‘Bastards!” bellows the woman of a certain age, steaming out of the restaurant and heading right for me on the terrace. “I can’t believe you’re eating alone! Men are bastards!”
Before I can swallow another piece of steak in its silky porcini sauce and tell her it’s OK, two men emerge sheepishly from inside, sit down at my table and introduce me to life in San Godenzo, the town where everyone knows everyone else’s business and eating alone is a matter of communal shame.
An hour later my new friends Massimo and Alessandro have both delivered my first hugs from a stranger in 18 months, paid my bill as penance for having initially left me alone and persuaded me to join them later at a village party.
Welcome to San Godenzo: Tuscany, but not as you know it. Not just because of the locals, who (almost) instantly adopt any newcomer into their 800-strong community, which has a 1950s friendliness. Here, an hour northeast of Florence in the ankles of the Apennines, the hills don’t roll, they rollercoaster; instead of prissy trimmed cypress, they’re bushy with forests of beech, holm oak and chestnut trees.
This is part of the Foreste Casentinesi national park — a Unesco-protected range of 142 square miles of forest, straddling the border with Emilia-Romagna.
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For more than a thousand years these trees have played a central role in Tuscany’s history. The terracotta cupola of the Duomo in Florence? Propped up inside by struts made of wood from the national park. Pisa’s fearsome Renaissance seafaring reputation? The ships were built with this timber. The park is even the birthplace of the River Arno, which starts as a trickle on Monte Falterona, rearing up behind San Godenzo.
The park is so central to Tuscan identity that the most famous Tuscan of all, Dante, referred to it multiple times in his Divine Comedy. In fact Dante is why I’m here. For one month only a fresco of il Sommo Poeta, Italy’s supreme poet, has been brought here from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.
It’s part of the new Uffizi Diffusi — or “scattered Uffizi” — project: an attempt to dilute overtourism in the city and regenerate rural Tuscany by scattering around the wider region the visitors who would usually clog up Florence.
The scheme was launched in July along this eastern strip of Tuscany, with a highbrow Dante exhibition in the pretty hilltown of Poppi, backing on to the park 35 miles southeast of San Godenzo.
Next up, in September, will come a show in Anghiari, which skirts the park southeast of Poppi in the Valtiberina area; then another in Montespertoli, near Florence. From October Castiglion Fiorentino, near Arezzo, will display a painting by the baroque artist Cigoli of St Francis. The friar used to meditate near by.
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That’s the other point of the Uffizi Diffusi. As well as getting tourists to less-visited areas, the project will send artworks to places linked with them, in an attempt to set the art in something close to its original context.
That’s why Dante has arrived in San Godenzo — or, to be precise, Il Castagno d’Andrea, a hamlet of 300 residents four miles further up the mountainside. His fresco was painted by Andrea del Castagno, who moved amid the greats of 15th-century Florence, including Donatello and Masaccio. (The hamlet, once called simply Castagno, was renamed in his honour in 1957, 500 years after his death.)
The fresco of Dante was painted for a Florentine villa in 1448, before being whitewashed over, rediscovered in 1847 and moved to the Uffizi, where it sat behind the till until 2004, when it was taken off display. Now it’s holidaying on the second floor of San Godenzo’s national park visitor centre, a glass-panelled, corrugated-roofed modern excrescence.
As you walk into the room, where a billowing black curtain hides the Venetian blinds, the incongruity hits you like a fist. There is Dante, 8ft high, one blue-stockinged foot stepping out of the frame towards you as he gestures to someone stage left. He sizzles with vitality, right down to his five-o’clock shadow and post-pandemic eye bags. Communing with him, the mayor gets emotional. I cry. As a work of art, it’s admirable; as an installation within the environment from which it originated, it’s a showstopper.
There’s another reason that Dante has come to San Godenzo. The fresco is following in the steps of the real Dante, who came here in 1302. Exiled from Florence when his political party fell from grace, he was part of a plot to retake the city — they held a conference about it in the 11th-century abbey that sprouts here between mountain folds.
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It didn’t work out and Dante left town, and Tuscany, never to return. He died in Ravenna in 1321, but not before writing his masterpiece. “Halfway along life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the right path,” he wrote at the beginning of Inferno.
And just outside San Godenzo I find myself following the old path out of town (hacked open again in 2019), across a medieval bridge and into a wood of thick oak and ash. High above a brook the path winds up towards the mountains, and Emilia-Romagna. Brambles tug at my legs as the path tapers, until I turn back. Is it the dark wood? My new friends think so. And Dante certainly left San Godenzo in a dark place, exiled from his beloved city
of Florence.
Eventually I, too, must leave San Godenzo, though not without promising those new friends that I will return: perhaps in October for the harvest of the chestnuts, which flower here on the hillsides like tiny green pompoms; perhaps next summer, to hike up Monte Falterona, where head-height ferns sway under giant beeches, and to bathe in the swirling waters beneath the Acquacheta falls, which Dante wrote about in Inferno.
