First chef's table (at Corrigan's Mayfair) a culinary disappointment

I'd been wanting to get to a chef's table for a long while.  Just about every top restaurant in Europe seems to have one these days.  Basically it's a table, in a space just off the kitchen, with a view of what's going on and special attention from the chef.  In a world where it's increasingly tough to get jaded, seen-it-all executives to attend events, chef's tables offer a different twist on corporate hospitality.  And the small tables ensure good conversation.

I've researched and planned these for my company, but I've never attended one myself.  Thus I jumped at the chance to attend a PR roundtable at the chef's table at Corrigan's Restaurant in Mayfair last week.  I fear my expectations were far higher than reality.

I'd accepted the invitation expecting a gastronomic experience above normal dining.  At the dinners I've planned for others, the chef comes to the table for every course, discussing the food in detail.  It's usually a chef's tasting menu, with many small courses, giving the chef a chance to show off and the diners a chance to learn.  And there's a matching wine flight, with more good information coming from the sommelier.  All with a great view of the kitchen.  (At one event we organised in France, the view was actually over video screens and, if you wished, one or two guests were plucked from the table between each course to help with the cooking and get a mini master class.)

Corrigan's has two chef's tables.  One, which seats no more than six comfortably, is in an alcove directly across from the pass in the kitchen.  This might have been the option closer to my expectations.  We were in a private dining room where two thirds of the back wall was a window looking onto the far end of the pass, with glimpses into a corner of the kitchen.  As a private dining room it was lovely:  wood panelling, mellow lighting, ten substantial, comfortable leather chairs, an elegantly laid table.  All as if plucked from an Edwardian country house or gentlemen's club.

But as a culinary experience it was nothing special.

Rather than a tasting menu, we had a standard three courses chosen from a version of their a la carte menu (five options for each course).  With everyone choosing different items, this offered no practical chance for thoughtful wine pairing.  Just a multi-purpose red, or white, poured as you desired.  (Interestingly, the white was a Picpoul de Pinet, with distinct flavours I would have thought a risky choice for a general pouring.)

The chef didn't come into the room, and we got little information on the food.  The thing that started to elevate our experience was a wander back into the kitchen before we ordered, when we met Head Chef Chris McGowan (generally thought to be one of the young guns to watch on the British restaurant scene) and were able to have a little chat.  This was a fascinating 10 minutes, in which we discussed the challenges of local sourcing through this year's rotten weather, the rising trend in foraging and how those suppliers were devastated by the cold, wet winter, and his tip for gnocchi.  Use the dry, fluffy insides of baked potatoes.  But that was over all too soon, and we were back to our table.  So aside from the privacy, the glimpse of the kitchen and the chat with Chris, it was just a nice meal in a private dining room.

How nice a meal?  Delicious, but unexceptional.  I had nothing that made me think "I must make a booking and bring Piers back here."  I started with Riddle Valley duck en croute with hazelnut.  Essentially a round terrine of mixed duck meats with a pastry case, sliced and served cold on a salad.  Worth investigating as a dinner party starter for its prepare-in-advance qualities.  My main was certainly the most elegant beef rib I've had, with the thick slab of meat and fat cut off the bone and slow cooked until most of the latter was rendered out .. highly reminiscent of a good pork belly.  It was served with the bone from which it had been cut arching above it, which the waiter kindly sent home for the spaniel in a posh Corrigan's bag.  The real star of the plate, though, was the bone marrow toast.  More of a crostini, actually, and the best thing I tasted all night.

The place is, according to Chef Chris, famous for its dessert soufflés.  But the combo of chocolate, pistachio and salted caramel appeared on the menu, and I couldn't resist.  I should have taken the chef's advice.  An elegant looking dessert, but the dark chocolate was so dominant it drowned the other flavours.  Chris sent a couple extra rhubarb soufflés out and my taste of this was, indeed, much better.  Light, sweet yet sharp, a much better follow up to the heaviness of the beef.

So, as a gastronomic experience, Corrigan's chef's table wasn't exceptional enough to really be worth the round trip to London.  But it did get me to accept an invite to an agency event I wouldn't have attended without it.  Which, from a marketer's viewpoint, is the whole point of chef's tables anyway.  And the conversation was worth the commute.  Eight mostly senior executives in PR and marketing, most with at least 15 years under their belt, talking about the convergence of the two disciplines as the Internet, social media and the economy change the playing field.  For me, that depth of interaction with peers outside of my own company is far rarer than fine dining experiences, so I was delighted.

Though perhaps not as useful as Chris' tip about baked potatoes for gnocchi.  We shall see...

Up to London, back to France ... at least for art and food

With a new puppy to house train, a new garden to plant and bank accounts to replenish after holiday, staying close to home for the next few months seemed like a fine idea.  But it's spring, finally.  As the worst winter in recent memory fades away, the social diary fills up.  It's as if the whole country has had cabin fever, and wants to get out and about.

And so up to London, for a French chef and a French artist.

