What is it about this piece of Italy that makes it such a phenomenon in the eyes of the whole world? In a series of mesmerizing vignettes, Dan Hofstadter provides his own definitive answer. We can but follow…

Last April, on the eve of the Italian general election, I set out on a search for something elusive. This something was what you might call the Tuscan sense of life—the Tuscan temperament. It was to be a brief ramble, and I was concerned that I'd do meager justice to such a rich topic; the consolation was that brevity might concentrate my thoughts. Tuscany, like very few other places—Paris, for instance—is an idea as well as a place. It gave its language to a country. Its most gifted mathematician invented modern science. Its artists redesigned Rome. Its grand dukes had nineteen palaces. There is even a "Tuscany" perfume, as if the local breezes were unfailingly aromatic. Until recently, the national language was not properly spoken by very many people, the gifted mathematician was shut up in his house, the artists who redesigned Rome didn't talk to one another, one of the grand dukes and his wife were poisoned in their palace, and the Tuscan breezes, laden with wild thyme, mint, sage, and juniper, were redolent of the kitchen, not the boudoir. But the myth of Tuscany persists, for the simple reason that it is based very largely on fact.

Ever since international travel on a large scale was invented, by the English in the eighteenth century, huge numbers of people have come to Tuscany every year, including some very famous people, like Byron and Shelley and, a little later, Dickens. Dickens was startled to discover that in the port of Livorno "there was an assassination club, the members of which bore no ill-will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people (quite strangers to them) in the streets at night, for the pleasure and excitement of the recreation." This jolly pastime has gone by the board, and nowadays the visitors, many of them Italians, come to Tuscany for the art, the architecture, the food, the universities, the shopping, the beaches. The region includes not only the great medieval and Renaissance centers of Florence, Pisa, Siena, Lucca, and Arezzo but also seldom-visited cities that long ago became industrial, like Pistoia, or were badly damaged during World War II, like Livorno; and even these have great treasures.

Tuscany—more than any other area, with the possible exception of the Amalfi Coast—corresponds to our conception of what Italy ought to be. The traveler who first arrives in the Florentine countryside, with its parasol pines, its alleys of cypresses, its villas and crenellated towers, may feel that he has seen it somewhere before. The hills to the north and south of Florence are surmounted by manors, castles, and formal gardens that, though by no means necessarily old, do not give a theatrical or dreamlike impression, as they might along the Rhine, but rather one of conscious, serene, and elegant organization. This is not so much a romantic as a classical landscape, and therein lies its magnetism.

I have lived in Tuscany on several occasions over the past thirty years. Although I have a certain fondness for the lesser-known littoral of the Maremma and the uplands of the Casentino, this time I set myself the task of revisiting only the provinces of Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. I began with the Sienese countryside, and if anyone were to wander about its rolling hills as I did last spring, slipping in and out of the cloud shadows, peering at arrangements of vineyards so perfect that they might have been composed by Sassetta or Pietro Lorenzetti, at castles festooned by clotheslines and abandoned abbeys wanting only a chorus of hooded friars to complete the picture, they could be forgiven for thinking that here, at last, is the eternal Italy. The panorama is unremittingly tempting: On any unpaved road, you find yourself bouncing past huge fortified farmhouses, sheepfolds guarded by scrambling dogs, ancient olive orchards climbing up hillsides. Beware of easy conclusions, however, for this is a land of illusions and paradoxes.