Watch Out: Tuscans Approaching!

Dedicated to my Tuscan grandfather – Manfredo Ciampi

This piece is a deep dive into my Tuscan heritage, with its characteristic misanthropic irony which hides and reveals a unique blend of love for our land, irreverent pragmatism, and poetic imagination. The text is adapted from controversial writer Curzio Malaparte’s Maladetti Toscani (Cursed Tuscans).

If I had to do a portrait of the Tuscans, I would do it with lean colours. And perhaps I wouldn’t use oil paints, although the oil in Tuscany is good: I would rather use a drypoint. I would etch the oval shape of their faces with a single stroke from temple to chin, without uncertainties, regrets nor smudges. I would make the lips thin, as true Florentine painters do, taut and closed. The eyes would be looking sideways without turning the head, in the Etruscan manner.

They would have slender wrists, bony hands with long thread-like fingers. Wide chest, but not muscle-bound, and the same goes for the arms, long and hard, round in the shoulders, but sharp at the elbows: because elbows in Tuscany are not used, like in the rest of Italy, to make the sign of the cross, but to elbow each other in the stomach.

– From Maledetti Toscani by Italian Tuscan writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957)