Fra Angelico was a humble monk who happened to be a great artist. In this post we look at his works in the Monastery of San Marco in Florence – this will be a short piece to complement my recent longer post on the Signorelli frescoes in the duomo of Orvieto in which I briefly introduced Fra Angelico.
To recap, the artist and Dominican friar known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, to modern Italians as Il Beato Angelico and to Anglophone art historians as “Fra Angelico” was a talented artist of great piety and personal simplicity. In terms of the periods we ascribe to art history, he straddled late-medieval “International Gothic” and the Renaissance, and painted in both styles as the occasion demanded.
When Fra Angelico was executing commissions for important and wealthy clients, he painted in a formal style, and used the most brilliant and expensive colours. We saw an example of that in my photograph of the two ceiling panels which were all he completed in the Cappella Nuova in the Orvieto Duomo. I will reproduce the photograph again here to save you going to look for it.
The Fra Angelico panels in the ceiling of the Cappella Nuova in Orvieto, an example of his formal style. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm lens (click to enlarge).
But there is another aspect to his painting, simpler in style, reflecting his own subject choices, and giving us a bit of an insight into the character of someone who Vasari described, a hundred years later, as not only rarely talented, but humble and modest (in contrast with some of Vasari’s other subjects). To see this side of Fra Angelico, you must visit the monastery of San Marco in Florence (nowadays officially the “Museum of San Marco” – you can buy tickets online at its website).
The Monastery of San Marco
Map of Florence showing the location of the Monastery of San Marco at the top right (click to open in Google Maps).
There had been a monastery, or a series of monasteries, in this location on the northern side of the city for a least a couple of hundred years when, in the 1430s, the previous order was evicted for their laxity. The property was made over to a group of Dominicans from nearby Fiesole, which included Fra Angelico. But the buildings were in poor condition and the new proprietors had to live in makeshift accommodation at first.
San Marco was in the part of Florence known as the “Medici quarter” and it was the head of that wealthy family and the de facto ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, who decided to finance the rebuilding of the monastery in contemporary Renaissance style. And at some point it was decided that Fra Angelico and his assistant, Benozzo Gozzoli, would paint frescoes in various communal areas of the monastery and also in the monks’ cells.
Fresco in San Marco, Judas kisses Christ by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
Probably the most famous of these is his Annunciation, which is a very simple scene compared to what he would probably have painted had he been commissioned to do something for a great cathedral.
Fresco in San Marco, Annunciation by Fra Angelico.Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
No doubt in gratitude for his generosity in financing the reconstruction of the monastery, Cosimo de’ Medici was granted a cell there, as a peaceful retreat from the pressures of running Florence while pretending to be just a normal citizen. It is about twice the size of the rest of the cells, but just as austere inside. For this, Fra Angelico put in a special effort. His Adoration of the Magi is very beautful – there is no gorgeous and complex background such as might be seen a similar work by Perugino, but the figures are elegant and richly dressed. Below that is a space for a little altar with an image of Christ.
Fresco in Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell in San Marco, Adoration of the Magi. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back, two images merged in Photoshop (click to enlarge).
It is a special experience to visit Cosimo’s cell and imagining him there in silent contemplation, or perhaps reading letters brought to him from Popes and princes.
But despite the beauties of the Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi, the impression that stayed with me was that of a naive, almost cartoon-like literalness in his depiction of gospel scenes. In this Nativity the ox and the ass don’t quite take centre stage, but they certainly do not want to be just minor characters.
Fresco in San Marco, Nativity by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
In this scene of the women at Golgotha on Easter Sunday, they are rather theatrically peering into the empty sarcophagus, while an angel points upward as if to say “he went that-a-way”.
Fresco in San Marco, Resurrection by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
And I will finish with my favourite, a picture of the medieval tradition of The Harrowing of Hell, according to which Jesus descended into Hell, bashed up a few devils and released various worthy souls – prophets who had had to wait until the resurrection before being admitted to heaven. I can recognise John the Baptist, and I think the chap with the forked beard is probably Moses, but I can’t place the others. Perhaps the one grasping Jesus’s hand is Isaiah.
Fresco in San Marco, The Harrowing of Hell by Fra Angelico. Note the flattened devil. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
But the best parts are the devil hiding round a corner to the left, and the one who has been squashed flat when Christ smashed the door down. It makes me think of the coyote in the Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Not long ago I went for a drive up to the northern tip of Umbria, in the Upper Tiber Valley near the town of Sansepolcro, not far from where Umbria, Tuscany and Marche all meet. Why? Well firstly because it was quite hot, so the prospect of spending much of the day in an air-conditioned car had its attractions. But the main purpose was to visit a place called Cospaia, whose history sounds like something out of a Peter Sellers film.
Pliny the Younger
But before I got to Cospaia I set the GPS for a town called San Giustino, where there is an archaeological site I wanted to see – the villa of Pliny the Younger. The nephew and adopted son of – you guessed it – Pliny the Elder, this Roman historian did the right thing by history. Possibly knowing that attribution of ownership to a building was going to be difficult two thousand years later, Pliny the Younger took the precaution of having his initials moulded into the bricks of which his villa was to be made (not “PTY” but “CPCS”: Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus).
PTY’s main contribution to history is the large number of his letters which survive, in some of which he describes the death of his uncle (PTE) who was killed while trying to organise the rescue of people from Pompei. PTY’s detailed descriptions of the eruption of Vesuvius, which he witnessed from across the bay, are the main source of contemporary information about what happened, and as a result that type of volcanic eruption is still technically known as “Plinian”.
It’s mildly embarrassing to acknowledge that I first encountered PTE not at school or even in a book but in an episode of the classic BBC radio program, The Goon Show. It was called “The Histories of Pliny The Elder”, featuring Caractacus Seagoon, Brutus Moriatus et al. Spike Milligan obviously paid attention in history lessons.
I wasn’t expecting much of the villa, having looked at online descriptions, and indeed this is a site that was excavated several years ago, and has been fenced off and locked ever since.
What remains of Pliny the Younger’s Villa. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Supposedly many of the finds from the excavation are now on display in a museum in a nearby town, but I couldn’t find it. Still, it was nice to look around at the countryside, and imagine PTY sitting there looking at something like the same view after a hard day’s letter-writing. Actually, he was also a lawyer and a magistrate in Rome, so he only spent his holidays here.
The view from Pliny’s villa, much as it would have been – minus the solar panels. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).The view up into the hills behind Pliny’s villa. This is probably a bit more like how it was in the 1st Century AD. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, was a polymath who, in addition to several military histories that have not survived, wrote an enormous work of natural history, really the first of its kind. Last year I was overjoyed to find that in his Naturalis Historia he mentioned the grape variety known as “Grechetto”, and described it as “peculiaris est tudernis”, or “typical of Todi”. You can still buy a bottle of Grechetto in the supermarkets of Todi.
Cospaia
Checking out PTY’s villa didn’t take long, so from there I headed off to Cospaia, a small village which had about 250 inhabitants in the 15th Century, and I’d guess a bit fewer now. And Cospaia, despite its modesty, became an independent republic. By mistake. And stayed that way for almost four hundred years because no-one could be bothered fixing it.
Sign to Cospaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Back in the 1400s the Pope of the day (Eugenius IV) was running short of cash. The neighbouring Republic of Florence (later Grand Duchy of Tuscany), run for all practical purposes by the very wealthy Cosimo de’ Medici, had cash to spare. So in 1440 an agreement was reached whereby the town of Sansepolcro and its territory would be sold to Tuscany, and officials on both sides were set to work to establish where the new border should run, and draw up the treaty which would formalise it.
Rivers make obvious and unambiguous boundaries, provided there is no confusion about which river is intended. But in central Italy, any little dry creek bed tends to be called Rio. And in Cospaia there are two, about 500 metres apart, either side of the village. You can see where this is going, can’t you? The Papal cartographers selected the one nearest to them, and the Florentine cartographers assumed their instructions referred to the one nearest to them. The result was that Cospaia ended up neither in the Papal States, nor in Tuscany.
