. Amongst the floor debris, one of the excavators picked up a small, double-headed axe, too small to be practical. Beside it lay a bundle of bronze rods. At first appearing insignificant, it turned out to be the most remarkable of all the finds. This was the fasces, the quintessential symbol of Roman power, the means to punish and execute – also the symbol of Mussolini and his vile regime. Soon afterwards another example, another bundle of whipping rods and axe, was recognised on a piece of Etruscan tomb sculpture. Fascism, it turned out, had one of its poisonous roots in the Tuscan soil.

When dawn breaks over Pitigliano and the warmth of the butter-coloured sun washes down the houses on the tufa cliffs, the town wakes and quickly begins to bustle. The sharp twang of two-stroke engines rents the stillness and the bars at the Piazza della Repubblica fill with coffee-drinkers who grab a pastry in a paper napkin. Noone sits or stays longer than a few minutes. Metal shutters rattle up as shops and offices open at eight or sometimes earlier and the medieval streets and lanes clatter with footsteps. The occasional car noses impatiently along the narrow Via Roma.

Pitigliano is no museum, but a working town where people live and die. But not in ignorance. Tuscans are everywhere aware of their past, and in countless otherwise inconsequential cultural habits and many colourful public festivals, they celebrate its ancient glories. And the past is not something apart, categorised as history, something separated from the everyday business of living and making a future. It is an indivisible part of life. This seamlessness is very attractive – and immediate. For those who come to Tuscany simply for its beauty, to the place where everyone in the world would like to live, according to one writer, this book is intended as a way of understanding something of that seamlessness, of how it all came about.

2

Before History

In the deepest glades of the forest, where not even the brilliant midsummer sun can break through the canopy, the only tracks to be wary of are made by the wild boar. Their coarse, dark coats half-camouflaged in the shade of the great oaks and the undergrowth, they can be very dangerous if startled, erupting into a charge, their razor-sharp tusks able to rip huge gashes. An enraged sow, protecting her young, has been known to kill, propelling her massive bodyweight over short distances to devastating effect.

The hunters were always wary, carrying their weapons and ready to use them, moving quietly through the temperate jungle. When he gathered his men, the chief would give clear and simple instructions. Those most experienced would form small hunting parties and would follow the boar tracks in the heart of the great forest. The chief huntsman would know where the prey had made their dens and how wide their territory was. The day before he would have looked for signs, their fresh droppings, where they had been rooting the forest floor, and new tracks. At places where he had heard and sometimes even seen the boar, at stream crossings, at the foot of the cliffs, where paths met, the old man would command his hunting parties to take up their positions. There they would use the wildwood as cover, making no sound, waiting. And on no account were they to move.

A second, much larger, group would take their pack of hounds and begin to sweep through the woods, making as much noise as possible, shouting, whistling, clacking primitive wooden rattles. They and their dogs were to drive the boar before them, towards where the hunters lay in wait. With luck, and if the gods smiled, they might kill two or three. And the rich meat would keep.

When the chief huntsman hears rifle shots crack in the still morning air, he knows that the beaters have flushed an animal. And as the yelp and howl of the dogs becomes audible down at the lodge, and seems to be moving across the hillside in the direction he set them, the man known as the capocaccia relaxes. Boar hunting is tightly regulated in Tuscany. Each hunt, or caccia, involves paperwork, for all those with guns must register, and when the capocaccia tells each party where to go, they must do exactly as he says. Gunfire in dense woodland can be dangerous to more than the wild boar, the cinghiale, and if hunting parties moved around, not only potentially fatal chaos would follow but nothing would be caught.

The Tuscan boar hunt is ancient, a long echo from prehistory, certainly 8,000 years old, probably more. The only change made in the modern era is in weaponry. Long before rifles, a boar spear was carried by the most experienced – and bravest. To deliver a killing thrust, a hunter needed to get close to a large charging animal with its head down and leading with the points of its tusks. Others fired arrows. These in themselves were rarely fatal but they slowed a fleeing animal and the dogs could track its blood trail as it grew weak.

