A Farmhouse In Tuscany

I had a farm in Africa, Karen Blixen begins in Out of Africa. I have a farmhouse in Tuscany, I might start, perching on top of the Florentine hills of Chianti – and facing South, so that the two ochre-coloured buildings bathe gold in the morning and almost colourless in the bright midday sun, and loom murder-mystery sinister when silhouetted against the dark evening sky. For five hundred years this place used to be a farm: its vineyards won some national prizes, and its main house enlarged each century with a new section or a room, not to mention that the house is one of the important local casa coloniche, farmhouses, depicted in the frescoes of the nearby Strozzi castle.

The last peasants lived here during the decades following the WW II. Afterwards the two houses were abandoned for a long time.

The son of this family, a white-haired, soft-spoken Fiat mechanic, is our friend, and at times drops by, bringing cherries or wild asparaguses he’s found in the woods. Never revealing the exact spot of his asparagus expeditions (all of which is highly classified information), he nonetheless entertains us with stories about How Our Farmhouse Used to Be, telling us time and again how that German soldier was shot in front of the main house and thrown into an adjacent ancient well, or how there is a secret room underneath the kitchen, full of water; or how animals – cows – used to live on the ground floor, whereas his family occupied the first floor, now carefully renovated and furnished with Swedish Gustavian furniture and late-17^th century paintings, and big, white sofas.

All in all, it is some four hundred square metres of terracotta floor and poorly heated, high-ceilinged rooms. And that is where we live – myself, a Finnish-born writer; my Italian husband, a university professor by profession and an unflinching pedant and an aesthete by way of life; our twelve-year old son; two hairy dogs… and that dead German soldier of course, now a ghost.

We’re not farmers per se, but in the course of the fourteen years that we’ve lived here, we’ve become bona fide experts of farmhouse life.

What is it, farmhouse life?

Farmhouse life is nothing more and nothing less than a row of muddy rubber boots in the entrance hall. It’s fireplaces and stoves, and a scent of smoke that hovers in the corners of the rooms in the winter. And superbly thick woollen socks and cardigans, a must-have when you come home and peel off the city clothes. A kitchen so big you could play football there. And farmhouse life is baskets full of lavender, cut in June. Ripe figs in September. War-zone-like banging in the autumn, when the hunting season starts. Lonely Friday evenings spent shivering in the inundated boiler room, trying to fix the damn boiler in torch light. (Not succeeding, of course.) Dogs, dogs, dogs. Firewood. A real, proper larder, often full of home-made jam and tomato sauce – or pomarola, as the Italians call it. A basement with rows of dusty wine bottles that smells like childhood adventures. Sun-kissed apricots in early-July. Mind-boggling, world-stopping cold in January – and not outside, as you might expect, but inside the house. Gigantic, cockroach-like machines making their way on the vineyards during the grape harvest in September, and a row of chests, brimming with freshly picked olives, shining in the bright, crisp November sun.

And beauty. Beauty is elementary in Tuscany in general, but it is all the more so essential in Tuscan farmhouse life in particular. Because wherever you look, the panorama is achingly beautiful, and there are no urban monsters like shopping malls or motorways to break that perfection. It’s just vineyards, olive groves, castles and farmhouses – and vineyards, olive groves, castles and farmhouses, repeated endlessly on a chain of hills that rolls all the way on to the horizon.  

That is what farmhouse life is like here in Tuscany.

That’s how it is to live in a big, centuries-old house in the countryside of Italy, and what I’ll be talking about in this blog.