A Few Days in Tuscany

Tuscany in July is a cliché I'd been avoiding for years.

Too hot, too touristy, too photographed — every cypress on every hill already on someone's screensaver. So of course, when a long July weekend opened up, that's exactly where we pointed the car. Down through the Gotthard, across the Po valley, and into the Val d'Orcia by dinner.

A few days, no real plan. Just a rough loop: hilltop villages first, then the thermal pools, then out to the coast. Here's what stuck.

A car parked on a dirt road winding through the rolling golden hills of the Crete Senesi — The Crete Senesi. The dirt roads are the point — leave the asphalt and the place opens up.

Val d'Orcia

The Val d'Orcia is a UNESCO site for the same reason a Vermeer is in a museum — somebody, at some point, decided this was the version of the thing we should preserve. Wheat fields shaved to gold by mid-July, single farmhouses on single hills, a cypress driveway like a hand-drawn line.

It's the kind of landscape that makes you suspicious. Surely a place this composed can't be accidental. But you drive a back road for ten minutes and the next view is just as good as the postcard one, and the one after that, too. There's just a lot of it.

A cluster of cypress trees in the foreground with rolling hills, olive groves and a farmhouse beyond under a moody grey sky — A grey sky over Tuscany is rare and underrated — colours go deeper, the cypresses go almost black.

View over terracotta rooftops of a Tuscan hilltop town across the Val d'Orcia toward distant hazy mountains — From the top of one of the villages, looking out over the valley.

Hilltop villages

Every Tuscan hill seems to come with a village stapled to the top of it. Stone, terracotta, a church, a fortress, a bar with three tables — the formula doesn't change much, but it works every time.

A Tuscan hilltop village crowned by a ruined medieval castle, with terracotta roofs and olive groves cascading down the slope — A ruined castle on top, olive groves on the way down. Tuscany follows a recipe and refuses to apologise for it.

The trick is to skip the famous ones at midday and aim for the smaller ones at aperitivo time. Park outside the walls, walk in through whatever gate is open, and find the piazza. Order something cold. Watch the light go orange on the stone. Move on before dinner.

A long dinner

The best meal of the trip wasn't in any town — it was at the agriturismo, on a long table dragged outside, with vineyards going down the hill and a hilltop village glowing on the horizon.

A long outdoor dinner table with woven placemats, wine glasses and candles, overlooking Tuscan vineyards at golden hour — This was about thirty seconds before someone brought out the second bottle.

There's a specific kind of golden hour you only get over Tuscan hills in July — long, slow, and almost too perfect. Everything reddens. The wine glasses pick it up. Conversation drops half a register. You stop checking your phone without deciding to.

Saturnia

A detour south, into the Maremma. The Cascate del Mulino at Saturnia are exactly as advertised: chalky turquoise terraces of travertine, hot sulphur water cascading down through them, an old stone mill at the top, and — at any hour you choose to show up — a fair number of strangers in swimsuits sitting around in a milky-blue bathtub.

It smells faintly of eggs and feels exactly right. Best done early — by mid-morning the bus tours roll in and the parking situation gets philosophical.

The Maremma coast

From Saturnia it's another forty minutes to the sea. The Parco della Maremma is the bit of Tuscan coast they didn't pave — pine forest, scrub, dirt tracks, and long wild beaches you have to walk to. No bars, no umbrellas, no row of identical sunbeds at twenty euros a head.

A wide empty wild beach with frothy waves and forested green headlands curving into the distance — Maremma — the Tuscan coast as it must have looked everywhere, once.

Somebody had been there before us and built a small driftwood teepee on the sand. We left it standing. Felt rude not to.

A driftwood teepee shelter on an empty sandy beach with turquoise Mediterranean waves and an island silhouetted on the horizon — Whoever built this — thanks for the shade.

A book and a slow morning

The other thing Tuscany is for, of course, is doing nothing. Long mornings on a tiled floor with a coffee and a paperback. The book of the trip was a deliberately silly one — a thriller called Murder Under the Tuscan Sun, picked up at the airport for the obvious reason.

A hand holding the paperback Murder Under the Tuscan Sun by Rachel Rhys, with a sunset Tuscan villa on the cover — On theme. Recommended only if you're already where the cover is set.

Going back

Four days isn't a trip to Tuscany — it's a tasting menu. You leave with a list twice as long as the one you arrived with: the val di Chiana next time, the Apuan Alps, the marble quarries above Carrara, a proper week in the Maremma with a tent.

But what stayed with me wasn't any single view. It was the light, and the slowness — both of which are harder to find than they should be, and both of which Tuscany still has in absurd quantities.

If you go in July: drink water, drive the dirt roads, eat outside, and don't try to see everything. You won't. That's fine.