Ferenc Máté - The Wisdom of Tuscany: Simplicity, Security & the Good Life

Dear Reader,

Tuscan wisdom I found nowhere written. With the exception of some proverbs, no slogans proclaim it, no songs laud its virtues; it seems instead to quietly surround you, to engulf you unnoticed like the warmth of a summer night. It is there in the tranquil landscape, the proud hill-towns, the vitality of Florentine art, the serenity of the paintings and buildings of Siena.

But mostly it is expressed in la vita quotidiana, daily life, in the encounters of Tuscans in the streets, cafes, shops, and open markets; in the bonds that hold people togetherfamilies, neighbors, communities and friends. And it is there in the quality of the craftsmans labors, the lovingly tended vineyards and olive groves, the lush vegetable gardens, the long daily meals, the crusty loaves of bread, the complex pasta sauces, the robustness of its wine.

I have no intention or pretensions to be a reverse De Tocqueville, but having spent one half of my life in Europe and the other in North Americamy childhood in Hungary, my youth in Canada, years in California and New York, and the last twenty in TuscanyI simply try to understand the startling differences between the two worlds. And while each has much to learn from the other, it appears more and more that the balance is swinging back toward old Europe, to Italy, and above all to Tuscany, where the epitome of the good life seems to reside. And more and more, the splendor of material wealth begins to pale when compared to the simple richness of daily Tuscan life.

So this booksometimes rambling, always probing, now and then chaotic, but most often admiringis, if anything, an attempt to remind usremind meof the boundless joy in living, the thrill of simple things, the daily celebrations, the pleasure that people bring, and the pleasure that we are capable of giving.

It is meant to awaken the Tuscan in us all.

Ferenc Mt
Montalcino, Italy
Summer, 2009

G razietta is petite. Shes just over five feet tall, but has such piercing eyes that they could hypnotize you, and a voice so clear and forceful it can pin you to a wall. Marching up and down the steep stone streets of our town, Montalcino, where she was born almost sixty years ago, she has the gait and spring of a girl still in her teens. Shes very pretty. She ran her own hair salon all her life, which means she heard, mostly sooner than later, everything there was in town that was worth repeating. She is also one of our best-read and most articulate citizens, and she speaks with enormous passion about this place.

A fervent Tuscan, proud of her Etruscan blood, she says with dignity, Were not like the Romans. They chipped marble and made war. We Etruscans preferred to eat, drink, and love. And we loved where we lived. We never saw a need to conquer, to enslave. We love our freedom, and respect the freedom of others. No empires, thank you.

Until she was ten, her neighborhood was her world. In her parishthere were twelve churches in the town of six thousand people, looking after each parishioners body and soula mob of fifty or so children ebbed and flowed in the streets, climbed the long-stepped alleyways up to the fortress, down to the spring, into Piazza Padella, or into someones little garden terraced into the hillside behind a narrow house.

Montalcino is a medieval town of pieni e vuoti, full and emptymeaning behind each row of stone houses lining the narrow streets shoulder-to-shoulder, there is a strip of empty land giving each house its own little garden. And each little garden brims with the stuff of life: vegetables, grape vines, olives, and under the arches chickens in a coop.

When Grazietta was little, there were five butchers and six bakers in the town, two pharmacies, and a greengrocer, two doctors, a veterinarian, assorted farmers, craftsmen, lawyers, accountants, and woodcutters who sometimes stayed away in the gullies and hills for weeks. They all lived together and mingled in the town. A bankers palazzo was next to the cobbler, who lived an austere life, and the lawyer lived in a palazzo with a bridge, while beside him lived a collier with six barefooted children.

In the summer the townspeople migrated outside the town walls and up the hill of the pineta , a vast grove of pines where the ground was cool from the shade and the breeze from the sea blew in every day. They brought tables and chairs, and things to cook and wine. Everyone came; there was no rank or class. On those warm summer evenings they ate and drank in the pineta and talked as if they hadnt gossiped enough in town, then someone would begin to play an accordion or mandolin, or saxophone or guitarall the towns craftsmen played in the town bandand they played and people danced until their houses in town cooled down enough to sleep in.

The township looked after the kids all summer long with games and outings, while the church ran summer camps at La Velona, an enchanted-looking castle on a lonely hill below the great volcano. From here there were hikes into the wild woods, or to the river, or to the hot-springs where ninety-degree water cascaded from the rocks into natural pools. There were families of contadini living in the castle and working the land, and, when needed, the kids would go in the fields and vineyards to lend a hand.

In the winters there were the circoli , big halls owned by each political party where kids could play and scream to their hearts delight. And all year long, starting at dusk, when the sounds of mules shoes clattered homeward on the stones, the whole town would emerge for the evening passeggiata , gathering in the piazza s and flowing through the streets, to meet and mingle and exchange the latest news or gossip with those you had somehow missed on your errands during the day.

And every week the theater featuring troupes of traveling actors was full to the rafters. There is a magnificent theater in the center of town, a scaled-down version of La Scala with a good, deep stage and three tiers of private booths with padded velvet armrests that rise toward a great fresco of a sky. It was built a couple of centuries ago by the forty wealthiest families in the town, who then got to sit in their private balconies while the rest sat in the orchestra on benches, paying next to nothing or for free.

There were also films in the old cloister, or, in summer, the courtyard of the fortezza . And you could roam the streets on the darkest night without a care, because you knew exactly whod come out each door.

And you also knew what went on behind those doors, not just from the tone of voices that ricocheted in the narrow streets when the windows were wide open from the spring into the fallwhen you could tell who loved who, whose child got bad grades in school, and whose family was lacking in funds or food or carebut also through the actions of friends and neighbors. As word spread through the parish, the parish came to help. And they did so with as little fanfare as they could, sometimes just inviting a poor student to do homework with a good one, or stopping by to lend a helping hand, or creating work that hadnt needed doing just to preserve the head of the familys pride. And when small gestures werent enough and plain money was required, the parish would discretely, through the parish priest, provide.