The dream of the god Tages 

Land and memory in Val di Chiana

I dreamed of the god Tages, in the moment when the Etruscan Tarquin, who was ploughing a field, saw a boy emerging from a furrow. His name was Tages and he had the wisdom of an old man.

The priests all ran to see the prodigy and to hear the boy preaching, After finishing his tale he vanished into the air like a god. Legend tells that he was son of Mother Earth and grandson of the sky god, Tinia.

According to Etruscan beliefs Tages could foresee the future and in in my dream he prophesied to the priests who had hurried from nearby cities like Cortona and Chiusi and from the surrounding countryside.

His legend was taken up by the romans, who named him Tagete.

His prophesy tells of enormous monsters made of an unknown metal, shaped like long worms, which crossed the valley at lightning speed, from North to South and South to North, worms which meet but never touch.

High towers carry miles of suspended lines, carts without horses which travel on a strip of grey, hard earth.

Tages' anguished premonition continues: The river that cost us such pains to tame is unrecognizable now, the fresh, shaded channels have disappeared. The water, which flowed towards the south in the direction of Volsinii, now travels north in a canal made by an enormous plough. The small, cultivated fields have disappeared, together with the trees, bushes and vines. In their place are large, ploughed expanses travelled by colossal tortoises, which pull the plough instead of oxen.

Maybe they are underworld gods, emerged onto the Earth, provoking a war and eradicating our people, rendering slaves the few that remained. The houses of our descendants have been abandoned and destroyed, their belongings rot in the earth.

Tages' is a terrifying and distorted vision of a future that corresponds to our present but, if we try to imagine how today's Val di Chiana would appear to a minor divinity from three thousand years ago, it isn't so far from how I imagined it.

I've been traveling the Valley, photographing what I see that catches my eye for almost fifty years. in 1976, with a group of young photographers and anthropologists, we did some research here that resulted in an exhibition entitled 'One Val di Chiana', which was held for just one day in Montepulciano during the May 1st Fair.

The ethno-musical research, which was done in parallel with the photography, gave rise to a show 'Villan d'un contadino' (literally 'loutish peasant') which took place in Piazza Grande in August 1977 during the second Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte.

'One Val di Chiana' is a corpus of photographs which, revisited now, show the final moments of the life of Mezzadria (share-cropping), the houses of la Fila were still lived in, work in the fields was manual, with hoes, haystacks as they were always built and hens that roamed free. It is work that bears repeating for a new public.

Since then, I have continued to visit the Val di Chiana, always with a camera round my neck. These visits alternate with those to the Val d'Orcia because the attraction for me lies there too, two worlds so close but so different. Worlds divided by different histories and natural characteristics, in the east (Val di Chiana) fertile soil and plenty of water, in the west, dryness and misery.

The poverty of the Val d'Orcia means that it has been better preserved, from the viewpoint of environment and natural beauty but let's not forget that up to only one hundred years ago it was an inhospitable, abandoned land. The principal communication route was from olden days the Via Francigena or Romea, which passed along the banks of the Orcia. Later this route was moved to the Val di Chiana, favoring commerce and production there. The drainage works in the Val di Chiana undertaken by the Dukes of Lorraine transformed the marshland into a luxurious garden. In modern times this has changed again, with the small vine-separated fields given to the Testuccio (head of the family) transfomed into enormous extents to allow  the practice of intensive agriculture.

The construction of the first railway between Rome and Florence, which travelled via Cortona, did not significantly alter the landscape, and the line from Chiusi to Siena, which was financed by the Bastogni brothers at the end of the nineteenth century, was built to serve the large farms.

By contrast, the opening of the Autostrada del Sole, which happened just as the Mezzadria system was ending, opened a wound that is still bleeding today. At the beginning it was for the few, lunch at the Autogrill, served by waiters in white jackets, was for the few. Today the Autogrill is a crowded rest area, with a progressive reduction in the levels of service.

The construction of the high-speed rail line has irreversibly modified the valley, the train itself has become an element of the landscape. I've travelled the line from Milan to Rome without any stops, the landscape of the Val di Chiana lasts only a few minutes and no one looks out of the window to see the decaying buildings. I've tried to photograph then from the train, especially the beautiful farmhouse Rialto, which is only a few meters from the rail embankment.

Recently many renewable energy generators, such as fields of solar panels, have been installed in the valley, definitely important for the environment but which also negatively impact the landscape. There's also a loss of biodiversity due to the impact of monoculture crops to fuel the biomass generators.

The photographs from my research were taken between 2008 and 2020 and are ordered by subject, the infrastucture contamination, the condition of the Canale Maestro, road geometry, ploughed lands.

An important section covers the condition of the abandoned buildings and contents after the exodus caused by the end of share-cropping. This is why poor Tages imagined that this was caused by a war launched by the underworld gods against the poor farm worker discendents of the Etruscans.

I saw the inside of the ruined Leopoldine (farmhouses), the details of the walls, the few objects that are left like an installation of Land Art, which assumes a special esthetic value when added to the declaration of a decay that needs to be healed.

I distinguish myself from the 'urbex' view, however, because I do not want to tell of a ghost world but rather to testify to what remains of a still-living culture, even if now little seen. A culture based on solidarity aand natural wisdom which modelled the landscape which has made Tuscany world-famous.

In my work, I am not trying to judge what is good and what is wrong, what is sustainable and what not (and maybe non-sustainability is the essence of home sapiens), it doesn't contain nostalgia for the past, which would anyway be distorted, nor messages for a better future. My intention was to leave a record of the state of things as they are, which everyone is free to interpret as they wish. Another aim is to conserve the value of memories of recent history, which is completely ignored by younger generations.

Some parts of this memory have particularly moved me, the hole caused by one of the bullets from a gun fired in July 1921 by a fascist group against a family of socialist share-croppers who lived in the farm of Abbadia. Two young cousins died in the attack. 

The Val di Chiana is rich in stories and emotions like these and one of the reasons I take photographs is to communicate them.

I hope this work will help increase knowledge of the beauty and the importance of these places with the hope that they will be reborn.

Finally, I want to return to poor Tages who, frightened by his own prophecy, chose to disappear, maybe to avoid making similar catastrophic forecasts. I see him observing and asking the birds, once many and now reduced to a few, whose flight is a symbol of hope.

I like to imagine him, eternal child, still playing in the earth of this rich land.

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Paolo Barcucci

May 2021