My Day Under the Tuscan Sun

It’s a major benefit to have a brilliant travel companion who knows her way around and navigates like a personal tour guide. I’m fortunate to have that in my longtime pal Vera, who is a journeywoman at the core. After I arrived before dawn in Rome from New York without any sleep worth mention, she whisked me off for a day trip to Cortona, in Tuscany. What better way to start a 17-day European adventure, in a dream-state with someone else driving?

I had deposited my bag at Donna Camilla Savelli, the understatedly elegant hotel and former convent in Trastevere, the district in Rome not unlike Paris’ Left Bank, bohemian in spirit and separated from the main city to the west by a defining river, in this case the Tiber. Conde Nast Traveler described the gentle luxury and well-priced 4-star hotel as a “lure…for professional sightseers.”

I arrived just as the flow of checkouts was beginning, and, without a ready room, the kind breakfast staff fortified me with a hearty cappuccino while I waited for Vera. I retooled with caffeine in the vaulted corridor overlooking the spacious garden of the former 17^th century Baroque monastery designed by Borromini. On the way out the door, I passed by an early Mass underway in the chapel – in fact, another beautiful, vaulted space wrapped in quiet jewel tones of marble.

As Vera confidently challenged the other Italian drivers – a habit based on living in Rome for 18 years – I watched the parade of monuments and settled in the back seat to doze on and off as left the city for the Tuscan landscape. Each hilltop presented a distinct profile, fortifications across the heights of the region that had been an historical crossroads for centuries. I sketched them as we were driving through the countryside.

After about two hours, we made the steep climb to the walled commune of Cortona, known heretofore in my mind as the “Tuscan Sun village.” We whisked past Villa Laura, named Villa Bramasole in Frances Mayes’ memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. It’s now a nine-bedroom luxury estate where Mayes’ lives part-time and the locals keep in the rearview mirror.

It was Sunday and the town plaza was relatively empty, but not the hospitable restaurants, such as Osteria del Teatro, where we met up with friends. From the succulent lineup of homemade pastas, I started with a rich duck taglionini (a white-wine duck ragu with wild fennel over thin pasta) followed by venison medallions with pomegranate, chestnuts and marinated leek. Only 24 sleepless hours earlier, I had been faced with airplane catering at JFK! I was indeed in a dreamstate…

Our day finished with a tour of a restored stone tower on a small farm at the crest of the Florentine hill. It’s now the retirement digs of broadcast filmmakers who are now creatively enjoying their own Tuscan sun inspiration.

“’Oh, must we dream our dreams  and have them too?’” That’s Frances Mayes quoting the poet Elizabeth Bishop in Garden & Gun magazine. Mayes affirmed, in response, “yes.”