But while Dante went north to Emilia-Romagna, I head southeast, to Poppi, on a road careering around mountain switchbacks. My fellow travellers are the stoats, foxes, badgers and deer that share the road with me this evening. (Only true bravehearts should follow the Google Maps shortcut along the single-track mountain road through sylvan glades around Rincine.) I wiggle around cliffs cut by a brook below — the Arno, just a trickle here — emerging at Stia. This cute little town is the home of panno casentino, a dense wool fabric that looks like felt but, being Italian, is more elegant — Audrey Hepburn’s orange Givenchy coat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was made of it, and the artisans at Tessilnova, in an elegant 19th-century mill, sell clones of it, along with swirling capes and blankets.
This, the Casentino area, is more typically Tuscan: rugged hills braided with vines and topped by Renaissance turrets, none more spectacular than Poppi, a walled citadel draped over a bluff in a yawning, hill-wrapped valley. Its stout castle, which inspired the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, is visible for miles around.
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The exhibition at Poppi, in the castle, is as small as it is highbrow: just seven works that will make little sense to non-scholars or non-Italians, though there are four nice Dante illustrations by Federico Zuccari. While they alone aren’t reason to leave Florence, Poppi absolutely is.
Elsewhere in the castle an Escher-like staircase wraps round a courtyard that resembles that of the Bargello museum in Florence, and up to an old library and a chapel frescoed by Giotto’s student Taddeo Gaddi. From the belltower the town unwinds like a snail below, as a rainbow slides over the valley beyond.
Poppi itself is a toy-town Florence, with a hint of Bologna: sagging porticoes, imposing stone-rimmed doors, heavy cobbled streets and a mini Florentine Duomo — a hexagonal chapel that houses a Madonna and Child attributed to Filippino Lippi.
Beyond Poppi is the Foreste Casentinesi park again. At Camaldoli, a medieval monastery, I peer at a meadow of incongruously English cottages in the hermitage, then twist round the mountainside to Il Capanno restaurant for a plate of homemade ravioli suffocated by a nutty wad of truffle shavings (mains from £8; badiaprataglia.com/alberghi/capanno). Those beams for Florence’s Duomo were cut here, dragged down to Poppi and floated down the Arno, 600 years ago.
That’s the genius of the Uffizi Diffusi project: it weaves together a history of Tuscany that goes far deeper than fancy wines and blockbuster art. Will it disperse the tourists? I hope so. Not least because chatting for hours in San Godenzo is a much better use of your time than queueing to see Botticelli’s Venus.
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Julia Buckley was a guest of San Godenzo, Poppi, Casentino and Sawday’s. The Dante exhibition (free; comune.san-godenzo.fi.it) runs until August 23 in San Godenzo. The Poppi exhibition (£6; www.castellodipoppi.it) runs until November 30. Details of the other exhibitions can be found here, though dates are subject to change
Three places to stay
Novanta, Bibbiena
In centuries past Gello was a thriving farming community in the mountains behind Poppi. But like so many remote villages in Italy, it was abandoned after the war. This albergo diffuso — or scattered hotel, the model from which the Uffizi Diffusi project takes its name — is restoring the houses, little by little, with 16 rooms dotted across the hamlet. Not that this is a building site: the shabby-chic rooms are deliciously comfortable, and the activities, from cocktail classes to lunch with the neighbours, will keep you occupied when you’re not by the (glorious) pool.
Details Full-board doubles from £158 (sawdays.co.uk)
Astieto, San Godenzo
Along a gravel track ten minutes below San Godenzo, near Dante’s bridge, Astieto is a haven of calm: a two-room B&B around the side of the farmhouse. Further up this mountain, it’s said, lived Giotto’s teacher; the painter (from nearby Vicchio) immortalised the landscape in his works. The owner Antonietta’s breakfasts — home-baked crostata, fruit crumble straight from the oven and freshly laid duck eggs — are as celebrated as her warmth, while the grounds extend across the surrounding hills. A proper agriturismo.
Details B&B doubles from £60 (astieto.com)
Il Contado, Poppi
You’re right in the countryside overlooking rolling hills at Il Contado, but you’re also halfway down Poppi’s hill, making it an easy walk — and an even easier drive — into town. The pool overlooks the fields outside town, and there’s a quiet, informal atmosphere. There are seven rooms and four apartments, though there’s plenty of space. For dinner, the Parc Hotel, a sister property at the bottom of the hill, is genuinely excellent and beats the more atmospheric restaurants in town.
Details B&B doubles from £94 (contadospa.com)
What are the rules for getting into Italy?
Travellers to Italy from the UK must produce a negative PCR or antigen swab test taken no more than 48 hours before entering the country (children under six are exempt); fill in a passenger locator form (app.euplf.eu); self-isolate for five days on arrival (this requirement is in place until at least August 30); call the Covid-19 helpline for the region you are in within 48 hours of arrival to inform them of your visit (find the number at salute.gov.it); and take a PCR or antigen swab test at the end of five days to release. See salute.gov.it
