To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Travel April 14, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/04/14/tuscany_excerpt Bella Tuscany A pilgrimage to Bagno Vignoni reveals the daily miracles of Italian life. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Frances Mayes Ed is limping from a stone bruise. He leapt when his hoe suddenly disturbed a snake. His foot came down on a jagged rock. "What kind?" I asked. "A very snaky-looking snake. Scared hell out of me. We were eye-to-eye." He's rubbing his foot with lotion. "Let's go take the cure. We can be there by four." "Then we can go on to Pienza for dinner. I'd like to drive up to Montechiello, too. We've never been there." Bagno Vignoni, the tiny hilltop town near San Quirico d'Orcia, and within sight of the castle on top of Rocca d'Orcia, is built around a large thermal pool where the Medicis used to soak themselves. Where the central piazza is located in most towns, the pool (no longer used) reflects tumbling plumbago, tawny stone houses and stone arcades. Not much is going on in Bagno Vignoni. Right behind the village, a hot stream runs downhill, through a travertine ditch. On either side you can sit down and soak your feet just as Lorenzo il Magnifico did in 1490. When I first started spending summers here, I read in an Italian newspaper a heated debate over whether or not health insurance should continue to cover yearly sojourns to spas and thermal springs, a practice many Italians take as a birthright. I had been to Chianciano Terme and had seen people clutching their livers while sipping small glasses of water.They otherwise looked tan and fit. I glimpsed tanks where various body parts or the whole corpo could be immersed for the absorption of the healing properties of local waters. I've heard workers at our house discuss the merits of various waters as though they were discussing wine. Italians are great connoisseurs of the plainest elixir of all. I see them at various roadside springs filling demijohns. Water is not just water; it has properties. My grandmother used to take the sulphur waters for a week at White Springs, Florida, down near the Sewanee River. I was deeply bored and considered her a holdover from Victorian times. I only accompanied her so that I could swim in the cold black springs, emerging from the water smelling something like an old Easter egg. She waved from the third latticed balcony around the spring, a small paper cup of the odorous water in her other hand. I did not expect to be drawn into this passion. Then I went to Bagno Vignoni. I converted. Ed's stone bruise takes us now but we must go at least once a year. "Her dogs are barking," my aunt would say when we saw a woman whose feet had swollen over the edges of her pumps. After a few weeks of hauling stone, erecting trellises, and navigating stony streets, my dogs, too, are barking. We like to arrive very early, before anyone has revealed their work-torn, ailing, sometimes frightening feet. We're late today. I take off my sandals, and slowly lower my own miserable feet into the running water. Ed plunges his to the bottom.Then we notice a man with a red, red nose paring his yellow-talon toenails into the water. He must not have cut them for months. We stare as his big toenail, like a curl of wax, falls into the water. We move upstream from him. At fifty-two degrees Celsius, the shock of hot water on a hot day is intense. Ed's size twelves magnify through the water next to my long rabbit feet. Sometimes the water feels merely warm. Rubbing my heels against the smooth travertine streambed, I concentrate on the invisible but potent minerals which are starting to soothe blisters, relax tendons, muscles, even purify nails and skin. Ed says his purple bruise is fading, fading. The water starts to feel as though it's swirling through my feet. When I close my eyes, only my feet seem to exist. After twenty minutes, I'm back in my sandals, toes glowing lobster-red. Ed slides on his espadrilles under water and squashes out. Cured. This is the strange part. Walking back into town for a strawberry gelato, not only do I feel a surge of euphoria, my feet feel as if they could levitate. Everyday Italian life continues to astound me. What is in these Italian waters? We reach Montecchiello by a white road that climbs through fields of purple lupin scattered with the last poppies. The walled town is mysteriously empty. Finally we figure this out: Everyone has simply closed shop and gone home to watch the big soccer match, which we hear blaring from every window. As we wander, we encounter a man peeing outside the closed public W.C. on the edge of town. Much of the castle wall is intact. Inside, the streets are so clean they're like swabbed decks. "It's tarted up," a friend had warned us. "I've never seen so many geraniums in my life." True, they're on every stoop, step, and sill. The effect is stunning against the immaculate shuttered houses and the pencils of sunlight falling into medieval lanes. It's one of hundreds of such hilltowns but one we'd never visited. We'll have to come back to find the fabric shop I read is here and, since the church is locked, to see the Lorenzetti Madonna. Even the priest probably is riveted to a small ball being kicked around a TV screen. Down, down from Montecchiello, leaving it to its rioting geraniums, through the wildflower meadows, vineyards, passing