No I don’t mean in the tree hugging, hemp suit, brown paper recycling way.  The landscape itself is actually green – bright, glowing verde.

Everytime we’ve come to Tuscany in the past it has been midsummer.  And the heat of the preceding months have done their work – the colours of summer are tans and browns and burnt ochres.  The colour palate hints at green in the trees, cypresss and pines, but the overwhelming look is a faded patchwork of earthy tones.  Fields of sun flowers are dotted in between hay fields that have been harvested and now lie dormant, brown and tanned in the sun, the hay resting in rolled bails drying and waiting for collection before Autumn.

But May is different.  Everything is growing furiously.  Crops have yet to be harvested and the countryside is bursting with life.  It’s like some controversial artist has taken a brush and wiped the brightest green across the Tuscan hills and valleys.  The Tuscan tourist board would not be impressed.

A neighbouring villa on a nearby hilltop.

As we drove to our cottage for the first time this green-ness took us by surprise.  Were we in the right place?  Had we inadvertantly stumbled into Tuscany’s greener and wetter neighbour Umbria by mistake? Were our memories playing tricks with us?

Happily the last few days have seen the start of Tuscany changing from spring to summer.  Spotted across the landscape, some fields that were green have now been harvested and have, overnight, taken on that dried summer feel.  In the mornings we hear the sound of tractors firing up and later that day another field has been transformed.

Already we can see the Tuscany we remember returning, slowly but surely.

The full view from the terrace.

After a 2 hour drive from the Portofino Coast with a stop off in Florence to pick up some doggie supplies we arrived at our place.

We were greeted by the owner Mrs Patrizia whose grasp of English was amost as good as our grasp of Italian and after much hand waving, nodding and gesturing she showed us around our home for the next 6 months or so.

The guided tour didn’t take long.

We’d figured that the whole cottage was about half the size of our living room at home and we were right.  Three rooms – an open plan lounge, dining room and kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom.  The open plan area is compact enough that taking the dishes from the dining table to the kitchen means leaning back and putting things on the bench.

The cottage has an unofficial fourth room which will probably get used the most as summer progresses – the front verandah which is shaded in the mornings and catches the afternoon sun filtered through the surrounding trees.  In the height of summer this will be the centre of living, I suspect.

Although the cottage is ideal for a week long summer rental, it lacks a few things we consider necessities for a 6 month stay and we are spending the first week making lists. Currently the list contains everything from a decent kettle (making coffee, no problem everything is provided but boiling water for tea means a saucepan of water on the stove) to more pillows, a barbecue (we are kiwis after all) and decent wine glasses.

One thing that took us by surprise was the lack of a decent oven. There is a gas hob and a small benchtop oven but nowhere for Jean to cook her famous Tuscan roast chicken.  This something we are going to remedy and we are on the lookout for a decent benchtop oven.  Either that or we are going to be buying one hell of a barbecue.