It is at this point that one thinks of the 1959 Peter Sellers film The Mouse That Roared, about the fictional independent duchy of Grand Fenwick that declares war on the United States. In the film about Cospaia I can see Alistair Sim as Eugenius IV, and maybe Alec Guinness as Cosimo de’ Medici. And of course Peter Sellers as the Mayor of Cospaia. Or maybe Peter Sellers could have played several of the main parts, as he did in The Mouse that Roared, and Dr Strangelove.
Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, Columbia Pictures, 1959 (source: IMDb). Interesting fact – the actor on the right is William Hartnell, later to play the original Dr Who.
One can see him wandering over to the newly-built Papal border post. “Are we in your territory?” “No”. Then over the hill to the Tuscan border post. “Are we in your territory?” “No”. So like Asterix and his indomitable Gauls they declared the independent Republic of Cospaia.
Cospaia from below, with a perfectly legal field of barley. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Anyway, the mistake was soon noticed, but the negotiations had been difficult and no-one felt like re-opening them just yet, for the sake of possession of a little place that no-one much cared about.
Cospaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
But less than a hundred years later, along with syphilis and a lot of silver and gold, the Spanish started importing tobacco from the New World. The Pope, finding scriptural reasons, banned tobacco altogether in his territories and made its import a crime punishable by excommunication. The Tuscans, like most other European jurisdictions, simply levied a massive excise on it. Cospaia, faced with neither eternal damnation nor a large tax, saw its opportunity, and the few acres between its ambiguously-named streams became a lucrative tobacco monoculture, with the crop smuggled into both its neighbours through the fields and woodlands.
Cospaia. I assume the vents in the side of the building are to allow tobacco leaves to dry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
People say that Italian bureaucracy is slow to act, but eventually all the smuggling became too irritating, and act it did. After a mere 386 years it swung into action and renegotiated the treaty, placing Cospaia in the Papal States for another forty years or so, until Italian unification divested the Vatican of its secular dominions. But the Papal Government had by then decided that smoking was not a grave sin after all, and allowed Cospaia to continue cultivating tobacco in return for a cut of the proceeds.
Cospaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Cospaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
These days Cospaia is a pretty, sleepy little place, dreaming of past glories. But reminders of those past glories are everywhere. The main street is the Via Della Repubblica, there is a Tobacco Road, and signs to a “smugglers’ trail”. Above the door of the village church there is a dedication not to some patron saint, but to “perpetual and established liberty”.
Cospaia, Via del Tabacco. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Cospaia – the village church in Via della Repubblica, dedicated to “perpetual and established liberty”. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Cospaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
I wandered through Cospaia and took a few photos. After that I drove up the Apennine slopes and through the pass of Bocca Trabaria into Marche. As I ascended via many a hairpin bend, passing panting cyclists and daredevil motorcyclists on the wrong side of the road, the temperature dropped about five degrees which was most welcome. The views were not great – after a couple of still days the central Italian valleys quickly fill with heat haze.
The pass of Bocca Trabaria, between Umbria and Marche. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
But it was quite heavily wooded – these bits of the Apennines are not high enough to be above the treeline as they are in Abruzzo. Apparently in ancient times the forests were a source of timber for Roman shipbuilding, with the logs floated down the infant Tiber towards Rome. It seems this would have been a major source of income for Pliny the Younger’s villa, down in the valley below.
The woodlands near Bocca Trabaria, once a source of timber for Rome. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
A good recent book about the two Plinys is In the Shadow of Vesuvius, A Life of Pliny by Daisy Dunn. The title is doubly misleading, as it is only partly about the eruption, and it is in fact a biography of both Plinys, PTE and PTY. I can only assume that it was the publisher’s marketing department that made the decisions, but I can recommend it anyway.
References to Cospaia and its accidental independence can be found in Umbria, A Cultural Guide, by Ian Campbell Ross, in Umbria by Patricia Clough, and most entertainingly in Philip’s Travel Guides – Umbria by Jonathan Keates, with photographs by Joe Cornish.
Iris Origo (1902–1988) should be much more famous than she is. Not just as a writer, historian and biographer but as a philanthropist, agricultural reformer and a war heroine.
I first encountered Iris Origo about fifteen years ago when I bought her book The Merchant of Prato. The Merchant of the title was Francesco di Marco Datini (1335-1410), a resident of the city of Prato near Florence. Datini was a successful businessman with interests across Europe, especially Papal Avignon, although he also imported Cotswolds wool for the Florentine textile industry.
Datini kept meticulous records of his numerous letters and commercial documents, and in his will he directed that they be kept and stored in his house. Over time “storage” seems to have been rather broadly interpreted, as they were discovered in 1870, stuffed into sacks under the staircase – but still in his house, so the terms of the will had arguably been observed. While doubtless a few learned monographs were produced, the material had to wait until 1957 to be introduced to a wider audience in the form of Iris Origo’s book.
The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo, 1957
I really enjoyed the book and have re-read it a few times. It could have been rather boring, but her writing style is engaging. She manages to synthesise a compelling narrative from an enormous amount of source material, and combines painstaking scholarship with a deep understanding of the historical and cultural context in which Datini lived. In particular Origo manages to show real empathy for her distant subjects while not ascribing feelings to them beyond those supported by the historical evidence. If only some 21st-Century writers could avoid such speculative attribution of emotions and experiences to historical subjects, in what purports to be non-fiction.
We actually have a couple of representations of Datini’s likeness. Like many wealthy merchants with a nervous eye on the church’s ban on lending at interest, Datini donated to good causes including paying for religious art, and in a painting by Filippo Lippi he is shown imploring the intercession of the Virgin Mary on behalf of a group of fellow-citizens.
The “Madonna del Ceppo” by Filippo Lippi, showing Francesco di Marco Datini in red.
If I can produce enough relevant photographs of Prato, I might do a separate post one day on Datini, but now I have a more compelling story to tell.
Who was Iris Origo?
So who was this writer, so obviously of extensive learning and considerable intellect? The back cover of The Merchant of Prato called her a Marchesa or Marchioness, which is to say above a countess in the order of Italian nobility, but below a duchess. It also turned out that she had never really been to school, let alone university.
She was born in Birdlip, Gloucestershire in 1902 to Bayard Cutting, a very wealthy American diplomat from New York, and Lady Sybil Cutting, daughter of the 5th Earl of Desart, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Alas, Bayard contracted tuberculosis and despite traipsing around the world to various health resorts in search of relief, he died in 1910 leaving his wife and young daughter alone but independently wealthy.
Bayard had developed strong internationalist ideas and before his death had asked Sybil not to bring Iris up either in America or England, but in an environment where she would not develop a strong sense of nationality. It is hard to say how successful this was, as Iris clearly always thought of herself as English, spending a lot of time in England (and some in America) in the 20s and 30s and being presented at court as a debutante. Moreover, she was to live in times when men with guns were liable to demand to see one’s passport, which rather forces the decision on one. But as we shall see she would spend more time in Italy than anywhere else.
An unusual childhood
Sibyl therefore decided to settle in Florence, arriving there in 1911 with the nine-year-old Iris in tow. Since the days of the 18th Century Grand Tour, and right up until the Second World War, there was a substantial British (and American) colony in Florence. Given the city’s artistic heritage, the English-speaking colony was rather self-consciously intellectual – like other expat groups though, it tended to factions and feuds.
Sibyl Cutting would have made a bit of a splash on arrival, as she rented the Villa Medici in Fiesole, one of the grandest Florentine addresses in terms of location, luxury and history. Fiesole is a town on a hill which overlooks Florence from the north, and in the mid-1450s Cosimo de’ Medici had built a villa there with magnificent views over the city. With Sibyl and Iris in residence, the villa quickly became one of the main social centres of the English colony, and Sibyl was to buy it outright in 1923.
The photograph of Fiesole below was taken from the viewing platform at the top of the Brunelleschi dome on Florence’s duomo. The Villa Medici is the square white building in the middle of the picture.
Fiesole from the Duomo of Florence, with the Villa Medici in the centre of the picture. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar C 250mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The free-thinking Bayard had not wanted Iris to attend a normal school, and she mostly did not, although when she was briefly enrolled in a school in London at the age of 12 she was assessed to be three years ahead of other girls of the same age. Instead she was schooled partly by a succession of governesses, partly self-educated by being given free run of the library at home, and partly by her mother’s intellectual friends, including the American art historian and fellow Florentine resident Bernard Berenson.
