Beyond Rome: Idyllic Italy

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

It would be 14 years before Frances Mayes would discover Cortona in 1996 and write her best seller Under The Tuscan Sun so life was simpler when we bullied our rental car up those hills. Seems like yesterday. Fifty miles from Florence, the mountain village of Cortona clung precariously to the hills of Tuscany. Cars clambered up narrow dark cobbled streets wheezing and gasping to reach the market place. At the top, the brilliant sunlight illuminated the square like a theatrical stage. Antique clock towers, ancient palaces and medieval churches formed the backdrop. Old farm trucks, dilapidated vans and tiny sports cars lay scattered around in disarray, parked with doors unlocked, windows open and belongings in full view. Farm people soberly dressed in dark thick clothes animatedly discussed the events of the day.

All was serene.

There was a growling noise from the street, and a red and black Ferrari 512 Berlinetta Boxer emerged from the steep hill snarling like a lion about to enter the Colosseum. The car crouched in the sunlight. The air tingled with the excitement of its throbbing 12 cylinder engine. Never had a Ferrari looked so good. It was as dramatic a moment as a stage ever saw. You faced the crowd to share its enthusiasm.

Nothing. The people had not turned. Not even the pride of Modena would divert them from the formality of their talks and the contentment of their times. This was the land where simplicity, style and manners merged to make even the humblest scene a gentle reminder of a world man had forgotten.

This was idyllic Italy.

Leave Rome and its treasures, an Italian friend had told us. Go the classic way. Visit the vineyards of Tuscany, open the jewel box of Italy, Florence, and end, enraptured, at Venice.

Beside three mountain passes cut in the lowest reaches of the Apennine chain, where the River Arno flows at its most narrow, the Romans built their city of flowers: Florentina. It is a city of history -- the sleeping river saw its first bridge twenty one centuries ago.

Florence awoke to become the city of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, Donatello, Botticelli, Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci. Here Michelangelo carved his "David." Here studied Galileo, here schemed Machiavelli, and here ruled a family: Medici. And here God re-created the world, taking not six days but three centuries for the Renaissance. When Lorenzo the Magnificent died in Florence in 1492 his countryman from Genoa was sailing west towards a new continent. At this time Florence was already the center of the old world, and interestingly enough, the first building of the Renaissance was the Foundling Hospital (Ospedale degli Innocenti) designed by Brunelleschi in 1419.

Today the whole of Italy is a museum: a testament to that artistic light which shone into the Dark Ages. Florence today has forty museums and, unless you are careful, they will all be closed the day you arrive because the Italians have strange roles to confound the tourist: museums close for repair, cleaning, afternoon siestas, holidays, and other reasons known only to Italy's tantalizing bureaucracy.

So full of artistic wealth is Italy that minor government clerks spend their working lives huddled in corners below treasures which would stagger the minds of art lovers were they not already devastated by the knowledge that because there is so much, some art never sees daylight and is stored -- jewels that never sparkle -- forever in basement boxes.

Yet even with museums closed you can savor the impact of this city of elegant towering spires, and massive fortress-like churches.

Look. See the Baptistery with its 15th century masterpiece by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great golden door called by Michelangelo "the Gate of Paradise." Gaze up. That's Brunelleschi's Duomo dominating the city. And see beside it Giotto's Campanile leaping into the sky to defy gravity.

And if you seek satisfaction, if you crave contentment, if you wish a vision of yesterdays' beauty then cross the Arno and in the moonlight look across the city from the heights of the Piazzale Michelangelo.

Florence lies before you: a city built like a citadel yet softly shining with a luminous light. And in the fore is the Ponte Vecchio with its rows of goldsmith and silversmith shops, built in 1345 and miraculously spared in World War II. Your taxi driver coughs discreetly to return you to the comfort of the your century, the splendor of the Savoy Hotel and the story of the Piazza della Republica. This piazza, the old market place, has a checkered history. It was the Roman Forum of the city then a place of ill repute then in 1571 the first world ghetto. (The Italian word ugetto means "fusion" and historians believe this Jewish encampment was next to a foundry). Anyway, the huge square housed a Jewish community for 277 years until in 1848 the doors were removed and the settlement demolished.

In 1893 a palace was built in this public square. It later became a hotel. Now refurbished, the Savoy Hotel is considered one of the great hotels of Europe. The then manager Vittorio Spicciani demonstrates from the new fifth floor the spectacular view of the city. He waves his hand at the people in the square below: characters straight out of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. And he introduces you to a special member of the staff -- barman Lorenzo Constantini. Barman Lorenzo brought distinction to the Savoy by winning first prize in national cocktail championships for his drink "Stella Marina" and subsequently in 1980 for his “Onda Marina.”

