La Bougie

Tag: europe

  • photoessay: under the tuscan sun

    photoessay: under the tuscan sun

    We drive from the Siena train station for some 15 to 20 minutes along hilly roads that wind through miles of grapevines arrayed in perfect rows across the undulating landscape. Signs point towards the village of Vagliagli, but we turn and turn again down a graveled road with a sign reading Dievole Wine Resort. Olive trees are to our right, autumn-hued vines to our left, and a valley dotted with an occasional stone villa before us. This is the quintessence of Tuscany—a grand but quiet agrarian landscape that I can almost convince myself hasn’t changed too much since Dievole was founded in 1090.    

    a sign on a rock reading "Dievole" with an arrow

    the resort

    The resort is laid out as a cluster of buildings on a steep hillside. Working from the bottom up, the first level is occupied by a pool that overlooks the rolling Tuscan hills. It is too cool to swim in October, but not too cool to lounge in the sun when it finally emerges toward the end of the week.

    a pool surrounded by green hills under a cloudy sky streaked with sunset
    feet in a lounge chair beside a pool

    The next level up is the main area of the resort, containing a bar, a restaurant, a rose garden, and some guest rooms.

    Higher still, a beautiful stone cottage hung with ivy turned a brilliant shade of red in October houses the wine tasting room and more guest rooms. The cellar contains rows upon rows of casks where the wine is aged.  

    a brick tree-lined path leading down to a house with old tiles and ivy-covered walls
    red ivy covers a stone wall

    All the way up the hill are the last of the guest rooms, where I stayed. As I described in my previous post, these rooms boast the most dramatic views of the valley.

    The architecture throughout the resort is simple but lovely, with stone or stucco buildings, white walls, dark wooden beams and trim, and simple décor, like hand drawings of animals that evoke a 19th century country manor.

    the grounds

    The real magic of Dievole is not indoors, but the grounds. Yellowing grapevines and eucalyptus-green olive groves paint the hills in every direction, sloping upwards to the west, and downwards to the east. There, in the mornings, the sun rises over the mist-swathed valley, breathing warmth into the chill October dawn.

    sunrise over rolling hills
    morning mist clinging to hills under a rising sun
    red grape leaves foregrounded before a rising sun over hilltops
    sun rising over hills swathed in mist

    Guests are free to roam among the vines and groves. Wandering solo on the grounds is the highlight of my time in Italy. There’s a pastoral silence that’s only interrupted by a gentle breeze and chirping birds. I meander down rows of vines, taking photographs of the yellow and red leaves and the few bunches of grapes that remain, nearly rotting, after the harvest. The harvest of the olives is ongoing, and workers shake the trees, forcing them to drop their fruit into massive tarps.

    a path through vineyards leading to distant hills
    red grapes on a vine
    a large pile of green olives
    red and yellow grape leaves
    a blue tractor beside rows of yellow vines

    There’s also a farm. Actually, I lied, this is my favorite part of the trip. On the first afternoon, I go on a walk. As I round a bend in the road, I come upon a small stone building and am greeted by a rooster and chickens scurrying away from me, while a pair of geese angrily hold their ground. A farmhand napping in a white pickup truck parked by the building awakes to tell me something like, “go ahead, you can walk down the path.” (My Italian is basic, but I get the gist.) I gesture at the angry geese and try to reply something like, “I don’t think they want me to.” I find an alternative way around the geese and spend some happy time chasing the chickens around the farm. Later in the week, I return with my long lens for some tighter shots.

    a rooster and two chickens
    an old farmhouse on a hill
    rooster with a cocked head
    two geese seated side-by-side

    food and drink

    On our first full day in Dievole, we are welcomed with a wine tasting in the tasting room. We sample a white Trebbiano, a Chianti Classico, and the Novecento (my personal favorite, which I order exclusively for the rest of the week). We also tour the cellar where the wine is made.

    wine bottles placed on a grid-like shelf
    white wine pouring from a bottle into a line of glasses
    large wine casks

    We eat like Grand Dukes of Tuscany for the entire week we are at Dievole. Breakfast is a typical European-style breakfast buffet, with platters of pecorino and prosciutto, heaps of breads and cakes, and some cooked eggs for us Americans. Each night, the chef prepares a three-course Tuscan meal—primi piatti, secondi piatti, and dolci—that are unfailingly scrumptious. Throughout the week, we sample all the various olive oils that Dievole produced—and all the wine of course!

    white bean soup
    a serving of pasta with mushrooms
    a pan slicing a ham
    foam and a chocolate leaf over a teacup

    coda

    My only regret about this trip was that we were so busy I didn’t feel like I had as much time to just bask in the wonders of the Tuscan countryside as I would have liked. It’s no surprise that the landscapes of Tuscany have inspired so many artists. While I was there for a photography class, others in our group were taking painting and cooking classes. But alas, time was short, and there was also so much to love and explore in the towns and villages of Tuscany—which will be the subject of my next post!