The Villa Medici in Fiesole, where Iris grew up. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
And it was on Berenson’s recommendation that Iris was sent for personal lessons with Professor Solone Monti on three afternoons a week. Monti taught her Greek and Latin and western literature, rather in the way that a Renaissance humanist scholar might have tutored the child of a prince. She learned Latin and Greek grammar by completing exercises while travelling to and from Monti’s home on the tram.
One of the many English people who drifted into the Cutting’s circle was an architect called Cecil Pinsent. A rather diffident young man, he set up a business with another Englishman restoring and redecorating the old buildings owned or rented by the expatriate colony, and increasingly designing their gardens. Apparently they were not very good at the practical side to start with, but learned on the job. It was not long before Sybil Cutting asked Pinsent to work on the gardens and interior decoration of the Villa Medici.
Florence as seen from the Villa Medici in Fiesole. Hasselblad 501 C/M Camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back, two images stitched together (click to enlarge).
Sybil sounds like a difficult character – an increasingly self-obsessed and neurotic hypochondriac. As Iris grew older she was probably happy to spend more time in England away from her mother, where despite an understandable lack of self-confidence, she moved in some fairly exalted literary circles, meeting and talking with the likes of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot.
Marriage and La Foce
It might have come as a surprise therefore when this quiet, brainy young woman on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group married a young Italian aristocrat: the Marchese Antonio Origo. It might have been even more of a surprise when the newlyweds announced that they were sinking their combined capital into the purchase of a large but very run-down estate in a distant corner of southern Tuscany – the Val d’Orcia.
The Val d’Orcia, near San Quirico d’Orcia. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
Nowadays the Val d’Orcia is one of the top tourist destinations in Italy, with some of the country’s most iconic views. I have photographed it many times, including on two visits this year. As indeed have hundreds of thousands of tourists. And as I’ve said elsewhere, modern visitors understandably think of the region as a land of milk and honey, or at any rate a land of pecorino cheese, salami and wine. But a century ago it was impoverished. Education rates were low, while disease rates, especially of those diseases associated with poor nutrition in children, were high.
There were a few reasons for this. One was soil degradation – the Val d’Orcia, heavily wooded in antiquity, had been deforested by the Etruscans and the Romans. What soil there was, already rather thin, was in many places eroded away to the underlying clay, and poor farming practices only made the erosion problem worse. Lack of education, conservatism and suspicion of outsiders hindered the introduction of more scientific farming techniques.
All of these ills occurred within, and were compounded by, the system of sharecropping known as mezzadria. As the name suggests, tenant farmers handed over half their crop (il mezzo) to the landowner. Traditionally, mezzadria was supposed to be a two-way street, with landowners having reciprocal responsibilities for various aspects of their tenants’ welfare. However by the early 20th Century, the great majority of landowners were absentees living in towns, handing over the management of their properties to factors (farm managers) whose job it was to maximise profits.
Into this sailed Antonio and Iris, two idealistic amateurs determined to be the old-fashioned, caring type of proprietors. In Antonio’s case this meant studying and introducing the latest scientific farming methods, while in Iris’s case it meant medical care and education for the children.
La Foce lies near the southern edge of the old Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in sight of the fortress of Radicofani that guarded the border with the Papal States. It was near the old pilgrim road called the Via Francigenaof which I have written elsewhere. Along the old pilgrim routes, various charitable institutions would build hospices for pilgrims and other travellers, and the main building of La Foce was such a one, dating from the late 1400s.
La Foce, the original building. Hasselblad 501 C/M Camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
In the 1920s the old building was much neglected, without water or electricity, and the grounds were described as being like a lunar landscape. Iris’s choice of an architect to restore and extend the buildings, and lay out the gardens, was obviously going to be Cecil Pinsent.
La Foce, the gardens. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens
Pinsent extended the building with a new wing at the rear, and in doing so realigned it. While the original wing faced the west and the old road, the new wing had a panoramic view south across the valley towards Monte Amiata.
The Val d’Orcia from La Foce, with Monte Amiata in the distance. Hasselblad 501 C/M Camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back, two images stitched together (click to enlarge).La Foce, the new front of the house. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens
As a birthday present for Iris, her American grandmother paid for water to be piped from a distant spring, and with a secure water supply now available, Pinsent could start laying out the garden. Photographs from the 1930s show that the modern garden is largely unchanged from Pinsent’s original design.
La Foce, the gardens. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lensLa Foce, the gardens. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens
In 1925 Iris and Antonio had a son, Gianni, to whom Iris was utterly devoted. Alas, he was to die of meningitis shortly before his eighth birthday. Pinsent designed a small chapel in the grounds in which Gianni was buried (as later were his parents). Much later they had two daughters, one of whom, I believe, still lives at La Foce.
Antonio’s efforts to rehabilitate the estate and improve the productivity of the farms were starting to show results, as were Iris’s initiatives with the children of the estate, including starting a school and a clinic. These projects happened to be consistent with the rural modernisation programs of the Fascist government, and La Foce became something of a propaganda showpiece for the regional Fascists. Not unnaturally this caused the Origos to be viewed with suspicion by some people after the war.
But in fact Iris’s Anglophone circle was strongly anti-fascist, and Antonio was a conservative aristocrat, a reserve army officer and an Italian patriot rather than a Fascist. Like many of his class he would have thought the Fascists a better choice than the Communists at first, changing his views as the harm Fascism was doing to Italy became apparent. After the fall of Fascism, when Germany became the enemy, it would be clear which side he was on. But in the 1930s, politics was a subject that was avoided at the Origo dinner table.
War comes to La Foce
As war approached, Iris recorded in her diaries the increasing hostility towards Britain and the expatriate community. These diaries were published posthumously in 2017 under the title A Chill in the Air. Once war broke out, she was viewed with suspicion by the authorities, but protected by her marriage to an Italian and by the fact that she had an American as well as a British passport (America was to stay out of the war for two more years). Iris tried unsuccessfully for a while to get some sort of volunteer work and eventually managed a job with the Red Cross in Rome, helping families on both sides of the conflict to get news of sons who had been taken prisoner.
Later, Iris made representations to the Italian authorities to be allowed to take in at La Foce children evacuated from northern cities like Milan and Turin, by now under heavy bombing. Eventually this was agreed to and small groups of traumatised and in some cases orphaned children began to arrive, to be housed in the farm buildings closest to the main house.
After the Italian surrender in 1943, many thousands of allied prisoners of war were released or escaped and the Germans – after some frightful atrocities – left Rome and began retreating up through central Italy. Word spread among the POWs, partisans and Italian army deserters that La Foce was a place in which they might find aid and advice. There are some quite surreal accounts of escaped POWs creeping through the woods above La Foce and suddenly finding themselves addressed by a tall woman dressed in tweeds who would hand them a bit of food and a map, and in upper-class English tones would briskly advise them where to go to hide, or where the allied lines were believed to be, and how to avoid German patrols. On at least one occasion, Iris was out at the back of the house on just such an errand while Antonio was out at the front casually engaging a German patrol in conversation. I’m surprised no-one has made a film of it.
Some of the POWs made the dangerous journey south to rejoin the advancing allies; others preferred to hole up until the allies got to them. The wooded country around the base of Monte Amiata was a major partisan stronghold, and some POWs went and joined them there. A good many POWs and Italian deserters were sleeping rough in La Foce’s own woods.
Monte Amiata. The woods on its slopes sheltered many escaped POWs and partisans. Hasselblad 501 C/M Camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
If the word had got around in partisan circles that the Origos could be relied upon for help, then it would not have been long before the Fascists found out too, and the Origos were denounced in local Fascist news sheets. To have been caught helping the resistance by the Germans would have risked arrest, deportation to a concentration camp or summary execution, so to survive must have required a good deal of both agility and luck.
Escape with the children
Inevitably the allies – Americans, British, Indians and New Zealanders – arrived in the Val d’Orcia, with aerial bombing and artillery fire from both sides. One day the Germans came and informed the Origos that La Foce was to be requisitioned as a command post, so the time had come to get the remaining families and the refugee children to safety. Iris and Antonio gathered them all together and led them on foot to Montepulciano, about ten kilometres away.
