Castelnuovo Berardenga, San Gusmé, Pietrafitta, and Panzano: Travels in the Chianti region

Somewhere between travels to Florence to spend a day sketching at the Uffizi and lunch in Siena (a city that remains forever etched in my mind and yet remains, with each visit, a constantly changing city)… there was a pause: the Chianti region of Tuscany. The travels took us to small towns that usually remain outside the jurisdiction of the tourist economy where the new and the old seem wedded to each other. Unlike the stages set for the traveler in Venice, Assisi, and even Siena, the towns of Castelnuovo Berardenga, San Gusmé, Pietrafitta, and Panzano are somehow more authentic. Ah! the word "authenticity" may bring doubts to your mind and visions of Baudrillard's simulacra or his post-modern romp through America, or at worst, a Heideggerian conundrum. Or perhaps, just a deep and fundamental doubt. After all, what is authentic? A highly contested terrain to say the least! But what other word offers so much? These towns remain alive and functioning without being made-up to appear as "they were" – or rather, to appear "as we would like to imagine that they were."

Our driver also served as our guide on this journey. We could ask for no better guide (as Danté was taken with showing Virgil something or other…) for Julius (shall we not give a name to this visitor who offered so much?) was also an architect and a photographer. He seemed to know the roads as if he were always in Tuscany and to recall, to the faintest detail, the location of the bends in the road and the best trattoria… It also helped that he had a car, for these towns, and indeed, most of the Chianti region would otherwise be inaccessible.

The entire experience became an opportunity to gather a sense of this most alchemical wedding: the city is definitely a palimpsest with each layer somehow engaged in a dialog with the others… and, together, the city's voice becomes salient! In turn, we offered these experiences and images to the students of italia2009 who, in their design studio projects, are studying and searching for a similar dialogue: a new, albeit temporary, intervention into the existing fabric of the city.