It almost always happens, however, that ideological expectations meet unexpected results. So it is that the planned workers' and peasants' paradise of Siena has led instead to something quite different: the tourist state—for Siena Province today depends for its livelihood largely upon tourism, essentially a luxury industry, and its most notable product is very expensive wine. As for those picturesque castelli punctuating the horizon, don't imagine that they were there in Garibaldi's day. Oh, the vine was surely cultivated here at various times in the past, and the ancient fortresses surely existed in a different, more dilapidated, form. But most of the estates in this area are no more than fifty years old, and the castles housing the vintners' cantinas were usually restored in a similar span of time; the same can be said of many grand villas in the more northerly Chianti region, which followed the lead of the Castello di Brolio, rebuilt in the 1830s in the Gothic Revival style. As one Brunello winemaker, the proprietor of a tiny but lovely terroir with a stunning view of Monte Amiata, put it to me, "This place was so overgrown that we had to hack our way through to it after we bought it."

The little Brunello estate is in the neighborhood of Montalcino. I am sitting with charming company on a sunny afternoon, eating fresh fava beans with homemade ricotta and drinking the house wine. The family speak of knowing this terroir yard by yard, of lovingly coaxing along each slope, and of how that has little in common with "knowing wines" as oenologists do. The buildings, small enough to feel very domestic, actually belong to a ruined borgo, brought back to life by the winemaker and his family; there is even a deconsecrated church. Wherever I look, I see flowers, and creeping vines on warm stone walls, and brief passages of horizon that seem to watch over me. From my position, I contemplate a fine old stone tower, ruined but slated for restoration, which I will later explore with some risk to life and limb. It occurs to me that with so much that is new and yet also old—new-old, you might say—the genuine Tuscan temperament, that abiding sense of life transmitted down the centuries, can sometimes prove rather hard to come by.

Then the winemaker tells me a story. He remembers meeting a Tuscan farmer who began to praise his village and its land, adding that if you walked over to a nearby hill town, which you could see outlined against the sky, you'd find that it too was beautiful and productive, if admittedly a little less so. The only trouble with that other village, the farmer said, suddenly scornful, was the way they sounded when they spoke. Their Italian was truly dreadful.

Later, when I think about this story, it seems to me that the farmer was incidentally elucidating two distinct but related elements of the Tuscan identity. One is that the Tuscan at his most elemental lives at the center of the world. The other is that one's degree of social status is defined here largely by precision of speech. It was because of Dante's poetry that the Tuscan dialect, one of numerous offshoots of low Latin spoken in the fourteenth century, was adapted as Italy's national language, and many Tuscans, including those of humble birth, can recite long passages of Dante by heart. Correct, clearly enunciated Italian always carries prestige in Tuscany, even when spoken by hucksters or paupers. Older Tuscans recall shepherds whiling away the time reciting the tales of Paolo and Francesca, Farinata and Cavalcanti.