Articles > La Foce

We’ve all seen it. That procession of cypress trees winding along a dusty track then twisting away into the vivid blue horizon It’s pure Tuscany - Italy’s most photographed countryscape. And it’s the view which inspired the garden at La Foce.

La Foce was Iris Origo’s passion. In 1924 Iris, a spirited Anglo-American who grew up in the palatial Villa Medici, left the aristocratic comfort of Florence with her new husband Antonio. They decamped to La Foce - a 15th century hamlet secreted among the wavy knolls of the Val d’Orcia.

‘When my parents arrived here it was a remote and forgotten place,’ explains Benedetta Origo, the present head of the family. ‘A dilapidated medieval hamlet with seven thousand acres of brutal terrain. Farm workers lived alongside their animals, scraping a living from the land. My mother and father brought prosperity to the valley - building a school and excavating lakes for irrigation. To soften the terrain, they decided to create a garden’.

They commissioned the English architect Cecil Pinsent to create a garden to shield them from the burning Tuscan sun and embrace views of the Amiata Mountains. The garden is full of optical tricks which draw it into the landscape. Stone walls dividing the three tiers are built from local travertine stone and covered with wisteria. A long cypress avenue dissolves into the horizon. As you turn the corner by the pergola, the full panorama of the Amiata Mountains rushes into view.

And what a view it is: the corkscrew of cypress trees; the almost lunar Sienese craters spilling waterfalls of white dust onto the mountainside; the tulip-flecked wheat fields posing for an impressionist canvas , and fields and fields of sunflowers cricking their necks for a few extra rays.

The family carried on extending their garden until the work was stopped by the war. It was this grim period that inspired Iris Origo’s literary legacy: a diary recounting the heroism of the ordinary people of the Orcia. Many of the locals risked execution to feed and clothe escapee allied troops. Most were English soldiers trying to get back to their units. The Origos hid escapees and, on several occasions, were a whisker away from detection by the Nazis. In 1947 Iris published her diary from this period; still in print, War in Val d’Orcia is one of the most vivid and moving accounts of wartime life in rural Italy.

It took time for the valley to recover after the war. ‘Our situation was extreme,’ says Benedetta. ‘The Val d’Orcia, already scarcely populated, was virtually deserted. The tenant farmers abandoned their farmhouses and headed for the cities. It was a frightening feeling. Kidnappers operated in the valley between La Foce and Radicofani. Tuscany was in its darkest moment’.

Though the land-owning families in nearby Monticchiello and Pienza sold up, the Origos stayed put. To encourage visitors they started an annual music festival and opened La Foce’s grounds to the public. In 1986 Prince Charles set up easel at the end of the garden to paint a watercolour of the famous cypress-tree hill.

The valley’s revival has been kindled by tenant farmers buying up land they used to work on, heralding the return of families have lived here for centuries. ‘Life in the Val d’Orcia has always been played out in small communities,’ says Benedetta. ‘The medieval town, the hamlet, the padronal villa and the farmhouse; they are our touchstones of life here”.

Ironically, the poverty which left the Val d'Orcia untouched has allowed it to become a Tuscan idyll. Benedatta is determined to keep it that way: ‘I want to encourage a small number of the “right” visitors to the area. People who want to spend time with the Tuscan landscape, and learn about Italian gardens’. To this end she has restored many the estate’s traditional farmhouses for rental, as well as several abandoned buildings that she couldn’t bear to see fall apart. Gardening enthusiasts come during a special fortnight of lectures and tours conducted by Peter Curzon. Curzon looks after the garden at La Foce, as well as designing a garden for Nicola Bulgari who has bought villa in the Val d’Orcia.

Despite its brush with celebrity, the Orcia remains blissfully free of chiantishire commuters. The valley settles your pulse rate as you instinctively slow down to enjoy the scenery. And when you finally reach that view, the best place to admire it from is the garden at La Foce.

• More from Marc Zakian