They were both surprises.  Chef Bruno Loubet, because someone I'd never heard of is producing Michelin-star quality food at bistro prices a 5-minute walk from my London office.  Painter Edouard Manet, because the much-lauded show left me bothered and unsatisfied.  Let's start with the art.

Manet:  Portraying Life, just concluded after a 4-month run at the Royal Academy, was London's museum blockbuster for the spring.  The focus was portraiture and, by extension, a look at the upper middle class life of Paris in the late 19th century.  Surprisingly, I found that place and time disturbing.

Normally, when I think of the City of Light in this time period I imagine sparkling cafe society, partying at the Moulin Rouge, darling children playing in formal gardens, the luscious Napoleon III rooms at the Louvre.  Monet's paintings show us something darker.

The fact that his colour palette is mostly blacks and greys doesn't help, but it's more than that.  In the most interesting paintings here, the sitters are lost in introspection.  You sense unhappiness.  A feeling of impending menace.  Take, for example, In The Garden, shown above.  At first glance it's a charming portrait of a young family.  But the longer you stand before it, the more you see the husband's downward gaze as a wish to be elsewhere, and the wife's slightly wistful look as a feeling of entrapment now that the fuzzy-faced baby has arrived.  There's the famous Music in the Tuileries Gardens, where the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd doesn't look like they're enjoying themselves, but doing a duty to see and be seen.

Madame Manet had a pensive look as she stared into space in multiple portraits, as if hoping for better things.  Her son Leon turns up a lot, his gaze into the middle distance redolent of teenage angst.  Frankly, while the descriptions on the paintings didn't explore this angle, I felt I was walking through room after room of unhappy, dissatisfied people.  Perhaps I was imagining it, but there seemed to be a back story the curators weren't bothering to explain.

The glowing exception here is Manet's compelling portrait of frequent sitter, fellow artist, sister-in-law and possibly lover Berthe Morrisot.  There's a reason the curators picked this as the main promotional image for the show.  It captures her energy, dynamism and charisma.  She seems alive, ready to climb out of the frame and saunter down Piccadilly in search of a cafe au lait.  Or probably an absinthe.

Whether brooding or charismatic, the best of Manet is compelling.  But there was a lot of average, unmemorable stuff in the exhibit as well.  Many people you drift by without any desire to learn more of them or the painting, and some ... especially the pastels ... that seem so insipid you wonder how a  great artist could have produced them.  This could have been a better show with half the art, and a lot more delving into the sitters and the darker emotions floating behind their disconnected gazes.

Earlier in the day, a colleague had treated me to lunch at Bruno Loubet's bistrot in The Zetter hotel.  Loubet was a very big deal in London in the '90s, then disappeared to Australia for a decade. I missed the news that he'd turned back up as chef of the bistro in this hotel near Smithfield. The place is surprisingly low key and little known considering the quality of the chef, and the food.

Everything we had, and everything I saw coming out of the kitchen, could have comfortably been served in a one Michelin star restaurant. My colleague's starter was particularly grand: a clear beef bouillon dotted with tiny, precisely cubed vegetables, crowned with cubes of fried foie gras and a morel mushroom stuffed with chicken liver pate. Mine was a bit lighter, but still felt terribly gourmet: two beautifully poached quenelles of salmon and scallop, floating on a thick soup that was essentially bouillabaisse base. These both testified to a gourmet hand in the kitchen and, sure enough, there was Bruno, visible in the open plan kitchen, clearly in charge.

I went on to grilled fish surrounded by tiny beetroot ravioli, then we shared out desserts. A vanilla cheesecake was average, the peanut butter mousse with citrus gel was a revelation. I never would have paired those things but the mousse was so light, and the peanut so subtle, that the pairing with the sharp citrus was perfect.

Add to this a nice wine list and great service, and you have a place worth going out of your way for.  It may have been French food, but I can't imagine Manet's subjects ate this well.  If they had ... they would have looked happier.

As a wine holiday, the Burgundian-Florentine axis is a tasting, buying and educational success

And finally, to the wine.

If there's one element that tied this whole trip together, that was it.  From Chablis to Chianti, Maconnais to Montepulciano, Cote d'Or to SuperTuscans.  We built sightseeing days around it.  We chose restaurants as much for the wine lists as the menus.  We drove, lured by the idea of filling the boot in order to fill the cellar at home.  We may have dipped into high culture in Italy, sunk into the luxurious chateau in France, but what we'll no doubt remember (and drink) in years to come is the oenological adventures.

Some general observations.

The Italians don't have the marketing savvy, or sophistication, of the French.  Granted, the French pretty much invented both the concept of terroir and the idea of essentially trademarking region-specific food and wine.  But the Italians taught them how to make the wine in the first place.  You'd think the Italians would be better at wine tourism.  Sadly, they have a long way to go.  Expect better tasting venues in France, and a far better ability of hosts to take you through flavours, varieties, growing techniques, etc.  We should have done more research in advance of the Tuscan leg, and picked out specific winemakers in the Chianti hills to visit.

