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Giorgio, you see how unsuited they are to traffic. They were designed without that in mind, and it simply doesn’t work to try and incorporate it. It’s as if you decided to go around in the house on a bicycle. Technically you could probably do it, but you might begin to think that there was something wrong with the house.
    When I took the train north that morning in October, it wasstill dark, although before long the light came over the land, and I thought of how much I like this landscape in winter, possibly even more than I do in summer. I like it when the soil is turned up in the empty fields: sometimes the earth lies in thick brown clods, sometimes it’s as fine as powder. Through the leafless trees you can see the configurations of the land, as if its bones have been laid bare. Just past Assisi, the train rolled slowly over a level crossing, and past the backs of some houses, past hen-runs and small wire pens full of geese and ducks. A mean-faced ginger cat stared at the train as it trundled past, so slowly that I could clearly see the grapes on the vines. Soon, they would be harvested. There were persimmon trees, near enough to touch. I love that tree so much; I love that combination of bareness and fertility, the black, leafless branches and the solid orange fruit, (even though I don’t like to eat it, the flesh is too pulpy, and it tastes as though it has already begun to rot). The tree is wonderful, though, with all the fruit like orange lamps; it looks like something a child has decorated.
    A few miles further on, I kept a particular lookout for a long row of coloured beehives, in a hollow below a farm. It always gave me a real delight to see them, but they were only ever visible in winter, when there were no leaves on the trees. A little while later, we passed Lake Trasimeno on the left, and everything was blue – the water, the sky, the distant hills, all different muted shades of blue, the sky a colour quite unlike either the heaped clouds of where I lived in Ireland, or the high bare sky of an Italian summer. As we went on north into Tuscany, the land changed, and the rounded hills closed in gently around the track.
    I liked the landscape there, and in winter I liked it for that particular combination of bareness and softness. Even though it can be bitterly cold in Italy, I always had the feeling there that winter wasn’t going to last long, that it was a brief aberration, while in Ireland you feel that it’s the summer that’s the freak, having somehow managed to break through the usual wind and rain for a short while.
    I have a theory, a strange, maybe a silly theory of my own, to do with landscape: I think that each particular landscape has itsown period of time, its own moment in history when it is, or was, most in harmony with the society which exists in it. In Umbria it was the Middle Ages, in Tuscany the Renaissance – the time when the spirit of the land was most complementary to the spirit of the society. I always think of Tuscany as a merchant landscape , able to submit with unparalleled grace to the forces of money and power, in the form they took at that time. You only have to look at the buildings. The merchant towns of pink stone, defensively walled, with solid churches, blend perfectly with the hills, in the way the factories and warehouses of today do not. But the land itself is rich and fertile, yielding easily to cultivation, with its olive trees in neat rows, and its twisted vines. It is so self-evidently a land which has submitted for hundreds of years to the stamp of human power, more than any other I can think of. But it bears that stamp so graciously that people love it for that. Central Italy is one of the most humanized landscapes you can imagine, a place which soothes rather than frightens. It lacks the violence of the sea, and the hard indifference of high, bare mountains.
    And much as I liked Umbria and Tuscany, sometimes their prettiness got on my nerves and I missed the