The Tuscan landscape is a farming contract that ran out of signatories.

It is worth starting with the physical constraint, because it explains the rest. Tuscany covers 22,987 square kilometres and has almost no flat ground: hills take up 66.5 per cent of the surface — 15,292 square kilometres — and mountains another 25. Plains come to 8.4 per cent, and nearly all of that is the Arno valley. Nine out of every ten hectares in the region are on a slope.

01 Two thirds hillside, and made of clay

It is not only slope: across much of the centre and the south it is clay slope. The Crete Senesi and the Orcia valley are built of marine sediments folded and lifted, a material water carries off easily. When rain attacks a bare hillside it leaves two characteristic forms: calanchi, deep gullies like knife cuts, and biancane, whitish domes standing out like termite mounds.

Ground like that sets conditions. It cracks in summer and turns to sticky mud in winter. It does not take large continuous plots. And it forces you to build high: the house goes on the ridge line, where it drains, where the whole farm is visible and where air moves to dry the grain. That is the real reason behind the region's most repeated image.

02 The podere: one family, one house, everything inside it

The unit of that organisation was called a podere. The owner supplied the land and the house; a peasant family worked it and handed over half of what it produced. That half is the key to everything: if the family kept only fifty per cent, the farm had to give it absolutely everything it needed to live, because there was no money to buy anything outside.

Hence the coltura promiscua, the visual signature of the Tuscan countryside. Cereal, vine and olive were grown in the same field at once: the trees and vines along the edges and in rows, often climbing living elms or ash trees used as supports, and the grain in the space between. A single hectare produced bread, wine and oil. A specialised plantation would have yielded more of one thing and none of the other two, and with half going to the owner that was no use.

The lines of cypresses belong to the same domestic logic: they mark the drive up to the house, show from a distance where it is, and take the wind without shading the crops, because their crown is narrow and their roots do not spread. Every element of the postcard has an agricultural function that is no longer in use.

03 A landscape that had already been designed

There is an older layer still. The Orcia valley, which today is the image most people have in mind when they hear the word Tuscany, was redrawn between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it became part of the territory of the city-state of Siena. It did not simply grow: it was deliberately ordered, following a model of how the countryside should be run and an explicit idea of how it ought to look.

UNESCO inscribed it in 2004 on exactly that argument, and as a cultural landscape rather than a natural one: 61,188 hectares of core zone, recognised as an exceptional example of the redesigning of a pre-Renaissance landscape and for having been painted again and again by the artists of the Sienese school until it became an icon that changed how the countryside was looked at across Europe.

Put another way: the postcard predates photography. What is recognised as the Tuscan landscape was composed, painted and circulated for six hundred years before tourism existed.

04 15 September 1964

That day law 756 was passed, banning new mezzadria contracts and voiding any signed from then on. It was not an immediate eviction: existing contracts ran on, and law 203 of 3 May 1982 converted them into direct-cultivator tenancies. But the system stopped reproducing itself that day.

What followed was fast. Mechanisation cut the labour needed drastically; the size of a podere no longer matched the income a family could earn in a factory; and the families, large and patriarchal precisely because the system needed them that way, came apart. The houses on the ridges emptied by the thousand.

Here is the paradox that explains today's region: for twenty years, the most admired landscape in Europe was left without the people who maintained it.

05 Who filled the houses again

Two things refilled them. The first was law 730 of 5 December 1985, which regulated agriturismo in Italy for the first time and allowed a working farm to lodge and feed guests without ceasing to be a farm. Tuscany now leads Italy in this, with around 6,000 establishments: one in five of the 25,849 the country had in 2023.

The second was the buying and restoring of abandoned coloniche by private owners, many of them foreign, above all in the Florentine and Sienese Chianti — to the point that the area earned the nickname Chiantishire. Houses built for a sharecropping family and its tools got their roofs back under a different function and different money.

The result carries an uncomfortable, honest reading. The Tuscany people visit is an agricultural landscape kept alive by an economy that is no longer agricultural: the hedge, the cypress, the house on the ridge and the ploughed field survive partly because someone is willing to pay to look at them. The contract that invented them has been repealed for sixty years. The shape it left on the ground still works, even though it no longer does what it was for.