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WINTER
A New Year in Tuscany
Winter arrives slowly this year, as if it wants to apologize for the increasing nip in the air. Though the early mornings are crisp, the heavy jackets still loiter in the closet.
People tend to assume that when January comes—the retreats over, guests gone—Hans and I cuddle up for the season, taking time for ourselves. Oh, how I wish. Once the holiday festivities are finished, the hangovers departed, the decorations packed away until next year and the diets and best intentions showing their unwanted faces, we take on the interminable repairs that keep Villa Reniella beautiful—painting and plastering where suitcases have bashed the walls and mending any broken furniture or fittings. Now is also the time of year when I have the time to think up larger projects. As each winter settles in, I dive into what I want to add to our paradise next—a cutting garden here, a meditation platform there. Hans does his best to close his ears to my persistent chirping along the lines of “I may grow potatoes this year, or what if we add another eating area, or what about extending the patio?” But I always wear him down.
This year, our big project is going to be a vast extension to the main terrace.
For centuries before we got here, Villa Reniella was a working farm. After five years of intense renovation, we managed to morph it from a home for pigs and chickens into a villa. Umberto, the lanky, blue-blooded Italian architect who was glued to my hip throughout the renovation and rebuilding, looked down his aristocratic nose when I added the prefix Villa to the farm’s name, which was Reniella.
“It is not a villa,” he scoffed. “It is a podere.” To him, once a farm, always a farm, no matter how we dressed it up. Villas are signs of prestige and wealth, and, Umberto insisted, I had neither. “I really don’t care,” I said. “I have spent my life savings on this pile of stone, and I will call it a castello if I so desire!”
That was pushing it, given that our home does not resemble a castle by any means. So villa it was.
A little note: Italian villas—country estates, often with numerous outbuildings—date back to the Roman Empire. A villa is truly what I intended this dilapidated farm to become. Still, Umberto had a point: it was a long road from podere to here. He is a superb architect with an impeccable fashion sense that was irrelevant and annoying on a building site, but invaluable when it came to the essential task of charming the ladies in the permit office. We’d chosen him after we visited a real castle that he’d tastefully restored to its eleventh-century glory—his work seduced us. Then he and I proceeded to argue over every single decision for the next five years.
When we bought the place, there was a main farmhouse with stables on the ground floor. The workers and their families had lived upstairs, and the animals down below. Then there was the barn, a brutally ugly structure that we converted so that it resembles a fancy stable on the outside but inside houses designer suites and a communal lounge and kitchen. The third and last building was a sprawling series of cement pigsties—or, in Italian, the porcellia. (Guests look downtrodden when I announce they’ll be sleeping in a pigsty. Porcellia sounds so much more romantic.)
Large chunks of Tuscany are protected from development. In areas of great beauty, such as the Val d’Orcia, which is the valley we overlook, it is painfully difficult—well, actually, impossible—to add new buildings to your property, or even to change the roof lines and the size of the original windows on the existing ones. The contortions you have to undergo to make even the slightest change to an historic building are about as painful as grabbing a scalpel and operating on yourself. The local bureaucrat we had to deal with believed her job was to turn down every request from a baffled foreigner who had the audacity to think she could restore a property in Tuscany. She loathed me. I am convinced she watched out the window as I parked my car, her rubber stamp already quivering above the permit forms. On a weekly basis I would walk through her office door and the NO stamp would immediately thump down on my application. NO, thump, to the request of changing the size of an existing window. NO, thump, to the absurd idea of a shrinking the overly wide entrance built for cattle to the size of a practical doorway. NO. NO. NO.
When I applied to add a wrought-iron Juliet balcony, with visions of cascading geraniums, she turned scarlet, as if I had asked permission to marry her dog, and pointed at the door. A neighbour had painted the outside plasterwork of his converted barn a deep blood red. I applied to do the same—NO. When I begged Umberto to reason with her, she screamed at him too. Apparently, the neighbour’s house was on the other side of the road, which meant it was in a different comune. Certain ufficio permessi around here would not even allow a swimming pool. Luckily, we received a Sì stamp to this courageous request, as long as it was not blue or used for swimming!
But there is rhyme and reason to this madness: it’s why much of the Tuscan landscape still resembles a Renaissance painting. Which is one of the reasons our paying guests love to come here so much.
