The 2009 edition of the Florence Biennale kicks off at the Fortezza da Basso, close to Santa Maria Novella, on December 5th, and runs until the 13th. This year’s highlights include Chinese artist Shu Yong and video artist Marina Abramovic. A short train ride to the west of Florence, Montecatini’s Terme Tamerici is now exhibiting “Il nuovo dopo della Macchia.” The exhibition looks at 80 works by the Macchiaioli and examines their importance in the development of Tuscan realism, and includes works by Lodovico Tommasi and the “father” of the movement, Giovanni Fattori. The show runs until January 18th; entrance is €10.

If you’re new to the Macchiaoli movement, the best place to head remains the exquisitely located Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori in the port city of Livorno.

And, then, of course, there’s his dome. It was the largest span ever attempted when it was built. The huge hole in the Duomo’s roof was a problem that, without Filippo’s obsessive study of antiquity, 4 million bricks and a large serving of cojones, might never have been solved. But he fixed it, and lived long enough to see the project well on its way.

Perhaps, though, “do it like Brunelleschi” isn’t something we’d advise when it comes to workplace safety. From Vasari’s Lives (Oxford edition, p. 135):

The structure had grown so high by this time that it was extremely disruptive to go down to the ground after having climbed up, and not only was a great deal of time lost by the masters [builders] in going to eat and drink, but they suffered great discomfort from the heat of the day. Filippo therefore found a way to open eating places with kitchens on the dome, where he sold wine as well, and in this fashion no one left work until the evening.

“In this fashion” presumably being a euphemism for “completely legless 140 feet above Piazza del Duomo”.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying “it’s amazing what you can find out from a book”. I love Vasari, and have read him over and over, but as a travel guide he leaves a little to be desired. He made some of it up, for starters. He hated the artistic traditions of Siena, for seconds. You won’t find any such bias in my new guidebook, Florence and Tuscany Day by Day, published last month in the US and out here any day. I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who has read it, or has comments positive or negative to pass on. I’m very proud of the finished product, but these projects are always a work in progress.

If that doesn’t take your fancy for holiday reading while you’re in Tuscany, here are some other suggestions. Enjoy.

• Where to buy the best gelato in Tuscany

• Five art highlights of Tuscany (yes, just five…)

• Doing Tuscany on a budget this summer

Though Simonseeks.com only launched yesterday, there are already one of two other interesting pieces on travel to Tuscany, so head over there and take a look. More soon.

Franco’s small, family-run estate lies on the sand-clay coastal plain, just inland from the holiday area known as the Costa degli Etruschi. Between May and October, the weather is uniformly warm and usually rainless. Great for sunbathers; tricky for a vine.

DOC Bolgheri rules insist that local red wine be Cabernet Sauvignon based. Ever since the success enjoyed by Sassicaia and Ornellaia (and other Super Tuscans), international varietals have been Bolgheri winemakers’ mainstay. Tuscany’s staple red grape, Sangiovese, needs 300m or so of height to perform, and that kind of altitude just isn’t available round here.

Batzella’s inspiration are the similarly gentle coastal slopes of Bordeaux. Peàn and Tâm are blends of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, in an approximate 2:1 ratio. Tâm uses grapes from lower-yielding vines, more new oak barriques and spends longer aging in both barrel and bottle. The resulting ruby-coloured wine has a firm tannic structure that will stand up perfectly to rustic Tuscan mains. Wild boar (cinghiale) comes to mind as a pairing.

Even more radical, and still less typically Tuscan, are Batzella’s other offerings. Bliss 2007, a new addition made in limited quantities with 100% Syrah, is so radical it has to be sold under an IGT classification rather DOC Bolgheri. His Rhone-inspired 70:30 Viognier-Sauvignon Blanc blend, Mezzodì, one-third fermented on its lees in oak with the rest in steel, is modern, fresh and predictably perfumed. In a region whose whites can verge on the bland, it’s un-Tuscan in a very pleasing way.

Franco speaks good English and is happy to see visitors; just call or email ahead. His estate also produces small quantities of olive oil, for which the slopes around the nearby village of Castagneto Carducci are famous.

