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
