Ronciglione | Baptism into the Other Italy
The story of how one small town rewired how I travel, and how Anywhere Italy began
First and foremost, this is an origin story. Yes, you will find some insights on travel here, but this is, or will be, probably the most personal story on this publication. I’ll try writing the personal notes shorter and focus more on the travel documentary, but you know, zero promises.
As of today, we have been living in Tuscany for three years now. Before we decided to move our lives here permanently, we did a lot of long rides through Italy. Slow travel, as a travel journal would say. Not counting the 2-3 weeks-long regular holidays to Italy that most Europeans do anyway, the first long trip was after, or more like, during the pandemic in the summer of 2021.
We’ve spent nearly 3 months in Italy. A couple of weeks in Lerici, a couple of weeks in Florence, and more than a month in Rome, and some in-between days here and there. The goal of that trip was this: experience Italy without the masses of tourists (most foreign travel was banned that time, we’ve got our vaccines, so we were the few ones who could travel), and live in the two main tourist destinations for a longer time (Florence & Rome).
Also, we knew that we would get married at the end of August, a couple of days after we returned from this trip. So we kept the trip romantic, picked our wedding rings from an artisan in Florence, and had a pre-honeymoon weekend in a small villa for just the two of us. The latter will be important later in this article.
Long story short, we arrived from the North and made our way down to Rome. In Rome, I picked a place called Fonte Dell’Vsignolo, a perfectly designed farm estate turned villa, next to a town called Ronciglione. The villa was run by a wonderful German lady, by the way, and designed by her Italian husband. Not sure if it's still operational, though. It was 4 years ago, last time we were there. Anyhow, we ended up in Ronciglione for a romantic weekend.
Now, this story is not about what happened in the villa, because that’s private. But when we first left the villa for a dinner in the town. Ronciglione. Like you, we had probably never heard about this town before, and I am not even sure if we were able to pronounce it correctly at first. But that is where somehow something clicked. I don’t know, the universe was just in the right constellation, or we simply got drunk after dinner, or it was the summer evening, or the landlady in the villa spiked our drinks, but something was totally and completely in balance, and we, or at least I, got the idea.
Before this experience, when we traveled, we did what most people did. We went to the main city and spent some time there. We tried some “hidden things to see in X,” but mostly we just stayed in The City or In The Destination, and our hack was to stay longer than usual so something unusual could happen. Our hack was time, because we had time. We worked online, and there were no offices or schools we needed to get back to. I remember, one of the first “hmmm that is different” experiences I had was in Valencia. Finally, a Spanish city that is not Madrid, Barcelona, or Sevilla. Finally, a place which functions as a city, a place where you can live and pass time, without encountering masses of tourists. Or when I spent an unusually long time in Tel Aviv and only dedicated a few days to Jerusalem. Or when I was locked on Malta for a week, alone, doing pretty much nothing, just wandering around Mdina and Valletta. These were fundamentally different travel experiences compared to the usual “go to Cyprus, spend a week in a hotel in Ayia Napa, do a day trip to Nicosia” or “let’s just go to Athens for a week.”
Italy was even worse in this, because the country has so much to offer that everyone is ticking off the basics first. And even the basics take a lot of time. I have lived in Florence for two weeks, and since then I have been living sort of next to it for years now, and I am still unable to say that I’ve seen it all. So obviously, when we went to Italy, we did the basics. Even on this first longer trip, we did the basics: Florence, Rome. Ok, in Lerici, we got a taste of a bit of difference, but still, we went there to see the Cinque Terre without the armies of Jennifers. And, by the way, this longer trip was probably the, I don’t know, tenth trip total to Italy, twentieth if we combine both of our trips. Sophie did an entire road trip from Venice to Sicily before.
But in Ronciglione, something has changed. The best way to describe this is this:
Suddenly, we weren’t running around. Ronciglione has nothing, and I mean zero things to show you. It’s a pretty generic medieval town near Rome. It doesn’t have a big piazza. There is a gate, a duomo, 2-3 main streets, and pretty much that’s it. Yet, it was the center of our attention at that time. After spending just a few days there, we went back to Rome without wrinkles, with an oddly weird smile on our faces.
