Among overhyped travel media darlings, Tuscany is the equal of Provence. As we're packing to leave, both Bon Appetit and Wine Spectator have dedicated entire editions to its charms. It has turned up, ever lovely, in such recent movies as Life Is Beautiful, Stealing Beauty, Tea With Mussolini and The English Patient. Frances Mayes' bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun is doing for Italy what A Year in Provence did for France: God Herself might not be capable of making a Tuscany that could live up to this eloquent ballyhoo.
But it's only human to hope. Certifiable foodies, my wife and I are enrolled at Villa Delia, the cooking school outside the town of Ripoli di Lari near Pisa. Once owned by the Vatican, the property is, according to its roof tiles, about 500 years old. It's not large, just 12 bedrooms designed for comfort in two buildings painted yellow and fitted with shutters the colour of cilantro. It sits in a Tuscan postcard of 22 hectares of vineyards, shimmering blue-green olive groves and lemon trees, all the better under ochre-bellied cumulus at dusk. It was a wreck when Umberto Menghi -- the entrepreneur whose empire currently encompasses four Vancouver ristorantes and another two at Whistler -- purchased it a decade ago.
For Umberto -- nobody calls him Menghi, not even his enemies -- it was much more than business. It was the emigrant dream fulfilled, the triumphant return of a wandering son who had long ago spurned a career in the priesthood. His travels took him to Canada -- to Montreal, a job at the Queen Elizabeth hotel -- in the grand year of Expo 67. He opened his first restaurant, Umberto's, on a bleakly unfashionable stretch of Vancouver's Hornby Street in 1973. It was mobbed on its first night and the poor boy from Pontedera never looked back. Today he grosses $16-million a year.
He restored the ruin to the tune of $5-million and named the complex after his mother. He installed his sister, Marietta, as resident chef and her husband, Silvano Malacarne, as manager, host and court jester. The result is a "villa" as defined in the 15th century for the all-powerful Medici family: "the harmony and concord of all the parts, achieved in such a manner that nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for the worse."
Opened in 1995, Villa Delia more than holds its own against 20 or so rival cooking schools in Tuscany. With daily cooking classes conducted by Marietta and occasional guest chefs, including Umberto himself, it delivers the gastronomic goods. Smartly, it skirts the confines of compound life with sightseeing excursions to the great cities of the region: Florence, Siena, Volterra, San Gimignano. And from mornings among the pots and pans to ebullient evenings at the table, it may be the best non-stop party in Tuscany.
Villa Delia caters to foodies with fat wallets. A 10-day stay, including air fare, can cost a couple close to $20,000. Remarkably, the clientele is 90 per cent Canadian. Umberto's cachet in Vancouver is legendary and we anticipate a brigade of classmates from west of the Rockies. So we're surprised at the mix: only one couple from Vancouver, a couple from England, a woman from California and her friend from Norway, and the rest of us -- 13 in all -- from Ontario, mostly Toronto.
Our group includes a lawyer, a legal-system entrepreneur, an investment banker, a manufacturer, an Internet marketer, a computer consultant, a health-care counsellor and a high-school teacher. The binding forces are an abiding love of food and wine, boundless curiosity and, at some flashpoint along the way, the spell of Villa Delia: Maybe it has to do with Marietta Menghi's sunburst smile. Maybe it has to do with Silvano's happy mischief, for a man who makes olive oil and wine with his own hands must be the most satisfied of men. Maybe it has to do with Umberto's instinctive take on his adopted countrymen: I've never seen our infamous Canadian reserve collapse so quickly and completely, resurfacing only on the last day to cushion the angst of goodbye.
Marietta and Silvano apply their happiness therapy to stressed-out New Worlders nine months a year, closing December through February to work with the olive groves, the vineyards, the vegetable gardens and the herb garden which boasts four varieties of oregano and four of thyme. "This isn't a job," Marietta tells me. "It's a home. It's become a place where life and work no longer have a dividing line. And what makes it all worthwhile is the enthusiasm of our guests." The guests, lubricated with equal parts of red wine and olive oil, are a burbling fountain of that.
