The Da Vinci road: walking through Tuscany

On the first morning, I lean out of my hotel window in Florence and admire the garden below. Whose can it be? There’s a wonderful curving greenhouse that leans on an ancient wall. There are palms and lemon trees, fragments of time-worn statuary, an elegant wrought-iron table with a chair. On the table is a folded newspaper and a steaming espresso coffee, but no gardener visible. It’s all a bit untidy and overgrown, enclosed by tawny walls capped with pan tiles, many apparently ready to slide off on to the artfully abandoned terracotta urns below. This is exactly what I expected and wanted from Tuscany: a place that looked carelessly civilised, and had been that way for a very long time.

When I arrived the previous night at the Hotel Loggiato dei Serviti, I’d asked the barman how old the building was. “It was built in 1492,” he told me, “the year of Columbus.”

In that same year, local artist Leonardo da Vinci turned 40, while up-and-coming teenage rival Michelangelo was nursing a broken nose after a fight in the Carmine Chapel. The Florentine Renaissance was well under way, but the start of the wider European Renaissance is usually dated to 1519, the year of Leonardo’s death and the birth of Catherine de’ Medici (in Florence). That anniversary is the reason I’ve come to walk between the city and its neighbour, Siena, the second one-time powerhouse of western civilisation. Can there be a better moment to trumpet the news that dark ages can give way to renaissance?

Read the article at The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/feb/09/leonardo-da-vinci-road-walking-tuscany-florence-siena