Hunting wild boar by chasing it, in the way that pink-jacketed horse-riders used to go after foxes in Britain, was not only dangerous but likely to be a waste of effort and time. The use of the drive and sett is also ancient and much more efficient. As the beaters swept the tangled wildwood of prehistoric Tuscany, they put up many other frightened animals, and at the sett, the hunters waited with nets. In 4000 BC there was no sport involved, only survival.

Now, the capocaccia must report what his men have killed and if they register to go after cinghiali, they cannot touch anything else – no birds, no hares, no deer. If boar are brought down, then more immensely old traditions come back sharply into focus. Each animal is butchered at the lodge and divided amongst the huntsmen. The haunch is most valued because it can be salted and hung up to be air-dried to preserve it. Prosciutto crudo means ‘raw ham’ and while most of it now comes from domesticated pigs, boar meat is widely available. And some of it is hunted in the wildwood.

After the end of the last ice age Italy was quickly carpeted with dense forest, a temperate green jungle stretching away far into the distance to every horizon. As the ice melted in the north, the level of the Mediterranean rose and the western coastline shrank back close to its present line. And as the Adriatic refilled, it crept north to Trieste and Venice. The Apennine spine of Italy had been very cold during the ice age, what prehistorians call ‘park tundra’. In the low temperatures and the chill of the near-constant wind, no trees grew except in the shelter of ravines, and the thin soil of the lower slopes supported only a brief flush of vegetation at the height of summer. But when the ice-sheets of the Alpine range began to groan and crack and the weather improved after 10 000 BC, the tree-line climbed slowly up the mountain sides. Pine, oak, chestnut and beech began to spread their wide canopy over the land and drop their seeds. Watered by the rains of a thousand winters and warmed by summer temperatures close to modern norms, the Tuscan wildwood grew lush and filled with life.

Animals of many kinds browsed the young spring shoots and in the autumn rooted for ripe nuts on the forest floor. In natural clearings red deer grazed, always listening, always alert for the tread of a stalking predator. The famous Tuscan lion is long extinct, and was in any case probably a jaguar. But the memory of this impressive beast was persistent and it lived on in sculpture and medieval heraldry. Perched on a column by the entrance to the Orsini fortress in Pitigliano, a melancholy-looking lion gazes out over the Piazza della Repubblica.

The giant prehistoric cattle known as the aurochs thrashed through the wildwood, almost certainly unafraid of any predator, wolf, lion or jaguar. With a hornspread of up to 2 metres and as big as a rhinoceros, these great grey-coloured juggernauts were kings of the wildwood. Pine martens, polecats and squirrels scuttled through the canopy, beavers felled trees and dammed the streams, bears fished, ate berries and sought out the nests of wild bees, and a host of smaller animals rustled the leaves as they searched and snuffled for food. Several varieties of succulent wild fruit and berries tempted many species of birds, and as the land began to rise towards the Apennines in the east, eagles hunted, flying high and turning their stern gaze on the wildwood below.

The great birds live for many years; captive eagles have been recorded as surviving to the age of 100 and beyond. When they spread their wings and glide in the warm updrafts by the mountains, they can see the shimmer of the sea far to the west. Bounded by the Mediterranean, Tuscany is almost encircled on the landward side by the sheltering Apennines. Near the dazzling white gashes made by the marble quarries at Carrara, on the northern borders, the mountains edge close to the sea. Then they swing away to the east before turning south-east towards the Adriatic coast. These are the natural limits of Tuscany, and only in the south was there a need for an artifical line. In the twenty-first century it follows the low hills north of Lago di Bolsena before reaching the Mediterranean near Capalbio.

