A Three-Quarter Room with a View by Ben Mallalieu
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A loggia is a room open on one side, or a terrace with a roof and three walls. Every home should have one. The Villa Mangiacane has two, but it is one of the better villas in Tuscany.
The downstairs loggia is grander, some 90 feet long and 30 feet high and deep, like three cubes, with trompe d’oeil frescoes and vaulted ceilings. But we spent most of our time, one sofa each, in the upstairs loggia where the view was even better and the breeze more refreshing in the hot Tuscan summer.
In the silence, a swallow swoops effortlessly in through the first of the three bays, almost to within touching distance, then out through another. Occasionally, a member of the staff comes up to ask if we want anything. A taxi into the city? No. Some chocolate? That’s a good idea. Another bottle of wine? Why not.
We should be doing more with a weekend in Florence. Like perhaps setting foot in the city. But we can see it from where we are sitting, and there surely cannot be a better view than this. It is like being inside a Renaissance painting. Very little has changed, apart from the addition of the occasional telephone or electricity line. Three cranes in the distance are evidence of a new building, standing on a hill like a symbolic motif in a Florentine nativity. The landscape is still composed of pine and deciduous oak woods and square fields neatly striped with olive trees and vines.
It is easy to understand the appeal of Tuscany. There is an almost complete absence of ugly things. The countryside somehow manages to combine the best of the Mediterranean and the best of Home Counties England. The hills are picturesque but gentle — no hurried gear changes from fourth to first, no beetling drops on the outside of blind corners. All the infrastructure works. All very civilised. It even has its distinctive smell, like a sanitised version of the north Indian hills.
Many of the large farmhouses, once home to several generations of extended families and their cattle, have been converted into agriturismo. This is the right kind of farming for agriturismo. You can be certain that your cottage or apartment won’t be next door to a chicken farm or that you won’t be invaded by horseflies every time you open a window. Chianti is strictly a two-crop countryside, wine and olives.
It produces the most famous and, still, probably the best wine in Italy. But it is not an easy place to grow olives, although local growers claim that their oil is the best in the world. But autumn comes early because of the latitude and altitude, and they cannot wait for the fruit to fall or even shake it from the trees. Each olive has to be picked by hand, an expensive exercise. If anyone offers to sell you some Tuscan olive oil at cost price, don’t take it – it’s far more than the retail price.
But no one grows oranges any more as a cash crop. You no longer find the orange groves of Botticelli’s Primavera or the extraordinary hedges of oranges and white roses you see in the National Gallery’s version of Uccello’s Battle Of San Romano.
On the north side of the villa, a rectangle of terracotta-coloured earth awaits planning permission (even more complicated in Tuscany than in England) for conversion into a formal garden with fountains. From there, a gate opens into an olive grove with a path leading into a wood. Above the wood, perfectly aligned, right in the middle of the central bay, rising like a mirage in the lilac-blue haze is Brunelleschi’s Doumo and Giotto’s Campanile, eight miles away. Nothing else of the city is visible. It is as improbable as if you were in the English countryside, looking out over London and the only buildings you could see were Nelson’s column and the Tower of London.
Mangiacane was built in the 16th century by the Machiavelli family, Niccolò’s richer relations. It is attributed to Michelangelo but without any real evidence. Inevitably, you have to be sceptical — for years every decent house in England of a certain age was attributed to Christopher Wren, or if a little older to Inigo Jones. Almost all, as it turned out, were wrongly attributed. But Mangiacane has a simple, robust elegance that is hard to imitate. As you sit on your comfortable sofa on the loggia, anything is possible. For a weekend at least, you can happily suspend disbelief. This could be the real thing. You could be inside a genuine Michelangelo.
Until four years ago, Mangiacane was on its way to becoming a ruin – it was caught in the crossfire in 1944, then suffered 50 years of neglect. A rich South African bought it and began doing it up, rebuilding the villa and restoring the vineyards and olive groves, a daunting undertaking, and you suspect that he is likely to become considerably poorer before he has finished. The villa opened as a hotel last summer with six guest suites leading off the upper loggia. The next-door farmhouse is currently being converted into a further 20 suites plus a restaurant due to open next year.
Niccolò Machiavelli lived more modestly when he spent his exile from Florence nearby in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina. He described in a letter to his nephew how he rose early and worked in the fields or the woods until lunchtime, when he would eat “such food as this poor farm and my slender patrimony provides” (they all say that; I’m sure he ate very well). Then he was off for the local inn where he would pass a couple of hours drinking, chatting and playing cricca (presumably a card game and not a form of cricket) with the local butcher, baker and miller. In the afternoons, he lay in the fields with a book. It sounds a rather pleasant life, not entirely unlike that lived by modern British exiles in ‘Chiantishire’.
“When evening comes, I strip off my muddy workday clothes and put on the robes of court and palace and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and are welcomed by them.” Perhaps he walked over to Villa Mangiacane and sat in the loggia (is it in or on? You sit in a room and on a terrace) discussing grand ideas with Michelangelo or Guicciardini. More likely he sat on his own in his room talking to the wall, holding imaginary conversations with Virgil, Dante and Petrarch. “I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death,” he wrote. “I pass indeed into their world.”
We felt something of the same sitting on (or in) our loggia.
Centuries ago, the main road south passed near the house. Michelangelo came this way on his journey to the Sistine chapel. So too did the 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova when expelled from Florence, his powers waning. He wrote in his memoirs about his ignominious exit from the city: “I had not yet become accustomed to the fact that I was growing old, and that old age, especially when it is poor, cannot touch a young heart.”
Fortunately, I was still in love with my wife and we had more fun on our loggia than Macchiavelli and Michaelangelo could ever have had.
A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.