Tuscany shore excursions

The cypress-tree, which only in this part of the world succeeds in being something other than a me­mento morì, was introduced here only in Etruscan-Roman times, when the reorganization of the network of roads and a new measurement and distribution of territory (known as "centuriation") gave the region a really new look. But we have to wait for the late Middle Ages and the dawn of the modem era before seeing the Tuscan landscape take on that unique balance between man and nature in which man lives in scattered farms covering the hills as if with a network of dwellings, dose enough to each other but not too dose.