Elewhere at LIWF ’09 I discovered a Tuscan grape I’d never come across before: Fogliatonda (’round leaf’). Produced in Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia by Donatella Cinelli Colombini, Cenerentola (that’s ‘Cinderella’) Orcia 2004 is surprisingly light and savoury, and would be a great match for a lunchtime bowl of al fresco pasta.

Back on the Chianti trail, Campomaggio‘s Chianti Classico Riserva 2003, aged 24 months in oak, is ripe and hearty. Badia a Coltibuono Chianti Classico Riserva 2005 is as refined as ever. That’s why it’s one of the tried-and-tested Chianti tasting stops recommended in my new Tuscany guidebook, out next month.

If you’re heading to Tuscany for a spot of wine tourism, don’t forget to read my review of two new Wine Travel Guides first. Buon viaggio!

Read the rest at TravelEden.com.

Duomo, Siena

In lieu of a proper post here, I have added some new shots to my flickr set: on Siena. (If you click “Show Info” in the top-right of the slideshow, I’ve written brief guidebook-style information on each slide.)

Last time I was there was in the immediate aftermath of the Palio, in the steamy heat of August last year, won by Bruco (the Worm). By chance, my room for those few nights was in the Bruco contrada. I didn’t get much sleep. On the plus side, my room was bang opposite a gelateria that I might never have found otherwise: Kopa Kabana, on Via de’ Rossi. I suggest you stop by next time you’re in town; the panpepato flavour, based on the traditional Sienese sticky honey, nutty, peppery cake, is spectacular.

An annual subscription offering unlimited access to all 50 guides is £49, or download a single guide for £7.50.

The two Tuscany mini-guides are packed with just the sort of detailed wine tourism information likely to be missing from a mainstream guidebook. Author Michèle Shah has an impressive pedigree in Italian wine, and shows it off with plenty of winemaking and DOC(G) knowledge. There’s just the right portion of technical nuggets for a proper enthusiast.

The Chianti/San Gimignano mini-guide helps you visit a couple of fine estates that also made the cut for my forthcoming book—including Badia a Coltibuono and Vicchiomaggio—but also several of which I wasn’t aware. I’ll be stopping by next time, for sure.

The Montalcino/Montepulciano guide has broad coverage of the heights that Sangiovese hits in southern Tuscany. On top of that, both recommend select places to stay and eat, as well as to shop for wine, food and artisan souvenirs—many of which I can vouch for, too. The detailed food and wine glossaries are invaluable; advice on matching local dishes with the perfect regional wine is an ingenious touch.

“The idea is to have 3 more Tuscany guides, making 5 in total. One by Michèle Shah is planned for mid-summer, probably to be called ‘Between Florence and Lucca’; later there will be 2 to the Tuscan coast areas,” explains Wink Lorch, who founded and runs Wine Travel Guides. “Eventually we will extend the guides to cover other key Italian wine regions like Piedmont, Friuli and Umbria.”

There are occasional gripes, of course: travel guides are personal things, especially for a guidebook writer. I’d like a bit of help choosing a winery or hotel when I don’t have time to see them all. Even a crude star system works for me. The guide needs a proofread, and if I’m being pedantic it should be trattorie not trattorias; ditto with contrada.

One or two out-and-out errors have slipped through: there are no Pietro Lorenzetti frescoes in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, Banchi di Sopra originates at Piazza Salimbeni, not by San Domenico. The main street in Cortona isn’t the “Corso”, but Via Nazionale (sometimes nicknamed “flat street” because it’s the only one in town that is). Montalcino’s Consorzio moved from the address provided a year or so ago, and the driving directions from Rome are wrong.

Compared to the precision of the wine-related information, the “regular” tourist advice is a touch vague in places.

Montepulciano’s Bravio delle Botti, costumed shenanigans in the usual Tuscan style, is a curious omission from the festival section, given that it involves racing wine barrels up the town’s precipitous Corso.

So, my overall impression is of a guide that doesn’t quite deliver on the (non-wine related) travel side of its promise. But I’ve not seen any impartial source that’s quite as good at helping me plan an independent wine tour round Tuscany. If you know one, enlighten me in the comments below. But it’ll have to go some to beat my Wine Travel Guide.

* Follow Wink Lorch, founder of Wine Travel Guides, on Twitter for plenty of wine trivia plus occasional offers and competitions.
* Register at Wine Travel Guides to claim your free sample guide.