The photograph below shows Montepulciano from the little town of Montefollonico. La Foce is beyond the hills at the distant right of the picture, so it would have been over these hills that Iris and Antonio led the refugees.
Montepulciano from Montefollonico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The roads were mined, and subject to artillery fire. The group walked past the bodies of dead soldiers, and hid in the cornfields when they heard shellfire. Eventually, exhausted and desperately thirsty, with the adults carrying the smaller children, they arrived outside the walls of Montepulciano. The Germans had left, and the refugees were taken in by friends in the town. Again, I don’t know why someone did not make a film of this – I can see Vivien Leigh as Iris and Dirk Bogarde as Antonio.
There was one peripheral element of this story that did end up on film, in a small way. Commissioned into the Royal Engineers, Cecil Pinsent returned to Italy in 1944 as part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission – one of the “Monuments Men” who tried to recover art works lost and stolen during the fighting, which inspired the film of that name.
Iris the writer
Iris started writing seriously after the death of her son. It is therefore a bit poignant that her first published book was Allegra, a biography of the poet Byron’s short-lived illegitimate daughter, published in 1935. She brought out a couple more biographies before the war interrupted her writing career. You can find a complete list of Iris’s books in the Wikipedia article – I don’t propose to list them all here.
Her first really popular book was published in 1947. War in the Val d’Orcia was based on her wartime diaries and did a great deal in England and America to create more positive feelings towards Italy after the years of hostility.
In the late 1940s word got around in publishing circles that there existed in Italy a trove of letters from Byron to his last mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, but that the current owner, an elderly descendant of the Countess, was reluctant to allow access to them. Iris was asked by her London publishers to visit the owner and seek access to the letters, which she did without much expectation of success. Whether it was her manner, the fact that she had already published on Byron, or that she too was an Italian aristocrat of sorts, the old gentleman agreed. Thus was born her next book: The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Countess Guiccioli.
In 1967 Iris was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1976 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Antonio died in 1976 and Iris died in 1988.
La Foce Today
After the war the mezzadria system started to break down. The system as a whole was irrevocably tarnished by the injustices suffered by so many, and the Origo’s efforts to have been good proprietors did not really help them. The new republican government of Italy was keen to see the end of mezzadria , and applied its own inducements and penalties. Probably the most inexorable force was economic: the large-scale movement of the rural workforce to work in the industrial cities of Northern Italy, which brought fundamental changes to Italian society over the course of the 1950s and 60s. The estate was now worked by a hired workforce and a few remaining mezzadri who now, on the Origos’ own initiative, received 70% of what they produced rather than the old 50%. After Iris’s death her daughters sold off about two-thirds of the estate.
A visit to the gardens is very rewarding and we would thoroughly recommend it. They are open a couple of times a week for guided tours in English and Italian, and you need to book on their website (see below). Comparing the gardens as they are today with photographs from the 1930s it is clear that they are more or less exactly as they were after Pinsent established them. At the end of the tour you end up in a small shop where some of Iris’s books are on sale.
I do not have figures to hand, but it seems that by the 1970s many of the La Foce farmhouses which the Origos had modernised in the 1930s would have been vacant and derelict. Then along came the agriturismo movement. These days the houses are mostly agriturismi at the end of cypress-lined roads where foreign visitors and Italians escaping the cities enjoy the idyllic Tuscan scenery. Few visitors would be aware how much the beauty of the modern landscape owes to Iris and Antonio.
One of the original farmhouses on the La Foce estate, now an agriturismo. Hasselblad 501 C/M Camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back, cropped (click to enlarge).
More Reading
My principle sources for this post have been Iris’s own writing, and a biography by Caroline Moorehead published in 2000.
Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia, by Caroline Moorehead, 2000. The cover illustration includes a photograph of Iris with her son Gianni.
If you are interested in reading more, then Moorehead’s biography or Iris’s War in the Val d’Orcia would be good places to start.
I would also recommend La Foce’s own website, which features some impressive aerial photography of the estate as it is now, and some archive photographs which show the Val d’Orcia in its barren days before the Origos started to improve it. A page marked “References” contains external links to various articles. Italy seems to specialise in idiosyncratic website designs which are not always easy to navigate, and some of the outbound links are broken, but it is worth persevering with.
Postscript
I mentioned earlier my impression that Iris’s wartime experiences would have made a great film, and while checking something in Caroline Moorehead’s biography I found that in the 1980s a film based on War in the Val d’Orcia had been contemplated – something I had forgotten. Apparently Iris’s opinion was that she should have been played by Meryl Streep. That would have worked.
The Val d’Orcia is something of a sacred place for photography. As I have said elsewhere, there are spots where you are placing your tripod feet in the grooves worn by some of the great professional landscape photographers. And the reason is not difficult to see – it is one of the most visually inspiring landscapes in Italy.
We visited the Val d’Orcia twice in 2022. The first time was in late June, during a very hot summer with temperatures regularly over 40˚C. Our main objective was to find a place with air conditioning.
The weather wasn’t tremendous for photography – the sky was hazy and the light was harsh. On the plus side the wheat had recently been harvested and the fields of stubble showed the undulations of the terrain. Eventually we found ourselves in an area below the walls of Pienza. At some time in the last few years, someone has decided to call this the “Elysian Fields” as a way of marketing it to walkers and cyclists. On a blistering hot afternoon it felt rather more Hadean than Elysian.
If you are going to try and capture the mood of an exhausted baking landscape, it helps a lot to include the sun in the composition, but this brings its own challenges. If the sun is in the picture it means that it is shining directly into the lens, which will cause lens flare, or internal reflections, visible in the photograph below as light-coloured blobs. A good quality lens with anti-reflective coating on the internal elements will reduce this a bit.
Late afternoon in summer, outside Pienza. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
In the end I decided not to try and edit the lens flare out in post-processing. People are used to seeing it in photographs and so it doesn’t seem too unnatural. Indeed some photo editing software suites actually allow you to add fake lens flare to images where there is none, which seems rather strange to me.
In my film photography days I would have needed to use a neutral-density graduated filter to reduce the brightness of the sky compared to the land, but a medium format digital camera like the Fuji GFX 50R captures enough detail at the bright and dark extremes to allow you to achieve the same effect in post-processing, with greater control.
The Valley in Autumn
Our second visit to the Val d’Orcia in 2022 was in September when the fields had been ploughed and the landscape was gradually taking on its autumn colours. This time we had guests with us and watching their reactions to a first visit to the area was most enjoyable – it took us back to how we felt the first time, twenty-three years earlier.
It was also an opportunity for me to try out a new lens – a 100-200mm zoom with optical image stabilisation. My two Fuji zoom lenses really are remarkably good – the first zooms I have used which can really stand comparison with prime (ie fixed focal length) lenses. The image stabilisation means that you are less reliant on a tripod.
On this visit we were staying in Pienza itself, with easy access to the town walls from which you get wonderful views over the valley. My plan was to take advantage of the low angle of the sun at sunset and sunrise to find more undulating patterns in the terrain.
The photograph below was taken shortly before sunset. Using the 100-200mm zoom at its long end meant that I could zoom in on sections of the view for effect. The 50 megapixel sensor in the GFX 50R has loads of detail to spare, so I could, in effect, zoom in further by cropping during post-processing, without losing much quality.
The Val d’Orcia at sunset, from the walls of Pienza. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
Next morning I set out in search of the very first light on the valley floor. It being around the autumn equinox, getting up before dawn did not require setting a very early alarm.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
As the sun crept over the hills in the east, the light started to touch the higher points in the valley below, casting long shadows across the fields.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
The iconic winding roads lined by cypress trees were often the first to appear, and the folds of the land were accentuated by the shadows, like muscles beneath skin.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
All these pictures show the starkness of the Val d’Orcia, and it used to be a lot less fertile than it is now. If you want to find out a bit about how it got this way, and learn about a very remarkable woman, I recommend my post on Iris Origo, La Foce and the Val d’Orcia.
Later that day we stopped beside the road from San Quirico d’Orcia to Pienza, to photograph the famous Cappella della Vitaleta. I have taken many pictures of this little church over the years, but there is always room in the catalogue for one or two more.