  • a tuscan dream

    a tuscan dream

    I awoke a little after sunrise to the sound of birds chirping. Blue sky with puffy clouds reflected in the pane of my open bedroom window, which was framed by white curtains.

    my bedroom window

    At the window, I reveled in the view. A fig tree and a cypress tree framed the two sides of the window, and from there, the ground sloped downwards, towards a vineyard, yellow with fall. Beyond that, rolling hills to which mist still clung.

    view of the sunrise from my bedroom

    I dressed, grabbed my camera, and walked down the little path outside my room, which ended at the start of a vineyard. I followed the paths through the vineyard, climbing to the top of the hill for the most panoramic view of the valley—superior to the view from my bedroom only due to the height.

    I photographed sweeping vistas and the tiny details of grape leaves in equal measure, then moved on to the freshly harvested olive groves. I actually spun around, my hands grazing the hanging olive branches as I went. This was the Tuscany that I had imagined when I booked this trip a year ago.

    I take photography classes back home in DC through the Capital Photography Center. Sometime in summer 2023, a week-long photo workshop in Tuscany had popped on their website for October 2024. Clicking through the photos from previous classes, a vivid dream took shape in my mind of cypress trees, vineyards, olive groves, and charming medieval and Renaissance villages. It would be a pricy trip, so I hesitated for a few days. But I found myself daydreaming, lost in the fantasy of Tuscany I had crafted in my mind. The dream would not be denied.

    The trip was worth every penny. The worst thing I can say about it is that the rain that dogged my first week in Italy (see posts on Bologna and Ravenna) continued well into my week in Tuscany. As we were driving through the Val D’Orcia on a dreary morning, we stopped for a photo opp. I was wearing waterproof boots with good treads, but the soil was so damp it had turned into the consistency of wet potter’s clay, wedging itself into every cranny of the boot. Effectively, I was walking on a slick sheet of clay on a surface of slick clay. Long story short:

    a woman disheveled with jeans and boots covered in mud
    I fell in the mud

    (Photo credit: Marie Joabar)

    I had to walk around sopping wet and muddy for the rest of the day while we toured Pienza.

    I share this story because a) it really was quite funny, and b) I wouldn’t want anyone to get the misimpression that my travels, bougie though they may be, are always so glamorous. Sometimes I end up covered in mud.

    (On the plus side, how great is that rain hat that I bought in Siena? Courtesy Cappelleria Bertacchi.)

    woman modeling a black rain hat
    new rain hat!

    Rain and mud aside, I have much to say about all of Tuscany’s delights… so much so that I’m going to break this up into a few different posts.

    Next week, look for a post on the Dievole Wine Resort, which was the site of the aforementioned twirling in the olive groves. I truly cannot imagine a more heavenly place to spend a week. I could go on and on about how much I loved this place… and I probably will.

    The following week, look for a post about the towns and villages that we visited on our daily photography excursions around Tuscany: Siena, San Gimignano, Radda, and Pienza. Each delightful in its own charming way!

  • bologna: a damp journey through a foodie paradise

    bologna: a damp journey through a foodie paradise

    Our group of mostly American tourists followed Caterina of Secret Food Tours through the winding streets of old Bologna like little ducklings. We stopped in one shop and tasted little pastries, then in another shop we picked up a parcel, then tasted slices of almond-flavored cakes called torta di rizo, then acquired another parcel, then squeezed into the cellar of a wine shop, where we tasted 8-, 12- and 25-year aged balsamic vinegar. This was decidedly not the commodity we buy in grocery stores in the US, but something thicker, sweeter, and less acidic—a perfect blend of the tartness of vinegar and the sweetness of syrup.

    a woman points to a series of black casks
    Caterina explains the making of balsamic vinegar

    Eventually we reached the Osteria del Sole, located in the Quadrilatero and distinguishable only by a faint sun painted on the door. (Side note: Stanley Tucci visited the same place in the Bologna episode of Searching for Italy.)

    a painting of a sun on a wall
    the sign of the Osteria del Sole

    Traditionally, we learned, osterias only served wine and other spirits—food was BYO—and Osteria del Sole was a rare one that still abided by this ancient rule. So here, the mysterious parcels we had picked up earlier came out.

    They turned out to be two platters of charcuterie—or salumi, in Bolognese parlance—featuring some of the region of Emilia’s best pork-based delicacies. Slices of salami gentile, ciccioli (pork belly), culatello (culo being “butt”), salami rosso, and of course, Bologna’s famous mortadella and prosciutto di Parma.

    a platter of multi-colored meats
    a platter of salumi di Bologna

    While a long-time lover of prosciutto and cured meats in general, I had never tried mortadella before. We Americans had long ago bastardized the name of this cold cut from Bologna into “baloney”, so I looked at this item somewhat askance. But like the balsamic vinegar, mortadella had little to do with what we find in American grocery stores. This pale meat with flecks of white (fat) and black (peppercorns) was as buttery soft as the best prosciutto. Rounding out the platter were some hunks of parmesan (originating in neighboring Parma) and slabs of focaccia di Bologna.  

