A Literary Landscape- Iris Origo and the Val d’Orcia
My mom capturing an image of the Val d’Orcia with Cypress in the foreground and background
The Val d’Orcia is a special area within the Tuscany region which is also recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Geographically, it is a ‘valley’ (read: Val) that hosts the ‘Orcia’ river in the more southern part of the region of Tuscany. The UNESCO recognition for this natural area is quite strictly connected to the way the landscape was captured by Renaissance painters, specifically those from the Sienese School. These iconic views have “come to be seen as icons of the Renaissance and have profoundly influenced the development of landscape thinking,” as explained in the UNESCO criteria. You can read the full criteria here. As described in the Introduction to the Region, if you imagine Tuscany with Cypress trees lined up across undulating verdant hills, ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, you are envisioning an image of the Val d’Orcia.
Thus, it is probably fair to say this aesthetic was ‘born’ in the Renaissance and captured by some artists, but it was further popularized by an incredible 20th century woman named Iris Origo.
A picture of me standing in Origo’s landscape at the incredible Rosewood Castiglion Del Bosco resort and estate
Until recently, I was unaware of this literary connection and fascinating woman with such a compelling story in the Val d’Orcia. As a literature teacher, I am always drawn to the literary connections and history of a place, and I attempt to highlight these throughout all Italian regions on this website. Origo fascinates me on a number of levels. First, she wrote her first ‘war diary’/ memoir in 1939 at the age of 37, my current age when writing this segment. However, unlike me, she was born into the expat life as the daughter of a wealthy American, who served as American vice-consul in Milan in her early years. Her mother, on the other hand, came from a British family of rank. Thus, Origo, already the product of mixed Anglo cultures, was raised in Italy and married an Italian, 10 years her senior, but of a similar priviledged social class. Iris Origo is so central to the idea of Tuscany that resonates with America, that is, the imagery of the Val d’Orcia, because she helped create it. Understanding Iris Origo helped me understand Tuscany, and specifically, the American attraction to it, on a deeper level. Tuscany is now fixed in the Anglo imagination. Florence, for instance, is the most popular city to ‘study abroad’ as featured in the recent Netflix series ‘From Scratch’. Alas, the hold that Florence and the larger Tuscany region has on the American heart stays strong.
This article in The New Yorker gives a comprehensive overview of Origo’s biography, but if you are planning a trip to Tuscany, I HIGHLY recommend you read one of her diary style memoirs in full. Find them on Amazon here. You will learn about Tuscany and the context of World War Two from the intimate and subjective point of view of an outsider/insider who lived through it. In addition to planting the iconic Cypress trees that now dominate the imagination and our understanding of a ‘Tuscan Landscape’, she sheltered refugee children, Italian Jews and Anti-Fascists on their Tuscan estate. She was not a war hero. She was not even as political or outspoken as she might have been to receive our 21st century praise.
Another view of the Val d’Orcia in peaceful paradise at the Rosewood Castiglion Del Bosco. Origo, interestingly, saw this view during times of peace and times of war.
She is a complex, literary, magnanimous woman, an insightful writer who not only contributed to the image of Tuscany in the Anglo imagination, but contributed something special to the canons of travel writing and war literature. I only wish I had read her works earlier. Through Iris Origo’s eyes, I found that Tuscany was given even further depth and dimension.
A school named after Origo in Montepulciano. We happened to park very nearby and I fortuitously was able to take this shot.