As a writer – and I know a lot of creatives want to do the same with their rediscovered work – it’s all I can do, reading through my thirteen-year-old posts, not to edit them, not to correct language errors or grammatical slurring, and even the odd typo must stay, lest it changes history. Nostalgia has already done that: one’s own sweet editing.

I do have to apologise to the Italian language for my early days (years) of massacring verbs, adjectives and syntax indiscriminately. Like the word “Bellissimo” (which you will see in the below post. Cringe). In Australia we tend to use the word “beautiful” to describe a delicious dinner, and that adjective would be sufficient to cover the meal’s presentation as well as its pleasing flavour. Instead, in Italian, you’d say “bello” or “bellissimo” (extra bello!) to describe the food’s presentation, and “buono” or “buonissimo” (extra buono) to describe its flavour.

Just to confuse you along with the Italian imperfect tense, here are some examples:

L’ultima volta che ho mangiato qui, la cena era buonissima!
(The last time I ate here, the dinner was delicious!)

La torta era proprio bellissima e anche il sapore era buonissimo.
(The cake was really beautiful and it tasted very good).

Lezione d’Italiano, over and out!

Anyway…back on the ranch in 2012…
La Casacce in Seggiano is straddled on a ridge overlooking the Val d’Orcia on one side, and the Orcia’s “poorer cousins” (in label terms only…certainly not in vistas and sunsets and all things southern Tuscany.

Now the stunning winery Podere Montale, back then La Casacce in it’s rough-hewn beauty, was a much-needed haven for two days in between hikes. We attended a basic cooking class, had the time for swimming and washing socks (not in the pool!), and to be served all the pizza and all the pasta and all the carbs that we were so utterly done with.

The red-bespectacled owner was an odd bod to say the least. He looked to be in his sixties and had the air of stylish eccentricity: a chef, an artist, flamboyant, a stereotype of the self-made Italian man. What I hadn’t written into my original post back then was that he was a bit of a touchy flirt after a whiff of grappa, and made it clear he was thoroughly enjoying entertaining our group of women at his place. I later learned that he was renowned for that behaviour.

He was also known to not pay anyone, which made a lot of people irritable with him and that made him a master at sudden and miraculous disappearances when they came to collect.

A year or two after my first visit, The Etruscan and I paid yet another visit to collect on a job that was already a year in arrears. He was never there at the appointed time and then stopped answering calls, so our visit this time was unannounced. His staff recited the script that he wasn’t in but I saw the door that led to a bedroom off the loggia crack open, through which I could see a book, spine-up, lying on a bed, and those distinctive red spectacles on the floor, as though dropped in haste.

Living like that can’t be good for the heart, and he died – the ultimate disappearing act – a few years later, still owing The Etruscan (my ex husband) and many others a fair amount of money. At times I wondered if he really actually died, or if he absconded from that, too.

Back to the post and the days that the writing group stayed there…I mention feeling “flat”. That just happens on tours: the high highs of the joy of travel, walking, writing, eating, and view after extraordinary view that give way to fatigue. We’re all just little kids at a birthday party.

The tour had proved itself to be a walking tour that had already been “constructed” just for that: walking. There had been no provision made with time for writing in mind. Each day we were being picked up from one accommodation and dropped off at the next… and these agriturismi were gorgeous, but they were only a few kilometres apart; we could have been based in one place for the whole time and done our hiking from there, which, it was agreed all round, would have made a lot more sense.

On top of everything, slights and niggles were pulling down the pants of paradise: dynamics between soft and tough personalities in the group, physical fatigue, June heat meant that some of the women weren’t feeling well at all. Add to that, we were all writing deeply into previously folded and carefully concealed parts of our beings, and rawness and sunlight are a recipe for tears.

However, to paraphrase the late Mr Cohen, the cracks are where the light floods in.

Il Quinto Giorno – Olive Farm Casacce

First published 14 June, 2012

After our morning workshop we partook in a 3 hour cooking class at the farm, making pasta, pastry for cake and a thick Tuscan vegetable soup, all of which we had for lunch. Bellissimo!

I have to admit, though, I am quite over pasta. I think I was over pasta by day three. Pizza is heading into that territory also. I thought I might return from the tour fat – cakes offered for breakfast, piles of bread and pasta for lunch and dinner, and the very necessary daily siesta – but I think I’m swinging the other way. All of us are worshipping the idea of fruit and salads and thank the gods for cherries…

A good swim in the pool here at the farm was very welcome yesterday, and in the surrounding olive groves there is a gorgeous (somewhat cantankerous) donkey we all fell in love with, although he was reluctant to pose for long for the photographers amongst us.

Today has been a much-needed day of rest. The workshop was about awakening the senses and writing from the senses but the writing isn’t flowing for me today as much as I’d hoped. One of those flat days you get when part of you is catching up to itself. Nothing for it but siesta.