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all over the valley, opting for the sheen of factory-made ones. The distinctiveness of the old farmhouse has been disgraced.
    “È una tristezza,” he says, “proprio squallido come lavoro. It’s a sadness, an absolutely squalid work. The Luccis did everything as cheaply as they could with the state’s allotment.”
    Though we don’t understand the meaning of this last sentence, Barlozzo’s facial expression and the bold period he’d placed at its end make it clear this is not the moment to seek further. His cruelly honest take on the house smarts, and yet I share it with him. I remind myself that we didn’t come to Tuscany for a house.
    T HE SUN HAS gone to wash the other side of the sky and the light is blue over the garden when we go out to sit on the terrace. It’s just past seven and Barlozzo is still in soliloquy mode, talking now about the history of the village. Like all good teachers, he begins with an overview of his subject. “The last of the hill towns on the southern verges of Tuscany as it gives way to Lazio and Umbria, San Casciano is precisamente, precisely, 582 meters above sea level, built on the crest of a hill that divides the valleys of the river Paglia and theriver Chiana.” It’s thrilling to be sitting in the midst of what he describes, and I want to tell him this, but so deep is his own captivity in the story that I stay quiet. “Old as Etruria and likely older yet, the village grew up under the Romans. It was the baths, the healing, theraputic waters that sprung from the rich argillaceous soil of the place that attracted the upper-bracket Romans, put the village on the map.” And when the Empire built the Via Cassia—a most grandiose feat of construction that connected Rome with Gaul—San Casciano dei Bagni, San Casciano of the Baths, now more accessible to travelers, became the watering hole of such personages as Horace and Ottaviano Augustus.
    “Toward the medieval epoch, baths gave way to wars and invasions between the Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the territories from Siena clear to Orvieto. And so it wasn’t until 1559, when the village entered under the protectorate of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, commanded by Cosimo dei Medici of Florence, that the baths of San Casciano returned to fame, attracting all of crowned Europe and their courts. This royal traffic inspired some of the more ornate constructions in and surrounding the village.” All that history right outside our door. Though I still look at Barlozzo as he proceeds, my mind flits about, needing to rest from his docent’s lessons. It’s enough for now to just imagine that we can bathe in the same warm spring where an Augustus once did.
    E ACH MORNING, WE walk early, while the sun is still rising. We find the Roman springs, which gurgle up soothing and very warm waters in which we soak our feet or, when we like, much more of us. The still cool air and the hot water are delicious taken together before breakfast. There are few paths among the meadows and moors and so walking becomes a swashbuckling causing my thighs to burn as they did during my first Venetian days among the footbridges. A rogue breeze ripples up every now and then, intruding upon the stillness. Sometimes it becomes a wind, announcing the rain, which soon blows down in sultry sheets against us, the force of it carving tiny rills in the warm earth. We take off our boots, then, and squish in the mud like the two children we never were but can be now.
    When we can’t bear to wait for breakfast any longer we move fast as we can through the brush, over the fields, back up to the house, arriving breathless, hearts pounding, bodies sweating out the juicy scents of grass and thyme. I feel as though we are living in a summer camp directed by obliging absentee counselors who look smilingly and from afar upon genteel eroticisms. We bathe and dress and head up to the village.
    Within a few days, we are setting rituals. As we pass the baker’s, he, or sometimes his