You're more likely to discover inexpensive gems in Italy.  Precisely because it's less sophisticated.  The French have their hierarchy of Grand Cru, Premiere Cru, Village, etc.  In Burgundy, certain fields have carried these labels for more than a century and you know exactly what you're going to get.  The Italians have something somewhat similar, in DOCG, DOC and IGT.  Problem is, these labels seem to be given out liberally and they're not dependable.  We had some deeply average DOCG (supposedly the best) while the finest wine we had in Italy ... Bombereto, from La Rampa di Fugnano; a delectable, robust yet mellow red from near San Gimignano ... was just an IGT.  That's the equivalent of a French village wine and, in theory, not that special.  And yet, it's the regret of our trip that we didn't bring a case of this home, as it's unavailable in the UK.  Going to pass along details to our regular wine shop and see what they can do.

Drink with dinner for less in Tuscany, but with more sophistication in Burgundy.  It pains me to say this, as I was raised from the womb to believe that Italian food is the best in the world.  But I have to admit, they just don't get food and wine matching the way the French do.  Only in one restaurant (Dorando in San Gimignano) did we encounter any serious consideration of the pairings.  Whereas most Burgundian restaurants were obsessive about it, and served up wines of sophistication and complexity that enhanced the meal.  The Italians seem to be more limited to "these are nice reds", and "these are nice whites".  The flip side to this is that the Italian restaurant wines were generally half the price of the French, or less.  Agreeable, gluggable, wonderful wines that might not have been memorable, but were perfectly good and moderately-priced companions to good food.

The result of all of this?  We probably drank more in Italy, but bought more in France.  If you want to do some tasting yourself, here are our highlights.

BEST PLACES TO TASTE AND LEARN
La Cave du Connaisseur, Chablis - Chablis is a ghost town on Mondays, with most restaurants and caves closed.  We could have stopped into the omnipresent William Fevre, where I'd tasted on my last trip, but we were hoping for something smaller and lesser known.  On a hunch, we ducked down steps into the stone cellars of La Cave du Connaisseur, and struck gold.  Yes, the wine is good.  And, like any place in Burgundy, you can experience the miracle of terroir here.  Inevitably, you're tasting over a map, so you can see the precise field the grapes in the bottle came from.  Then compare the bottle made from the grapes over the road, or down the hill.  And yes, they're different.  But our real luck here was with Rachel, the manager of the cave who grew up in San Francisco, so can take you through the full range in glorious English detail.  Because tasting is good.  But tasting with someone who can explain the details, discuss flavours, recommend what to drink now and what to lay down ... that's magic.  We bought a mixed case of premier crus that need to lay down for two to five years to be their best.

L'Imaginarium, Nuits-Saint-Georges - Back in Beaune, we'd bought the combo ticket for both the

hospital and the wine museum.  The latter is a bit sad.  The highlight isn't the collection, but the fact that it's housed in what was the palace of the Dukes of Burgundy.  (Bitterly cold in the off season.)  What's here is museum circa 1950: rows of objects behind glass with dry descriptions.  What it should be, if the city fathers were clever, is what you can find half an hour north in the Imaginarium.  No worthy museum here; it's actually a very clever marketing facility created by big sparkling wine maker Louis Bouillot.

But they keep things subtle, never pushing their brand too hard in the displays and offering plenty of other vignerons in their tastings and shop.  You start with the story of the vine, a multi-media show that walks you through several large rooms to illustrate the history of wine and wine making.  Many of the objects on display are the same as those in the cases in Beaune, but here you're getting lights, music and a bit of narrative.  A sister facility on the other side of the building is the story of bubbles, where you learn about the sparkling wine process.  Here, the displays are more hands-on.  There are electronic quizzes, blind scent-sniffing machines to test your nose, and a riddling game that kept us amused for longer than it should have.  (Riddling is the process of regularly turning sparkling wine bottles as the yeast is developing the flavours.  This game let you test how long it took you to spin every bottle on the board.)  At the end, you come out into a big shop where you taste six wines, mostly premier crus or village wines.  Because we were obviously so interested, our hostess took us over to the premium area and let us taste six more of the Grand Crus.  Admission cost 7 euro each, which was a steal when you combine the education, the fun and the tasting.  We didn't buy here, though.  Prices seemed a bit high and we thought we could do better when dealing direct with producers.  Which we did just up the road , where we found our favourite Burgundian red, Clos Napoleon, at Domaine Pierre Gelin a Fixin.

Le Caveau Puligny Montrachet - One of the challenges of tasting along the Cote d'Or is that, outside of restaurants, you rarely get the opportunity to try wines by a variety of makers.  Usually, you're in the cave of a single producer, tasting his range.  Julian Wallerand, the son of a famous Burgundian sommelier, has turned that idea on its head with his chic little wine bar in the centre of one of the world's greatest white wine villages.  Pop in and you can taste whatever range of reds and whites he has open that day, probably options from little-known producers that he knows well.  An example:  We told him one of our favourite wines was Patrick Javillier's Mersault "Les Tillets".  We'd driven by his winery but he'd been closed.  An excellent wine, Julian agreed, but overpriced now that he was exporting regularly to the UK.  If we liked that, why not try Michel Bouzereau's Mersault.  Very similar but much cheaper, as he didn't have the reputation.  Perfect.  Julian's wine knowledge combines with all the gossip he picks up as his place is the watering hole for the vignerons as well as the tourists.  We'll make him our primary source for Cote d'Or wines on any future trip.

