Iris Origo, La Foce and Val d’Orcia

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
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.

Lippi Madonna del Ceppo
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
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.

Villa Medici
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 from Fiesole
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.

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 Francigena of 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
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
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.

Val d'Orcia
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
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
La Foce, the gardens. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens
La Foce
La 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
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.

Val d'Orcia
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.

Moorehead Iris Origo
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.

A Return to the Val d’Orcia

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.

I have posted before on the Val d’Orcia. Here, I wrote a bit about the history of the place, around a large format panoramic photograph of the valley at dawn. I followed that with some of the other photographs I took on the same morning. Then I posted some photographs of the valley just before an early summer thunderstorm. But I keep coming back, and the valley seldom disappoints.

A Hot Summer

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.

Outside Pienza
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.

Val d'Orcia at sunset
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.

Val d'Orcia at Dawn
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.

Val d'Orcia at Dawn
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.

Val d'Orcia at Dawn
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
Val d'Orcia at Dawn
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.

Val d'Orcia
In the Val d’Orcia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
Cappella della VItaleta
Cappella della Vitaleta, Val d’Orcia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

The Val d’Orcia at Dawn – II

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.

Val d'Orcia
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.

Val d'Orcia
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.

Val d'Orcia
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
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
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
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
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
Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).

A Storm in the Val d’Orcia

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.

Val d'Orcia
Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
Val d'Orcia
Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
Val d'Orcia
Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
Val d'Orcia
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.

History in Focus: The Val d’Orcia

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.

Val d'Orcia
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.

Edit: here is that post.

The history

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.