What Time is it in Italy?

Well...It Depends.

(This article is a bit different than what I’ve done in the past. If you read the article, you’ll see some videos that are applicable. Unfortunately, if you’re listening to the voiceover [press “play” at the very top] you won’t be able to see them! BUT…Have no fear! If you’re listening, you’ll hear some recordings I made that are also applicable, and not available for readers.

You choose…or do both!)

The day most certainly did not start like any other.

At least not from my 21st century point of view. Now, perhaps if I was living in the 14th century, a member of the noble class, then what I was experiencing at 7:59 AM would have been as routine as anything I could know.

The bells in the tower of Chiasa di San Biagio, the church in Montecatini Val diCecina, began to ring their bells according to the clockwork within. The sound was solid and loud. The tone? Well, each strike of the hammer produced a ring that was somewhat tinny and dissonant as if the wear of centuries of ringing have caused the bells to fall out of tune, the original clarity tarnished not unlike the theology of Christianity itself, depending on who you ask.

Still, there was a distinct romanticism to the medieval alarm clock. There was no snooze-button feature, no way to delay the beginning of awake time. When the eight-o'clock gonging was complete, the tower continued its call to those in earshot with its own rendition of Ave Maria de Lourdes. To the already awake locals it is a call to mass. To me, it was a plea to arise and enjoy the world around me.

Loud though they were, I was glad for the bells. While I wouldn’t be attending mass, I did find a different kind of salvation that day.

Italy is six hours ahead in the day from where I live on the east coast of the United States, and this fact was always in the back of my consciousness—the constant understanding that I was in a different time zone. It almost seemed like a different reality.

This was our second trip to Italy, the first being two years prior. On the first visit, a Mediterranean Cruise, we’d taken a shore excursion into the ancient city of Volterra and fell in love with the stillness of the Tuscan region. We’d promised ourselves that if we ever came back, Tuscany would be our destination. Two summers later we fulfilled our promise to ourselves.

My wife had found an Air B-n-B in a 14^th century tower, Torre dei Belforti. It was built in the first part of the 14th century–that’s the 1300’s, folks–by the Belforti family of Volterra. Within a couple decades, the nearby church bell tower was also erected¹.

One of the things I like best about visiting old places is to do my own little version of time travel. I imagine myself in the same location, only decades or centuries earlier. It’s as if my extrovert ways aren’t just about seeking connections with people in my life now. I wonder to myself about the life experiences of people of the past. What were the similarities to what I’m experiencing now? It's a curiosity driven by the belief that human experiences transcend time - that joy, worry, love, and daily routines connect us across centuries.

With architecture that’s foreign to me and often times older than anything we have in America, time travel is somewhat easier to do in Italy than back home.

Take Florence, for instance. The buildings look older, mostly because they are. The roads aren’t necessarily paved, but laid out with cobblestones, or large slabs of basalt somewhere over the edge of gray, closer to black. They feel different to walk on than what I’m used to. Overall, the feel of the locale is different, so it doesn’t take much to transport myself to a different time. I close my eyes and listen to the conversations in Italian. I feel the warmth of the baking sun and am reminded that the sun which shone upon the Florentines of centuries past is the same warming me today.

The warmth felt like warmth, and the air they breathed was like air I breathe. The River Arno was there just like it is today, and the sounds of water lapping the shores would have been there then too. I hear the click-clock of horse drawn carriages and pretend they’re not transporting tourists, but ancient locals as they would have been centuries before. I’m not in the carriage myself, but can imagine hopping out of the way, all the while avoiding mounds of horse manure. There was hustle and bustle then just like there is hustle and bustle today.

I like to time travel this way. The reality is, in the grand scheme of eternity, those we call ancients share the same blip on the timeline of the universe that we do.

Time travel was especially fun in the tower.

Laying there with my eyes closed at 7:59 AM as the bells rang might be the most efficient experience of time travel in which I’ve ever engaged. There I was, 28 meters up an ancient castle-like stone structure–that’s 91.8635 American feet–on the 5th floor. The room is square, and I don’t really have to explain what it looks like. What you’re imagining is how it is.

I try to imagine how a 14th century person would experience it. Surely they’d awake and find the furniture in the room to be familiar in function to what we use now. You know, some chairs and a bed.

There are three windows, each on a separate side of the room, opened so the night breeze has full access to our living quarters. The breeze is stiff at that height, and it serves as the only source of air conditioning during the summer. We found it to be as effective as we needed.

As I lay there listening to the bells chime, I was reminded that the sun streaming through the window was shining upon the same spot it did 700 years to the day prior. It’s the same sun basking through the easternmost window as it has every morning since the first stone was set in place.

I can’t be sure, but I think my experience that morning wasn’t too dissimilar from what it might have been had I been waking up in the same room in 1350.

Time traveled.

It was a fun thing to think about. The floor where my bare feet were walking supported how many people through the years? I gave it little thought, but enough to produce a half-grin as I thought about it.

I went to a different window and looked out. Several meters below the base of The Belforti Tower, situated off to the northern edge of the property is a garden full of olive trees.

An actual olive garden. That’s where my wife and I would be spending a few hours in the morning, quietly, until our adult children pulled themselves out of bed and joined us.

Down a path into the garden is a pool. It’s manmade—gunite, if you’re curious—but understated in its design. No deeper than 4 feet at its maximum depth at the center, it’s a small pool of gradual slopes and natural-feeling steps to sit upon, should one feel inclined to recline. I made my way to the pool the morning after our first sleep in the tower and made the most lovely, albeit accidental, discovery.

There was no WiFi in the olive garden, and it served as a cold turkey purge from internet scrolling for me. On this day I’d learn there are more natural ways to get a dopamine rush. I thought it would be by reading an eBook.