Le Volpi e l'Uva, Florence -  The Italians tend not to do wine by the glass beyond a restaurant's house
brand.   This little wine bar tucked away in a side street on the Pitti Palace side of the Arno, therefore, is a treasure.  They have 15 or 20 different wines by the glass, covering all of Italy but majoring on Tuscany.  It's not a restaurant, but they'll put together platters of bread, charcuterie and cheese to balance your tasting.  Their English is good enough to diagnose your needs and have a good chat about the characteristics of the wines.  Our new friend Leonardo took us through four interesting glasses each, listening to what we liked and didn't like in wines and then producing samples that worked to our tastes.  (We knew he was good when we loved our own selections, but weren't so crazy about each others'.)  The bar runs regular tastings and even has a week long wine school, something I'm keeping in mind for the future.

Enoteca Italiana, Siena - A very curious place with a lot of undeveloped potential.  Not worth going out of your way for now, but it could turn into a hot spot in the future.  We ended up here mostly because my old favourite, Le Cantine Greve in Chianti, was closed for the off season.  (And didn't bother to say so on their website, thus seeing us standing in the rain in front of a locked door.  Most irritating.)  Le Cantine, written about here in the past, offers a vast range of Italian wines in serve yourself tasting kiosks, activated by a card you charge up when you enter.  Whilst there's not much expertise amongst the staff, the ability to try so much is great, and they have a library of books available for reference.  Disappointed by the closure, we pushed on to nearby Siena for some sightseeing, and while parking in the lot below the old Medici Castle saw a sign for the Enoteca, offering tastings and hundreds of wines.  I had hopes this would be something similar to Greve.  On the tasting front, no.  They had perhaps 10 bottles open for tasting, served by a stylish barman whose knowledge of hair gel and precision shaving techniques seemed far better than his wine expertise.  In fact, the main floor ... though empty at 4pm on a Tuesday ... seemed much more like a trendy nightclub and restaurant than a serious wine enterprise.  Go down the broad, gently sloping, winding stairwell (clearly designed for horses to traverse) and you end up in a cavernous network of high cellars.  Here, where we'd hoped for Cantine-style kiosks, we found a strange museum of wine, with room after room of glass shelves with bottles arranged as if an art installation.  A wonderful testimony to the Italian label-designers' skill, but we could see no logic to the arrangement and learned nothing about the wine.  Might be worth trying at mealtime in the regular tourist season, but for now it's still worth the trip to Greve.  Assuming they're open.

And that's the end of the story, for now.  Our collection of acquired bottles now slumber peacefully in the wine fridges.  Most will be at their best around 2017, though there's one very special bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin the owner told me is going to be superb in 25 years.  That one now has a little "drink for retirement party" sign on it.  As for drinking today?  If only I could find some of that Bombereto...

Join the Napoleonic aristocracy at Chateau d'Etoges

My accommodation strategy this trip was one of escalating elegance.

We started out staying with friends.  We moved on to the Mercure in Beaune, a functional business hotel on the lower end of the scale.  Basic, comfortable, with free broadband and within easy walking distance of the town centre.  Next to Italy, where we had a week in an apartment within the 14th century Villa Pandolfini (at right).  This was a return to a much loved haven for me, which I've written about before here.  

At Pandolfini, we started to tip the scales to luxury.  With its two bedrooms, kitchen, gracious sitting room, 20-foot painted ceilings and Renaissance-era loggia overlooking the garden, it was undoubtably more than we needed.  Had we filled the other bedroom, the shared price per couple would have been the equivalent of the Mercure.  With just the two of us, the cost was more equivalent to a top hotel in Florence.  But then we wouldn't have had all that space and privacy.  (Or the owner's family on hand to help with car problems.)  Still, the overall accommodation costs weren't outrageous.  Until we got to our last two nights.

On the way home, I decided to splurge.  It was the Easter weekend.  Nothing would be open.  We were breaking up a long drive.  I figured the low accommodation cost of the first week would average out in the second.  And so, it was a premium room inside the Chateau d'Etoges, in the heart of the Champagne region.

If ever there was a setting for my husband to win his argument for the primacy of French culture, this is it.  It is a country house hotel on a very grand scale.  The chateau, a mostly 17th century confection built on the foundations of a Medieval castle, and still standing within its moat, stands in its own grounds at one end of its eponymous village.  The ground floor is a procession of grand sitting rooms with a white stone entry hall with a sweeping stair at their centre.  I'm not sure how many guest rooms there are (I'd guess no more than 25 or 30), but there are certainly few enough that these main rooms are never crowded.  We spent a happy afternoon playing backgammon in the grand drawing room, a view of the terraced gardens across the moat out the window at our elbow.  Later that evening I sat alone in the library/bar area reading for 40 minutes before dinner.  When we walked the grounds ... dotted with fountains that legend says influenced a young Luis XIV ... we only ran into one other couple.  And yet we knew there were other guests, as the breakfast room (buffet an additional 17 euro, but does include the local fizz) and dining room were always full.