In the Val d’Orcia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).Cappella della Vitaleta, Val d’Orcia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
In the sleepy countryside on the border between Tuscany and Umbria, the towers of Beccati Questo and Beccati Quello testify to past conflicts. And quite possibly the locals’ sense of humour as well.
This is a continuation of my previous post on Lars Porsena of Clusium, but I decided to make it separate so as not to complicate a post about the ancient Etruscans with something about medieval and Renaissance water politics. It will however be quite short.
Before unification in 1861, the various Italian states were separate countries with their own rulers, laws and, to varying degrees, languages. It is hard for modern visitors to register this as they flash past a sign saying TOSCANA beside the autostrada, but 18th-Century grand tourists were well aware of it. South of Siena, travellers from Florence to Rome, on leaving the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and entering the Papal States, would have to unload all their luggage for customs inspections, show passports, pay duty on goods, and possibly have books confiscated if the border guards suspected they might be heretical Protestant tracts.
Earlier on in the Middle Ages, territories might be associated with city-states and could be much smaller than they became later. In central Italy, Siena, Florence, Perugia, Assisi and similarly-sized towns were all independent and frequently at war. What would have been just a customs post in the 18th Century might have been a border fort in the 12th.
Sitting on such a border, between the territories of Siena and Perugia (in modern terms, the regions of Tuscany and Umbria) and just near the town of Chiusi, is a lake of the same name. Today Lago di Chiusi is fairly small and rather attractive, surrounded as it is by the rolling country of the Valdichiana. In prehistoric times the lake was huge and covered all the low-lying area, while in antiquity as now the waters of the area were carefully managed to drain them away from agricultural land.
Lago di Chiusi, seen from the campanile of the Chiusi Duomo. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)
By the early Middle Ages however, the water management system had gradually broken down until the area flooded again, converting a large area of productive farmland into malarial swamps and closing some important overland routes. The latter was one reason for the rise of the more westerly road that became the Via Francigena. Water drained out of the swamps in two directions, northwards into the Arno or southwards into the Tiber. This dual drainage meant that the area was strategically important to both Florence and Rome.
Water Politics
In the 14th Century, starting near the town of Arezzo, people – often monastic communities – began to build dykes and canals again to try and harness the waters, mainly for power for mills. Such efforts were piecemeal and done without much understanding of the overall hydrology of the area, and they usually made the situation worse in other parts of the valley.
Unfortunately, as people’s understanding of the science and engineering improved, this knowledge was often used for military purposes. During a war between Florence and Pisa, Leonardo da Vinci came up with a plan to divert the course of the Arno away from Pisa and thus destroy its commerce (it didn’t work).
In the Valdichiana, Papal and Florentine forces created or destroyed earthworks and canals in order to cause flooding in each other’s territory, or deny water to agriculture. As late as 1598, a major flood in Rome was blamed – probably unfairly – on works in the Valdichiana undertaken by the Medici.
So it will come as no surprise that, as dry ground emerged from the receding swamp, fortified towers started to appear at various points. The first we know of was built by Siena in the 13th Century, and its belligerent purpose was made clear by the name it acquired: Beccati Questo!, or “take this!”.
Not surprising either that when the Perugians erected their own tower a short distance away, it was known as Beccati Quello!, or “take that!”.
The original Sienese tower had to be rebuilt a couple of hundred years later, and the new Renaissance one is much smaller and daintier than the medieval Perugian tower which still stands – albeit not entirely vertical. Perhaps the soil beneath was not yet dry enough to make a stable base to build on.
Beccati Questo, with Chiusi behind. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)Beccati Quello. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)
I have not been able to find reports of the towers featuring in any military actions. It would seem that the main use of the towers over the centuries until Italian unification was to collect tolls and customs duties.
Beccati Quello (L) and Beccati Questo (much smaller, R) with Chiusi behind. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)
Now they sleep in the Valdichiana, surrounded by canals, dykes and, in summer, fields of sunflowers. The road which they once guarded is now a quiet back road . The tolls have not gone away though – they are now collected as you exit the motorway.
The Etruscans were pervasive in Central Italy, but their legacy was largely overwritten by the Romans. Three years ago we visited a recently discovered Etruscan tomb in Sarteano, and then went on the trail of Lars Porsena of Clusium.
Who were the Etruscans?
If you had asked me a couple of decades ago what I knew of the Etruscans, my answer like Gaul would have been divided into three parts. First, they lived in the area now known as Tuscany, which derives its name from them. Second, they spoke an unknown language unrelated to Latin. Third, Rome had been ruled by Tuscan kings until they heroically overthrew the last one, Tarquinius Superbus, ushering in the Republican Period. I then might have quoted a couple of half-remembered lines from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, the part about Horatius defending the bridge that begins:
Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore That (something something something) should suffer wrong no more.
Not surprisingly, it turns out that things are bit more complicated than that.
Firstly, it is true that they started out in what is more or less modern Tuscany, although their original homeland extended eastwards into what is now Umbria, to the Tiber River and Perugia. At its widest extent their civilisation extended north into the Po Valley as far as Mantua, and to the south it reached down to Campania and Naples, so it well and truly included Rome. On that southern border they came into contact with the Greek colonies in Italy, absorbing many cultural influences.
As for the language, it is tantalising how little we know of the Etruscans’ culture, given how much we know about where they were, when they were, and what other cultures they interacted with, several of which were literate. We know that their language was indeed not Indo-European, and that it (and they) therefore probably pre-dated the migration of Aryan peoples into Europe. We also know more or less how it sounded because when the Etruscans became literate they adopted a version of the Greek alphabet, albeit written from right to left. In fact, in most of the museum exhibits I have seen, they even flipped the Greek characters into true mirror-writing, which makes it look odd indeed until you work out what is going on (note 1).
Etruscan inscription from near Perugia, National Archaeological Museum of Umbria. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
But they left nothing but funerary inscriptions, and a tiny number of other documents recording religious rituals or commercial contracts, a couple of which are actually in parallel Etruscan and Latin language versions.
Finally, they left no descriptions of themselves, and the only descriptions we have are from early Greek writers, or Roman historians writing many generations later, which included the bits about the Etruscan kings of Rome. Given that Rome defined much of its early history by stories of wars in which the Etruscans were the bad guys, the traditions on which those historians – mainly Livy – were relying were probably not entirely objective. And like all such societies in that era, the great battles and glorious victories they celebrated were probably not much more than cattle raids. Finally, the Etruscan civilisation didn’t fall as such. Instead it was gradually romanised until it became indistinguishable from that of Rome, and faded away.
But it isn’t just that Etruria became Roman; some aspects of what we think of as Roman culture have Etruscan origins. It turns out that certain words which modern European languages inherited from Latin, including the English person and military, are thought to be derived in turn from Etruscan originals, so there are some distant modern echoes of that otherwise vanished language.
Chianciano and Sarteano
In June 2018 we were staying in the southern Tuscan town of Chianciano while waiting to hear whether our offer on an apartment in Umbria had been accepted. Chianciano is divided into a charming little medieval hill town and a newer town (Chianciano Terme) on the eastern slope of the range of hills that divides the Valdichiana from the Val d’Orcia. Chianciano Terme, as the name implies, is a spa town. It is mostly composed of mid-20th Century hotels catering for elderly patients who came there to take the waters for their livers. It’s a nice place and in particular the old town has some lovely views eastwards across the Valdichiana to the Umbrian hills. A particularly good place to look at the view was from the balcony of the Bar Pasticceria Centro Storico (below).
View of the Valdichiana from Chianciano. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
When the new town was being built they uncovered quite a few Etruscan tombs, and Chianciano now has a decent little museum in which to display the contents.
We have to admit though that a better Etruscan museum is in a town called Sarteano, about halfway between Chianciano and Monte Cetona, a few kilometres south.
Looking south from Chianciano toward Sarteano and Monte Cetona. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
As is almost always the case, the Etruscan remains around Sarteano are mostly tombs. When a few finds were turned up in the mid 19th Century, the aristocrat on whose land they were found financed some excavations which were scientific enough by the standards of the day, but proper archaeology as we understand the term had to wait until after the Second World War.
