Part 1: Tears Over a Plate of Pasta

On the first day, a plate of pasta with tomato sauce brought tears to my eyes.

We had stopped for lunch at a workers’ bar on the way into Tuscany. It was simple food, the kind you’d barely notice on an ordinary day, but I’d spent weeks unable to taste much of anything. That was when I realised how much I needed to be there.

Why Tuscany

Earlier that year I parted ways with my job, and then I came down with a severe flu. A change of scenery was overdue, so we booked the cheapest flight we could find, which happened to be to Bologna, and hired a silver Fiat Panda at the airport.

I’m aware this could read like a budget-version scene from Under the Tuscan Sun. My whole life and work have been about taste and smell, though, and when I’m unwell everything tastes flat. I need flavour the way a photographer needs light, and I knew where to find it.

We kept off the main roads as long as we could. When we did rejoin the autostrada, it was after an oversized lunch of pasta with ragù, a meat course and then one course too many, and with the windows down the big questions stopped rattling around my head. You can’t really get lost in Tuscany. Keep driving and sooner or later a sign will point you back to the motorway.

A stone house in the Mugello

We arrived at sunset at a stone house in the mountains of the Mugello, less than an hour’s drive north of Florence. It’s a wild place of rushing streams and unpaved tracks that twist up through the hillsides. On some bends the grass grew so tall that we couldn’t see a metre ahead.

The family who owned the house welcomed us with a bottle of local sparkling white and a slab of pecorino.

Heading south

From the Mugello we drove south, past Florence and the hills of Chianti, and on towards the Tuscany of postcards, where rows of dark cypresses line pale green hills. Big drops of rain were bouncing off the windscreen, yet you could tell the land was drier down here. We were on our way to Montalcino.

After eating my weight in pasta, I was beginning to feel like myself again for the first time in years. It had started with one plate of tomato sauce in a workers’ bar.