Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

NEWS

Want to hear yet more of my dulcet tones? (Don’t answer that.) You can locate more here: Liturgies on Dwell

Or the Merrie Lecture at Temenos?

Want to read thoughts about the Sun? Mythologists Fear Heatwaves

The above conversation was last week in Eastbourne. Some of it you’ve heard thematically before on the Liturgies campaign trail, but there’s some new things budding up here and there, I promise.

Run To The Hills

Traveller, thou art approaching Cortona! …Thou mayst have wandered far and wide through Italy – nothing hast thou seen more venerable than Cortona. Ere the days of Hector and Achilles, ere Troy itself arose – Cortona was. On that bare and lofty height, whose towered crest holds communion with the cloud, dwelt the heaven-born Dardanus, ere he left Italy to found the Trojan race; and on that mount reigned his father Corythus, and there he was laid in the tomb…Away with doubts – pay thy full tribute of homage – Hast thou respect to fallen greatness? – Yon solemn city was once the proudest and the mightiest in the land, the metropolis of Etruria, and now – but enter its gates and look around…

George Dennis, 1845

It’s not unusual to journey to Tuscany to escape the English weather, but it’s highly odd when the weather you are escaping is even hotter! England is dripping to a standstill. I confess it’s roasting here – and unusually hot for June, as any resident of Cortona will tell you – so you have to be highly tactical as to when to wander the cobbles. The walls of this hill town seem to subdue the worst of the heat, but it’s still quite something. I’m delighted to be here with my daughter Dulcie, just blinking and out the other side of her film degree at Bristol university. Wherever I am with Dulcie is simply the best place to be. Our guide into the town and its mythos is Selena Garefino, a friend of my school and a woman with a real gift for friendship and conviviality. Everybody knows and loves her. She’s generous with her time and offers an experience we never could have had without her. She makes a town become a village.

Cortona’s a world of genial eccentrics and raconteurs, of hushed churches and the clink of a Negroni glass, of determined old ladies with slim, dark sticks climbing the lanes to light candles for the venerable dead. The secret to this long life (according to Selena) may be tons of good quality Italian olive oil, the aforementioned steps, and having a good red with every meal after breakfast, no slacking. However, no wine without food. So now we know. “Wine’s not a grape it’s a territory,” says the Wine Man Marco, “each bottle tastes different every five minutes, filled with wind, earth, stones, volcanic ash and even the distant tang of the sea.” There’s a couple of serious cases being shipped home. Just beforehand I’m happily wrangling over a tapestry.

The bartering: the sellers’ charm offensive, then the snarling bear-pit, then the meeting in the middle.

Early morning I have a little espresso and wander to the city walls before it gets too hot. As I stand, a little agog, heart-rending scents erupt from the flowers and tree bark that I haven’t smelt since a summer painting in Rome almost twenty-five years ago. Incredible thing, scent. Transformative, immediate. I close my eyes so the scents come closer.

My child snoozes on, as young people are meant to do, but I prowl about. There’ll be a nap for a solid block of the afternoon. First night I sleep under soaking wet towels, but after a day the air conditioning establishes its superlative function.

I’m here to keep an eye out for St Francis and some other Italian saints of the rural variety, but before that we’re heading back a little further into history, back to the Etruscans.