Each time we are granted the privilege – yes, privilege – of being shown the incredible beauty of the Tuscany, the soul grows and the spirit widens flying beyond the horizon.

Light is the first thing that hits you in Tuscany. And with it, the landscapes and the colors of the earth, the lightness of the air, almost transparent to the touch.  No matter if one travels in the winter, in the summer, in springtime or in the autumn: Tuscany surprises; surprises because each time it shows itself anew, reminding us that it is much more than just Florence, Pisa, Siena; it is much more than the bucolic image of a wavy field, of the beautifully worked farming lands, of the abundance of works of art, of its convents and abbeys; Tuscany is not only the Mecca of the English aristocrats of the 19th century and of the well off Germans of the 20th century, new occupants of the villas and garden cottages.

And when we believe we know all about it, when we take pride in our knowledge – complex and ample – about it... we discover that Tuscany offers, in addition, a more rustic and jealous side; it opens to us its mountainous side, almost alpine, and from its heights in the winter we can enjoy the view of the Adriatic sea, rocked to the rhythm of the storms; the popular culture of its fiestas, its gastronomy, its houses in bloom that only appear when one searches for them patiently. And then we understand what goes beyond the romantic post card and the Ponte Vecchio: Tuscany is secret, is profound, and is practically and beautifully discreet.

It is not surprising that illustrious personages like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron loved to take walks through its woods of pine that border the sea in these lands. And what to say about Goethe, who left in his diaries pages that relive times and monuments already disappeared among the light and the enchantment of this land, or Albert Camus, Italo Calvino and many more. What attraction does Tuscany have that already during the 20s it had turned into a meeting point for intellectuals of the stature of Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann? What is it that charms writers, poets, film directors, painters, journalists and thousands of people that have wanted to copy its beauty, its strength, its din?

This daughter of the light and the water bewitches like a restless and dancing Salome, it shows and hides, tempts, offers and takes away, seduces with a rosy blush on the façades of its country houses, in the brilliance and voluptuousness that are evoked by its madonnas and its squares, that invite one to loose ones head between its valleys and its coasts, in its mountains and its villages, taking hold of stone walls that are now a secure base for a picturesque and spectacular landscape which rises above them.

Uncertain Tuscany, Tuscany of light in the hearts of the sunflowers and the poppies, secret Tuscany in the parks of the Maremma and in the waters of Saturnia, de luxe Tuscany in the beaches surrounded by pines and cypresses, pristine Tuscany in the islands, exquisite in the art guarded by its walls, in the anecdotes and in the façades; Tuscany proud and precious in its marbles, sharp on the tongue of its inhabitants, self governing and anti clerical by nature.

This pearl of Europe, precious jewel inserted in the palette of its fields, is an explosion of light given to us, as I said, as a privilege, almost as if one approaches a sacred miracle, with the prudence of contemplation but at the same time with the determination and vigor of life that in Tuscany moves, anxiously, like a mystery of water and light.