During the last ice age the Tuscan coast and the lower-lying land west of the Apennines was cold but habitable. There appears to have been no break in human settlement, and the earliest remains, found mostly in coastal caves or shelters by the lake shores, are half a million years old. But these early people were not like us, not like modern Tuscans.

At several sites archaeologists have found the bones of the descendants of these first Europeans, the Neanderthal men and women. They had long, low and large ape-like crania, massive brow-ridges and a chinless jaw. To protect their brains from shock, Neanderthal noses were broad and long enough to warm up cold air as they breathed it in. Their skeletons suggest long bodies, short legs and tremendous musculature. Detailed examination has discovered evidence of healed fractures, and one scholar has conjectured convincingly that Neanderthal hunting parties attacked their prey at close quarters. Using short, stabbing spears to bring down deer, wild horses, even aurochs and bison, they may have suffered severe injury. It was a bruising, dangerous way of life. Despite the pejorative use of the name, there is no evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were stupid or brutish. It may be that they simply failed to adapt to a changing climate and a changing world.

Between 40 000 BC and 35 000 BC the Neanderthals who hunted the European wildwood disappeared. Their extinction seems to be related to the arrival of new people from the east and south, Homo sapiens, the ancestors of modern Europeans. They too were hunter-gatherer-fishers, and archaeologists have found gossamer traces of their lives along the Tuscan coast, especially at river-mouths. These were places where families could over-winter, finding year-round supplies of food on the sea-shore; shellfish, crabs, lobster and edible seaweed. They could fish the estuaries and the inshore waters, and drawing on stores of preserved food from the summer wildwood it was possible to survive. The dried funghi known as porcini, dried figs, and roasted nuts, often mashed into a paste, can still be bought in Tuscan grocers’ shops. Pinoli, ‘pine-nuts’, are now seen as a delicacy, but for the hunter-gatherer-fisher families of prehistory, they were a necessity.

The early peoples seem to have flitted through the wildwood, passing like evening shadows, leaving little more than soil-stains where they lit fires and pitched their shelters. But the presence of pinoli and porcini and other fruits of the wild harvest are more than a pleasing tradition. They are emblems of continuity, of a real and living link across 300 generations with the hunter-gatherer-fishers of prehistory.

In his brilliant The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the French historian Fernand Braudel developed a thesis out of these fragments of continuity. In what is called the longue durée, he argues that climate and landscape, and ‘the liquid plains of the sea’, have exerted similarly determinant influences over millennia. For the hunters, the fishermen, the shepherds and the ploughmen of the Mediterranean life has certainly changed, but some of its essentials provide clear and unequivocal links with our ancestors. And so by understanding more modern, better recorded lives we may see into the darkness of the past and know something of all that lost experience. Prehistory is alive and it often unconsciously inhabits the lives of country people all around the Mediterranean. And nowhere more so than in Tuscany.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the longue durée is tree-bread, castagnaccia. Chestnut trees live for up to 500 years and each can drop many hundreds of nuts at the end of summer. For thousands of years Tuscans have depended on this wild harvest to make bread. On a griddle over the embers of a fire, ripe chestnuts are roasted and carefully raked off before becoming burned and inedible. Once cool, they are shelled and ground into a brown, faintly sweet-tasting flour. Sometimes it is mixed with the dried grains of wild grasses or cultivated cereals before being baked into flat, tough, unleavened bread. Roman legionaries are recorded carrying cakes of castagnaccia, and until the early twentieth century it was a countryside staple. Now chestnut flour is used to make a sweet cake known as baldino di castagna, and often it is mixed with chocolate, orange peel and nuts. Few bake the ancient tree-bread any longer; perhaps it is still too reminiscent of hard times, the poor peasant life of scratching a living, gathering food in the wildwood.