Marietta's morning classes -- preceded by giant cups of sublimely addictive cappuccino -- are easygoing. Tuscan cooking is, after all, the last word in simplicity. "We learned to make beautiful things with very little," says Marietta, of a time when Tuscany was obscure and poor. "We learned to feed 20 people with one chicken."
There is more than one chicken in her kitchen these days, and the ingredients piled up on the stainless-steel counters vary from edible zucchini flowers to alps of beef. Red onions suddenly have the presence of rubies and parsley sits there like clusters of emeralds. Tuscan cuisine is so disarmingly simple and clean, there is no place for inferior ingredients to hide. Pasta comes together from scratch. Watching Marietta knead flour, butter and eggs in her hands is an exercise in grace and beauty.
Under her tutelage, we turn out grissini -- yes, breadsticks, but the best in the world -- Tuscan pesto infused with walnuts, fresh tomato sauce roaring with basil, feathery gnocchi wholly unlike the lead pellets dished out in Toronto trattorias, porcini mushroom risotto, wild boar braised in wine with olives and osso bucco whose flesh cascades from the bone at the sight of a fork.
One morning, Paul, the investment banker, treats everyone to Bloody Marys.
"Gawd," groans a delirious acolyte, "This is camp."
Frequent sightseeing drags us away from food. Or to it. In Siena, we ooh and ahh at the starred-and-striped interior of the cathedral -- perhaps an atonement for the city's impolite treatment of Saint Ansano, who introduced Christianity: He was tossed into a pot of boiling tar, then beheaded. After a badly needed walk around town, we do the important stuff: pizza in the piazza known as the Campo.
We eat outdoors at a long table at Spadaforte, set in one of the square's oldest palazzi, which may have been the Executioner's House. At any rate, dinner is properly executed: Vino Nobile di Montepulciano flows with endless antipasto of prosciutto, pancetta, capicolla, salami of wild boar and pecorino cheese. I finally learn the Italian for anchovies: acciughe, pronounced "achoo-gay." By the time we finish dinner, the Campo's Mangia Tower stands floodlit gold against a purple sky and a table of lawyers next to us is singing through each course.
In Florence, the history and art of that monumental Renaissance city are instantly overshadowed by the restaurant Le Fonticine and its signature bistecca alla Fiorentina, a T-bone steak juicily grilled over a wood fire and served with deep-fried zucchini and eggplant sticks: Good grief, Tuscan tempura.
One afternoon, when the weather is poor on the Ligurian coast, we change directions to Volterra, a perched town whose roots go back to the Etruscans, those ancients so beloved to high-school Latin teachers. We are shown funerary urns in sandstone and alabaster, the faces carved on them understandably disapproving. The Tuscans have taken to seeing themselves as the Etruscan descendents, but there's been a lot of genes under the anthropological bridge between then and now, and the notion seems more fancy than fact.
Another excursion takes us to San Gimignano, the most perfectly preserved medieval town in all Tuscany. Poverty and neglect have once again proven the saviours of the past, and 13 of the town's original 76 medieval towers still stand. The Basilica of Santa Maria was the setting for the lyrical belfry scene in The English Patient. Today the town is a hive of honey-coloured stone and cobblestone streets of such seductive visual power, we cancel our plans to stay in Florence and book a room on the Piazza delle Erbe for $70 a night. The piazza, too, has a place in the movies: We're told director-actor Roberto Benigni used it to fall off his bicycle in Life Is Beautiful.
One afternoon, we venture out to wine country for lunch at the tavernetta on the Machiavelli Estate, the 16th-century family home of the Machiavellis and nowadays a producer of superior Chianti. Here Niccolo Machiavelli would work in the fields by day and in the evenings adorn himself in "royal and courtly robes" to write. Here, during his exile by the Medicis in 1513, he wrote The Prince, his crowning and somewhat damning work.
