A four-year-old’s voice cuts through the quiet of a Tuscan morning. “Papa, I need to show you something.” The child’s small feet race across cold marble, then pause at the edge of the olive orchard. “I heard a voice. It was calling my name.” Maybe it was the wind, I suggest. Nature. She insists that it was a fairy.
The Etruscans settled in this valley around 900 BC, blending death into daily life rather than treating it as a sharp divide. Their tombs at Cerveteri reveal a culture that saw death as a continuation—one of feasting, music, and dance. DH Lawrence later described this perspective in Sketches of Etruscan Places, writing that for the Etruscans, death offered “jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance.” Yet excavations at the Necropoli delle Pianacce uncovered a darker layer: the Tomba della Quadriga Infernale, with its frescoes of a demonic chariot, suggests the journey to the afterlife included peril before reaching that continuation.
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Lawrence, who died of tuberculosis in 1930, knew the valley well. After visiting Cerveteri in 1927, he wrote The Ship of Death, lines that still echo: “Now it is autumn and the falling fruit / and the long journey towards oblivion.” A hundred miles south, near Monte Amiata, the poem’s next stanza feels inevitable: “The apples falling like great drops of dew / to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.”
Grief in the Shadow of Olive Groves
For a family staying at Tenuta di Trinoro, a winery in southern Val d’Orcia, the valley’s quiet carries a different burden. Their first miscarriage arrived with a doctor’s detached words, the father working beside his partner as the news settled in. Over the next year, two more losses followed. Grief came not as a dramatic reckoning but as a slow, unspoken ache. “For men, it’s projection,” the father’s father had once said. “For women, it’s physical. They lose a part of themselves.” Yet the father couldn’t shake the sense that he, too, was failing—that the land itself, with its ancient olive groves and pomegranate trees bleeding bright fruit, witnessed their pain.
They arrived in Val d’Orcia by chance. A hurricane in Jamaica, a canceled flight to Brazil, and a friend’s offhand suggestion, “Just come to Italy.”, redirected them here. The northern towns, like Pienza, gleamed with tourist polish, but the south held emptier villages: Sarteano, its medieval walls still intact; Cetona, its shuttered windows preserving centuries of silence. The Etruscans had shaped the land in ways beyond tombs, the way it absorbed loss, as if the hills themselves could hold sorrow.
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Unconventional Roots of a Winery Empire
At Tenuta di Trinoro, the vineyards follow the land’s contours, where Bordeaux grapes like Merlot and Cabernet Franc thrive despite the region’s harsh conditions. The estate’s founder, Andrea Franchetti, planted these varieties in the early 1990s, sourcing cuttings from Pomerol’s châteaux. The heavy clay soil and erratic rainfall would have deterred most growers, but he saw potential where others saw only struggle.
His son, Ben, now runs the estate after his father’s death in 2021. “Today, the estate sits firmly among Italy’s most respected producers, its reputation built on a site others dismissed. Andrea’s life followed a similar trajectory, unconventional and intuitive, shaped as much by literature, art and travel as by wine, with well-documented family ties to Cy Twombly and Ernest Hemingway.”
The estate’s grounds include Palazzo la Nuta, a casale built with local fieldstone and brick, its weathered facade contrasting with Tuscany’s polished luxury villas. Nearby, a pink dome stands out, a deliberate break from the surrounding calm. The layout reflects Franchetti’s ability to find value in what others overlooked, whether in soil, architecture, or the land’s hidden potential.
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Etruscan Tombs and the Journey Beyond
Further south, Cetona sits just beyond Val d’Orcia’s official borders, its shuttered windows and warm stone buildings untouched by tourism. The drive back passes Sarteano, a medieval stronghold with Etruscan roots, its fortress still guarding the valley. Nearby, the Necropoli delle Pianacce, a network of fourth-century rock-cut tombs, includes the Tomba della Quadriga Infernale, discovered in 2003. Its frescoes depict a demonic chariot, reinforcing the Etruscans’ belief that death was both a crossing and a perilous journey.
The family’s youngest child wanders among the olive trees, their silver-grey leaves filtering morning light while pomegranates split open, seeds spilling like embers. That night, as she sleeps, the father walks into the vineyards. The earth smells of iron and damp soil. Above him, stars blink indifferently. In the distance, an Apennine wolf howls, a sound carrying weight older than grief, something the Etruscans might have called a crossing.