A mixed woodland of chestnut trees and pines was not only a source of two sorts of nuts, and of firewood, it was also believed to be the most likely place to find funghi. Much more than just mushrooms, funghi have been hunted for millennia in the woods of Tuscany, and all over Europe. Some are poisonous but there are 230 edible varieties, and fifteen of these are common. White truffles are the most sought after and expensive, but these notions of value will have counted for nothing in prehistory. In addition to nutrition, what mattered particularly to the early communities of hunter-gatherer-fishers was that funghi were easy to preserve. Once dried in the sun, they would keep through the hungry months of winter and early spring. And when they are soaked and softened in water, most varieties taste almost as good as when they are picked fresh.

Usually on September weekends, especially if there has been a period of heavy rain followed by days of sunshine, Tuscans most resemble their prehistoric ancestors. Armed with baskets or plastic bags and a stick to root around with (and deal with snakes), they search the wildwood for food, and a flavour of their long past.

Not far beyond the northern borders of Tuscany, at Arene Candide, archaeologists have found the remains of a hunter-gatherer-fisher settlement which has preserved evidence of what they hunted. Dating to around 6000 BC, the large bones of wild boar mark the documented beginning of an ancient tradition. But other finds suggest something quite different, perhaps the most profound change in human history.

Farming began in Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, some time before 7000 BC. Animals such as goats, sheep and cattle were domesticated and edible plants grown from seed. Almost immediately, small fields were fenced to keep these animals from browsing young and succulent shoots, and what might be easily recognised as farming communities established themselves. No more than a set of ideas and techniques, farming was gradually transmitted westwards and around the Mediterranean shore. By 5000 BC, the hunter-gatherer-fishers at the settlement of Arene Candide had also become shepherds.

As well as the bones of wild boar, archaeologists found the remains of many young lambs, too young to have been weaned. They had been killed not only for their tender meat, but also for their mothers’ milk. Even at that early stage ewes’ milk was almost certainly being made into the cheese now known as pecorino. By an unknowable accidental sequence, shepherds and their families discovered how to use rennet to curdle the milk, either taking it from the gut of animals or using the stamens of certain plants, and even funghi. In the cool of a hillside cave cheese would keep for a long time and become another precious winter staple.

Rennet may have been discovered when young lambs were killed and butchered. An observant shepherd will have noticed that their mothers’ milk had curdled in their gut, cut it out and experimented with fresh ewes’ milk to see if it had the same effect. Some Tuscan farmers’ wives still make pecorino at home. As they heat the rich milk in a copper, rennet is added, and when the mixture curdles, the cheese-maker pulls out the curds, squeezing out as much whey as possible. After the pecorino is patted down into moulds, or forms, and then turned frequently for several days, it is ready to be eaten. And it will keep for many months, its wonderful flavour intensifying all the time.

Wasting nothing, the farmer’s wife uses the whey to make the soft white cheese known as ricotta. In Italian it simply means ‘re-cooked’. A copper of whey is boiled up and the white curds lifted out with a slotted spoon. Ricotta does not keep so well as the full-fat pecorino and is best eaten soon after it is made. Farmhouse cheese is much prized in Italy – and it has been made for a very long time.

Drainage helped form the pattern of settlement and cultivation in early Tuscany. River valleys flooded easily, spates tearing down from the encircling mountains in torrente, and in the summer they became infested with mosquitoes and malaria. The flat coastal plain known as the Maremma was also largely uninhabitable. Much later, malaria claimed famous and powerful victims. It killed Tuscany’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri, and two popes, Alexander VI in 1503 and Leo X in 1521, were both fatally bitten while out hunting.

Although by no means every valley was intolerable in the summer, many of the early farming communities preferred the upcountry. Much of Tuscany is hilly and wooded, and for the first shepherds, with only very small flocks to tend, no vast tracts of pasture were needed. In any case, the ancient cycle of transhumance appears to have begun very early. In spring shepherds began to drive their sheep, goats and cattle to higher pasture, to new and more nourishing grass, shoots and leaves. Down at their winter quarters, the land needed to recover, and where crops were planted, the absence of hungry animals was an advantage.

