Grand Tour

The most obvious route of access, and above all the one most capable of ensuring a regular flow of trade and tourists, was the one from Bologna. Crossing the mountains through the Raticosa and Futa passes, the road that led to Florence by way of Pietramala could be traversed in just one day thanks to the nine well-equipped post houses located along it.

Charles de Brosses’s description (1740) of his journey to Florence from Bologna, covering fifty-five miles in a single day, is celebrated: it was a really hard day of travel by stagecoach, however, owing to the difficulty of the roads. In fact going up and down the Apennines was no easy thing and although the mountains he encountered while passing through the papal state were «good little devils of Apennines, » the ones on the Tuscan side were «more difficult to tackle,» rough and wild. The route passed through the town of Firenzuola, and then Pietramala. From the heights one could glimpse the valley in which the city stood, surrounded by villas and a charming countryside. The panorama was so attractive that many travelers, de Brosses included, attempted to recapture its fascination once they had arrived in Florence by climbing Giotto’s Tower.

De Brosses’s account fits into a very long series of sources that, from Montaigne (1581) onward, tackled the theme of the contrast between the barren Apennines and the pleasant Tuscan countryside with monotonous regularity.

It is worth remembering that, while safe, that route of access to Tuscany was not easy in the modern sense of the word, although it may have been so in comparison with others. One of the reasons for this was politics. It was in the political and military interests of the states of the ancien règime, in fact, to keep the passes in a precarious state rather than heed the commercial pressures that were to lead, from the end of the century onward, to their subsequent improvement.

Nevertheless it was a route that presented a variety of attractive features: climbing the foothills of the Apennines from the lush countryside around Bologna, the fields gave way to boundless expanses of oak and chestnut forest. Then there were two places that never failed to astonish travelers. The first was Pietramala, with its bluish flames springing as if by magic from the ground. These prompted the most disparate conjectures, until Alessandro Volta was able to show, in 1780, that they were caused by the natural emission of methane gas (Rodolico, 1945). The second was San Piero a Sieve, a monastery of Trappist monks who were famous for the strictness of their rule and, in Tuscany, for the manufacture of seals.

One last consideration concerns the mentality of 18th-century travelers: responsive to the agricultural landscape for the order and rationality of human labor that it reflected, they were loath to succumb to the charms of the wilderness and the undisciplined variety of mountain scenery. As the state of the infrastructure improved, a shift in perception resulted in a new appreciation of these areas, previously regarded as harsh, difficult and rugged.