D ario G aggio . The Shaping of Tuscany

It is one of the most iconic roads in Italy—a cypress-lined zigzag that runs up a Tuscan hill to a rustic farmhouse. The site is La Foce, a luxury agriturismo resort nestled in Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia. According to Dario Gaggio in The Shaping of Tuscany, it has come to represent an “authentic” Tuscan rural scene prized by tourists and preservationists. The scene has become so generic that variations of it can be found everywhere, from the walls of Italian restaurants to the dust jackets of popular novels. What is not generic, however, is a construct forged by generations of conflict that have shaped the Tuscan landscape since the nineteenth century. The bel paesaggio, so dear to Frances Mayes’s readers, is an embedded landscape of conflict, and the seemingly harmonious Tuscan scenery is, in fact, a reflection of the contradictions and complexities that have shaped the region in the twentieth century. In this finely textured and nuanced study, Gaggio convincingly demonstrates that what appears to be “heritage” is actually the product of a profoundly modern process

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