It's not like we needed the public rooms, because our bedroom was a ridiculously large cube of perhaps 25 feet in height, depth and width.  Big enough to accommodate not only the superking bed under its royal canopy, but a sofa, a big table with armchairs on either side, a big fireplace with mirror towering above it and a massive wardrobe.  Remarkably, as the place suffered a lot of neglect after its Napoleonic heyday, the original delicately-coloured panelling with its inset paintings survives intact.  Through a door in the corner, next to a window that towered almost as high as the ceiling, was the bathroom.  Both rooms were delightfully suffused with the sound of flowing water, thanks to the fountains burbling into the moat outside.  The bathroom had another window looking out to the moat and gardens, a massive marble tub and dressing table and, beyond that, another room for the toilet. 

And through the room with the toilet, a first for me in hotel accommodation:  a small staircase up to the servants quarters, where a third person could have been quite snug in the single room tucked into the lofted space above the bathroom.

The only drawback to all this luxury, I must admit, was the mattress.  It's a real shame to be surrounded by such luxury, clamber into bed and think that your mattress at home is more comfortable.  

These main chateau rooms at d'Etoges run 298 euro a night.  I can justify it with my averaging over the holiday strategy, or by considering that many a perfectly average room in nice hotels in London or Paris charges as much.  But there's no denying, this is eye-wateringly expensive.  I wouldn't consider it unless you're planning to spend most of your time at the property, as we did, so you can really make the most of it.  

The restaurant in the Orangery is very good, as discussed in the early entry on our best meals of the trip.  There's a nice little spa with one treatment room, a whirlpool, a sauna and steam room.  Without a pool, I wouldn't pay the fee just to use the spa, but with a treatment it's a nice place to relax, and the prices for massages were actually a bit lower than the English norm.  The village has two champagne producers less than 100 yards from the chateau's gates, and you can take one of the bicycles from the courtyard to explore the surrounding countryside.

There are three other levels of rooms, from tiny ones in the chateau's attic to basic options over the orangery and something slightly nicer ... but still not as grandiose as ours ... back in the chateau.  I must confess to already thinking how wonderful a return on some future long weekend would be.  With all those lovely public rooms, I bet you wouldn't feel deprived in the smaller bedrooms.  It's less than 5 hours total travel from home, and we didn't have any time to go to any champagne houses.  Or space left in the car to buy any.

But for now, I need to turn my attention to earning the money to pay that bill.

In Beaune, take a break from wine with mustard

Our time in France was mostly about wine.  Of adventures beyond the oenological, I have only two to

relate, and both in Beaune: a hospital, and a mustard factory.

Beaune itself is a beautiful little town, and a perfect place to base yourself if you're keen on a wine-tasting holiday.  Its architecture harks back to the glory days of the Dukes of Burgundy and, if you've ever been to Bruges, will remind you of that Belgian city.  Which is no surprise, as that was the northern capital of the same dukes. 

The main attraction in town is the 15th century hospital, which I described here on my last visit.  We stopped in, and enjoyed it, but our most memorable bit of sightseeing came just outside the city walls at La Moutarderie Fallot.

France is the world's leading mustard producer.  It grinds out 86,000 tonnes a year, and 98% of that is Burgundian.  If you want a fascinating insight into this market domination, sign up for a tour at Fallot, who've been making the stuff here since 1840.  You can reserve and pay for your tickets in advance on their website, and though the tour will be in French, they provide English translations throughout.  

The tour takes you through the original factory rooms, venerable stone-walled spaces.  (Production today is still on site but has moved to more modern rooms.)  You start by learning about the plant, its properties, and how it's been used through history.  The ancient grindstone, with its ridges carved in opposing directions to achieve a fine grind, is fascinating.  Stonemasons needed to re-chisel the lines regularly to keep things going, as the seeds would dull the stone.

Next, you learn how they make the stuff. Turns out there's a reason so much mustard is produced in wine country; after the seeds, the most important ingredient is verjus, a bi-product of wine making.  As you'd expect from those numbers, Burgundy used to grow a lot of mustard seed.  These days, production far exceeds what Burgundian fields can offer, so the bulk of the seeds come from Canada.

Special mustards, however, are still produced entirely with Burgundian ingredients, and marketed accordingly.

After learning how it's made, you get to try your hand at producing your own mustard.  Just three ingredients ... mustard seeds, salt, verjus ... should be easy, eh?  Let's just say there's a reason to leave this to the professionals.

After learning the basics, you walk through a model factory filled with century-old equipment, while old Fallot the mustard maker guides you through on a headset.  Finally, you emerge with a handful of free little pots, and then move on to the shop.  There, you'll find a tasting bar with pumps that allow you to sample a wide variety.  This is where you really feel the magic.

