I am fascinated by a volume like this, financed by the Banca di Credito Cooperativo di Cambiano and edited by the Study Center of the Italian Touring Club, which contains research conducted not only by Touring, but also by the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa. I still leaf through the pages of the volume full of statistical tables, questionnaires, comparisons and summary tables in drafts and I realize that the topic is "Tourism in Valdelsa and lower Valdarno" which covers all the variations of the phenomenon.
An impeccable scientific instrument like an endoscope, sharp and exact like specialized microsurgical equipment, analyzes a minimal fraction of Italy and Tuscany and does so under the sign of tourism, a phenomenon partly elite, partly mass, which disarticulates , dissects and examines in all its aspects.
I don't know economic sciences, the methodologies deployed by the TCI Study Center and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa are unknown to me and yet there is no page of this exemplary scientific research that does not bring back places in my eyes and heart dear to me for having lived them as a guardianship technician and then as Superintendent of Florence and Tuscany for many years.
Here is Vinci seen from the belvedere which is next to the parish church. White plaster and sandstone houses, brick roofs that have the color of the sun and bread, all around the undulating sea of the hills, the silver gray of the olive trees, the black green of the holm oaks and, in summer, the blond gold of the cornfields. The countryside surrounding the town is intact; a balanced alternation of cultivated fields and woods distributed in perspective as in a predella by Paolo Uccello, exact and luminous in every detail like a relief by Pollaiolo. If Leonardo returned and looked out from around the walls, exactly at the point where my memory places me now, six hundred years later he would find no appreciable differences. And how can we forget the parish church of Vinci? It is ancient, it has been restored and modified many times over the centuries, it has always been there, its bell tower represents and signifies the community: the mayor, the parish priest, the school children, the small artisan industries that have made this part of the Italy, the works and days of women and men. The heart leaps in the chest if one thinks that inside the church there is a chapel that overlooks the square, a small, simple chapel, with a modest stone baptismal font in the center. Leonardo da Vinci was baptized in that chapel. I leave Vinci and, still on the thread of memory and not forgotten emotions, I move to San Gimignano because the places are close and travel is quick in this part of Tuscany. In San Gimignano "Manhattan of the Middle Ages" there are towers, there is a historic center among the most intact and fascinating in Italy, and there is the church of Sant'Agostino. In there Benozzo Gozzoli told the stories of the bishop of Hippo: from Carthage to Rome and then from Rome to Milan. In Milan, in the year of Christ 386, the fact takes place that Benozzo understands and perfectly represents: Ambrose, a high-ranking Roman official born in Trier in Germany, made bishop by popular acclaim, baptizes Augustine, an African intellectual with traces of blood Berber in the veins. From the encounter between Augustine and Ambrose, from the visionary spiritualism of one reflected in the pragmatic rationalism of the other, from this sublime contamination, modern Christian Europe was born. An educated tourist can have experiences of this kind while pausing in the shadow of the towers of San Gimignano. Just as he can meet in the shade of secular holm oaks, in the din of cicadas in the great summer of Valdelsa, the paths and buildings of the Holy Places of Jerusalem: Pilate's Praetorium, Golgotha, the Sepulcher of Christ. It is, in the lands of Montaione, the Sacro Monte di San Vivaldo, archetype and model for all the other Sacri Monti in Italy. Not far from Montaione is the castle of Certaldo, linked to the memories of Boccaccio. For scholars and connoisseurs from all over the world the Palazzo Pretorio remains unforgettable, the grandiose Romanesque Christ of Petrognano, now in the.
In Empoli there is the parish church of Sant'Andrea with its sundial bell tower of Val d'Arno and with the Romanesque facade that everyone remembers from having seen it in the "Night of San Lorenzo" by the Taviani Brothers but, annexed to the parish church, there it is an art gallery full of Renaissance masterpieces. In the art gallery of Empoli there is the delicate eccentric Starnina and there are Lorenzo Monaco at his debut, Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo Rossellino. And how can we forget that in Castelfiorentino, in the Santa Verdiana art gallery, there is the germinal moment of Giotto, practically the incipit of the modern figurative language of the Italians? I am referring to the famous "Madonna and Child" by Cimabue with the participation of the very young Giotto.
The journey could continue. To involve you in curiosity and amazement will now be the Buontalentine ramps in the Medici villa of Cerreto Guidi, now the shiny yellow-gold majolica of Montelupo, now Filippo Lippi del Botinaccio of the Museum of Sacred Art of Montespertoli. Everywhere you will encounter a continuous reflection, a constant dialogue between what you see (the rural and built landscape, the hamlets, the parish churches, the villages, the roads) and what has been: the history, the art, the documents of a civilization glory that still lives on in the lifestyles, in the proud awareness of the community, even in the language and in the food. All of this is a heritage to be guarded and preserved but it is, even more, a treasure of civilization and education to be given to the women and men of our day so that they can use it. Also through that formidable tool of freedom and knowledge that we call "tourism".