Paying guests? Wait! What happened to finding a home somewhere in Italy, one that we could retreat to on holidays or just when we needed a rest? Well, we did spend several years searching for exactly that (more about this later). But somewhere along the way, I became intrigued by the beneficial ways in which time spent in Italy affected my health and happiness, and I decided to share my Italian home with others by turning our villa into a retreat and oasis.
So, instead of a place all to ourselves, we live in the main villa, in a home that is also a small hotel, with fourteen guest suites, massage huts, a kitchen garden, a swimming pool, a pond and a yoga platform. After we demolished the barn and pigsties, we rebuilt them on the same footprint, turning them into the suites, and then we reinvented the farmhouse, including adding a kitchen with an enormous centre island around which a crowd of women can gather over glasses of Prosecco to learn the art of pasta-making. On top of all that, we terraced the surrounding hilly land into gardens. Our hundred acres includes several olive orchards, a chestnut and oak forest, and a stream—and it also came with a pensioner who, for forty years, had farmed a small campo, or lot, on our land, where he raised rabbits, chickens, fruit and vegetables for his family. What were we to do with him?
We asked around and found that inheriting a person is a common predicament when buying property in Italy. Swiss friends told us that when they purchased a house on a tired old farm and were spending their first night there, camped out on the ground floor, they heard movement upstairs. They investigated and discovered an eighty-year-old man. The next day they called the previous owner, who told them, “Oh, that’s Granddad! We forgot to mention that he comes with the place.” The young Swiss couple had no choice but to embrace this old man, which turned out to be a good thing. In return, he taught them everything he knew about sustainable farming, and he ended up staying on with them until he died.
Another friend put it wisely: “Do you need that patch of land? If not, carry on the way it has always been, and let change come when it is ready.”
Not only did Simone and his wife continue to work their campo, but they delivered regular gifts of fresh eggs and plastic bags filled with blooded rabbit limbs (horrifying to look at, but they do make for a good stock!). Finally, the day came when he told us he was moving away to live with his children in the warmer south. Now that he was too frail to work the land, he was handing it back to us. The rhythm of life! It often works out in the end.
We kick off January, as planned, with the building of the new terrace, a humongous job. If we’d widened the terrace that runs along the south-facing side of the villa when the initial renovation was taking place—as I’d wanted to do—it would have been a straightforward affair. But Umberto had insisted the authorities would allow it to be only so wide, and I peevishly succumbed. Since then, I have learned to be more Italian and ignore the rules. The trouble is that, with the entire property finished, there is no way for large equipment to access the area where the extended terrace will be built.
When the contractor and the stonemasons arrive, they engage in a long and animated discussion over numerous espressos and walnut cake. This is the Tuscan way. Arms get flung in the air, gestures indicate that someone is crazy (that would be me), and then magic happens—they find a solution and the work begins.
In this case, they first need to pour concrete footings and a foundation on which to build a three-metre-high retaining wall. And it can’t be just any old wall. Due to the mind-numbing rules and regulations of renovating a property in a protected area, the wall must resemble the ancient stone structures of a bygone era.
Claudio and Luca, our stonemasons, are brothers who resemble characters in a children’s book: Luca, skinny and sullen; Claudio, round and jolly. They have built every exterior wall at Villa Reniella. Walls that terrace the land, walls that hold up the buildings, walls that required restoring, and outbuilding walls that needed to be rebuilt from scratch to look as if they had been here for centuries.
We’re ready for them. Ramps have been built and a small crane has hoisted the heavier equipment into place. But before any work begins—before trucks of butter-coloured stones are unloaded and before the cement mixer, which has been dragged through my lavender beds, is booted into life—the inevitable conversation takes place. Luca asks, “Where do we set up for lunch?” As he and his brother discuss the dilemma, I see them staring at the massage hut. I crumble with despair. With no guests around, I’ve been intending to repurpose it as a writing hut, where I would be far enough away from Hans’s constant questions about what’s for lunch and whether we are out of loo roll that I’d be able to concentrate. I planned to replace the massage table with a desk and chair. The shelf that usually displays body oils would be for my research and drafts.
No such luck. Soon the brothers have hauled in a set of rickety chairs, a microwave oven, a kettle, and a tablecloth to throw over the massage table—all the makings of a clubhouse typical of a builders’ site anywhere. (The tablecloth, probably, being exclusive to Italy.)
As with all my plans for life in Italy, I have had to make a major U-turn before I even got started. You’ll now find me tucked away and writing in a broom cupboard in the villa, rather than “a hut with a view.”