Grainy.  Yellow.  Brown.  French.  English.  That's just the start.  The Fallot folks weave spices and flavours together to create varieties strong and mellow, spicy and mild.  Tarragon, red pepper, cassis, mushroom, nuts ... enough to ensure we filled our shopping basket with jars to take home.  They sit in the kitchen now, just waiting for the opportunity.  A rare roast beef, crusted with cep and smoked tea mustard?  Can't wait.

Siena, San Gimignano, Medici Villas: Get out of Florence to truly understand it

One of my favourite elements of Renaissance art is the backgrounds.  Look over the shoulder of every madonna and there's an exquisite, hilly landscape, dotted with olive groves, striped with rows of poplars, crowned with walled cities.  Sacred space bears a startling resemblance to the Tuscan countryside.

Florentines were urban captains of industry, but they loved the land outside their walls.   It graced their art, they wrote and read poetry about it, they built villas within it.  They also spent a lot of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries fighting with neighbours like Siena and Lucca, trying to take over more of it.  Thus any introduction to Florence really needs to include some forays out of town, if you're really going to understand the big picture.

We started with one of the oldest and most significant of the Medici villas ringing town:  Poggio a Caiano.  It's hard to overstate the architectural significance of this place.  Lorenzo de' Medici (the great) asked Giuliano da Sangallo to do something revolutionary in the late 15th century.  Instead of the usual defensive, enclosed castle, he wanted a gracious building looking back to ancient Rome, set in gardens, with no military potential.  It inspired villas throughout Tuscany, which inspired Palladio in the Veneto in the 16th century, who set the model for most of the grand country houses of England in the 17th and 18th, which then set the model for the idea of noble living around the rest of the world.  Including the White House in Washington D.C.

When I visited about a decade ago there wasn't a lot to see once I admired the world-shaping exterior.  The main hall, filled with grand frescos glorifying the Medicis, commissioned by Medici Pope Leo X, and a 19th century theatre and billiard room added for Italian King Vittoro Emanuele, was about it.  The government's clearly been beavering away, as the aforementioned rooms are now in great shape, and have been joined by almost all of the other rooms on the piano nobile (the main entertaining floor). These aren't Renaissance, but 19th century.  Some are a suite of rooms done up for Napoleon's sister Elisa, who he made Grand Duchess of Tuscany and who took her responsibilities there seriously.  This was a favourite retreat and the rooms are lovely examples of the light, delicate neoclassicism of the Napoleonic era.  The other rooms are more of the renovations made for the King during the brief years when Florence served as capital of the newly-united Italy.  They are heavier-handed, but still a pleasure to explore.  Though the villa had been emptied, the curators have found representative furniture to stage the rooms.

Amazingly, Poggio a Caiano is free.  As are all of the Medici villas.  A bit of pay-back, I thought, for the steep service charges at the Uffizi.  These villas are also little visited.  As opposed to the crowds in every corner of Florence, we spent an hour here on a Sunday afternoon wandering by ourselves.  In fact, it looked so empty we drove right by the first time, thinking it was closed.

While Lorenzo and his successors were chilling out at these villas, writing poetry and commissioning art, they were also plotting to take over traditional enemies like Siena.  If you're going to see just one other town in Tuscany, this is my pick.  I think its cathedral is the most beautiful in central Italy, and its down square the most distinctive.  It's also filled with lovely shops, many of them specialising in local delicacies like cured meats and truffles.  It's all spread across several hills, adding to the picturesque appeal of the place.

The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta stands atop one of those, a shocking confection of striped black and white marble rising out of the mellow tones of walls and tile roofs that gave the Crayola box the name Burnt Siena.  It's a sizeable place, but to one side you see half finished walls that show the original ambition; the Sienese at their peak were challenging Rome, but they ran out of money so had to scale back ambition. Inside, those bold stripes continue, leading your eye relentlessly to a monumental altar.  They're so compelling you might not notice anything else.  But you need to, because this place is a treasure trove.  There's the line of lifelike papal busts that stretches along the tops of the arches in the nave.  The magnificent pulpit by Nicola Pisano, sitting on columns that balance on the backs of prowling lionesses, some with their prey in their mouths.  Most famous are the unique inlaid floors, depicting ornate scenes created with different types of marbles.

Through a door on the right you'll find what I think is one of the most beautiful rooms in the world, the Piccolomini library.  Added by a local boy who became pope, it houses an impressive collection of illuminated manuscripts.  You'll hardly notice them, though, because the walls are covered with a pastel riot of frescoes of religious and historical scenes.  If that weren't bright enough, there's an ornately painted ceiling, a highly patterned floor and a Roman sculpture of the three graces in the middle of it all.  It is not a room for fans of simplicity.

Sloping towards the top of another hill nearby is the Piazza del Campo.  This is regularly rated one of the grandest squares (albeit it's actually scallop shaped) in Europe, and is where the horses run the famous Palio.  Like many an Italian piazza it's dominated by a towered town hall.  The elements that make this one so stunning, however, are its unique shape, accentuated by the ribs of lighter marble laid into the pavement, the way it slopes up the hill, and the assortment of pleasing, architecturally matched buildings that edge it.  On finer days, I've sat at one of the restaurants at the top of the slope and watched the world go by.  But it was too cold for that.

