CORTONA, Italy – The ancient doors of this walled Tuscan city are wide open – no doorbell, no ticket taker, no donation required.
Narrow cobblestone streets, some the width of a hallway and steep enough to challenge the best Colorado mountain climber, wind toward one of the city’s main squares, Piazza della Repubblica. Here chic women in Armani and wrinkled men in wool caps sit on the steep steps of the 13th-century city hall.
They have front-row seats to the city’s daily drama. Little has changed since the Etruscans staked their claim here in the eighth century B.C., but these locals are witnessing what could be the beginnings of another invasion.
Packs of tourists stumble along with their noses deep inside a book. It’s not one of the seemingly mandatory guidebooks, such as “Let’s Go” or “Lonely Planet.” They’re flipping through dog-eared copies of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” the blockbuster book written by American and part-time Tuscan Frances Mayes.
It immortalized her nearby farmhouse “Bramasole” and served as the inspiration for the recently released movie.
“American people kept coming up to me and asking, ‘Do you know where Villa Bramasole is?”‘ says Vittorio Camorri, a curly-haired 33-year-old. He was born in the city’s only hospital, started the first villa rental agency and had no clue about this villa.
“I says, ‘I don’t know Villa Bramasole’ because it wasn’t as famous as it is today. Villa Bramasole was a normal house, like mine. I was asked this once, then twice, then three times. Then I began to ask myself, ‘What is there?”‘
Just a rustic, two-story farmhouse.
In Mayes’ 1996 surprise best seller, she chronicled her impulsive decision to buy and restore the crumbling building. Readers in at least 18 languages soaked up Mayes’ loving details about the smells and sounds, cuisine and characters in Cortona.
“Bramasole” means “yearns for the sun,” and the name couldn’t be more appropriate these days. The burnt-orange farmhouse is a star of literature and now the silver screen. In turn, star gazers, mostly American tourists, are making pilgrimages to Cortona.
The Touchstone film, shot partly here last fall, captures on celluloid the medieval magic kingdom that Mayes could only describe. Meanwhile, the locals (called Cortonesi) worry that this charming city might get burnt in the spotlight.
“(Mayes) kind of romanticizes it, which is nice,” says Louise Maciejewski, a British citizen who first came here 30 years ago and is married to a Cortonesi. She and others have mixed reviews of the book. It’s flattering and has helped business, but it also has robbed them of their privacy.
“In her book, she sold a dream,” says Maciejewski. “People come here because they want to find that dream.”
Tourists painstakingly fufill their fantasies. They down cups of espresso at Mayes’ favorite caf. They eat bowls of “ribollita,” a hearty soup she praised in the book. They even buy fruit and vegetables from the signora who sells what Mayes described as “luscious” tomatoes and a “cunning little bunch of radishes.”
Daily errands for locals take on a Tuscan glow for the Mayes groupies.
“A lot of people come to Cortona, but they’re not the kind of tourists you would think of as annoying tourists,” Mayes says in a telephone interview from her other home in San Rafael, Calif.
Sure, they aren’t the photo-happy, fannypack crowd. But they have stormed the city with a force not seen since Hannibal plowed through here in 217 B.C. Cortonesi, with an Italian flair for drama, swear that every one of the more than 2 million people who bought the book have visited.
In reality, Cortona doesn’t track visitors. But tourism officials do credit the book with a significant increase in tourists from 1998 until Sept. 11, 2001, when the market toppled. The movie is expected to reel in more. It differs greatly from the book, starring a radiant Diane Lane as a much younger and hipper Mayes. This alone may draw a new and wider audience to Cortona.
These days, Mayes even has a hard time getting into some of her favorite restaurants. However, she says these tourists are incredibly polite.
“They are people who are interested in the culture,” she says, her Southern accent oozing like fresh olive oil. “They are people who stay a few days and walk around and read and sketch and get to know some of the local people.”
Some days more than 100 people walk by her house. Only a few have brazenly come through her gate and knocked on her door.
“It really hasn’t been a bother,” she says. “It’s much more flattering to think that someone would walk a mile outside town to see something that I’ve written about.”
The tourists follow a street outside the city walls that is lined with cypresses, one for each of the Cortona men killed during World War I. On this summer day, a gentle breeze blows, and bells ring in the distance.
Bramasole is tucked in a corner, easy to miss and unassuming. Flowers cascade from a second-floor balcony, and white butterflies flit about. The wall that Mayes and her husband labored over in the book is far more graceful than expected. Shelves of olive trees step down the mountainside into the Val di Chiana.
