The Balze: let there be light!

The Balze, Track 51 in Piantravigne, Valdarno

Water, wind and time have formed the dreamlike landscape of the Balze: the exposed bed of a dried up Pleiocene lake and erosion through millennia have given us the stratified sand, clay and gravel sculptures we see today.  They are quite unlike any Tuscan landscape I have ever seen, and have fascinated not only the local people, who have most enchantingly called them “fairies’ pyramids” among many other names, but no less a personage than Leonardo da Vinci: scholarly debate continues as to whether the Balze inspired the landscapes in the Mona Lisa and the Virgin of the Rocks among others.

Track 51 CAI signpost, the Balze

Track 51 map, the Balze

We are on the Borro dell’Acqua Zolfina, a picturesque part of track 51, a four-hour circuit track which we picked up at Piantravigne, and this day was now bright, now moodily suffused with the light of a stormy mid-May sky.  Other than a butterfly which fluttered alongside for a couple of metres, we had all of it to ourselves.

A taster: The Balze, Valdarno

View from Piantravigne, Tuscany, April 2011

March, and on the line from San Giovanni Valdarno to Florence, a route I have travelled a lot this year, a flash of colour along the greygreen fields clamped down against greygreen hills and a greygreen sky worried your eyes off the brow-furrowing double use of conditional and subjunctive on the dog-eared, heavily scored pages of Morante’s L’Isola di Arturo, was it, or Deledda’s L’Isola degli Spiriti, or even Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili, and you craned your neck, not quite believing another flash of blue clinging to a grey wall, or three successive bursts of yellow.

Other than these bright suspicions, cold tones gripped field and scrub, vineyard and cypress.  Metal curved dully, lines rusted in unpeopled spaces.  Weathered copper, powder green, held up the station roof; rainwater pooled on the station floor.  And yet, late March, winding through boulders and rocks, and closer to Florence, all along its broad sweep, a strange emerald centre began to blaze in the river.

April and I threw myself at anything green and physical – the track from Settignano to Fiesole, the fields around Rignano sull’Arno, familiar pine and oak woods – and eyed the light-bright countryside, like some lost magical landscape in a HG Wells short story, through a gap in the bolted gates along Costa San Giorgio, and then, in Piantravigne, during the simplest of picnics in the tall grass, we craned our necks for a taster of this most ancient of landscapes…

The Balze from Piantravigne

Florence to the Cinque Terre

Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre, Italy

The first week of a sustained if wavering sun this March and we headed to the Cinque Terre, to the lucid, blade-sharp light of the Mediterranean.  Just what the doctor ordered after the haze of a long Florentine winter.  Riomaggiore I greeted with sharp intakes of breath, as much for the views of the town from the road as for the road itself – steep, narrow, winding and taken with typical speed and nonchalance by F.

Manarola, Cinque Terre

Via dell’Amore to Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre

We drove on to Manarola for the choice of two towns to walk to, perhaps Corniglia, but the path being closed, Riomaggiore, and at 25 minutes on the fully-paved if graffiti-littered Via dell’Amore, by far the easier walk.  There were few people around – dilettante hikers like ourselves, locals with their backs welded to the cliff and their eyes to the water.  Benches lined the path, as did early spring flowers, and all around the deep-breath inducing openness of the sea and sky.

As at Manarola we had full run of the streets, which were boat-lined, sleepy-catted, and festooned with laundry out to dry.  After a cursory wander we sunned ourselves lizard-like on a pebble-sharp slab of rock and listened to the waves around us, sharing the space with a sharp-eyed gull and a fishing boat on the horizon.  I timed a plate of the local anchovies and glasses of the local white at A Pié de Mà exactly, and suspended over the Ligurian Sea, watched the sun sink into the water.  On the Via dell’Amore at dusk, with the first of the boats spreading its nets, most likely for anchovies, twinkling in the sea below; and as another rippled the surface of the sea in its wake; and the light striking at cliff, coast and hillside darkened, a town ahead – perhaps Vernazza – flickered its lights on in the distance.

Dusk on Via dell'Amore

From A Piè de Mà, Via dell'Amore