Instead, we went into the Palazzo Publico.  I wanted to show Piers the famous frescoes of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government.  Though badly damaged, it's still great fun to see this early bit of spin doctoring, with a happy, prosperous Siena under a democratic government on one wall, and a crumbling Siena with people getting murdered in the streets under the tyrant displayed on the other.  (One assumes the Medici, once in complete control, weren't too concerned about preserving the warning against the tyrant.)  The palace has a whole series of rooms with other interesting frescoes, most from the late Middle Ages but one room glorifying Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele and Italian unification.

Our meandering drive to Siena via Greve in Chianti went through some of the most beautiful landscapes in the region.  It is a pleasure simply to drive here, pulling over occasionally to take in the view or have a picnic lunch.

The road to San Gimignano is a bit less picturesque given the industrial sprawl of Poggibonsi you have to navigate to get there.  But the destination is worth it.  Much smaller than Siena, the town would be a forgotten backwater today if it weren't for the oddity that it retains so many of the towers that were once a feature of Medieval homes.  As civic governments got stronger, they brought warring families (think Montagues and Capulets) under control and demanded they de-fortify their townhouses.  But, for whatever reason, many of the towers in San Gimignano didn't come down.  So you end up with an intact, walled city looking pretty much as it would have circa 1300.

Beyond the architecture itself, there's little serious sightseeing besides the church, which houses my pick of the most horrifically graphic vision of hell in Medieval art.  (Yes, that devil is indeed impaling that screaming blonde woman there.) The clever folks of San Gim work to keep all those tourists who come to look at the towers, however, by turning the main streets into some of the best tourist shopping in Tuscany.  Here you'll find leather workshops, home stores with exquisite linens and kitchen items made of olive wood, gourmet food shops, ceramic workshops and art galleries. The prices are slightly lower than in Florence and the atmosphere somewhat more refined.  At least in the off season, San Gimignano does seem to calm down!


There are a wealth of other possibilities outside of Florence.  Some people love Lucca.  Others swear by Pisa.  I wanted to get us to Volterra, but ran out of time.  Tuscany's a big place.  If you want just a few highlights beyond Florence, I recommend these.

Strap on your walking shoes for Florence, and go easy on the art

Florence is getting harder to love.

After a week in Burgundy, where we were often the only visitors in sight, I had hoped that Tuscany's
tourist mecca might be a bit less crowded than in past summer visits.  Nope.  While there might have been fewer couples and families, the town was awash with school groups.  Noisy, milling teenagers, blocking traffic patterns and rarely displaying any interest in what's around them.  I suppose teachers have brought them on the theory that if you throw art and architecture at 100, it might stick to a couple.  Was I ever this obnoxious on school art history trips?

More than on any other visit, sadly, the centre of Florence reminded me of Venice: a historic stage set given completely over to tourism, with no locals besides those catering to visitors.

Or maybe, on past visits, I hadn't noticed so much.  My mother was an art historian and I was raised in her interests.  We'd both forget about the crowds to happily linger in contemplation of the elegance of Ghiberti's door panels, the majesty of Brunelleschi's dome or a room full of Botticelli madonnas.  But this time was different.  This time, I was introducing my husband to Florence, desperately trying to do anything I could think of to spark some appreciation of Italian culture in him to match mine.

Now, I'm not saying my husband is a cretin.  He's well-rounded and intellectually curious.  But he is, I think, a fairly typical man, and he didn't study any art history at school.  He felt no driving need to pack in the sightseeing, and I'm fairly sure that by the fifth madonna, fresco or church facade, it was all starting to look the same to him.  I suspect he represents the majority of the population, whilst my past visits, always with the art historically obsessed, belong to a tiny niche of society.  It put a whole new light on holiday planning.  I went for what I thought was a fairly light agenda, and we still hit cultural overload pretty quickly.  The milling teenagers didn't help.

Thus we only spent two days in Florence, rather than the planned three.  (And thank God for that, as the change of Friday plan allowed us to discover car problems which, if not revealed 'til we started our drive back to France on Saturday, would have been a real issue.)  We walked around Florence's historic core, popped in to a few attractions and got in a bit of historic spectacle.  It was, the man tells me, a decent introduction.

It's fairly easy to get around Florence on foot, and if you didn't stop anywhere you could do a circular walk of the main sights in a few hours.  Starting at the Santa Maria Novella train station, pop across the plaza to the eponymous church, where you can see the one big, original late medieval church facade in town.  The Florentines had an odd habit of not finishing churches, meaning that San Lorenzo ... the next one you walk by ... is still unfinished and both the main cathedral and Santa Croce have been finished by 19th century restorers.  There's a fun street market around the side and back of San Lorenzo where you can find all the standard Florentine souvenirs:  leather goods, silk scarves, majolica pottery.  From there to the central piazza of the cathedral (duomo), where the dome, Giotto's bell tower and the far older baptistry combine to make a majestic sight, despite the heaving crowds.

