That headline conjured up a vision, admit it.
Rolling hills of trees and vineyards and narrow roads with great, ancient stone castles or villas or what-have-you surveying the scenes below.
They’re big and built of hand-cut stones and great timbers with red tile roofs and vines and outdoor dining tables for twenty happy people drinking wine from great jugs and trays of meats and cheeses and fruits…
And we’ll never be cool enough to be at those tables because that stuff only happens in movies.
Until it happens.
And when it does, you live it like it’s normal but commit every detail to memory and let it all soak in and get up early one morning to write it all down in a vast, cavernous space built of stone and marble with great vaulted brick ceilings and timber beams that will last another five hundred years and maybe you’ll paint a picture in someone else’s mind.
So here’s the deal.
My long-time friend Dave realized how short life is and booked the joint for a month. How he found it is beyond me, but if you didn’t know about the place, which you will shortly, you’d never know. The families that have lived in the area for the last 500 years know the place. It’s been here, looking down on the vineyards and valleys for that long.
Let that sink in.
The same family for 500 years.
Most people don’t know what to do with Grandma’s tea set.
The property originally, 500 years ago, comprised thousands of acres of vineyards and such, and parcels have been sold off here and there, but the house/villa/castle remains.
And what defines house or villa or castle?
Made of stone with giant timber beams and great iron grates over the ground floor windows that can be opened or locked to keep villagers with pitchforks at bay?
I think all three apply here.
This is someone’s at various parts of the year, but it’s certainly a villa and very well could be a castle.
God is in the details. Or is it the Devil?
Whoever it is, the details meld beautifully with the grand visions.
The main hall, and hall is the right word, is maybe a hundred feet long. You could park a gaggle of city buses in here if you were so inclined.
There are five huge, barrel vaulted sections of hand-cut, placed stone, each with a different pattern, and how the bloody hell do they do that? Each twenty-pound stone is cut perfectly and placed in a graceful arch with skill passed down from the original Roman builders of aqueducts.
And each of those big vaults has a purpose. One for the Great Hall Dining Table and some massive sideboards to hold your wine or grappa or, in my case, the Calvados I brought from France.
The next is a sitting area with huge, overstuffed and heavenly chairs and couches.
Then another the same.
Then, another, the same with the addition of saddles, one could alight on if one chose.
We’ve been travelling around Europe for a bit now and staying in private homes, and then came here, and it brings to mind a passage from Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan.
In one chapter, Don Juan tells his acolyte to “find his spot.”
He had no idea what that meant, so he started wandering around the house, the porch, the yard, and sat down and tried to figure out what “his spot” meant.
Then he got it.
He found the spot that spoke to him and gave him peace and let his mind travel.
That’s stuck with me most of my life and I’m always finding my spot, even when it irritates a restaurant host.
“I want to sit at that table… that’s my spot.”
There are a lot of spots here.
In the kitchen with an old kitchen table and kitchen chairs that might be the center of the universe.
Or in one of these vaulted sections in The Great Hall. I’ve tried most of the chairs and they’re all my spot.
I’m writing on an orange couch right now because it’s near a wall plug, but this could be My Spot too.
Our bedroom upstairs with the vast open window looking over the gardens has a delightful desk with desky accoutrements and that’s certainly my spot.
The great dining table for conversations over food (yeah, big trays of salami and cheese and fruit and more salami and hams and cheeses and cookies and croissants and, and, and…”
And then there’s outside. I’ll get to that. Hang tight. We’re not in a hurry here because Villa Time.
You could spend a day looking up at these monumental ceilings by the way.
I have. And I am as I write right now.
That’s one of the difficult parts of travel. Finding your spot. You can spend weeks or months on the road, but you’ll be in strange, new places, often with lousy furniture and noise and temporary places, and you need to find your spot to recharge.
This place has your spot and more choices than you know what to do with, but you’ll like trying them all.
