Looking out over the Elsa Valley: Tuscany, 1998

Today's poem, "Looking out over the Elsa Valley: Tuscany, 1998", was inspired by reading notes and poems I wrote while staying in Cellole Uno, ten years ago. I found them while doing the cleanup I wrote about in yesterday's poem, "clearing out the essentials"


For two weeks in April 1998, we rented a section of the villa shown here. This is located just a couple of kilometers from Castellina in Chianti, about half way between Firenza (Florence) and Sienna.

The view of the Elna valley shown here is partly visible in the above photo of the villa. The reason that the left side of the photo is dark is that I don't have a scanner: I took the digital image of the photo on the kitchen counter.

What struck me about the contrast between Canada and Italy was how wild our country is in comparison to the sense that every inch of Italy has been worked over for millennia.