Down the street to Orsanmichele, another church but this time converted from an old granary, famous for the Renaissance sculpture in its niches.  Next a little detour to the straw market, where more Florentine crafts are on sale and you're supposed to stroke the nose of the bronze wild boar to ensure your return.  The poor pig was encircled by people 20 deep, so we just gave him a nod and kept moving.  Not far from here you're beneath the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its piazza the civic heart of Florence to match the religious one up the street.  You peer down the corridor of the Uffizi, crowds streaming towards the Ponte Vecchio, but it's not time for that yet.  You need to detour a few blocks further to see Santa Croce.  Then back, over the bridge with its beguiling jewellery shops, and to the other side of the river to see the Pitti Palace.  Wander back down the Arno a bit, cross at the Ponte Santa Trinita ... from which you actually get the best view of the Ponte Vecchio, give a nod to Ferragamo's world headquarters in its Medieval townhouse, then head back to the train station.  It's possible to do this in about 3 hours; we broke it into two days, incorporating a few visits along the route.

Our first day in town was 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, long considered the Florentine New Year.  There's an annual procession of citizens in Renaissance costume that starts over by the straw market and winds through town until reaching the church of Santissima Annunziata.  The church is famous for a fresco of the annunciation, in legend finished by an angel while its exhausted painter slept.  I'm not sure it is truly divine, but it is certainly a lovely thing, now enveloped by a golden canopy within the only church in Florence that got the Baroque treatment.  Amongst all the Renaissance restraint this interior is actually a bit hideous.  But standing there as a whole crowd of people in period costume gathered around a young woman laying flowers at the feet of the virgin, with trumpet and drum accompaniment, was spectacular.

Earlier in the day we'd toured the Palazzo Vecchio, with its impressive progression of fresco-encrusted walls and its jaw-droppingly large main chamber.  There's a map room here of which Piers was fond.

On our second day we paid the entry fee to get into Santa Croce, most notable for its late Medieval
frescoes and its tombs of Italian greats.  Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo, Rossini, and plenty of others you've never heard of.  The main altar is currently under wraps but all of the side altars are fully restored and available to view for the first time in my memory.  There's little left of the famous Giottos, but what's there is so imbued with humanity and emotion, it almost brings tears to your eyes.  While here, you can also pop into the Florentine leather school, where the craftsmanship is excellent but the prices this time seemed far higher than they used to be.  Finally, on the way out, we popped into the Pazzi Chapel.  Designed by Brunelleschi, with subtle decoration in glazed terracotta by the Della Robbias, it's a study in restrained elegance.

We spent the biggest chunk of sightseeing time at the Uffizi.  It's been at least a decade since I'd set foot inside.  It's expensive, the crowds are usually crazy, and having seen all the paintings several times, I came to prefer the much quieter Bargello museum with its sculpture and decorative arts.  But you can't introduce someone to Florence without coming to this, the cradle of Western painting and one of the greatest museums in the world.  We bought the tickets online, in advance, which allows you to skip some lines but is still spectacularly inefficient, in that you still have to wait at Door 3 to show off your reservation and have tickets printed for you, before crossing the courtyard to get into the shorter queue at Door 2.  In other countries, you just print your own ticket with a unique bar code and the guy at the door scans it.  This screamed of job creation schemes, while the ticket was almost 30% more expensive than buying it on the day.  That said, the queues of the non-reserved were spectacularly long and filled with tired and grumpy people.  The extra expenditure was worth it.

Turns out the museum is in the middle of a long, slow upgrade they're calling the Uffizi Nuovo, meant to more than double the display space and allow them to get the wealth of stuff in storage onto permanent display.  So now, instead of completing the long "u" of galleries on the top floor of the building, you reach a new cafe with a magnificent rooftop dining area in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio's bell tower.  Had I known of its existence, I would have scheduled a lunch break here, as there are few more dramatic views in Florence.  I hit this old end point of the galleries, wondering where the Caravaggios were, then got directed down a modernistic, over-sized staircase made in a vast well hollowed out of the old building.  You descend one floor, and they then take you back around the whole "U" again, with those Caravaggios at the very end to give you the energy to keep pushing.  On the way you pass the Bronzinos, Baroque art, Northern European stuff and whatever special exhibition is under way, along with a progression of spare, modern galleries still empty and being finished.

I have mixed feelings about the changes.  Given how much of the collection has always been in storage, it's exciting to think of what's going to be accessible once it's all out.  They've done a great job on the new galleries and they show of the art beautifully.  But they've doubled the size of the museum while still maintaining the original chronological journey.  One gallery after another, with no choice but to follow the progression from start to finish.  Even I was flagging at the end, and I'm the museum kid.  Piers was downright grumpy.  Although he was cheered by the oddity of Bronzino's naked dwarf portrait, and Caravaggio's chill-inducing Medusa shield, both towards the end.  But I can't help thinking that, with the museum now so big, taking a hint from the Louvre and building an underground concourse from which you could access all the wings of the museum at your own pace, in whatever order you wished, would have made more sense.  With the old path remaining, my big advice is to plan on a break in that lovely cafe.  You're going to need it if you want to keep your energy up for the second half of the museum.