The annual journey to the upcountry has been made for millennia. By the early Middle Ages the shepherd-roads in Italy were called tratturi, and many can still be made out. Transhumance affected the way in which land was both owned and managed. Low-country villages usually claimed customary rights to high pasture, and often medieval parishes looped up into the hills to include it. The tratturi led to clearly defined areas where encroachment by neighbours was not tolerated. In the Chianti hills and elsewhere walkers are often surprised to find walls and ditches marking off what appears to be wild land.

Some of the first farmers in Tuscany may have been immigrants from the south. Around 5000 BC the new techniques spread very rapidly, moving from Greece to Portugal in less than 500 years. What is known as enclave colonisation may well have been the means of transmission. Small pioneering groups, probably a younger generation, split off from established communities and, travelling by sea, went in search of new territory. Domesticated animals and bags of seed travelled with them as the new ideas leap-frogged up the Italian coast to Tuscany.

Where the first farmers settled, they began a profound cultural shift – but also laid down traditions which have remained virtually unchanged over 6,000 years. These reinforce powerfully the sense of continuity over immense periods of time, the longue durée.

Farmers have been extremely conservative. Throughout the world there are 148 species of large animals and yet only fourteen of these have been domesticated as farm animals, grown for meat, milk or wool, or all three, or used to supply muscle-power to pull carts, ploughs or carry people. And with plant species the proportion which has been cultivated is even smaller. From 200,000 higher plant species, only 100 or so are grown for food. And almost all of these were first tended or cultivated in the fourth millennium BC in Europe.

Farming also changed the face of the land. Hunting, gathering and fishing did of course continue (up until the present day), but the way in which land was used and the customary rights to it developed in a new direction. It seems likely that hunters exercised rights of some kind in the wildwood, and will certainly have attempted to exclude others from their ranges. A supply of firewood was of crucial importance, and hunter-gatherer-fisher bands will sometimes have been forced to move on when it ran out. But the resources of the wildwood were probably nurtured and areas of it allowed to recover.

When farming was adopted and great labour invested in the cultivation of crops, land became much more securely owned. And defended. Field systems were hacked out of the forest, the process of clearing scrub and trees, and especially their roots, required a tremendous and sustained effort. Those who did the hard work will have developed a very emphatic sense of ownership. Some idea of what these early fields looked like can still sometimes be glimpsed in Tuscany, especially in the uplands.

They were small, more like large patches of garden, and unlike modern fields tended to include several different crops. A primitive type known as emmer wheat and six-row barley were common, but in the cultura mista, vegetables such as beans were also planted in the same patches, and around the edges of fields were olive trees, fig trees and others, like oak, grown for timber, for shade and as a windbreak. In the more remote upland areas of Tuscany it is still possible to see the outline of these ancient fields, often with later terracing stepping up the slopes behind. Sometimes the old broadleaved trees, the beeches and the oaks, have been pollarded and not allowed to grow too high, a sign that they were once used for growing vines.

As the techniques of farming moved rapidly westwards across the Mediterranean, the ability to cultivate grapes and make wine appears to have marched in step. Archaeologists believe that wine-making began in Georgia and northern Persia some time between 6000 bc and 5000 bc. These surprising origins are occasionally recalled in language, most notably the popular red wine style known as shiraz. It is a Persian place-name, one of the largest cities in modern Iran, and its association with wine is very significant. Outside its walls several large clay pots were found and they contained the oldest samples of wine ever found. It dated to around 5000 bc, and it was a dark red colour.

Wild grapes grew in the prehistoric Tuscan forests and around the shores of the Mediterranean, but it is likely that these were small and bitter. A helpful analogy might be a comparison between crab apples and cultivated apples. As the new technology spread and reached the coast of what is now Lebanon and Syria, the land of the ancient Phoenicians, it boarded their merchant ships and was quickly passed on westwards. Wine was an eminently tradable item and evidence of its production is found in Greece around 4500 BC, and at the same time its consumption was recorded on inscriptions and paintings in Egypt.

