La Foce: Where an American Woman Made Tuscany Magnificent

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The Road That Defines Tuscany

There is one road that has come to define Tuscany in the imagination of the world. Lined with ancient cypress trees, threading through golden hills toward a vanishing point of mist and light, the Via della Foce draws photographers from every continent. Yet few who frame that shot understand that the landscape they are capturing was, a century ago, exhausted and eroded farmland — a broken estate that two people chose to love back into magnificence.

La Foce. The name means “the mouth” — the point where a small valley stream, the Orcia, opened into the broader landscape of the Val d’Orcia. When Iris and Antonio Origo arrived in 1924, they found a derelict sixteenth-century villa, crumbling farm buildings, and land so depleted by centuries of sharecropping and erosion that the peasant farmers called it la terra di nessuno — nobody’s land.

They stayed for the rest of their lives.

Iris Origo: The Woman Who Chose Italy

Iris Cutting was born in 1902 in Birdlip, Gloucestershire, to an American mother — Sybil Cutting, heiress to a Chicago fortune — and an Irish-American father, William Bayard Cutting Jr., who died when Iris was eight years old. Her mother brought her to Italy, settling at the Villa Medici in Fiesole above Florence, where Iris grew up surrounded by the Anglo-American intellectual expatriates who made Italy their adopted country at the turn of the twentieth century.

She was educated across borders — partly in England, partly in Florence — and absorbed Italy not as a tourist but as a resident, learning the language, the customs, the hierarchies of rural life, the weight of the past in every stone. When the scholar and journalist Antonio Origo proposed marriage in 1924, he offered her not the glamour of Rome or the salons of Florence, but something far more difficult: an impoverished agricultural estate in the southern Sienese hills, a place most educated Italians of the time considered a backwater.

Iris accepted. She was twenty-two years old.

Transforming the Land

What followed was one of the great acts of private philanthropy and agricultural regeneration in twentieth-century Italy. The Origos did not buy La Foce to retreat into pastoral fantasy. They came to work. Over the following decades they built twenty-five kilometres of roads through the estate, sank deep water wells, constructed schools, a clinic, a hospital, and housing for the mezzadri — the sharecropping families — that far exceeded the obligations of their contracts.

They planted trees. They restored farmhouses. They introduced modern agricultural methods, dragging the estate from medieval practices into the mid-twentieth century without destroying the landscape that made it extraordinary. The poderi — the individual farm units — were rebuilt one by one. At the peak of the estate’s operation, more than fifty farming families worked the land at La Foce. Many of their descendants still live in the valley today.

The Gardens and Cecil Pinsent

In 1927, Iris commissioned the English architect Cecil Pinsent to design the gardens immediately surrounding the Villa La Foce. It was a felicitous collaboration. Pinsent, who had already designed gardens for Bernard Berenson at the Villa I Tatti and for the Cutting family at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, understood the Italian formal garden tradition and how to work it into the Sienese landscape.

The gardens he created are intimate in scale but grand in composition. Geometric box hedges enclose spaces of stillness — gravel walks, lemon trees in terracotta pots, a wisteria pergola, a rose garden of extraordinary beauty. Beyond the formal rooms, the garden dissolves into the countryside, and the view across the Val d’Orcia — to Monte Amiata, to the clay hills, to the distant line of medieval towers — frames every terrace.

The lemon trees, brought out each spring when the threat of frost passes, are among the most photographed features of the estate. In summer, the rose garden reaches its peak in June, when varieties that Iris Origo herself selected bloom in cascades of pink, cream, and deep red.

The gardens are open to visitors in spring and summer, and guided tours are available for groups who wish to understand the layers of thought behind what appears, from a distance, to be simply beautiful.

The Cypress Road

The road that runs from the estate toward Pienza — the Via della Foce, now commonly known as the SS146 — was planted with cypress trees as part of the estate’s infrastructure. Cypresses served a practical purpose: windbreaks on exposed hillsides, markers of boundaries, anchors for soil on eroded slopes.

