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