And the finds are still happening. One of the most spectacular occurred in 2003, and Lou had established that by paying a bit more on top of the price of the museum ticket, you could actually make a visit to that site on Saturday mornings. So we duly paid, and the following Saturday morning we made our way to the site following the directions given by the museum attendant (head out of town until you see a bunch of car dealers, then turn left just after the Rover sign). The road became a dirt track, then we eventually bumped to a halt in a field and got out to investigate.
Sarteano Etruscan necropolis. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
The first thing to say is that it is in an absolutely splendid location, augmented in this case by the fact that it was a flawless summer’s morning, with all sorts of flowers growing around, the air heavy with their scent, and resonant with the sound of bees and birds. We were standing on the broad shoulder of a range of hills that runs north-south and which separates the Valdichiana from the Val d’Orcia. Behind us to the right was the tall conical peak of Monte Cetona. Ahead, to the east we looked down into the Valdichiana which is a patchwork of fields and vineyards thrown over low rolling hills. On one such hill in the middle distance to the left was the town of Chiusi (the ancient Clusium of “Lars Porsena of Clusium“), in the distance was Lake Trasimeno, and on the distant skyline were the Apennines.
Chiusi from Sarteano Etruscan necropolis. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
The area appears to have been a necropolis, or burial area, and it seems to have been used for a period of several hundred years, stretching into the 1st Century AD. At one end of the excavated area is an oval structure of travertine stone which looks like a stage, which the archaeologists, plausibly enough, have decided was a stage, presumably used for pre-interment ceremonies. The entrances to the tombs are long passages cut into the hillside and lined with travertine; as the whole area is on a slope the passages can cut into the earth while being mostly horizontal themselves.
The “stage”at Sarteano Etruscan necropolis. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
Over the next quarter of an hour a dozen or so more visitors arrived, then there was a hallooing from a bit further down the hill which turned out to be coming from our guide. She was an archaeologist who had taken part in the 2003 excavations herself and been present at the discovery of the tomb we were about to see.
Sarteano: entrances to tombs. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
The tomb we had come to see is called the Tomba della Quadriga Infernale (Tomb of the Infernal Chariot) because of the frescoes. That they have survived at all is quite lucky. Some finds inside date from the early Middle Ages and suggest that it was actually used as a dwelling in that period. Or perhaps a refuge in times of war, as even by the standards of the time it can hardly have been a salubrious place to live. Then – in the 1940s, they think – grave robbers broke in and did some frightful damage to one of the frescoes. Fortunately much of the entry passage was buried by then, and the earth protected the other paintings.
We split into two groups to go in; Lou and I were in the first group. All the other people in our group were Italians, so our guide spoke in Italian, but very clearly and not too fast so we were able to follow most of what she said. Of course, we had visited the museum a couple of days earlier, so the vocabulary was familiar. You were allowed to take photos without flash, so I did, but just on my phone.
All the surviving paintings are on the left side as you go in. If there were any on the right, they might have been destroyed when the tomb was used as a dwelling in the Middle Ages. The first is what gives the tomb its name – it is a demon driving a chariot, drawn by a team of lions and griffins.
Sarteano Etruscan Tomb. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
He is heading towards the entrance of the tomb, which leads scholars to conclude that the charioteer is heading back to the world of the living after having carried a dead soul down to the underworld, in order to pick up the next passenger. This in turn leads those scholars to identify the demon with Charon, although we are more familiar with him as a boatman ferrying souls across the Styx. You can tell he is a demon, apparently, because of his large lower canine tooth, his red hair and white face. They didn’t mention the rouged cheeks and lipstick.
Sarteano Etruscan Tomb. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
Beyond the demon in the chariot is a picture of two men – one old and one young – embracing. The explanation back in the Sarteano museum had been that the younger one is the recently deceased, greeting his long-dead father in the underworld. The guide did at least acknowledge the other possibility that they were lovers – accepted enough in ancient Greece and therefore presumably possible in ancient Etruria.
Sarteano Etruscan Tomb. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
Then at the back of the tomb there was a three-headed serpent and a hippocampus or sea-horse. There was a sarcophagus at the end of the tomb which had been smashed up by one of the later intruders, and later reassembled by the archaeologists. Some human remains had been found among the bits, which on analysis had been found to be those of a male in his sixties.
Sarteano Etruscan Tomb. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge). Sarteano Etruscan Tomb. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
There were several extraordinary things about all this. One was that the paintings had survived at all after more than two thousand years. Another was that they had survived in such good condition. And another was that we could just wander in there and look at them – no hermetically sealed system, no sheets of perspex between us and the paintings, and no ultrasonic alarms to prevent you getting too close. Although given that one lady almost backed into the charioteer before being warned off by the guide, maybe that might have been a good idea.
It was also fascinating to think that when we were first in these parts at the end of the 1990s, the tomb had yet to be discovered. Afterwards Lou and I lingered up above in the sunshine, admiring the view which – minus the odd high-speed railway line – was pretty much as the Etruscans would have seen it, and pondered how much else might be beneath our feet.
Sarteano Etruscan Necropolis. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).
Chiusi
Chianciano is quite close to the town of Chiusi, which as I said is the Clusium of the ancients. In the first twenty years or so of our visits to Italy, Chiusi to us was a motorway exit on the way north from Rome Airport to the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany, and a handy shopping centre and supermarket at a place called Querce al Pino, called – significantly – Centro Etrusco. If, instead of continuing towards Montepulciano you turn east towards Città della Pieve, you go through the modern town of Chiusi Scalo which is fringed by light industry and some now shabby-looking 1950s social housing.
Once we had worked out that there was more to Chiusi we paid a couple of visits to the old town, which has much to recommend it. It is pleasantly compact and neat, up on the hilltop where those Etruscans once decided to make a home. Being close to such tourist drawcards as Orvieto, Montepulciano and Pienza it has never really cracked the foreign tourist market, but in many ways this is no bad thing. One can only buy so many fridge magnets.
We have a definite tendency, when turning up in towns for the first time, to do so on unsuitable days. In this case we got a double because not only was it market day (where do they put markets? In the car parks) but also the annual feast day of St Mustiola, one of the patron saints of Chiusi. So the market had extended hours, and later when we tried to get into the duomo there was a mass going on. However we got lucky and found a parking spot and wandered around a bit.
Chiusi. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
We walked up to a little park which is on the site of the old acropolis and which is full of various bits of antique stonework turned up in the 18th and 19th centuries and too heavy, or not good enough, to sell to foreign collectors.
The Etruscan Museum is quite large, and worth a visit. Around the town, Etruscan and Roman remains are everywhere. Several buildings have obvious ancient stonework incorporated in their walls, and next to the duomo there is an Etrusco-Roman cistern of which the base is Etruscan and the upper part Roman. The whole thing has been converted into a bell tower for the duomo by the addition of some medieval brickwork on the top. You can climb it for excellent views of the town and the surrounding countryside.
Chiusi – Roman bits incorporated into a wall. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge)Chiusi, the ancient cistern and medieval campanile. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge).Chiusi: view of Lake Chiusi from the campanile. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Nearby there is the entrance to something called Il Labirinto di Porsenna of which we took a guided tour. The story of Lars Porsena’s tomb being hidden under Chiusi and protected by a labyrinth goes back a long way, being mentioned by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder. So when the “labyrinth” was rediscovered in the 1920s people were quick to make the association. The truth is a bit more prosaic: it is in fact a system of aqueducts and drains that made up the town water supply in antiquity. The townspeople put it to good use in the 1940s as air-raid shelters.
There are other signs of Etruscan influence. The main street is called Via Porsenna and I was hoping to find a “Lars Porsena Bar”, but we did not find one. We did at least eat at a little restaurant called “Osteria Etrusca” where one of the pizza toppings was called “Pizza Etrusca” and consisted of sausage and gorgonzola cheese. No doubt its authenticity is based on scholarly research, although the menu omitted any citations.
I have enough material to do a separate post on Chianciano one day. And we are not finished with the Etruscans either, because the following year we visited the town of Tarquinia in the northern part of Lazio, which has an extensive Etruscan necropolis.
note 1: In the excellent National Archaeological Museum of Umbria, in Perugia, I saw an inscription in the Umbrian language, which unlike Etruscan is Indo-European and in the same linguistic family as Latin. It used the Latin alphabet, but was written in mirror-writing like Etruscan.
Evening photography can produce dramatic results, although it has its challenges. Here are some examples from Venice, Rome and Tuscany.