He now smiles and hands to his guests a "Savoy Special" white rum and Benedictine. This is surely one for tomorrow's road through Tuscany when the classic way will lead to Bologna and Padua, the centers of the medical world in medieval times.

The autostrada between Florence and Bologna climbs awkwardly on stilted legs through the hills of Tuscany, through straggling vineyards that march like soldiers up soft green fields to the tiled villas above. The road sweeps in great breath-gulping radius-shortening curves which never seem to end. In case drivers get bored, the authorities (if indeed anyone is in authority in Italy) place sudden detour notices on your side of the autostrada as you emerge from one of the frequent tunnels into the blinding light of the valley beyond. "Magnifico!” cry out the wild-eyed Italians pirouetting like bullfighters and swerving into the tiny lane created in the oncoming traffic. "Eh?" they call out as they swing equally fast back on to their lanes beyond the detour.

Italians are marvelous drivers. They watch the other traffic like hawks with superb lane discipline, and they anticipate all the time, driving with one eye glued to the rear mirror and one hand bolted to the gear change. They make American interstate drivers under the Federal 55 look like a wagon train of Retirement Village old timers heading for their last roundup. Thus you drive above yourself, ahead of the car, wired by adrenaline, and come to Venice, the city of magic, the city of Marco Polo.

Why would he leave it? How could a caravan to nowhere be an improvement? What more could the world possibly have offered him than Venice?

This Venice of grey waters and pink skies. This Venice of streets cobbled, literally, with the rocks of ages and the waters of time.

This Venice where every humble house has windows framed with flowers where caged birds send songs to float over the canals of centuries. This Venice of laughing gondoliers, smiling violinists, splashing fountains.

Venice is soft street lights. It's the Grand Canal, the Rialto Bridge, the "Doges' Palace, the Bridge of Sighs. It’s St. Mark's Square with its pouting pigeons strutting like opera singers. It's the Hotel Cipriani.

The Cipriani, blossoming like a rare orchid in a remote forest lies offshore four minutes by the hotel's courtesy motor launch to St. Mark's Square. To sit in the launch, skim past the gulls across the Grand Canal and approach that mystic spot in history; to see unfold before you such evidence of the majesty of man: Romanesque treasures, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance; to step up from the Cipriani boat and set foot on the living legend of Venice is to be overwhelmed, mesmerized, seduced by the song of Italy.

And, when the violins are finally silent at Quadri's, to rise from your capuchine and look up at the vast clock tower where the great bronze Moors have struck the hours of five centuries, to slip past the Basilica di San Marco and its precious relic the bones of St. Mark himself -- to walk by Titians and Tintorettos and even the last will and testament of the very Marco Polo; to enter the Cipriani launch and glide in the moonlight to one of the most lovely and romantic hotels in the world is to live Cinderella-like in an enchanted land of make-believe.

"he Venetians have their own word for this mellow city of the morning mists: they c: all it La Serenissima. It was, of course, the grand city of yesterday but in some ways it is the city of tomorrow. It is a city without vehicles, without smog, without pollution. It is a city from which the population does not flee. No Atlantis, it rises bravely if only temporally from the sea, an enchanting city of 400 bridges, 150 canals and 117 islands.

And on the island of Giudecca. Dr. Natale Rusconi, the then general manager and director of the Hotel Cipriani, weaved that spell that so beguiles the visitor to Venice. A third generation hotelier, and author of several books on international cuisine, from his early start in the Savoy, to managing first the Grand Hotel in Rome then the Gritti Palace in Venice, he had learned this skill, this so-Italian ability to receive so charmingly the world at his door.

To the Cipriani had come the Duke of Bedford and Nelson Rockefeller, Harold Macmillan and Giscard d'Estaing, Andy Warhol and Graham Sutherland, Tennessee Williams and Francoise Sagan, Sir John Gielgud and Dame Margaret Fonteyn.

And Farrah Fawcett. It is hard to forget Farrah Fawcett. She had stayed in our very poolside suite the week before. Here where Parisian architect Gerard Gallet had created a marvel of a bedroom with a superb spherical bathroom and a gorgeous circular Hollywood marble tub. Such luxury you might think is the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet when the US President came for a weekend stay here for a break from affairs of state, some oaf in Washington, DC thought to fly the president’s bed from America for his two-day stay. What an insult to Italy!

The Hotel Cipriani was created in 1956 by one Giuseppe Cipriani who also founded Venice's most famous watering hole: Harry's Bar. The original owners were the Guinness family. In 1976 the hotel was paid the supreme compliment by a regular visitor. The satisfied guest was James B. Sherwood an American industrialist. He bought the hotel.