Many artists have returned in recent years to take up a more permanent residence in this area, in the hope of regaining a different sense of time. Seduced by the idea of putting themselves to the test in unfamiliar surroundings, many of them have chosen to settle there permanently. Others spend long periods alternating the slow rhythm of country life with the fast, chaotic but vital life of the city.
Allow me to go back to a fairly distant period in time, when my memory returns to two men, with different backgrounds and concepts about the world, but united by the same honesty towards their vocation. I met the first many years ago and had to interview him. He received me in his isolated old farmhouse near Castellina in Chianti. He was sitting on a large stone, his wrists on his knees, his hands folded, his thoughts turned towards something grim. When he heard me coming, our eyes met as he was really gazing at me. He was Leo Ferrè, the strolling actor and intellectual, the poet of the people who with his music, his sad, cutting songs, his bitter, passionate romances, had earned the fame of a troublesome individual, a man ‘against’. He was frank, even harsh when necessary. He was always upset by the commonplaces of certain encounters, I realized that, in his case, I had to leave the usual cliches behind me. He asked real questions and did not admit formalities. “Are you here to write that even Leo Ferré has chosen the Chianti, to live in this wonderful countryside which is still the most beautiful in the world, etc. etc, or are you here to speak to me?” I Understood the provocation and the interview was a success and so was the meeting. A meeting that taught me something. Freedom for him was not something vague but a condition to be sought day after day. And to seek freedom you have to run more risks than usual and what is usual is not enough if you really want to run risks. Risk in itself implies a large amount of irresponsibility, but also an ancestral link to the first instinct of life, so much so that the true risk of life is nothing but an impelling search, a useful anxiety besides being an act of generosity to yourself. This dimension of the soul was very much a part of himself. When we left he said to me that the Chianti was very beautiful, but the same could be said of many other parts of the countryside and that if he had bought a house here, it was because a friend had made him an offer and he had acted on an impulse and, having done it, he had nothing to regret. We met again only once before his death, and now the memory of him is still strong.
His wife, signora Maria Cristina Diaz Ferré and their daughter, Daniella, produce Poggio ai Mori, now an established Chianti Classico. They do this in the unassuming, practical way that Leo loved with the usual understatement.
During the same years, a friend of mine took me to a lovely farmhouse with a large garden full of local plants, and a strange, inanimate vegetation. When getting closer to them, I realized that they were forged metal sculptures, hand-forged by the imaginative fantasy of Lionni who seemed in the past to have been an elegant professor of an English college behind whose sharp, bright eyes was hidden the soul of a child. And he confirmed this side of his nature when we got more familiar. Indeed, I had the sensation that I had come in touch with a current child-like energy. Leo had already been affected by the disease that brought him to death but his playful dialogue with the world had not lost any of its freshness. We took leave of his imaginary plants (one of which can be admired in the square of Gaiole in Chianti) and we stopped at his studio to admire some canvases on which he was working and spoke about his activity as a writer and his main activity as a great advertising artist and illustrator of childrens’ books or also, as he suggested smiling, for “adults who refuse to grow up”. And of course he considered himself the first of this category. Ferrè and Lionni were among the first artists who, in less ’suspicious’ times, loved this land.
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See also:

The Markets of Chianti, Meeting a Stranger, Tuscan Antique Furniture, Chianti by Bike, Portrait of a Land, Chianti at The Bar, Chianti Theatrical Festival, Music and Culture in The Vineyards, Villa Le Barone, The Art of Hospitality at Podere Terreno, Chianti English Style, The Legendary Millemiglia in Chianti

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