Stefania

The woman at the center of this picture, taken during a village chestnut roast on Monte Amiata, is Stefania Alboreti. She is an Irish ex-pat married to Antonio, the guy standing behind her. She helps stranieri (outsiders) find and maintain properties in the area. Because Momo would be traveling this winter, and because Sally and I have pitiful little Italian, Stefania would be our paid interpreter. And since her husband Antonio is a respected builder in the area, we'd get some good structural advice as well.

It turns out there were a few hitches in acquiring the property. For one, one of the owners of record had actually died in 1997, so her successor had to be officially registered. On top of that, there was a little issue of volume.

In Tuscany, restoration laws are strict. Basically, you cannot build where no structure has previously existed, and you can only restore the amount of volume that was originally there. In our case, Daniele said we'd be allowed to add the two chicken coops and the lean-to attached to the volume of little sharecropper's shack, plus we could dig an underground garage as long as it couldn't be seen from the road, for a total footprint of about 98 square meters. That would create a cottage of about 321 square feet. Not very big. But a nice livable love shack size if we ever got around to building. And besides, you don't go to Tuscany to stay inside.

The problem was that the chicken coops were not on the official platt registered in Siena. They would have to be added. There would be a fee to the commune of San Giovani d'Asso under whose jurisdiction the property falls. It would be about 6,000 Euro. 6,000 Euro no one in the selling family wanted to pay out of pocket before the sale.

After several months of round and round, I proposed that I would pay it and we could subtract it from the total paid at the time of sale. Everyone agreed. But there was a much harder issue to get them to agree to: When could all 10 owners the property converge from all corners of Italy in the notary's office for the sale?

A Crashing Boar or Three

Returning to the property one morning alone, I began a thorough assessment of its physical resources, the plants, the stones, the junk. Every rotten plank and broken brick were an asset to be considered for reuse in the spirit of whatever contadino had carted it there from somewhere else to reuse himself. And every mature tree, vine or herb would save me a a lot of landscaping. Rather than sculpting additively (by hauling things in to plant), I would reclaim the old farm, if we really bought it, by subtractively pruning and clearing--like chipping away marble to find the form hidden within, or chiseling a rough diamond. Except this little gem was green and living and dynamic.

Being mindful of rusty nails, broken glass, and hidden bailing wire traps, I walked the entire property starting at the top cataloging what I could see beneath the smothering rovi (blackberry vines) and vitalva (summer clematis). I found: 93 olive trees, 16 peach trees, 5 walnut trees, 4 cherry trees, countless wild prune trees, 2 big fig trees, 1 umbrella pine, and about 200 grapevines. And I was sure to discover more under the canopy of wild vines when I started clearing.

Working my way down the perimeter of the property where the lower grain field borders a small wood, I was also careful to avoid the ankle-twisting grubbing holes pocking the fields.

When I first heard the threatening grunt-snuffle-snort from under the expansive mat of blackberry bramble on the other side of the property line fence, my heart raced and I backed up, watching the brambles undulate like a giant mole was tunneling under them. Happily it continued tunneling away from me, even after I stepped into a grubbing hole and fell flat on my back, certain what I was hearing was a cinghiale, a wild boar.

My new acquaintance, artist and gardener Sheppard Craige, had told me a story over coffee just 2 days earlier. He was doing 55 miles an hour down a windy Tuscan road when a wild boar sow charged his pickup truck's left front tire. Within a mile the tire was flat, the sidewall punctured by a razor sharp tusk. Cinghiali, wild boars can get to be 700 pounds around here.

Cinghiale are rabbit fast and can rip the femoral artery out of a man's thigh in a heartbeat. Needless to say I gave that part of the property a wide berth.

At the very bottom of the property is the orto or vegetable garden area. Not only is the richest soil there, but that rare and most important resource in our area, a spring. It is a very slow trickle, but constant all year long and shaded by some pretty vinca, willows. The neighboring farmer had recently used the abandoned orto to grow corn and melons, the season's dry stalks stood in rows like so many straw sentries. Threading my way through them toward the stand of cane at the woods end of the orto, I began to fantasize about the great garden of heirloom fruits and vegetables I could grow. The soil was surprisingly moist because of the spring, a good sign.

I was savoring the song of warblers and thrushes and mulling all this over when I heard it again, not 6 feet from where I stood, the snuffling under the brambles. This time it seemed angry. Apparently, we'd both done a big loop and ended in the same place. The brambles undulated again, but toward me this time and fast. Then I saw the fawn-like backs of two boar piglets leaping away.

