A C. T U. A L. L Y

Caspar David Friedrich was never one of my favorite landscape painters.   I’ve seen quite a few of his canvases at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and they never much appealed.   Yet, after a recent getaway on the German island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea (which the Germans refer to as the Ostsee ), where we saw the magnificent chalk cliffs he painted (above), his work took on a new resonance.   On Friedrich from Wiki : Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti- classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. … F...

We first saw Valuberti, a small borgo (hamlet) 16 kilometers outside Castiglion Fiorentino, Provincia d’Arezzo, Regione Toscana, 25 years ago.   I had wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday, and spending the month of August in Tuscany was my idea of perfect.   We were living in San Francisco at the time, and a column in the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle called “Follow the Reader” raved about Alda Fantina’s house at Valuberti.   Inquiries were faxed (it was 1997).   It was available, and the rest is history. Every year thereafter, when deciding where to vacation, we just kept going back to Valuberti, never wanting to return to our American lives or livelihoods.   When a house became available, we jumped on it, and on June 4, 2001, we bought a small, abandoned house next to Alda’s.   It had no plumbing, the suggestion of an electrical system, a ground floor formerly occupied by turkeys and rabbits, and an upper floor full of pigeon droppin...