Cortona, without a map

I took a day trip to Cortona last week. It may be my favorite place in Tuscany so far, which is saying something. I cleverly left my map at home, but the centro is small enough that it's pretty easy to find your way around. What would be a real help is a map in topographical relief, because even by the standards of Tuscan hill towns, these are some steep streets.

Cortona is at the southernmost point of Tuscany, near the Umbrian border, where the mountains get steeper and craggier. It's at the end of a road full of hairpin turns, on top of a formation that blurs the line between mountain and hill. I'm pretty sure it's at least as high as A Mountain at home (and for non-Las Cruces people, no, that's not a typo; people call it A Mountain and there's a big A painted on its west face).


The streets are full of the odd little tunnels and expressionist angles I've come to expect from Italian hill towns. And did I mention the streets were steep? Some of the grades have to be close to 30 degrees.


Even more than Assisi, Cortona feels like a quiet mountain retreat. St. Francis sometimes came there to pray and meditate. I found the 13th-century Church of St. Francis--sort of the antithesis of his grand basilica.

Inside are some masterpieces by 16th- and 17th-century painters, along with traces of the original frescoes and the relics of Brother Elias, who led the Franciscan order after St. Francis's death. I was the only visitor. The interior was entirely silent--and I mean the silence of pine woods, not the silence of cathedrals filled with tourists.

One of the things I really wanted to see was Le Celle, a ways outside the city walls, a combination of natural caverns and human construction that used to be home to a hermit. I didn't find it, but the walk was gorgeous. There aren't enough greens in any set of paints to capture a Tuscan hillside.

For all I love city life, I'm still a child of the Southwest, and my heart leaps like a mountain goat whenever I encounter a landscape like this.

On the way I passed the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie al Calcinaio (Church of St. Mary of the Grace at the Limepit). The collision of old and new in Italy is often jarring, sometimes funny (as when we saw a man in full Arezzo jousting regalia speed past on a motor scooter), but here it seemed perfectly natural for a Renaissance dome to be rising out of the terraced olive farms.




Yes, I'll be going back to Cortona.