Today was tour day. But first, Montepulciano itself.
Montepulciano can be a little bit confusing because it’s the name of a medieval hilltop town in the province of Sienna in Tuscany, and it’s also the name of a wine that is not produced in Tuscany.
We had a photography tour booked for the evening with Alfredo, so we spent the day exploring the town. The real Montepulciano. The one on the hill.
The thing about Montepulciano is that it’s built on a ridge, so every street either goes steeply up or steeply down, and the alleys between them are narrow enough that you can touch both walls.
Every few turns you pop out to a viewpoint where the rooftops give way to the Tuscan countryside below. Terracotta tiles stepping down the hillside, cypress trees in the distance, the whole postcard.
We found a quiet garden terrace tucked behind the town walls, rested on the steps of an old church, and eventually did what you do in any Italian hilltop town at lunchtime.
Come photography tour time we got into the car and it became a game of racing for light.
We started at the Windows 95 wallpaper spot.
This involved pulling onto the side of a highway, scrambling down the embankment of an overpass and wading waist deep into grass for the perfect angle.
Then we moved to the Gladiator ending scene. To get here, we wound our way up and down various semi-steep roads, down the back driveway of a school before wading through more grass.
From this angle, outside of the wheel marks of mowed lawn, it would be difficult to discern what era we were in. We rested here for a good long while, crouched on the hillside, watching rippling waves of grass fields and feeling the breeze, waiting for Alfredo to take a smoke as we heard his tales as a reportage photographer. And tales Alfredo had, from stories of how he gained the trust of DRC Congo generals to facing down guns on the inner streets of LA in his search for the story.
The sun was starting to set, so we set out towards another set of hilltops, turning up and down more roads, questionable roads, then finally definitely not roads. Alfredo didn’t care. The man was chasing light.
We hiked up through fields of golden wheat to catch the ridgeline, our little group trudging uphill with tripods and camera gear like the world’s most over-equipped sunset pilgrimage.
Alfredo continued to tell us tales of his time as a reportage photographer as we watched the light change and the sun set –
– before we finally raced back to catch Montepulciano at night.
