Northward to Arezzo, Tuscany, which seemed a good base from which to visit other Tuscan towns, to see lots of Piero della Francesco frescoes, and to look around where some great grandparents of now Spillers left for Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.
A medieval town of brownish brick, Arezzo old town slopes gently up from a valley backed by a bowl of wooded hills. Its main piazza slopes, and has a nice colonnade. The weekend we arrived, it was all a mass of stalls and crowds for the monthly antiques fair that colonises most central streets with everything from bric a brac and 1 euro lucky dip packages to chandelier pieces, old books, furniture and frames. Serious antique dealers lurked further back in shops.
The badilica di San Francesco, the church whose apse chapel Piero della Francesca frescoed, is now a museum and you cannot enter without a ticket. Without an online booking to show, you are likely to be disappointed.
Apart from the Piero DLF works, I enjoyed the church itself which has other remnant frescoes. One was a remnant of a really lovely fresco of the Annunciation, by Signorelli, from a church in Casa del Monte, that Baron Tommaso Albergotti donated in 1920, for instance.
To continue the fresco frenzy you can visit famous renaissance art biographer, painter and historian Giorgio Vasari's house/ workshop, most rooms frescoed by himself including one featuring portraits of famous artists. Step out into the garden of the three storey villa and imagine Vasari in 1548 picking fruit or thinking about what to write about Leonardo da Vinci in his “ Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, considered the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing.
We ate a couple of celebratory meals at a couple of excellent trattorie /restaurants. If you feel you can eat pigeon, I recommend it in ravioli with truffles on top. My companion toasted a political result in terrific local wine.
Further afield, we tried to track down the grave of Elisabetta Gabrielli who with her husband David Papini and daughter Rosina had migrated to turn of the century 1900s Chicago, and eventually returned to Arezzo as an old woman in the 1950s. Tregozzano cemetery in rolling hills north of Arezzo.certainly had several Gabrielli memorials, but none matched. Portrait photos look out from every niche: to those accustomed to anglo cemeteries, the ancestors from the Italian locality seem more present.
