Il Dolce Viaggio: Crete Senesi

Community Highlights Road Trips Il Dolce Viaggio: Crete Senesi

In the morning there was nothing remaining to be done in Siena so we packed up and left early. My online sources indicated there was a rare Monday market in a city called Casole d'Elsa about forty minutes to the west, in the Val d'Elsa region we had already traversed on our way from Florence to Siena. It was the opposite direction from where we would be heading but the word was that the town was quite beautiful in its own right, and of course driving in Tuscany isn't the same thing as driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Once we got close we spotted a beautiful city atop a hill and as usually turned out to be the case, that was our destination. The town came into existence with the construction of a hilltop fortress by the Volterrans in the eleventh century. In the thirteenth century the fortress and the burgeoning village around it fell into the hands of the expansionist Sienese, who added it to their defensive perimeter against their mortal enemies the Florentines. The fortress has been converted into the town hall and is the first building to greet visitors who take the elevator up from the parking lot.

Casole d'Elsa wasn't exactly deserted but there was no sign of a market. We stopped by a cafe for coffee and croissants and the waitress told me that we had come on the wrong Monday. I knew that the market only took place on the second and fourth Mondays but I had thought that we were there on July fourteenth when it was actually the fifteenth. Instead we explored the interior of the town which was surprisingly complex given its small size. The buildings were constructed from a mixture of stone and brick and there was a high concentration of galleries which often displayed artwork outside. The town was livened considerably by planters as well as a variety of red flags which fluttered above the doorways throughout the town.

During breakfast I had been playing with the Google Maps app with an eye out for the purple camera icons that marked sites that might be worthy of investigation. This was no trivial task as the icons appeared and disappeared as I enlarged the map or scanned around. I checked out the first place, identified only as "Torretta panoramica" on my own while the others were having breakfast. I found the tower in question on the modern road that circled the old town. It was a part of a handsome stone building and had a sculpture of three dancing nudes adjacent to it. The sculpture appeared modern but complemented the medieval building quite well, as though it had always belonged there. I could see the railing of a viewing platform at the top so I entered a doorway of the building to see if it would provide access. I was now within a complex of studios and surrounded by artwork in various stages of completion. There was no one on the ground floor so I climbed a staircase and discovered more studios and numbered rooms which were obviously residences. It appeared I had discovered some kind of artists' commune or retreat. I finally ran into a couple of people who seemed a little surprised to see me. They spoke perfect English and told me that I could only access the tower from the entrance facing the old town. I eventually located the correct doorway on the only piazzetta in the center that we hadn't completely explored on our initial walk through the town. From the top I could see the lines of trees that divided the manicured fields of gold and green.

We finished our visit to Casole d'Elsa by tracking down two sculptures I had discovered on Maps. Tonnel turned out to be a figure of a man in work clothes relieving himself in an alley. Was it a protest against the lack of public restrooms in town? We couldn't figure it out but we aren't the types to pass up a good photo opportunity. Next up was the bronze of two lovers making out on the town wall. I taught Ian the "High Anxiety" trick of impersonating an embracing couple and he executed it much better than I ever had.

South of Siena extends one of the most iconic landscapes of Tuscany. The Crete Senesi, which translates to the Clays of Siena, is a region defined more by its appearance than any strict geographical borders. The distinctive greyish-blue hills are composed of clay left behind by an inland sea that was shouldered aside by tectonic activity millions of years ago. Wind and water erosion sculpted the soft clay into barren ridges and hillocks interspersed with golden fields and verdant grassland. We had traveled through it the previous day as well on our road trip to Buonconvento and San Quirico. Our first stop in the region was an unusual sculpture I had discovered in my online research called Site Transitoire. It was located in the middle of nowhere amidst this sparsely populated region and we had little idea of what to expect when we arrived. As we followed our navigation we came across one of those irresistible dirt roads lined with cypresses leading up a low hill, and we impulsively decided to make a detour. The drive gave us the opportunity to view some of the classic Crete Senesi landscape including the bare gray clay that showed through the brownish scrub on the ridges.

We had expected to retrace this detour but when I re-entered our destination I saw that we could reach the sculpture by continuing along the same road. We continued as far as we could but the quality of the road steadily deteriorated until I felt it was better to park the car and continue on foot. A sign warned we were now on private property but indicated that it was permitted to continue. It was just a hundred meters or so to the Site Transitoire, a grouping of several foreboding blocks of grey stone on a flat area of barren clay. One was obviously a chair, another was a bench or a bed, and another was an irregular window composed of four L-shaped segments. The name of the sculpture suggested that it was a place for travelers to stop, perhaps to have some form of interaction, and then move on. It was only from reading about the installation that I learned that the window frames the setting sun on the day of the summer solstice. This instantly put me in mind of Stonehenge, to which the sculpture bears some superficial resemblance, although the artist Jean Paul Philippe never makes reference to it. Instead he emphasizes the chair, bench, and window as the accoutrements of a home without walls, whose ceiling is the sky of Tuscany. An Italian couple had pulled up at about the same time as us, coming from the opposite direction, and we respectfully allowed each other some time alone with the installation. Afterwards the man asked me if it was possible to continue forward in the direction we had come from and I replied that the road was a little rough but I thought he could make it. He was quite relieved and told me that he wouldn't have wanted to return the way he had come. This was quite useful as I now knew that we should retrace our route back to the autostradale instead of continuing forward.

We hadn't had much of a breakfast and we were well into the lunch hour so getting everyone fed was now a high priority. We were quite close to Asciano which was frequently mentioned as an important city in the articles I had read. This proved to be another one of those nearly-deserted towns which is fine for atmosphere but not very positive for locating a decent meal. We found our way to the town's main square where the options didn't look good. One cafe had a selection of bruschetta on display of which I'm not a big fan. It tastes to me like pizza with a soggy crust and no cheese. Ian insisted that he wanted it and we were soon in possession of an oversized, lukewarm loaf that was just as awful as I had imagined. Ian naturally rejected it after one bite and the other kids wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Asciano's old town had a few charming blocks and a couple of interesting buildings but overall we found it unimpressive and rather low on energy. An outlet of Siena's Monte dei Paschi bank, one of the oldest in the world, looked out upon a colorful piazza. At the highest point of the town we encountered the eleventh century Gothic church of Saint Agatha, which was particularly notable for its neatly symmetric staircase that was wider than the church.

At this point we were in danger of missing out on lunch completely, which would have made the afternoon quite a chore to get through. Once we had returned to the car I did some quick research and found a hotel with an open restaurant in Chiusure, a tiny town fifteen minutes away. It was our last shot at getting a meal as it was already after two. Chiusure likewise seemed devoid of life when we arrived and the restaurant appeared closed from the outside. My heart sank but when we tried the door it pushed open. The restaurant was completely empty but the hostess seemed perfectly happy to show us to a table and take our order, despite it being just a few minutes from their closing time. The restaurant had mostly typical dishes which we were quite grateful to consume as we were down to our last option. The spot where we parked our car just outside the old town had the best views yet of the gray hillsides of the Crete Senesi. These were also to be the last as we were now about to cross over into the Val d'Orcia.

This featured blog entry was written by zzlangerhans from the blog Fledgling Explorers.
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