But the effect, as the decades have deepened the trees and the road has settled into the landscape, is something else entirely. The precise verticality of the cypresses against the soft horizontal rolls of the crete senesi — the grey clay hills of the Sienese countryside — creates a tension of forms that no photographer has yet exhausted. It is the single most reproduced image of the Tuscan landscape, and it was planted by two people who chose this valley and decided to stay.

War in Val d’Orcia

In June 1943, as Allied forces landed in Sicily and the Italian government moved toward armistice, Iris Origo began keeping a detailed diary. She wrote in English, recording the daily life of the estate as the war closed in — the movement of German troops, the arrival of evacuee children from Turin and Genoa, the partisans sheltering in the hills, the refugees, the fear, the administrative collapse of a country surrendering one certainty after another.

The diary runs from June 1943 to July 1944. Published in 1947 as War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, it remains one of the finest civilian accounts of wartime Italy — unsentimental, precise, morally serious. The New York Review of Books reissued it, and it remains in print today, read by students of the Second World War, historians of Italian rural society, and anyone who wants to understand what it meant to be responsible for fifty farming families in a valley where the front line was moving.

Among the entries most often quoted is her account of June 1944, when she and the estate workers walked a column of seventy-three children — evacuees sheltering at La Foce — across the hills to Montepulciano as German and Allied artillery exchanged fire around them. The column reached safety. The children survived.

Reading War in Val d’Orcia before visiting La Foce changes the way you see the valley.

Val d’Orcia: A UNESCO Landscape

In 2004, the Val d’Orcia was designated a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape. The citation recognised the valley as an exceptional example of how Renaissance ideals of good government and wise land management shaped a physical landscape — the poderi farms on hilltops, the roads, the watercourses, the towns of Pienza, Montalcino, and Montepulciano clustered on their ridges above the clay hills.

La Foce sits at the heart of this landscape. The estate’s long history of careful stewardship — of putting the land and the people who worked it before short-term extraction — is precisely the tradition the UNESCO designation seeks to recognise and protect. That stewardship continues.

La Foce Today

Iris Origo died in 1988, at the Villa La Foce, having lived there for sixty-four years. The estate passed to her daughters and then to her grandchildren. Today it is managed by Katia Lysy, Iris Origo’s granddaughter, who grew up on the estate and has devoted her life to ensuring that La Foce remains both a working property and a place of genuine cultural depth.

Under Katia’s stewardship, La Foce has evolved carefully. The estate offers accommodation in the restored casali — the stone farm buildings that sit within the working landscape, with views across the clay hills that have not materially changed since Iris first arrived in 1924. The gardens continue to be maintained to a standard that Cecil Pinsent would recognise.

Each summer, La Foce hosts Incontri in Terra di Siena, an intimate chamber music festival that Katia’s parents founded in 1973. The concerts take place in the garden, in the courtyard of the villa, and in the restored farm buildings — performances by musicians of international standing in settings of extraordinary beauty. The festival is one of the oldest chamber music series in Italy and draws an audience of music lovers from across Europe and North America.

For those who come to La Foce for the history rather than the music, the estate’s bookshop carries the full range of Iris Origo’s writing: War in Val d’Orcia, her biography of the Prato merchant Francesco Datini (The Merchant of Prato), and her memoir Images and Shadows — alongside works on the gardens, the Val d’Orcia, and the agricultural history of the Sienese countryside.

Planning Your Visit

La Foce sits twelve kilometres from Montepulciano and seventeen from Pienza, two of the finest hill towns in Tuscany. The gardens are open to visitors on Wednesday afternoons and weekend mornings from spring to autumn — check the estate’s website directly for current opening times before travelling, as hours vary by season.

The cypress road is accessible by car from Pienza on the SP53 and SS146. Drive slowly. Stop where it is safe to stop. Look at the light in the hour before sunset, when the shadows of the trees reach across the road toward the hills.

And read War in Val d’Orcia before you go. A landscape that has held this much history deserves to be seen with open eyes.

Photo: Cypress-lined road in Val d’Orcia, Tuscany. Credit: kuhnmi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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