Sunset on a 2000-year-old-dream

Numbers are the last thing that come to mind when thoughts turn to Tuscany. Paradise is not quantifiable, and few corners of the planet are more suggestive of an earthly paradise than the village-dotted hills that stretch across central Italy from Siena and Florence to the azure Tirrennian Sea.

Yet numbers matter a great deal in the modern world, whatever our romantic imaginations tell us, and the latest statistics on the health and welfare of paradise are numbing.

According to officials at Legacoop, an association of 25,000 farmers in Tuscany, the average age of its members is 62 and rising fast. A third are over 70 and only 2 percent are under 30. The trend casts an ominous shadow on the future of some of the globe’s best-known wines and olive oil, along with the feed-stocks used to produce much of Italy’s most famous salami, prosciutto and beef.

In the next few years, says Legacoop president Roberto Negrini, “it is reasonable to expect that a quarter of the cultivated land in Tuscany could be abandoned,” with vines, olive groves and fields of grain surrendered to weeds.

Italy, of course, is not the first place to experience the desertion of its countryside, or the economic and demographic changes that provoke it. The rural landscapes of the United States and Britain were dramatically altered by similar trends in the 1950s and 1960s.

But Tuscany is not just another stretch of farmland that has outlived its economic viability.

The vineyards and olive groves of central Italy are the idyllic backdrop to the paintings of Leonardo Vinci and Raphael, the fertile soil where the Renaissance took root and transformed Western art and thought 700 years ago. More than a dozen centuries earlier, the same hills were the favored setting for amorous Roman poets, and even earlier for the contented smiles on marble statues of the ancient Etruscans who gave their name to the region.

Tuscany is the template of pastoral reveries, still inspiring sun-struck fantasies two millennia after the Etruscans vanished from history.

Now the template itself seems to be vanishing.

SAN GIMIGNANO

Italians have a code phrase for what’s happening: “San Gimignano.” It refers to a spectacularly beautiful hill town near Siena, which was founded by the Etruscans around 200 B.C.

San Gimignano was long famous for its picturesquely decaying 13^th century towers, and for the flourishing vineyards its inhabitants maintained nearby. They lived inside the town walls, in narrow, simply furnished Medieval brick houses whose facades were often as cracked and weathered as the towers that rose above them. On Autumn mornings a generation ago, the streets and piazzas were abuzz with townsfolk before 7am, en route to harvest grapes or olives on terraced plots their families had worked since time immemorial.

It was a self-contained universe, defined by age-old traditions, social customs and bloodlines. Family, land and hometown were its pillars. Until very recently, that universe was remarkably intact.

From a distance, San Gimignano looks unchanged in 2010. But within the walls, a visitor soon notices that the town’s masonry is now picture-perfect, nearly every brick of every house scoured clean. Apart from the busy tourist months of July and August, the piazzas and streets today are all but empty before noon, and the butcher shops, groceries and farm supply stores that served generations of contadini have been replaced by fashion boutiques, art galleries and upscale restaurants.

Most startlingly, the nameplates on almost every doorbell are German, Scandinavian or English. “There aren’t more than a handful of us who still live here,” the proprietor of one of the few remaining groceries says. “Over the last 20 years, most Gimignese sold their apartments to northern Europeans at prices that made it impossible to say no.”

The buyers often spent more money “restoring” the old buildings than they did acquiring them, although they are rarely used for more than a month each year. The former owners have moved to new subdivisions scattered across the Tuscan lowlands. “They have things down there they couldn’t have in San Gimignano, things like cars and garages,” the grocer said. “What they don’t have anymore is their town and each other.”

Eventually, many of the vineyards were also sold off. The venerable ties that held a universe together – the history stretching back to the Etruscans, the morning streets noisy with men and women on the way to their vines – were broken.

San Gimigano became a Disneyland version of itself, restored and carefully polished, without the collective life and sensibility that add up to a community.

THEY CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

There is no guilty party in this tale, no villain in the tragedy.

The northerners who bought vacation homes in Italy, drawn to the warm southern sun, gorgeous land and charming villages and towns, were seduced by the very universe they inadvertently destabilized.

The Tuscans themselves were also overwhelmed by contradictory forces – forces measured in numbers – that paralleled the exchange of money for property. As cold, merciless statistics demonstrate, the story of the countryside’s abandonment is also the story of its inexorably ageing population. Tuscany has a shortage of young people in large part because Tuscans stopped making babies well before they stopped raising grapes and olives.

At just over eight children per 1,000 residents, the Italian birth rate in 2009 ranked 219^th out of 220 nations worldwide. That’s barely more than half the birth rate in the United States, and 30 percent lower than the figure for Britain and France. A third of Tuscany’s families have no children at all.

The death rate in Italy last year was nearly 11 per 1,000 residents, 30 percent higher than the number of births.

These statistics would have translated into empty spaces – empty rooms and silent streets in the fabled hilltowns, empty vineyards and olive groves – even if no Germans, Britons or Swedes had flown south on the wings of Mediterranean fantasies.

You can’t blame the Tuscans for any of this. Birth rates plummet almost everywhere in proportion to rising income expectations. The attractions of a “modern” standard of living, measured in expensive consumer goods and cars parked in attached garages, are flatly incompatible with large families and traditional rural lifestyles.

Ironically, the foreign real estate market in Italy has evaporated with the worldwide economic crisis, as have thousands of construction jobs. Many of them supported the very people who severed their ancient ties to towns like San Gimignano in the interest of being modern. Tuscans are like everyone else in this regard. Traditional life, once abandoned, is the home no one can return to.

But Tuscany is not everywhere else. It’s the template of an idyllic longing that has held sway over our imaginations for two millennia. As it withers, so do our dreams.

Article by Frank Viviano