Knowing the big undulation was a boar sow coming my way, and that thin bit of wire fencing between us couldn't stop it, I turned and bolted face-first into a rattling cornstalk that scared me more than the mountain lion had. Barely controlling my bladder, I felled stalk after stalk before me as I ran to the opposite end of the orto. I never saw the sow, but I'll never forget her sour earthy musk. The only thing I can liken it to is the territory marking scent of tiger urine that raised the hackles on my neck in Sikkim some years earlier....

1st & last images are by David J Slater at DJSPhotography UK.

The First of Many Obstacles Removed

Late that August, Momo placed a call to New York to tell us that the foot dragging 93-year-old woman had actually died months earlier and her lawyer hadn't bothered to inform the family. With this stumbling block removed, and the rest of the family still willing to sell, Sally and I would need to return to Tuscany soon to work out the details ... If we were still interested.

Meanwhile, we more earnestly entertained the fantasy of actually owning the property. I insisted that I would take this in a no hurry, no stress, carefully thought out and executed sort of way.

"How will we live there?" Sally asked.

"For the first 1-3 years, we'll just kind of camp there. I'll patch the roof in the little capanna (shed), well get a composting toilet and a solar shower and we'll cook on wood fires and eat from the land while we think about the next step. If at any point it stops being fun, we sell."

"Right."

On October 21, 2006, we returned to Italy.

World Cup 2006

I have forgotten to mention the single most vivid moment before we started looking for a piece of Tuscany, the galvanizing moment when Sally and I knew we wanted some part of it. In fact, it was the spirit of an entire village that drew us in, made us feel part of a small community we were very much stranieri, outsiders to.

Independence Day, July 4th, 2006, Sally and I joined the 200 or so villagers of Montisi to munch pizza and watch a soccer game in the alpenglow of a warm Tuscan evening. The ancient Etruscan road into and out of town had been barricaded , an old white bed sheet had been hung across the road between the old stone walls and chairs were set up many rows deep.

Italy had not won a World Cup in 24 years. For the match deciding who would meet France in the final game, Germany had the home field advantage.

There is simply nothing like sitting-standing-sitting-standing among an entire village of passionate Italians of all ages, genders and castes, cheering, jeering, laughing, spilling wine and occasionally, during bad calls, leaping up to punch the referee projected on the bed sheet screen with their fists.

That night, underdog Italy took a chance and won. A few evenings later, on July 9, Italy took the title in overtime. I am not too embarrassed to say that Sally and I danced in sprays of uncorked spumante like everyone else. Sleep came late that night.

The next day, we started looking in earnest.

Daniele

This is Daniele Monacchini. He is the geometra, the surveyor in the village of Montisi. He was charged with selling the property by the extended family who owned it. With Momo as interpreter, we learned that the property was 2 hectares (about 5 acres), that it came with precious vine and olive rights, that it was for sale for 100,000 Euro flat (plus 20% tax), and that it was owned in various fractions of one-twenty-sixths by ten different members of a two-family clan spread all over Italy.

There were only two catches. We had to get all ten to meet at a notary's office in Sienna, and one of them, a 93-year-old woman in Florence, didn't want to sell.

On Second Thought

Returning to the property, I wanted Sally to take a closer look at all five abandoned overgrown acres, including....

The tiny delapidated sharecropper's shack...

And the severely listing chicken coop beside it...

And the dying vineyard...

And the disheveled unpruned olive grove...

which happened to have some million-dollar views.

But when I tried to paint the picture of the place a little fixed up, Sally couldn't see it.

So I tried another tack and said I really wanted to give it a try. This caught Sally's attention because I rarely say I want anything. But it wasn't until I said I would turn the dilapidated two room shed into a love shack...

that she agreed to meet the sellers.

The Next Day

The next day, Sally and I went to look at properties with a real estate agent named Anne Marie. Over the better part of an afternoon, she showed us a dirt floored garage that reeked of gas and oil, a roofless caved-in grain mill, and a small farm house abandoned by the amateurs who'd recklessly half-restored it. The garage went for $300,000, the farmhouse for $600,000, the mill was claustrophobically attached to occupied apartments. None came with any land, let alone the olive trees and vines essential to the dream. By the time any one of these dismal properties was fixed up it would cost a million dollars or more.

It was depressing and it was clear: "location, location, location" had driven the price of Tuscany well over our budget. That evening over dinner we reluctantly agreed we'd simply have to remain perpetual visitors.

But all that night I lay awake, haunted by the abandoned property Momo had shown us. The rogue peach and grape leaves I'd seen thrust above the smothering vines like the hands of drowning swimmers, they'd been waving at me. They needed a lifeguard. They needed pruning. The next morning I woke with my heart racing, convinced I could heal that broken piece of land, reclaim it from the wilderness and make it our dream retreat.

"Sally," I said over coffee, "we need to go back for a closer look."