I’ve realized that I want to visit these generic towns. I started to favor day trips to odd places, or towns which I knew nothing about. Our travel planner was Google Maps, randomly clicking around, rather than Tripadvisor or Wikipedia. The idea of Anywhere Italy wasn’t born there. But the mindset shift for Anywhere Italy happened there.
On our next trip, we didn’t even stop at any of the famous places. We went straight down to Calabria and Sicily. Then we ended up in Rome for a year, but that’s another story…
So, Ronciglione was our baptism into hidden Italian towns. The first time, we spent only a few days there. On our next trip, we ended up in Rome for a year. From there, we’ve visited the town and the area many times. It was our first patch on the Italian map, which we discovered only for ourselves. With time, we’ve learned that this patch is called Tuscia.
After a month in Rome, we wanted to spend two more weeks elsewhere on our way back home to Budapest. I can’t even remember which city it was. Probably Venice or Bologna, because they are halfway between Rome and Budapest, but I know that we canceled our plans. We booked two more weeks in the center of Ronciglione. Yes, we’ve got red-pilled so much that we changed our entire plan and booked more days in an almost meaningless, small town in the middle of nothing in Lazio.
Since it was a small town and there was nothing to do there, we quickly discovered everything around us. We quickly became friends with Paola, who was an Italian aristocrat who lived in New York as a socialite, poet, writer, filmmaker, everything, and returned a couple of years ago to her estate here in Ronciglione. We’ve spent a couple of days by her pool. She invited us to a pool party with local artists, which sadly we couldn’t attend as it was two days after our departure. Her place, Relais Villa Lina is bookable.
We also spent time in the local lake, Lago di Vico, which is the heart of the Tuscia region. We’ve learned that the area is a supplier for Ferrero, as most farmers are growing hazelnuts here. Sophie once forgot her purse at home and realized after ordering gelato at the local bar. Got waived and even got free coffee, just because she was “bellissima.” These experiences are small and indifferent, but they were our first in Italy, and they were as close as you can get to local life. Banality, I know, but why the hell am I still remembering this after years? It didn’t even happen with me.
This was the first place where we just sat at the local bar and watched the locals. The young ones are the best, the teenagers. I know it might sound creepy, but it was here where we named all of them Marcos and Francescas. They are like doves on the main piazza, always going around in groups, always separated, girls and boys, two groups. They dress up, they are loud, they are like parrots, always talking. Almost no one is checking their phones, and you see no one doing selfies. It’s like the pre-internet era, totally weird and amazing at the same time to see. Or the old people, the group of grandpas who sit at the coffee table from 9 AM till 12:30, doing absolutely nothing, drinking a coffee, a glass of wine, maybe smoking a cigarette, or a cigar, reading the local paper, maybe having a talk with a friend. Then at 12:30, promptly, they religiously stand up, and like a rocket ship they speed up home, because it’s lunchtime.
Again, banality of everyday things. But it was Ronciglione where we have not just started noticing these, but started enjoying them. We were the creepy foreigners who were sitting on the same piazza at the same coffee table for an hour or more, and watching other people doing their things. Sometimes we were even more creepy and took a photo of the evening street.
I remember the third time that we returned here. Almost a year had passed after our first visit. It was my birthday, so we spent a couple of days again in the villa. We went for the same walks. We went to the same bars. No one recognized us, of course. But it felt like we were returning home. Which is an extremely odd feeling to have, because even then, our home was not even in this country. Still, feelings.
Because of the banality of the experience, I can only write about it with meaningless words. I could say this is slow travel. Or I could say this is watching life happen. Or, maybe, I can quote the Nobel-prize-winning Hungarian writer, Laszlo Krasznahorkai:
“Just watching this fucking life pass by.”*
* “Csak nézni, hogy telik a kurva élet” - in Hungarian, from his work Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango). I have no clue how it is officially translated into English, but above is my own rough one.
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