It was almost certainly either the Greeks or the Phoenicians who first brought wine and grape seeds to Tuscany, and by the time of the glittering civilisation of the Etruscans, in the first millennium BC, it features in the many wall paintings which show banquets and celebrations. The Romans and their imperial provinces established almost every wine-producing region in western Europe, and also developed different grape varieties and methods of cultivation.

The pollarded trees still visible on Tuscan hillsides are a relic of the Roman method known as arbustum. The vines were supported by the trees, and a compluvium, or trellis, was usually slung between two or along a row. This allowed farmers to train the growing tendrils in a variant of the espalier technique. Roman wine-making is particularly remembered in Tuscany, where Sangiovese is the dominant grape-type used to make Chianti. The name comes from sanguis Iovis, the ‘blood of Jupiter’. Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty and sensual pleasure, was the daughter of Jupiter, and etymologists insist that her name and the Latin word vinum for wine are closely cognate. After a glass or two of Chianti, who would argue?

Not long before the early wine makers of northern Greece began to harvest their cultivated grapes, more innovation was sparking into life only a few hundred miles away, on the other side of the Balkans. Near Nova Zagora in north-western Bulgaria Europe’s first metals were being dug out of the ground. From long and deep trenches, miners were excavating copper ore. Around 5100 BC smiths were refining it and making axeheads and chisels out of the new, shiny metal. Based on stone or flint models, the new copper objects appear to have been used, at first, not for any practical purpose but rather served as tokens of prestige, as gifts or as talismans with some spiritual significance. There must have been something magical and mysterious about the process of smelting, how apparently solid rock liquified and then cooled into something different. It seems likely that the first smiths enjoyed great prestige. Gold was also used for display (it still is) and large quantities were found in the form of grave goods in a prehistoric cemetery at Varna on the Black Sea. One man had 990 gold objects arranged round his corpse, including a penis sheath.

Magical metal, highly polished, lustrous, made into beautiful objects and worked by increasingly skilled smiths, began to stimulate trade and cultural contact all over the Mediterranean. It conferred names. Cyprus means ‘Copper Island’. Those who controlled or could exploit areas rich in minerals became more powerful, and in the rich deposits of copper and tin mined in the Colline Metallifere, the ‘Ore Mountains’, Tuscany would in time be able to develop a rare advantage. Meanwhile, the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by the vivid civilisations of Crete, and on mainland Greece, Mycenae. Their ships almost certainly sailed as far west as the Tyrrhenian Sea to trade for metal and other desirables.

While copper was attractive to look at and malleable, it was also soft and easily bent out of shape. Smiths had at first used arsenic to make a harder alloy but, understandably, had been highly motivated to experiment and discover safer admixtures. Between 2200 BC and 2000 BC significant quantities of bronze began to be produced in Britain and Ireland. Nine parts copper to one part tin combined into a rich, gold-like alloy which could be polished to a dazzling sheen. But crucially it was also hard; bronze weapons in particular could deliver devastating blows, and bronze armour could deflect them. Immense prestige was attached to war-gear made from this tough and beautiful metal. Here is Homer’s description of the arming of Patroclus in The Iliad:

Patroclus put on the shimmering bronze. He began by tying round his legs the splendid greaves, which were fitted with silver clips for the ankles. Next he put on his breast Achilles’ beautiful cuirass, scintillating like the stars. Over his shoulders he slung the bronze sword, with its silver-studded hilt, and then the great thick shield. On his sturdy head he set the well-made helmet. It had a horsehair crest, and the plume nodded grimly from on top. Last he picked up two powerful spears which suited his grip.