Me, a Canadian raised in a dull Toronto suburb more attuned to McDonald's than Machiavelli, I'm enthralled to visit the rooms in which he penned The Prince. And now, in the very room where Machiavelli supped, I get to lunch on antipasto and mixed grill and tipple the incredibly rich 1995 Riserva that bears the Machiavelli name. Lunch lasts about three hours and we waddle out, a gaggle of stuffed geese, hurrying back to Villa Delia in case we're late for dinner.
The nearest of our jaunts is to the hill village of Lari. We climb to the heights of its castle, which was built by the Pisans to stave off -- unsuccessfully -- the insatiable Florentines. As we reach the top, we find Silvano set up with tablecloth, cheeses and breads for a scholarly olive-oil tasting. Do you realize it takes between 10 and 30 years to produce a top-quality extra-virgin olive oil? Or that olive oil is as precious as great wine and as vulnerable to sunlight as a photograph? We sample oils from Florence, Lucca, Chianti, Montalcino and Villa Delia. Silvano's is a favourite, the work of a man much accomplished at pressing extra virgins.
Our best eating, however, occurs back at the villa, the procession of dishes marching out of Marietta's splendid kitchen: On a lazy Sunday, on which everyone plays bocce, an innocent and likable game, lunch begins with fried, breaded sage leaves stuffed with my beloved achoo-gay and follows through with roast chicken, breaded rabbit, caramelized onions, green beans, French fries and fried zucchini flowers, all perfect. That night is do-your-own-pizza, Marietta presiding at the wood-fired oven, a platter of achoo-gay at my fingertips. Talk about la dolce vita.
Ciao, ciao: It's not easy to say goodbye to la dolce vita, especially when it's dolce vita di Toscana, a sensibility acquired by osmosis. It's not easy to walk away when you can hardly walk. On the last day, we're seen rolling like bocce balls across the patio, past the lemon tree, past the yellow roses, towards our vehicles. Hugs are generous. Marietta is practically squeezed to linguine by overstuffed human raviolis.
Ciao, ciao: Marietta reminds us to take everything with us. It seems guests almost always leave something behind: a shoe, a skirt, a hat, a fat book. My wife and I see through this ploy immediately: People don't want to leave, so if they leave some token of themselves behind, they will, someday, sooner or later, be compelled to return for it. This return will give them something to live for. At least, that's the way any respectable subconscious is supposed to do its job.
Later that afternoon, we've activated our Eurail passes to get us to San Gimignano and are unpacking in our room over the piazza. "Omigawd," says my wife. "Oh, no," I groan. "What did you forget?"
"My walking shoes." Getting there: Alitalia flies directly from Toronto to Rome and Milan daily, with connecting flight to Pisa; and from Montreal Fridays and Saturdays, with connecting flights to Pisa.
Villa Delia's 10-day package of cooking and sightseeing costs $4,400 (U.S.) a person, double occupancy, and includes accommodations, cooking classes, sightseeing and guide services, airport transfers, three meals daily and unlimited house wine. Upcoming special events -- priced at $4,900 (U.S.) a person, double occupancy -- are a Puccini Festival (Aug. 8-15), including operas La Boheme , and Madame Butterfly performed at the open-air theatre at Puccini's birthplace, Torre del Lego; and guest chef James Barber (Nov. 14-23). Contact Umberto Management, 1376 Hornby St., Vancouver, B.C., V6Z 1W5; phone (604) 669-9723; fax (604) 669-9723; e-mail inquire@umberto.com ; Web site http://www.umberto.com .
For tourist information, contact the Italian Government Tourist Office, 175 Bloor Street E., Suite 907, South Tower, Toronto, Ont. M4W 3R9; phone (416) 925-4882; fax (416) 925-4799. Recommended guidebook: Insight Guides' Tuscany (Prologue, $29.95), and Lonely Planet's World Food Italy (Raincoast, $19.95), both widely available. Jeremy Ferguson is a Toronto freelance writer and photographer.