OUR MONTH IN TUSCANY AT VILLA SANTA LUCIA
By Gloria Rubeo
As published in the November 1999 issue of La Voce Del Nido
In November of 1998, Tom and I rented the Villa Santa Lucia in Castiglioncello, Italy from Nicoletta (Nicky) and Lindsey Turner.
We rented it for the month of September 1999. For a whole year we anticipated our visit there, and on September 1st Tom and I and two of our four children, Regina and David left New York and arrived in Milan, Italy onSeptember 2nd. We rented a Peugeot and drove to Castiglioncello to VillaSanta Lucia.
When we arrived we were delighted to see how beautiful it was.It is perched on the top of a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and surrounded by horizon. It was stunning.
The entrance to the house is preceded by an old roman-style stone staircase at the top of which is a long terrace, the width of the whole house and tiled with terra-cotta, with a long table and chairs for relaxing.
There are several staircases leading to different parts of the property and to other gardens. Then there is the staircase leading down to the semi-private beach and swimming in the sea. It was lovely, more than was revealed on the overall brochure of the villa.
When we arrived, we met Elio the caretaker, everybody loved Elio! He's a very pleasant person who always had a smile and a cheery greeting: "Buon Giorno!" He came by almost every day to be sure all was well and if anything went wrong, he got right on it to see that it was taken care of. We laughed a lot and chatted in Italian as best we could (Elio spoke only Italian). We all communicated very well.
The house was great, furnished in old antique (some in the Florentine style) pieces. We had three bedrooms and two baths. The four of us were there for the whole month of September, then the third and fourth week Tom's cousin and her friend came, and the fourth week another friend of the family came. By the last week there were 7 of us in the house. It was such fun. We had all our meals out on the terrace, all with wine of course (except breakfast), and we all shared the cooking. We had dinner by sunset every night except for one night when we had a storm. There was only one other day of rain but it cleared by afternoon.
At times we took turns cooking and other times two or three of us cooked together. We did our shopping at the local Co-op Supermarket only ten minutes from the house by car. Also, we shopped in Livorno which is about 30 minutes from the villa. There we went to the Saturday markets. The indoor market was in a huge building with food stands throughout. There were vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses, wines, pastries, and one whole room just for the fish-mongers. Everything was exceptionally fresh.
In addition to cooking at the villa we went to dinner in some lovely restaurants and had wonderful meals and excellent service. One night we went to a small cozy restaurant in town (Castiglioncello). When we sat down a lovely lady came by with a cart with a tank full of fish. When we asked for the menu she said "I am the menu", and she proceeded to tell us, in excellent English, the name of each one and how it was prepared.
There were some days when we just lolled around and went swimming in the Sea, and walked around and met the other people renting the other apartments on the property.
In the beach house we met Marco and Graziella from Florence. They are childhood friends of Nicoletta. In the apartment along side the back of the house was Dr. Stern and his wife who were staying a week on their way home from Genoa where he gave a presentation on a paper he had written on Exceptional Childhood Diseases. In the newer apartment on the right side of the house, was the lawyer and his wife from Livorno.
Other days we planned trips to some of the small towns nearby. We went to Pisa, Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, San Miniato, Volterra, Assisi, Venice, Rome, Greve, Lago Trasimeno, the Chiantigiana - the wine region, etc. etc. Our daughter Regina did all the driving. She was the only one who was able to compete with the Italian drivers. Besides the local roads, she had too navigate some steep ones leading into the mountain villages. On one occasion we weent up a steep dirt road with sheer cliff on our side, and as we were turning a blind bend in the road, a town bus appeared, coming towards us. We had nowhere to go but backwards. The bus driver inched his way alongside our car and passed. We could easily have been pushed off the side of the cliff. That's how close we were to the edge.
On a similar road, we stopped at a lovely Agriturismo (Pensione in the mountains) in Montescudaio. It had a winery attached. A woman came out to greet us and brought us into the wine cellar, a big warehouse. We tasted wines and olive oil and bought some bottles of wine she had, dated 1985. She picked figs off her tree and let us taste them and gave us pears from her other tree. Then off we went to visit the Castle at Vigna Maggio where they filmed the movie "Much Ado About Nothing". It was a private residence, and we were not allowed to go in. We visited other nearby wineries and bought more wine.
When we returned home to the States we carried six bottles of wine from small wineries that do not export to the United States, also 1 bottle of Sambuca and 2 bottles of Averna, in addition to pottery from Passignano at Lago Trasimeno, all neatly packed with bubble paper in carry-on bags.
The only down side of the villa, is that there is a train trestle across the street from the house, with trains going by periodically all day long and some at night. After the first two days or so, Tom and I got used to it and we thought "what train?" Everything about the villa was so great the train could not spoil it.
The night before we left for home, Elio's wife Giuliana and their son Massimo came to visit to say good-bye. Giuliana cleans the house for in-coming guests. When we arrived, it was meticulously clean. We said our good-byes and the next morning, October 1st, at about 7:00 a.m., Elio came to the house to say his good-bye. There was a lot of "Buon Viaggio" and "Ciao, Ciao" and hugs all around. Then off we went on our journey to Milan and Malpensa Airport. We stopped on the way at the Agip stops on the highway.
It was all such a wonderful adventure. A month was great! After a month it was time to come home.