Earlier I promised some evening shots to complement my early morning photographs of Venice. Evening photography has the same main benefit as dawn, which is to say warmer light and lower contrast. In fact, sometimes the atmospheric haze at the end of a long day (natural or from pollution) can produce more pleasing colours than in the clarity of dawn.
Venice at sunset from the bridge over the Rio de la Tana. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-M 300mm lens, Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Another advantage over dawn photography is not having to set the alarm clock. The disadvantage, of course, is that there will usually be many more people about. So bridges and waterfronts are good places to be to try and avoid having people wander through your shot.
Getting the exposure right can be tricky – even if your camera has the very latest algorithms to calculate exposure, it won’t always get it right. For much of my photography life, I did not use cameras with automatic exposure, but found that a good result could usually be obtained by using a hand-held spot meter on a point just to the side of the setting sun. For the photograph above I metered on a point about halfway between the sun and the belltower in Piazza San Marco. For the photograph below I metered from the clouds in the centre, just above the trees.
Rome: the dome of St Peter’s silhouetted by the setting sun, from Ponte Umberto I. Hasselblad 500 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The picture above was taken with a “standard” focal length which roughly approximates what the eye sees. But if I had used a telephoto lens just to zoom in on the bright area, the result would have been less realistic but more dramatic. The photograph of the Val d’Orcia below shows how, with a long telephoto lens, you can take that to extremes – if that is the sort of thing you like.
Sunset in the Val d’Orcia, Tuscany. Canon EOS-3 35mm film camera, 100-400mm IS L lens at 400mm. Fujichrome Velvia film. No filter was used, and no colour manipulation was applied to the digital file (click to enlarge).
The picture below of St Peter’s in Rome demonstrates a similar effect, although this time with some foreground detail. The “starburst” effect on the streetlights is not the result of a filter, but of the type of aperture used in large format lenses. The long exposure has smoothed the surface of the Tiber.
Rome: The Gianicolo Hill and the dome of St Peter’s after sunset, from Ponte Umberto I. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-M 300mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia film. No filter was used, and no colour manipulation was applied to the digital file (click to enlarge).
From memory, that photograph needed an exposure of almost ten minutes, given the slow film and the very small aperture I was using. Onlookers on either side took quite an interest, so I had to do my best to avoid anyone knocking the tripod. Halfway through the exposure, one of Rome’s ubiquitous hawkers tried to sell me a selfie stick but I explained to him that my camera was too big and heavy for that.
Venice: the lagoon in front of Giudecca, from the temporary pontoon bridge erected for the Festa del Redentore each year. Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
When you have a distant silhouetted skyline, as in the photograph above, it is important that it be sharp. But to focus at infinity, while giving you that sharpness in the distance, would throw the foreground out of focus. The solution is to focus on the “hyperfocal distance”. The exact calculation of hyperfocal distance, and why it is important, is explained here, but a rule of thumb is to focus about a third of the way into the area you wish to be in focus, and use focus guides on your lens, if it has them, to give you an indication of the closest and furthest points that will be acceptably sharp at your chosen aperture. Some modern cameras will give you an indication of the range of sharp focus on the display, but I always like to see focus guides on a lens.
After sunset, as the light fades, there will come a point where everything is lost in shadow. But before that there will be a brief period, perhaps only a couple of minutes, when the intensity of both sky and ground is similar enough to capture detail and colour in both. Exactly when that is will depend on various things, including how bright it is in the areas you want to capture. In the photograph below I wanted to roughly balance the sky, the lights strung between the lamp posts, and the interior of the shop. Although it was still quite crowded, the people walking along the quayside are largely lost in the shadows, giving a sense of peace.
Venice: the Giudecca after sunset, with festive lights put out for the Festa del Redentore. Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
If you are not sure, a hand-held spot meter reading from all areas you wish to capture will help. My meter even has an function which allows you to take spot readings from multiple sources and then gives you an average exposure value. High-end modern SLRs can do the same thing in-camera. But I have to admit that in this picture I guessed – the more experience you have, the more likely you are to guess right. And if you are using digital, it costs you nothing to try various settings.
This final photograph in the set was quite challenging to take. I was set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, which is one of the busiest areas, just near the Doge’s Palace. It was around 8pm, so there were still many people about, but I couldn’t leave it any later without the sky fading to black. My calculated exposure was around 10 minutes, and there was no way that I could go that long without other people wandering into the shot, or, even if they were out of shot, taking flash photographs which would have reflected off the nearer objects.
So I set the camera up, and started the exposure, timed with a stopwatch. Whenever it looked as if someone was about to wander in front of me, or was getting ready to take a flash photograph, I closed the shutter and stopped the stopwatch. When the coast was clear, I re-opened the shutter and restarted the stopwatch. All up, my ten-minute exposure took more than half an hour.
Venice: the Basino and San Giorgio Maggiore from the Riva degli Schiavoni. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Fuji Fujinon-W 125mm lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The long exposure necessarily produced some artefacts. Obviously, the rocking of the gondolas blurred their outlines. The faint white blur about a third of the way over from the left is the shirt of a gondolier who climbed onto his boat and rowed away. Various bright horizontal streaks mark the passage of the lights on vaporetti and other craft. And the wavy bright line to the right of the centre is made by the light on the back of a gondola that was being rowed along.
Is it a “realistic” photograph? Probably not in any technical sense of the word. But to me it does bring back the mood of that evening rather powerfully. And I really only make photographs to please myself, so I guess that makes it a success.
Just over a year ago I posted this “History in Focus” article, about the large-format panoramic photograph I took at dawn one morning in early spring 2006, with the rising sun illuminating the mist in the valleys of the Val d’Orcia, and the history associated with the area. A crop from that photograph is the banner image for this blog.
It was quite a productive early morning shoot; not only did I have my Horseman 45FA large format camera with me, I also had a Hasselblad 500C/M medium-format camera and a Canon EOS-3 35mm SLR (I travel lighter these days; carrying a 25kg backpack onto an aircraft is harder to get away with, and harder on my back).
The aim of that post last year was to concentrate on a single photograph, which meant that several other fairly decent pictures did not get published. So here they are. If you haven’t read the original article, I recommend you take a quick look at it before proceeding.
I set up in the dark and waited for the sun to rise. When it did, at first the colours were soft, muted and pink-tinged, and the contrast was very low.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, 125mm Fujinon-W lens, Horseman 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The picture above was taken in exactly the same position and in the same direction as the photograph in the original article, so showing the low contrast and pastel colours. The difference is that I used a 4×5 inch sheet film back rather than a 6x17cm panoramic rollfilm back. Interestingly, I am looking at this on a 15-inch laptop screen and the size of the image is only slightly greater than the original sheet-film transparency. That is why large format photography captures such an extraordinary amount of detail.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, 125mm Fujinon-W lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The photograph above was taken immediately after that shown in the original article. I simply rotated the camera on the tripod about 45 degrees to the left. Since the sun was now in shot I had to reduce the exposure time, and the shadow areas were much darker, and the contrast much greater. But it makes it quite dramatic. As with the photograph in the original article, I used a 2-stop neutral density graduated filter to balance the sky and the land, but no coloured filter. In the distance, right below the sun, you can make out the silhouette of the town of Pienza.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, Rodenstock Sironar-N 180mm lens , Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The photograph above was taken only a few minutes later, but in the time it took me to change the lens and film back, the sun had climbed a little way into the sky and the warm pink colours were fading. Photographers talk about the “golden hour” around dawn and sunset when the light is at its best, but the colours when the sun is only just above the horizon are very ephemeral. It is more like a “golden ten minutes”. For this photograph I changed from the slightly wider than standard 125mm lens to a slight telephoto 180mm. By the way, this is a very famous view: you see it in lots of calendars and advertisements.
Val d’Orcia at sunrise. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon 150mm lens, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
As the sun rose higher, the contrast in the scene increased, especially looking further round to the east where the mist was backlit by the sun. I switched to the Hasselblad. Using a telephoto lens foreshortened the perspective of the series of hills.
