In the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of talk in the media about Canadians changing their travel plans for upcoming vacations.
The Guardian reported that flight bookings between Canada and the U.S. are down by over 70 per cent.
Other travel destinations are gaining the visitors that the U.S. has lost. Europe is high on the list, and among the most popular European destinations is, as ever, Italy.
But there’s a problem with visiting Italy, namely that most organized travel focuses on Venice, Florence and Rome. Venice and Florence have long suffered from over-tourism.
Both cities are small and there isn’t enough space for everyone, especially when the tourists outnumber the residents. Rome is larger and the sights – museums, churches, ancient monuments – are spaced further apart, so the perceived damage is mitigated.
In 2009, I wrote two columns for The Florentine, suggesting alternative itineraries for visitors that would take them to destinations in the province of Siena.
Although those itineraries didn’t go beyond Siena, there are many attractions further south that merit the attention of all adventurous tourists. I’ll give just one example here – a trip I took on Nov. 1, the feast of All Saints (Ognissanti), in 1986.
In Italy, Ognissanti was a national holiday. Traditionally, people would attend mass and continue the celebrations with a family meal.
I was then living in Florence, and an American friend and I decided to visit Pienza, about 120 kilometres south of Florence.
My trusty Autobianchi 112 took us down the Superstrada to Siena, and from there along secondary roads through a gently rolling, velvety green countryside. We reached Pienza late that morning.
We were both architectural historians and wanted to see the site that Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini, 1405 to 1464, pope from 1458 to his death) had started constructing as an ideal town, which involved rebuilding parts of his native village Corsignano.
Pius II was a humanist scholar and wanted to create a town based on the most modern principles of architecture.
He engaged the architect Rossellino, his contemporary, born 1409 in Settignano (the same village where Michelangelo was born in 1475), but both the pope and the architect died before the project was finished.
Today, what we can admire in his ideal town is a paved square around which stand the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, the town hall, and the Palazzo Piccolomini.
Pope Pius described his palace in great detail in Book IX of his “Commentaries” (Vancouver Public Library has an abridged English translation).
My friend and I were able to wander on our own around the courtyard and the enormous garden laid out at the back.
The interior rooms of the palace were shown to us by an extremely elderly man who I was convinced had been the valet of the last Piccolomini count to have lived there.
At times it felt as if we’d become actors in an Italian film, a sad and slightly surreal Fellini production.
After we’d spent several hours exploring the "new" town, we developed a hearty appetite.
When you’re in an unfamiliar town and you don’t know a good place to eat, you must first of all leave the area where they sell souvenirs and have menus translated into English.
Then you have a couple of options. You can try to spot a local who looks like they enjoy food and ask them, “dove si mangia bene?” (Where can one eat well?).
Or if your nose has picked up an irresistible smell, you can follow it like an epicurean bloodhound, which is what my friend and I did.
We traced the smell to a small trattoria near the edge of town. Soon we were tucking into pici (thick hand-rolled pasta) with a sauce of tomato, leccino olives, garlic, porcini mushrooms and salsiccia al finocchio (sausage with fennel).
It was divine. It was so good that I promptly replicated it a couple of days later in Florence and invited a few American friends to share the meal.
They were as bowled over as I was by the combination of flavours. They took the recipe back with them to the US and months later assured me they’d made it for their friends, who’d made it for their friends, and so on and on.
I started making it again recently. Fortunately, I’ve been able to find real San Marzano tomatoes here, and I’ve also found two butchers who make their own salsiccia al finocchio.
The only thing missing is the fresh, hand-rolled pici – but gnocchi, I discovered, are a satisfactory substitute.
Sabine Eiche is a local writer and art historian with a PhD from Princeton University. Her passions are writing for children and protecting nature. Her columns deal with a broad range of topics and often include etymology in order to shed extra light on the subject.
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