The Summer Escape: A Secret Ingredient to a Life Well Lived
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So many things make Tuscany one of the most wonderful places to pass the time: the food, the history, the wine, even things that take you by surprise, like the scent of wild fennel that fills the air in springtime.
But if you close your eyes and silently think the word “Tuscany,” odds are that a singular picture will form in your mind. It will be a picture of a hillside, maybe covered with grape vines, at the top of which is a handsome stone house, standing sentinel as it has for centuries. A one-lane road leads to the house. The road is unpaved and, if you think of a car making its leisurely way up the hill to the house, a faint whisp of dust curling up behind it, you can almost hear the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. That is the famous Tuscan white road.
These unpaved roads—which are called “white” because the summer sun bleaches them until they appear white against the countryside through which they run—are the subject of countless postcards and paintings that strive to capture the essence of this iconic Italian countryside.
It’s not hard to understand why. The essence of Tuscany is tranquility; a purity of earth and air; a preservation of the past in which we in the present luxuriate; a still summer silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of quietude. And of course “silence” is a relative term. The silence here is not a void free from sound, but bright stillness filled with the distant buzzing of bees pollinating roadside flowers, birds calling and responding in the boughs of trees, a faint whisper of a breeze among grapevines and cypress trees. And all of this peace and tranquility is preserved by the presence of the Tuscan white roads.
No Accident
Tuscany’s white roads preserve the region’s tranquility because they are used only by those privileged few who have reason to travel them. No bustle of traffic passes over the white road. It has no rush hour. It is the site of no collisions or blaring horns. It is the way to that handsome stone house that you saw when you closed your eyes and uttered “Tuscany.” It is the way to privacy. It is the way to the privilege of time with those you love without unwanted intrusions. It is the way to a place that, if you know, you know—the way to a place that one goes to only intentionally, and only if one knows it’s there.
This is true even though these roads have existed for centuries, looking exactly today as they did centuries ago. Driving along one like the one that leads to Villa Ardore, one’s mind might turn those who have traversed them over those centuries, from the workers of medieval or ancient Roman—and in some cases even pre-Roman, Etruscan society—who felled the trees to make them, to the farmers who still crossed them on horses and wagons even into the early twentieth century. And yet, even over the course of hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of years, only a relative few have traveled these ancient roads: only those who knew where they led and had reason to go there.
If You Know, You Know
It is because of this rich history, and the reality that it is the white roads themselves that preserve it, that these unpaved byways are legally protected as part of Tuscany’s patrimony. It is, in most cases, illegal to pave them. On the rare occasion that permission to pave one is granted, it is only because something along them has brought so much public attention, and its attendant traffic, that the peace that the white road is intended to preserve has already been lost. Thankfully, that so rarely happens that when, once every few decades it does, it becomes a cause for a sort of collective public mourning, as happened last year when a world-famous hotel that until the past few years had been owned by the Ferragamo family, paved part of its white road.
An additional benefit of the white road is that it has little to no negative affect on the natural environment. Because it is unpaved, it is permeable, limiting runoff and allowing the maximum quantity of rainwater to seep into the aquifer. It also remains a natural surface that doesn’t impede the roaming of the area’s plentiful wildlife and includes no tar that can leach into the ground.
But a white road is not actually a part of nature and, like any road, must be maintained. There are specialists who do that work, usually in the spring, filling with a special combination of gravel and binding earth any holes that occurred during the winter rains. After filling the holes, shoring up berms, and clearing away any too-large stones, a layer of gravel is added to maintain a flat surface. It is a process that has been updated in its details over time, but that has been the same in principle since time immemorial. This process is applied to Villa Ardore’s five-century old white road twice each year, once in the spring and once in the fall, to ensure that it is always level and smooth.
To some, an unpaved road symbolizes something that is the opposite of luxury, a lack of progress; a “dirt road.” And no doubt in some places it is. Places where roads that should be paved are not due to lack of resources. But Tuscany is not such a place. Blessed with a soil that offers some of the world’s best conditions for olives and wine grapes, Tuscany is rich with bounty. When, in Tuscany, an unpaved road leads away from one of the region’s exceptionally well-maintained paved roads, it is because there is something special, something private, at the end of it. Something that you only know if you know.
That is the magic of the white road.