Then something unexpected happened: it started to get darker. Although it was a cloudless day the mist around me grew briefly thicker and partly blotted out the sun. The scene became almost monochrome. Since I already had my “classic” dawn light shots in the bag, I spent a few minutes with telephoto lenses on the medium format and 35mm cameras picking out interesting shots. In just the minute or two that it took me to take them, the mist thinned out again and it got lighter.
Val d’Orcia before sunrise. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, 0.6 neutral density graduated filter, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Some of the most dramatic photographs can be made when there is a combination of sunlight on your subject and dark stormy clouds behind. Under those conditions the light can take on a particular intensity and clarity. I have encountered this in central Italy at several different times of year. In spring and early summer the effect on the young vegetation can produce some extremely vivid greens, while in late summer or autumn you will often get some very warm and rich browns.
These four photographs were all taken in early June from the belvedere outside the walls of the town of Pienza, overlooking the Val d’Orcia. On the other side of the valley, from San Quirico d’Orcia to Monte Amiata, a thunderstorm was building, and for a brief period the closer part of the valley remained in sunlight while the distant part got darker and darker. The film I used – Fuji Velvia 50 – is sometimes criticised for the intensity of its green colours, but in this case it only served to heighten the drama.
I recall that I only just made it back to the car before the storm hit (Hasselblads are not particularly waterproof) and we drove back to Umbria in heavy rain.
Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge) Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge) Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
I posted another photograph of one of the iconic Val d’Orcia views as part of the History in Focus series of posts.
Sometimes it all comes together – a successful photograph of a beautiful scene with a rich history. For those few fortunate conjunctions I have decided to create posts based on a single image, and call them “History in Focus”. I will start with the image of the Val d’Orcia that I use as the header for this site. If you are looking at this on a desktop computer or tablet, please be sure to click on the image to see an enlargement – it’s worth it.
The Val d’Orcia (click to enlarge)
There is a spot on the strada provinciale (SP) 146 between San Quirico d’Orcia and Pienza from which a thousand calendar and coffee-table book photographs have been taken. Setting up your camera there, you are putting your tripod feet into the holes worn by hundreds of landscape photographers before you, including some of the greats like Joe Cornish, Lee Frost and Charlie Waite. It is for many foreign visitors the perfect Tuscan landscape of rolling hills, topped by picturesque farmhouses at the ends of avenues of cypresses.
The place
Val d’Orcia runs south-east from below Siena. To the west
are mountains, tallest of which is Monte Amiata. To the east is a lower range
of hills which divides the Val d’Orcia from the Valdichiana.
The difference between the two valleys is marked: until relatively recently the Valdichiana was full of lakes and swamps, and is now extraordinarily fertile. The Val d’Orcia, on the other hand, is more gaunt; the bones show beneath the skin, as it were. The area was heavily forested in antiquity, but denuded of its trees by the Etruscans and Romans. The resulting erosion seriously degraded the land, and by the early 20th Century this area, which we now think of as a land of milk and honey, was in fact in the grip of dreadful poverty. Its recovery, and the creation of the landscape we see today, is due to a program of agricultural reform and partial reforestation started in the 1930s and 40s by an Italian aristocrat called Antonio Origo and his wife, Iris.
Iris Origo – Anglo-Irish-American aristocrat, landscape gardener, writer of scholarly historical biographies, and war heroine, deserves a post of her own at some stage.
Down the western side of the Val d’Orcia runs an ancient road. In places it lies under the route of the modern SP2, and in places it wanders off by itself, a quiet unpaved road among the wheat fields, cypresses and oaks. Modern travellers on the autostrada and high-speed rail line follow the Valdichiana to the east, but in medieval times that route would have been hard to travel due to swamps and lakes, not to mention dangerously malarial. So if you were on a pilgrimage to Rome, or leading an army there, you might well have come this way. The route was generally referred to as “the road out of France”, or the Via Francigena.
The Val d’Orcia has always been a border region. It lies at the southern margin of what was republican Siena in the Middle Ages, later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The hilltop fortress of Radicofani, visible from pretty much anywhere in the valley, marked the northern edge of the Papal territories. You can see it in the photograph as a flat-topped hill on the horizon with a tower on it.
Here, in the year 1155, the army of Frederick Barbarossa paused in its southward march, while Frederick waited for emissaries from Pope Adrian IV.
These two men were among the most forceful personalities in medieval history. Frederick was determined to assert all the historic power – and more – of the Holy Roman Empire to which he was heir. Adrian (born Nicholas Breakspear, the only English pope) was elected to replace an unworldly and vacillating predecessor at a time when both the religious and temporal authority of the Church were facing multiple threats. Frederick’s army approached the papal domains from the north. The kingdom of Sicily, under its Norman rulers, pressed from the south. The aristocratic families that ruled Rome were asserting their historic independence, both from Pope and Emperor. And the greatest challenge of all was spiritual, in the form of a monk by the name of Arnold of Brescia who preached against the worldly wealth and power of the Church.
Adrian decided that his best approach was to make common cause, at least temporarily, with Frederick. He would agree to crown Frederick as Emperor, in return for Frederick’s help dealing with his various problems. After some careful preliminary negotiations with Papal legates here in the Val d’Orcia, Frederick and his army moved south until they were just across the border into Papal territory. There, after some protracted and prickly meetings between the principals, they moved south to Rome where the Roman senators were comprehensively outmanoeuvred, and Frederick was crowned Emperor by the Pope before the senators realised it was happening.
Later, after signing a treaty with Sicily, Adrian changed sides, and united the northern Italian cities against Frederick in what would become the Lombard League.
The biggest loser in all of this was Arnold of Brescia, who, deprived of Imperial protection, was condemned by the Church and hanged, his body burnt, and his ashes thrown in the Tiber. Allowing no bodily relics to survive was intended, in the Middle Ages, to ensure that a person did not become an object of popular veneration or even a saint. Arnold’s back-to-basics message was not all that different from that of St Francis of Assisi in the next century, but Francis lived in a more politically propitious time, and was more fortunate in his Pope. Therein lies another post, one day.
Recommended reading:
The Popes, A History, by John Julius Norwich, London 2011, Chapter XI.
The photograph
We were staying in the Agriturismo Cretaiole, just outside Pienza, only a few minutes’ drive away along the SP146. It was April, cool enough for morning mists, and when the sunrise is late enough that the aspiring dawn photographer does not need to get up in the middle of the night. It is also early enough in the year that a camera set up to take this view would be shooting into the sun. That would make things tricky in terms of contrast and lens flare, but on the plus side, any mist might be dramatically backlit.
I set the alarm for about 5.30am and crept out. It was still pitch dark. What’s more, I realised, there was a thick fog. I decided to put my hope on the fog clearing a bit when the sun hit it, and continued to the spot I had chosen earlier. I was going to use the Horseman 45FA large format camera, with a 6x17cm Kang Tai panoramic rollfilm back. I chose a standard focal length, which meant my Nikkor 150mm. On the assumption that the sky would be a good deal lighter than the ground, I also fitted a 0.6 neutral density graduated filter. This reduces the difference in brightness between the sky and the land to something that colour film or digital can manage without losing detail at either end of the range. As with all filters, the test of whether you have done it right is that it should not be possible to tell from the finished image.
No other filter was used. I say this because some people have seen this image and assumed that the pink colour is due to a filter. No, it is all natural.
By the time I had got all that set up, the sky was beginning
to lighten and the fog had lifted enough to see the tops of the hills sticking
out. I made the final adjustments to the composition on the focusing screen,
then removed it and replaced it with the panoramic film back, loaded with ISO
50 Fuji Velvia. Then I waited. The sun rose, and very quickly the mist started
to thin. I removed the dark slide, cocked the shutter, and got ready to take
the picture. Just at the last minute I realised that the filter had completely
fogged up with condensation from the mist. After quickly removing it, wiping it
dry and replacing it, I shielded the lens from the direct sunlight and took the
shot.
Time to set up: about 15 minutes. Time waiting for the light
to be right: about 40 minutes. Length of exposure: 1 second.
The resulting 6x17cm positive image was then scanned on an Imacon Flextight II film scanner. Post–processing in Photoshop was limited to making the scanned image as close to the original as possible. I have printed this image at a width of 86cm and it is completely sharp.
I took several more photographs after this one, which I have made the subject of a separate post here. And you can find more pictures of the Val d’Orcia, taken from Pienza, here.