The central difficulty with the development of bronze production was that tin is rare in Europe and occurs in only a few localities, Tuscany among them. Cornwall and southern Ireland had workable deposits and British and Irish bronze-making technology spread eastwards, and when it reached the Mediterranean, trade accelerated once more. Sails were hoisted for the first time on sea-going ships, journey times shortened and the world began to shrink. Elites became more powerful as their reach extended and their wealth increased. The beautiful palaces at Knossos and Mycenae speak of great kings, and archaeology was beginning to turn into history.

Except when underwater archaeologists occasionally come across their shipwrecked cargo, merchants rarely leave much of a mark. What they trade is consumed or passed on. War is what scribes and chroniclers remember, and quite suddenly, around 1250 BC, war burst over the eastern Mediterranean. The navies of the mysterious Sea Peoples sailed out of the northern mists, scattering the merchant ships, destroying the royal palaces at Mycenae and on Crete and attacking the great empire of the pharaohs in Egypt. The armies of Rameses III succeeded in repulsing the warrior fleets, but not before much damage had been done and territory lost. One insurgent group was almost certainly the Philistines and they took over the biblical land of Canaan.

Inscriptions on the walls of the Egyptian temple at Medinet Habu recorded other names of the Sea Peoples; the Shardana, the Shekelesh and the Teresh. After a generation of destruction and chaos, the Sea Peoples seemed to disappear as suddenly as they had arrived. Historians have argued convincingly that the Shardana colonised and named Sardinia, the Shekelesh, also called the Sikels, gave Sicily its name and, less certainly, the Teresh made landfall on the Tuscan coast.

Very recent and statistically significant DNA studies have supplied remarkable corroboration of the legends of the Sea Peoples and their migration to Tuscany. Samples taken from hundreds of modern inhabitants of the cities and towns of Arezzo, Chiusi, Pitigliano, Tarquinia and elsewhere show very clearly that the genetic makeup of Tuscans is very different from their neighbours and the rest of Italy. Moreover, it also shows conclusively where they came from. There are unmistakable affinities with the peoples of Anatolia in central Turkey, the supposed homeland of the Sea Peoples. This new evidence speaks eloquently and loudly of an ancient migration, the arrival of an exotic new civilisation on the shores of Italy, people who spoke a different language and who brought a vivid new culture. As warrior élites with the confidence and prestige of great deeds in the east, where empires were humbled, they may have been able to establish themselves towards the end of the second millennium BC. They chose to colonise a maritime economy which had tremendous potential.

Almost enclosed by Sicily in the south and Corsica and Sardinia in the west, the Tyrrhenian Sea had developed as a distinct trading network. And between 1350 BC and 1000 BC Tuscany was growing, perhaps stimulated by ambitious incomers. Almost wholly agricultural in nature at the beginning of this period, the population appears to have been evenly spread, with small hilltop villages of only one or two hundred at most. The Tuscan climate was temperate, the land productive, the harvests predictable. But under the tranquil surface, change was simmering.

By the beginning of the first millennium BC powerful kings had emerged and begun to create very large towns, especially in southern Tuscany. Several eventually occupied sites of between 250 and 500 acres, and most were built on easily defensible heights. Orvieto is perhaps the most spectacular, perched on its singular outcrop of tufa above the Val di Chiana. Other early towns have survived into modern times at Tarquinia, Cerveteri and Veio.

Not only could Tuscan agriculture support these large concentrations of population, their geographical location encouraged even more growth. Close to the sea and the Tyrrhenian network, Tarquinia, Cerveteri and the others also linked with the northern passes through the Apennines. Manufactured metal goods, amber and weapons all came down to the Tuscan merchant cities and were shipped out to markets around the Mediterranean. Long traditions began to establish themselves as riches were amassed and as kings became more powerful. The high summer of Etruscan civilisation was about to blaze into life.

