finding childhood ghosts in tuscany

When I was 12, my father took me and my younger sister to Italy and France. For four weeks we tooled around in a rental Citroen with no Google Maps or TripAdvisor to guide our way. Childhood memories are funny. I don’t remember visiting the Eiffel Tower but I do remember an atrocious hamburger we had in Avignon after my dad gave in to our demands for an ‘American’ meal. My recollection of the Colisseum is fuzzy at best, but the earth-shaking Roman thunderstorm that woke us up in the middle of the night feels like it could have been last week. I remember literally nothing about our stay in Padua (sorry, Dad!) but I have a distinct memory of painstakingly searching for little painted masks for all my junior high school friends in Venice’s vast maze of trinket shops.

One leg of our trip that lives on in my memory, and in family lore, is Tuscany. We stayed at the Fattoria la Loggia, a working farm, vineyard and villa built in 1427 in the heart of the Chianti region south of Florence. It was all the exact opposite of my city-kid life in NYC. Lush, rolling hills covered with olive trees and grape vines. The dog — a yellow Lab, I’m almost certain — who belonged to the owner and hung out around the farm all day, happily catching rocks in her teeth when kids threw them. The guest cottages, stone structures with dark wood details and terra cotta floor tiles, whose interiors felt to me like time had forgotten them since the 15th century.

When planning this trip with my family, paralyzed by the seemingly infinite permutations of destinations and time spent in each, I started here.

The Fattoria is now one of many players in the region’s booming agriturismo business. When I inquired in the spring, they were almost fully booked for the summer. There were a handful of open weeks, so I chose one in mid-July. The rest of our trip was constructed with Tuscany at its center.

As we rolled up the gravel driveway, a strange sense settled over me as my synapses registered memories I’d forgotten were there. The farm is still quiet, except for the cicadas, and surrounded by neat rows of grape vines and olive trees. The vistas haven’t changed, nor have the stone cottages. I would swear that even the apartments’ interiors are exactly the same, down to the bedspreads, but the property’s manager, Ivana, might dispute that point.

Some things, of course, have changed. Instead of dropping off food rations from the farm each day (fresh bread, eggs and poultry) for guests to cook, there’s now a small breakfast spread every morning that made my kids giddy with its just-baked fruit cakes, Nescafe machine — hot chocolate for them, triple lattes for me — and local meats and cheeses. And a major update: Instead of free passes to the no-frills community pool in the nearby village of San Casciano, where I swam alongside locals and my little sister, they’ve built a beautiful saltwater pool on the property.

Lulu floating around, in ecstasy, at the Fattoria La Loggia pool.

Their morning routine: fresh-baked raspberry or orange cake, cereal, hot chocolate and this view.

Traditional door knockers do double duty: Someone found Max’s Lamby around the property and left it on our front door.

I still remember some of the people from my stay in 1988: the owner, Giulio Baruffaldi, a gregarious man with a big white mustache and warm smile. Besides horses and winemaking, he was a lover and patron of the arts. Over the years he hosted artists from around the world, some for extended residencies. Pieces of their work are now displayed at the farm’s Contemporary Art Centre. One of those artists, an Italian painter named Giuliano Ghelli, was living there during my childhood visit. He showed us some of his whimsical, colorful creations in his apartment — and when he told my father about his workshop and showroom in San Casciano, we went. My dad bought an original print, which hangs in his apartment to this day.

Baruffaldi died in February 2017. Three years earlier, to the day, Ghelli had passed away. He’d moved to a bigger home on a nearby hill since my visit but still spent much of his time with his old friends at La Loggia up until his death. By sheer coincidence, the apartment where the artist had lived when we met him was rented to me for our 10-day stay. It’s still filled with his work.

Lulu under two Ghelli originals, in his former living room.

Our cottage has more Ghellis than the San Casciano art museum named for him posthumously in 2015. (They only have one!) This piece hung above our master bed.

During our 10 days here we took day trips and explored places including Florence, Pisa, Lucca and Bologna. Some days, our biggest trek was a 15-minute drive to San Casciano (pop: 17,171) for pizza or gelato.

These grapes were an essential part of ….

…our afternoon spritz. There was a fresh, cold bottle of La Loggia’s dry sparkling white wine (far right) in our fridge every day.

Lovely manager Ivana Natali started at the Fattoria 30 years ago, one year after I stayed here as a girl.

This is us. Relaxed. (Photo credit: Lulu)

The sweet dog I played with in 1988 is long gone. Now there are two cats in residence, and they can be found walking among the grape vines and cottages.

My girl, as pretty as the postcard-worthy backdrop.

This swirl of new experiences and old memories got me thinking about my children and my own inner child. There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘making memories.’ But what are memories really made of? Which ones stick as we grow older, and why? How do they shape us?

The impact of my childhood trip with my dad isn’t about photos in an album or long-gone souvenirs we bought with the small, pre-agreed allowance for which he acted as our ATM. (Apparently we occasionally spent it on him. A meticulously organized author and journalist, he still has his journals from that trip. He lent them to me. On Sunday, July 4, 1988, while staying at La Loggia, he wrote that my sister and I gave him a candle in the shape of a Chianti wine bottle.) No, the trip’s biggest gift was the epiphany it inspired in me as a junior high-schooler: that far from home, the world — though it may seem wide — is welcoming, exciting, and full of life both grand and granular.

The impact of our travels together lives on in the stories we share by shorthand: the one about the rude French waiter and the glass of milk; the one about the water park on the Cote d’Azur where my father lost our keys at the bottom of the wave pool and bought a T-shirt in a shade of purple that mortified his kids; the time we spent all day at Siena’s famous Palio and then stayed up way too late having dinner with a group of friendly Americans we’d been crammed next to for hours waiting for the 75-second bareback horse race to begin; the day we bought expensive, exquisite Florentine marbled paper products at the exclusive Il Papiro only to have my 8-year-old sister knock her drink into the bag minutes later. These memories tie us together despite the many years and miles that separate us. (Oh, and 31 years later: thanks, Dad.)

I’ve never played ping-pong with my son before — turns out he’s got a truly killer serve. And I’ve certainly never played ping-pong anywhere with a view like this.

What will my children remember from this summer? Who knows. It gives me a pang of sadness that the everyday life which seems so vivid to us now — we four are moving as a pack in our own bubble of exploration — one day will be reduced to a few random memories, even if they’re bolstered by my voluminous iPhone library. If I’m lucky, they’ll grow up to explore and love places neither they nor I have ever been before.

And maybe one day they’ll watch their own children splashing around in the pool at the Fattoria La Loggia and fighting over the hot chocolate machine, and will bore them with stories about the crazy summer they spent traipsing around Europe, getting lost in Paris, occasionally driving their parents crazy and learning that the world is bigger — and at the same time, smaller — than they had ever imagined.