abandoned and forlorn farmhouses on hills, through the mellow early evening and pig smells, toward Pienza, the first Renaissance town. Pienza doesn't look like other towns. A pope with the splendid name of Enea Silvio Piccolomini built it in honor of his own birthplace. He must have knocked down most of the medieval buildings to put up his ultramodern Renaissance town because it's a harmonious whole. There's a story about Rossellino, the architect, that stakes the heart of anyone involved in restoration or building. The architect overspent outrageously and concealed it from the Pope. When the excess finally was revealed, the Pope told him he was right to have hidden the sums because never would the pontiff have authorized such expenditures and never would he have had as his monument such a glorious town. He rewarded the architect with gold and a fancy cape. Perhaps our first builder had heard that story! The piazza, bordered by the cathedral and several palaces for bishops, canons, and the Pope, is staggeringly, astonishingly beautiful. Pienza is glorious in all its parts, from the felicitous residential street along the ramparts, to the iron flagholders and cunning rings fashioned in animal shapes, where horses used to be secured while their owners did their business in town. Today no horses, and no cars either, which contributes to the silent and unified feeling of the town. We wander the vicoli, the narrow streets, with evocative names: Vicolo Cieco (blind), Via della Fortuna, Via delle Serve Smarrite (the lost servants), Via dell'Amore, Via del Balzello (the heavy tax or, in dialect, the man who looks at women), Via del Bacio (the kiss),Via Buia (dark). The back end of Rossellino's airy cathedral is sinking, the porous limestone soil beneath it giving way a little every year. An ominous crack that looks as if it has been repaired with a staple gun runs down the wall and continues across the floor. I visit my favorite painting here, the martyred virgin Agata, who refused the attentions of Quintino and paid by having her breasts torn off. She comes down through history holding her severed breasts on a platter, which I originally took for a serving of fried eggs. Women who fear for their own breasts invoke her, and she is the patron saint of bell makers, too. Perhaps in a painting somewhere, the dome-shaped breasts were mistaken for little bells. I once read in a book about the medieval pilgrimage routes that all the towns along the way were crowded with souvenir shops. So, Pienza's plethora of stores selling ceramics to us on our various pilgrimages has a precedent. This area is famous for its pecorino. The street leading into the centro is lined with so many tempting shops selling the round cheeses wrapped in leaves or ashes that the pungent smell follows us down the street. We buy an aged pecorino (stagionato) and taste a semi-aged one (semi-stagionato). Honey and herbs also are specialties. Some are homeopathic -- we see a honey for the liver and one for the respiratory system. One shop has pots of ruta, rue, which I'll add to my herb garden. I'm drawn by all these food shops and also repelled. Pienza has rather too many; I'd like to see the shoe repair and the grocery store back on the main street.What remains of the ancient craft of ferro battuto, wrought iron, is an upscale shop selling lamps and tables and a few antique gates and andirons to the tourists down from Bologna or Milano for the weekend. And to us, of course. We look at their hanging iron lanterns with glass globes that end in a rounded teardrop, reproductions of old ones still on some streets of Siena and Arezzo. We need a light outside by the limonaia and one for overhead in a bedroom. They have them. I also buy an old iron that opens up to hold hot coals.The worn wooden handle tells me somebody pushed this five pounder over many a work shirt and apron. Just outside the main gate we find a trattoria with a terrace. I'm thrilled anytime to see fried zucchini blossoms.We fall onto pork tenderloin grilled with rosemary, roasted potatoes with lots of pepper, and a salad of young arugula barely touched with good oil. Around the cathedral piazza, the dignified pale stone buildings have travertine extensions around the bases. They serve as benches and over the years have been polished smooth by the bottoms that rested there while viewing the great well and the Pope's magnificent piazza. Over one is inscribed "canton de'bravi," corner of the good. Do we qualify? We're feeling dreamy after dinner, the travertine still warm from the sun. We watch a small girl in a white sailor dress chasing a kitten. The full moon is poised over Piccolomini's perfect piazza. "Amazing what a little egomania and a lot of gold can do," Ed says. "Perhaps he even ordered the full moon to drift overhead every night." Another soccer match blares from the TV in the bar, so the women and babies are outside, the men inside. In a piazza just off the main one, another TV has been set up outdoors beside a Renaissance well and all the neighbors have brought out their chairs into the early evening to cheer and shout for Italy. The blue light of the screen reflects on the semicircle of rapt faces. Arm-in-arm we walk the rampart road. For the second time today, I'm astounded by everyday life in Italy. Ed holds out his foot and says he feels no pain at all. salon.com | April 14, 1999