Lorenzo Maitani, Last Judgement, Orvieto cathedral

A quick update on “Dante’s Inferno“, the XBOX360 game I trailed here last year. There are two new teasers for your viewing pleasure, plus an interview about the development process.

The game is based on book 1 of Dante’s epic and, incredibly, “most of the dialogue and narration you hear in the game does come from the poem”. That’s some serious research. To my eye, the game’s art direction also shares much with the Tuscan tradition of the Last Judgement, a perennial favourite from pre-Renaissance art right through to Michelangelo and beyond. No idea what Dante would have made of all this, but I can well see painters like Taddeo di Bartolo and Luca Signorelli enjoying the gorefest.

The expected release date is unconfirmed, but the game is “at least a year away”.

Giotto's campanile, Florence

It’s easy to get overwhelmed in a city like Florence when you touch down for the first time. A top-10 hitlist is a great way to ease the inevitable sight-anxiety, and one of these days I’ll get round to writing one. While you’re waiting, check out the Top 10 Things to Do in Florence at WhyGo Italy.

Of course, I disagree with many of them. For starters, I never leave town without at least one trip up to the Romanesque basilica of San Miniato al Monte. The place is one of Florence’s (rare) contemplative corners, and plugs right into my love of all things pre-Renaissance. I blame Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic (well worth a read, by the way, for anyone interested in Tuscan architecture).

Visiting (and discussing) Florence is like that. It’s impossible to agree on the ‘best bits’, and no matter how long you’ve allowed for your stay, you’ll depart with the feeling you’ve missed something amazing—and you probably have. But you can always come back.

Corpus Domini parade, Orvieto, Umbria

Far from peaking here, February marks the first month in a busy Tuscan festival calendar. If I was planning to attend one a month, my year might look something like this.

March

Head down to Pitigliano, in the Maremma, for the Torciata di San Giuseppe, on the 19th. A torchlit parade along ancient Etruscan tufa paths concludes with the burning of a wicker man in the town square to welcome spring. More information from the Pitigliano tourist office.

April

Aside from the obvious Holy Week and Pasqua celebrations all over Tuscany, I’d pop over the border to Umbria for Coloriamo I Cieli, a balloon and kite festival held around Castiglione del Lago on the western shore of Lago Trasimeno.

May

Ascension Day in Florence sees the annual Festa del Grillo (the Cricket Festival) in the Parco del Cascine, alongside the Arno. Though it’s not quite the same since the city banned the use of real crickets in 1999, it remains one of the city’s traditional family days out.

June

Tuscany goes festa-mad in June, and among plenty of choice I’d probably make for Pisa for San Ranieri. On the evening of the 16th, a whole stretch of the Arno is lit up with 70,000 candles, the luminara, followed by fireworks before midnight. More information from Pisa’s tourist office.

July

There’s only one place to head in July: to Siena, for the Palio. The day itself can be unpleasantly packed, so I’d adopt one of two strategies. Either go for the costumed practice days in the run-up to the main event on the 2nd (they usually begin on June 29th). Or head into Siena on the day after and book yourselves a hotel inside the winning contrada (Siena’s tourist office will help on that one). You’re guaranteed dress-suit parades, traditional songs, impromptu celebrations and all the rest of it, as the winners rub everyone else’s noses in it—all night, every night.

August

Instead of Siena’s second (and marginally more important) Palio, on the 16th, high summer would probably take me to Montepulciano. The Bravio delle Botti, an uphill giant-barrel-pushing race between the town’s quarters, takes place on the penultimate Sunday. Which doesn’t sound like much, unless you’ve ever tried to walk up that hill in August.

September

As summer comes to an end, it’s time to toast the harvest at the Rassegna del Chianti Classico, in Greve-in-Chianti. Buy a glass in the square and wander the stalls sloshing sipping away. A number of wine-themed excursions and events cluster round the Rassegna in early September.

October

It’s back to southern Tuscany in late October for Montalcino’s Sagra del Tordo. If you’ve even wondered what spit-roast songbirds taste like, washed down with Tuscany’s finest red wine (Brunello), now’s your chance to find out.

Things (thankfully) start to slow down from November. By now, I’m thinking I’ve probably earned the rest.