Chianti From a Tuscan Villa

Paulette and I are very happy to see our collaborative effort, Chianti From a Tuscan Villa, in print.

We spent seven days on a modest group tour of the Chianti region of Tuscany, staying in a Tuscan villa and going on day trips around the area, to Castellina, Florence, Lucca, San Gimignano, Siena, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, and Volterra.

On those day trips, we both photographed extensively with the idea of creating this book, a combination of Tom’s photographs and Paulette’s paintings, to create our interpretation of the region that gave birth to the Renaissance and Chianti wine.

And although we visited places not on the tour, such as the Beaded Lily Glass Works in Florence, our plans for other sites did not always pan out. Thomas wanted to see the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery in Florence, but the cemetery was closed for renovation work. He did manage to get some photos from a distance. (If you want to see Browning’s tomb, watch the movie Tea with Mussolini. The film opens at her tomb. The film also shows frescoes of Santa Fina in San Gimignano’s Collegiata. )

Alas, museums and churches, for the most part, did not allow photography, and if they did, it had to be without flash (no problem) and tripod (which made getting good photographs in low light a challenge). One church, Santa Lucia al Borghetto in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa (the town where we stayed), allowed photography and the use of a tripod, one of the few times indoor photographs could be taken at a slow speed.

The typeface for the book title and running heads is Medici™ Script Std Regular from Adobe, appropriate for a book of photographs and paintings about the land of the Medici family.

If you have any questions, contact journprof@comcast.net.