The villa, and I’ll settle on villa, was started in the 1500s and has been growing here and there since, with some areas looking a few hundred years newer, but who knows. The place rambles about a bit like an MC Echer drawing. Stairs lead to more rooms, including sitting rooms and libraries, while hallways connect to additional living rooms with attached bedrooms and bathrooms, as though a half dozen homes had grown out of the ether and alighted upstairs.
One needs a map.
The kitchen seems small, but it has been preparing meals for hundreds of people for hundreds of years.
The sink. My God, The Sink.
It’s carved from one huge piece of marble. The double sink probably weighs a thousand pounds. ONE GIANT CHUNK OF MARBLE, but fully functional.
It’s the Millennial Sink, not for people of a certain age but for the ages it will last being used by people.
And the objects.
I’m sure there is an appropriate word for all this stuff but I haven’t found it. Because the scale of the place is so huge, the furniture is all huge. Great chests along walls, great tables, ancient, dark oak book cabinets, and on every surface is something fascinating. A collection of pewter mugs, each with antler handles, a thousand books scattered here and there in case the conversations had moved elsewhere. Decanters of carved crystal and silver and pewter and bowls and African art and spears and vases of flowers and more books and who the hell knows what that is but it’s wonderful. And the main stairs going up to the many alighted houses are lined on one side with knee-high equestrian boots in various tans of polished and patinated leather, and hats with African dust or English stables or distant mountain passes.
Great art in gold carved frames of ancient family, landscapes, horses, oceans, and all probably belonging in museums.
The villa is something that grew into being, not thrown together by a decorator. It’s the result of generations of living well, by interesting people who knew how to live well. It’s the kind of collection of things that could only come about with a thousand worthy events and stories, and as you wander through the place, you feel like an outsider who fell through a time warp into another world.
It’s like Jazz. It could happen right here, right now, and will never happen again, so absorb it all.
Immerse.
So what about outside.
There are “grounds.”
Most of us have yards, a hallway, or a deck.
This place has grounds. Gardens. Paths.
One path takes you to a rose garden, so stop and smell.
Another goes past vast walls of jasmine so fragrant that if you don’t like jasmine, you’ll avoid it and really should see a doctor. Another goes through an ancient grove of olive trees, and if you keep going, you come to an archway of tangled vines that leads you to The Pool.
The Pool is huge and formal, with great Roman couches and lounge chairs and a primitive shade veranda that seems so out of place but fits perfectly.
The Pool is huge and the temperature is perfect for The Hot Tuscan Sun. Which, I’m pretty sure is the title of something.
The Pool is surrounded by trees and vines and bushes and hedges and bumblebees bumbling about and butterflies and no cars or trains or planes to break their songs.
One has to wonder just how many people have experienced this house/villa/castle.
In the last 500 years, there have been many generations of the family, their friends, parties, and visitors, and friends of friends and workers and stone cutters and tile guys and wood carvers and who knows what else, but how many?
Maybe a few thousand people have wandered the stone floors? Of the billions of people who have existed over the last 500 years, perhaps a few thousand have seen this and had the time to open up and absorb it?
Maybe less. Who knows.
But right now we have Dave, who brought this to the light, his fine companion Cheryl, who shares our wonder. Our friends from Bologna, Paulo and Franchesca, who, together, are an amazing and well-loved musical act, Lovesick Duo. They brought their instruments with them, a resonator guitar and Franchesca’s beautiful upright double bass. They’ve translated at dinner in the little hilltop village a few clicks away down the gravel road and played in the gardens and at the great table last night. They’ll do a small concert tonight, and we’ve invited some of the locals, one of whom is thrilled because he’d always heard about the place but never been inside.
And my long-suffering wife, Loree, and I, who are always pointing out this and that and the other because you can never take a place like this for granted.
We’ve had great conversations by the pool, in the gardens, in the kitchen, in the sitting rooms, and around the table.
A villa like this thrives on people. One could invite dozens, and the stone walls would reflect the warmth of friends happy to see each other in a magical place.
So this is that Mythical Tuscan Villa.
Sometimes myths are real and sometimes we get to touch the mythical and it changes us and never leaves.
