Val D'Orcia

I’ve always loved road trips. This one, however, has the makings of one of my all-time favorites. With the bittersweet awareness of our fast-approaching departure always in the back of my mind, I’ve decided to savor the last few weeks. It has a bit difficult, especially as whenever I let my thoughts wander, they inevitably turn towards home. But yesterday’s experience was compelling enough to bring my back from the future and into the past.


We’ve just finished reading War in Val D’Orcia, a diary kept by a remarkable woman, Iris Origo. She chronicles her experiences during WWII, treating catastrophes with simple pragmatism and tragic circumstances with sympathetic strength. Her household and large estate provided a refuge for children, displaced families, and escaped POWs of many nationalities. When her villa was eventually taken over by retreating German troops, she and her husband had to flee with the twenty-three children under their care to the next village, dodging German mines and Allied shelling.
One of the stops along our road trip was La Foce, the Origos’ estate. The landscape was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, but not at all in a postcard, picture-perfect kind of way. These hills are stand aloof, the valley does not enfold you. Iris described the land as “wild and lonely.” In surroundings so subdued, it was difficult to picture the hell of war ravaging the graceful English garden, the quiet olive groves, and the empty fields of plowed earth.


I’ve always found visits to historical sites vaguely disappointing. When the narrative is confined to the pages of a book, the imagination is free to wander at will, to make men into either heroes or villains and actions into feats of valor or dastardly deeds. While some people want to see the actual places or, better yet, meet witnesses or descendants, I’ve always preferred my vague, epic notions to the commonplace but oddly pretentious relics of the past. I like my idealistic simplifications and dislike facing the reality of the past.

However, La Foce was anything but a disappointment. Iris’ simple, unemotional writing made it difficult to turn a collection of farms and a villa into a besieged kingdom, difficult to blow anything out of proportion, and impossible to vilify or idealize. Indeed, it was difficult to see how she could have done anything else under the circumstances. But now I’ve seen what she risked losing and begun to realize the vastness of the responsibility upon her and her husband’s shoulders.
Even so, I still could not imagine the menace of the Spitfires streaking overhead, the garden blown to bits by shelling, the villa ravaged by embittered soldiers. That is, until we were on our way back to the bus after a visit to the little graveyard. Walking along under the shelter of the beautiful oaks that lined the gravel road, we were just discussing how hard it was to visualize the destruction of the war when a plane passed overhead. Normally I wouldn’t have even noticed something like that, but this was the loudest plane that I’ve heard in a long time. It seemed that some airborne menace blazed across the peaceful blue of the sky. Then, and only then, could I see the destruction, feel the impact of the bombs in the earth, imagine Iris clutching her infant daughter and hustling the other children into the ditches alongside the road.