It’s easy to see why American tourists, used to roped-off historic homes and prim and proper audiotape tours, gravitate to this home and city. It’s a slice of Tuscan life, hundreds of years ago and today.
“It is very beautiful to be in Cortona,” says Ivan Botanici, Cortona’s tobacco shop owner.
The pony-tailed proprietor is a modern-day town crier. Tourists and locals stop by his shop on the town’s main street, Via Nazionale, to pick up cigarettes, newspapers and all the news that doesn’t make the papers. Botanici, like many locals, embraces the tourists with Italian hospitality.
“I think it is nice to have people come from all over the world, talking about many others things,” he says in nearly perfect American English learned from foreign exchange students and tourists. “It’s fantastic.”
He’s not talking only about the cultural exchange. Businesses catering to tourists are booming. More than 30 new shops have opened since the book’s publication. Young Cortonesi are taking over family businesses, reversing a trend of abandoning the city for opportunities in Florence or larger cities. But this success has its price.
“The other side of the coin is that houses are becoming very, very expensive,” says Botanici, who luckily bought his house before the boom. “I own a shop and work a lot, but I couldn’t afford to buy a house now.”
Home prices have shot up about 25 percent in the past few years, shutting out many locals. Many Americans and British want their own place under the Tuscan sun and are willing to pay inflated prices. Usually, they visit for only a few summer months. All winter, the houses sit empty, with no one inside to buy milk or bread, stationery or newspapers from merchants like Botanici.
“If I poke my head outside the store and look to the left and the right, there’s nobody,” Botanici says. “I am scared that Cortona will become a museum. In the wintertime, there will be nobody here. In the summer, there will be too many people.”
Some grumble that Cortona is becoming a medieval theme park. There are parking problems, and locals complain that all they hear in restaurants is American English.
Certainly, tourists aren’t just discovering Cortona. They’ve long come here to soak up fields of drooping sunflowers, visit ancient churches and gaze upon Luca Signorelli’s paintings. Many have rented properties from Vittorio Camorri. But even he wonders if becoming a hot spot could eventually spoil his hometown.
“Cortona has always been called the ‘City of Silence,”‘ he says. “Now, I say it is a bit like the ‘City of Tourism.”‘
This city should consider itself lucky compared to the Lubron in Provence, however. More than 14 years ago, Peter Mayle wrote the best-seller “A Year in Provence,” a hilarious take on his adventures buying and restoring a farmhouse in southern France. Hordes of tourists still visit. Tour buses jam roads leading to his former house. A fed-up Mayle fled town.
In Cortona, the city walls are helping to keep it all in check. Neither tour buses nor cars can come inside. There are only six hotels, and no multi-story hotels will spring up anytime soon because Italian laws prohibit new construction in this historic district. And Frances Mayes, now considered a Cortonesi, is staying put.
“I think the changes are only superficial,” she says. “I still feel that it is the Cortona it has been since the Etruscan times. And my little contribution, or blip, is just a tiny moment in the long, long history of this fantastic town.”
Nancy Greenleese is a radio and print journalist who lives in Denver.
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If you go
Location: Cortona is 70 miles southeast of Florence, 122 miles northwest of Rome.
Tourism information: Agenzia per il Turismo, Via Nazionale, 42, Cortona, Italy 52044, 39 0575 630352 (telephone), 39 0575 630656 (fax), info@cortonantiquaria.com (e-mail), www.turismo.provincia
.arezzo.it (website). Click on the British flag for the English language section, look under “comuni” for Cortona-specific accommodations, events and other information.
Transportation: Air France, Lufthansa, U.S., Alitalia, American, Continental, United and other airlines offer connecting service from Denver to Rome’s Fiumincino airport. Round-trip fares start at $453 and are valid for travel through January 2004. Rome’s Termini station has 18 trains to Camucia-Cortona station where bus service is available to Cortona’s historical center. Some of the trains require a transfer. Most of the trains are direct trains, which may include some stops. Second-class ticket is $10.31 (8.99 euro) for a 2-hour, 16-minute trip. Florence’s Santa Maria Novella station has 23 daily trains to Camucia-Cortona, some requiring a transfer. Most of the trains are direct or regional trains, which may include some stops. Cost for the 1-hour, 15-minute trip is $7.34 (6.40 euro) for second-class ticket.
