The Cultural and Artistic Landscape of Tuscany the Cradle of the Renaissance

A summer evening at any country house in Tuscany: the light of the setting sun flood a landscape that unfolds before your eyes in an unusual palette of color rangiпg from straw yellow, through dark violet, and silvery green to deepest black.

The ridges of the softly undulating hills melt into almost contourless crests. In the background, the Apuan Alps, the Appennines, and Monte Amiata tower like the framework of a stage set. In this entirely natural scenery, a second structure

becomes apparent only on closer inspection: a man-made pattern resembling a woven fabric. Pasture and arable land is fringed by endless drystone walling and flecked with rectangular, square, or diamond-shaped patches that mark farmsteads, olive groves, and vineyards as well as small hilltop townships, with slender towers, which are ringed by walls. Human activity has left its traces. This is the cultivated land of Tuscany. Cultivate derives ultimately from Latin colere, meaning "to till," but also "look after, uphold."

You can discern the beginnings of agricultural activity in the archaeological and architectural accretions of millennia of settlement, but the evidence is just as compelling in the trees typical of Tuscany: the olive trees, which, with their loose structure and indistinct outlines, seem to break up in the landscape but with their light-colored foliage leave a trail of silvery filigree over the hills, or the cypresses, whose clear silhouettes mark borders, indicate direction, and stake out subdivisions. Both were left behind by the original Etruscan inhabitants and have literally taken root here. Indeed, Tuscany itself takes its name from the Etruscans living here in the first millennium в.с. The term Tuscia, the land of the Etruscans, was introduced under the administrative reforms of the Roman emperor Diocletian (A.D. 284-305), becoming Toscana in the Middle Ages. (The Greek name for the same people, Tyrrhenoi, provided the name for the sea further south, the Tyrrhenian Sea or Etruscan Sea.) High up on ridges commanding expansive river valleys, the cities founded by the Etruscans – Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, and Fiesole – are still with us.

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