3

The Tower-Builders

In November 2007 a myth drifted out of the mists of antiquity and became history. A team of archaeologists had been working on the Palatine Hill in Rome amongst the ruins of its imperial palaces. Augustus, the first emperor, had lived in a modest house overlooking the Forum, but those who followed him onto the throne had built ever more elaborate structures which eventually covered the whole summit of the hill with halls, antechambers, bedchambers, guardrooms and servants’ quarters. The Palatine grew so grand that it is the origin of the English word ‘palace’. In digging down through the strata Professor Giorgio Croci hoped to build up a clear picture of the sprawling buildings which stood at the heart of the Roman Empire. But he found much more than he bargained for.

On the morning of 7 November 2007 excavators working near the edge of the Palatine plateau suddenly stopped digging. They had come across a large void directly below. After all their gear had been carefully removed, with as little ground disturbance as possible, a specialist team was able to insert an endoscope through the roof of what seemed like a buried structure of some kind. Lit by a miniature searchlight, a camera probe revealed something entirely unexpected and entirely astonishing. On their small monitor the archaeologists saw that it was not a building but a cave. Richly decorated with seashells, mosaics and beautifully veined marble, it seemed to be a shrine of some kind, and when the camera panned around, it revealed a small sculpture standing in the centre. It was a white eagle, the eagle of Rome.

Professor Croci was astounded. He knew exactly what his team had discovered, but was almost unable to believe the pictures transmitted by the tiny camera. Sixteen metres below a previously unexplored area of the Palatine, under the house of the great Emperor Augustus, he had found the Lupercale, the most revered shrine in all the empire, the very essence of the Eternal City, the place where Rome had been founded.

The Lupercale had been thought of as the unlikely location of a myth, part of the origin legend of Rome, and no serious scholar or archaeologist believed that anything tangible would ever come to light. But it had. Buried under millennia of rubble a half-forgotten story began to whisper.

The Lupercale is named for the she-wolf, the lupa, who rescued the twins, Romulus and Remus, abandoned in a basket amongst the reed-beds of the River Tiber. Having taken the baby boys up to her cave on the Palatine Hill, she suckled them, saving their lives and beginning the long story of an empire and a culture which lasted for more than 2,000 years. In many Italian cities there stand sculptures of the unlikely but powerful image of a wild animal standing protectively over two human babies as they greedily drink her milk.

A canny, capable and utterly ruthless politician acutely conscious of his place in history and mindful of how precarious that might become, Augustus wanted to forge a powerful link between himself, his dynasty and the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. When he built his deliberately unostentatious villa above the Lupercale on the Palatine, it looked as though destiny was at work, as though Augustus was the rightful and legitimate heir to all that the divine twins had set in train. An unbreakable symbolic, even mystical, bond was made between the first emperor and the babies in the cave below his house. But the story of the foundation of the city of Rome is also a profoundly Etruscan story, the best documented and detailed account of how and why cities were established. According to Marcus Terentius Varro, writing at the beginning of the first century BC and the first really rigorous scholar of Latin literature and antiquities, the rituals and mysteries which swirled around the foundation of Rome were almost all borrowed from the elaborate practices first played out in Etruria. For in the eighth century BC, when the she-wolf found Romulus and Remus amongst the rushes, Rome lay on the southern edge of Etruria as it moved into a golden age. And when the facts are winnowed out of the myth, a powerful sense of the beginnings of Etruscan civic society can be clearly discerned.

In 1988 archaeologists had made an earlier fascinating but much less sensational discovery on the northern slopes of the Palatine Hill. The Wall of Romulus, little more than a stratified discolouration, was dated to the eighth century BC, very close to the traditional date of 753 BC for the founding of Rome. Ancient chroniclers were even more precise and they confidently asserted that Romulus and his men began to dig a ditch around the Palatine on 21 April, 753 BC, or in their own reckoning, Year One AUC, Ab Urbe Condita, ‘from the founding of the city’. Agreeing with the chroniclers, the great Italian scholar, Andrea Carandini, believes that the Wall of Romulus in fact buttresses Rome’s origin legend and its traditional date with solid archaeological evidence.