Settled in a sling chair next to the pool I began reading. The wildlife, however, had other ideas and I was soon interrupted by a dive-bombing horsefly. I tried to ignore it, but it was persistent. And, as it turned out…

…it was talking.

“Look!” It buzzed at me a mere two inches from my ear.

I swiped at it, and it would go away for about 30 seconds.

“Look!” It tried the other ear. Passing my ebook from my left hand to right, I swatted again.

I watched for the bug bombardier, waiting for it to land on a part of my body that wouldn’t hurt much when I slapped myself with a horse-fly death-blow. Alas, it never landed.

I went back to the book…

“LOOK!” It said, this time buzzing both ears in one circumnavigation of my cranium.

Placing my phone eBook down I again waited for the fly to land.

And I waited some more. It continued to circle my cranial runway, somehow knowing to pull back to a distance beyond my hands for the purposes of self-preservation. I’ve always been amazed at this kind of horse-fly wisdom. Skilled defensive flyers, are they.

I laid my head back in the sling chair I was sitting in. I’d wait. I could be patient. I had nothing but time to offer. I closed my eyes.

I heard the buzz, sometimes close, other times far. But it never landed.

Never.

As I lay there with my eyes closed, I began to hear a different kind of buzz. One that was steady and lower pitched.

The buzz of a bee.

And that’s when I gave in to the demands of the horsefly. I looked.

I opened my eyes, trying to find the source of the steady buzz. There it was, about 8 feet away, hopping from one blossom of white clover to the next.

I don’t know if I’ve ever taken the time to watch a honey bee at work. But I did on this day. As I did, I realized I’d forgotten some of the work honey bees do. Mainly, the part about how they collect nectar.

Somewhere over the years my understanding of honey bees work is that they collect pollen, which of course they do. But for some reason, the nectar collection had slipped into the recesses of my memory where things are stored until we’re reminded.

As I watched him hop from clover blossom to clover blossom, I saw him sticking his little nectar straw into each nectar-holding part of the flower with pinpoint precision. That’s when I remembered the nectar thing.

Then I remembered I knew what clover nectar tastes like.

Because when I was quite young, my big sister taught me how to suck the nectar out of red clover. We’d spend hours doing it, stealing the little microdose of sweetness from nature.

I was at an age when I still thought my bigger sister knew everything there was worth knowing. “If you can’t taste any nectar,” She explained, “then you know the bees already got it!”

I wonder how many adults even know we can suck nectar from clover flowers. You have to pluck the little flower parts carefully. They’re like tubes with the tiniest amount of sweet liquid at the bottom.

And I mean the tiniest amount!

But it’s so good, and worth it. It drives you to look for more. It’s a competition between me and the bees. Usually the bees won. But when they didn’t, well, it gave real meaning to sweet victory.

So, you look and look, a race between you and the professional nectar sucker. And before you know it, mom’s calling you for lunch. You and your big sister have spent hours trying to see how much nectar you can find.

As I watched the bee and reminisced, I took note of what I saw. I just watched the bee at work. Fascinated, I captured a video. I didn’t want to forget. There was a simplicity to what he was doing. The bee didn’t seem to notice me at all.

As I watched, I considered how little the honey bee has changed, if at all, over the centuries since the tower was built. Surely the horseflies were around in the 14th century too–there were certainly more horses–and those people back then swatted them away. I wondered if they’d sat in an olive garden and watched the bees work.

I closed my eyes and listened. I pretended I was listening to it 700 years ago. Same sounds. Same kinds of insects.

I considered how many times I’d been scared of bees. The stinger, that is. I wondered if people who lived in the tower in the 14th century were scared of bees.

But here in the olive garden there was no threat of being stung. The bee was there to work, the other bees…to drink.

Fact is, the bee I was watching wasn’t the only one there. I’d passed dozens of them, maybe more than 100 on my way to my seat. I looked up, down at the far end of the pool and there they still were.

They were right at the edge of the pool, where the gentle laps of the water wetted the gunnite edge. They’d fly in, sip on the water in the crevices for a few seconds, and then fly off to wherever they were going. Never once did one of those bees come anywhere close to me or threaten me as I walked by.

It was as if there was an unspoken understanding with the bees. People would enter the pool from one end, and the bees would drink at the other.

It occurred to me that if one of them stung me, he would die. Stinging was a life-saving measure, one meant to protect the hive. It was the least self-serving act it could do.

I thought about this for a bit. I considered how humans act; the things we do to sting. We tend to sting each other a lot. Honestly, I couldn’t help but consider we shared this trait with our ancestors too.

It was the only sad moment I had that day. I wished we humans might be more like the bees. Do our work and then rest at the edge of refreshment. Maybe we have a little nectar-sucking competition with clover-sucking toddlers.

I smiled again.

Then I noticed another fellow. A lizard of some sort scurried out of the decorative rocks. Later I’d watch as a mourning dove dunked its head in the water for a drink before being spooked and coo-flying away the way mourning doves do.

The entire scene engulfed my emotions. I didn’t want it to end. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I captured some pictures. I recorded 10 minutes of what I heard. I took some video…

Later in the day, Luca, our host, came and talked with us at the edge of the pool. He’s an extrovert like me, and all of us were glad to have someone to teach us about where we were. I told him how much I was enjoying the garden.

“Ah! This place is like magic!” He said with a smile.

He was right.

If you have friends or family members who enjoy traveling, (even through time!) send them this article. Word of mouth is still the best way to help spread good writing.

1. I’m not particularly adept at writing reviews. This piece, as you can see, isn’t really a review, except that I’d like to say our stay in the tower was everything we hoped it would be. I did take some pictures, but mostly of the surrounding areas. If you’re going to Tuscany, I hope you’ll consider staying at Torre dei Belforti. Click the link to see pictures of the accommodations and to book a visit.