Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tuscany Tours: Three Key Ingredients in Our Secret Sauce
Beauty
T here was a poignant scene in one of the episodes of The Sopranos that said it all—without
a word. Tony Soprano has gone to Naples to line up some new blood for his crime family in
New Jersey. We are shown sunlit scenes of the Naples harbor, hillsides, restaurants, colorful
streets. Then, Tony flies back to Newark airport where he is met by his cronies who are glad
to see him. As they drive him home, Tony looks out the window at the refineries, dumps,
junkyards and other scenes of desolation off the New Jersey Turnpike. Welcome home…
Okay, it's true that there are not many places on earth as dreadful as this post-nuclear ex-
change landscape in the hinterlands around Newark. But there are many urban areas that
take a close second. And even where there is less sheer ugliness, there is often nothing beau-
tiful.
Older American cities like Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco and Chicago still have some
old world charm and style. But so many of the neighborhoods we have created in the last
fifty years are simply grids laid out to facilitate cost-effective construction. There is noth-
ing to surprise or delight you as you walk the streets, nothing to please the eye. If you want
to see something beautiful, you go to a wilderness area. We're resigned to a radical split
between an ugly world of man and a lovely world of nature.
When Americans see Tuscany for the first time, one of the elements that strikes them most
forcefully is the sheer beauty of the landscapes. These are not wilderness areas. They consist
of towns and villages, roads and farms, houses, fields and forests. The human world har-
monizes with and enhances the beauty of the natural world. Admittedly, the natural world is
lovely to start with. As the French writer Stendahl expressed it when he traveled in Tuscany,
it's an instance of “nature aspiring to the sublimity of art”. But the presence of man's con-
tributions adds visual interest, enhanced definition and historical depth to what would other-
wise be just a pretty picture.
Tuscans who restore and landscape a country property typically think in terms of how things
will look from a variety of vantage points, near and far, around the countryside. They plant
cypress trees in pairs to line driveways that meander up the hillside echoing the curves of
the road. Then, along the ridge of a hill, they might alternate bushy fruit trees with slender
aspens to create a sort of Laurel-and-Hardy effect that's visible from neighboring hilltops.
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