    As we noshed on the platter, the servers from the osteria brought us bottles of wine from the region. A Pignoletto, which my Bradt guide to Emilia-Romagna described as “the new prosecco”. A Lambrusco—again a departure from the varietal found in American grocery stores. Not at all sweet, but dry and fizzy, a combination of flavor and texture I’d never encountered before. And of course, a Sangiovese, a lighter wine made of the same grape I would later consume by the liter in Tuscany in the form of Chianti.

    And all of this wasn’t even lunch, it was just the appetizer.

    When I was planning my trip to Italy, two things had drawn me to Bologna. First and foremost was the food, for which Emilia-Romagna is justly famous as the best in Italy, even in a country known for its cuisine.

    In this, Bologna did not disappoint. The Secret Foods walking tour was easily the highlight of my time in Bologna. After the osteria, we went to the Trattoria del Rosso for tortellini in brodo (tortellini being one of Bologna’s signature foods, in this case served in a capon broth) and tagliatelle al ragù (the original form of spaghetti Bolognese, properly served over much broader tagliatelle pasta topped with a ragù made of minced veal, pork, prosciutto, onions, carrots, celery, and only the tiniest bit of tomato). While in the city, I sampled the ragù and tortellini more than once, along with the lasagna, made in authentic Bolognese fashion, with spinach in the noodles and bechamel rather than ricotta.  

    a shop with cheeses and hanging meats
    the bounty of Bologna
    multiple colors and styles of pasta in a shop
    the many pastas of Bologna
    lines of tortellini
    authentic tortellini bolognese

    The second thing that drew me to Bologna was the history. When I first started planning the trip, what I knew about Bologna was that it was home to the first university in the world, founded in 1088 (just 22 years after the Normans arrived in Britain), and that it had been a medieval cultural capital that drew scholars from all over the world long before the rise of such Renaissance families as the Medicis and the Borgias.  

    Given that, I was expecting to be more impressed by the architecture of the city, but perhaps I did not fully contemplate how much architecture changed from the Middle Ages to the grandeur of Renaissance Italy to which I was accustomed. Most of the architecture in Bologna is a brownish-red brick, which was the building material that was locally available in the city’s heyday. The city boasts some cute churches for sure, like the Basilica Santo Stefano:

    a small brick church
    the Basilica di Santo Stefano

    But the city’s main cathedral on the Piazza Maggiore, the Basilico di Santo Petronio, is a bit of a gargantuan eyesore. Though construction began in 1390, the façade was never completed, leading to the sense that the basilica started getting dressed in the morning and forgot to put on its shirt.

    a basilica at the far end of a piazza
    Basilica di San Petronio

    The two elements of Bolognese architecture that are admittedly kind of cool are its porticoes and its towers. All through the city, sidewalks are covered in arched porticoes, a feature of the city’s architecture since the 12th century. Some of them are simple, practical coverings, others stately, others whimsical, others works of art. All of them are quite practical, for when it rains in Bologna (as it did much of the time I was there) you can walk around the much of the city under cover, only having to emerge into the rain to cross the street. All in all, there are 62 km worth of porticoes in the city, and they lend the city’s architecture a unique character.

    a man walks under an arched portico
    a more stately portico
    a pair of shoes hang beneath a portico
    a more whimsical portico
    people walk beneath a portico with a blue painted ceiling
    a more artistic portico

    The towers, I suspect, were more impressive in memory than in current fact. Centuries before New York City started sprouting skyscrapers, the great families of Bologna (and elsewhere in Italy) built massive brick towers to the skies, simultaneously for purposes of status and defense. Food tour guide Caterina showed us a rendering of what the city had looked like over a century ago (something like this), before many of the towers crumbled or were torn down due to structural failings, and presumably bombing during World War II. Ruins of them can be seen tucked in corners all around the city, but the Due Torre (Two Towers), are the most prominent remaining.

    a tall brick tower
    Torre degli Asinelli

    Until recently, you could climb the larger Torre degli Asinelli, but now the smaller Torre della Garisenda is leaning so heavily towards its big brother that the larger tower has been closed due to safety concerns.

    Overall, I found Bologna and the Emilia region worth visiting for the cuisine alone. A true foodie could go nuts in this region, visiting wine, cheese, and salumi shops and production facilities, along with restaurants from the hole-in-the-wall to the Michelin-starred. But for me, the region lacked something of the charm that I associate with Italy. But perhaps my impression was soured on account of the rain, which prevented me from spending as much time as I’d have liked enjoying my all-time favorite Italian activity of sitting in an outdoor café, drinking wine, and people watching.  

    a woman standing on the sidewalk under a black umbrella
    rainy Bologna