dine•o•crat

Civitella in Val di Chiana is a small, picturesque comune in the hills of Arezzo in Tuscany with a grim war history. It has as its main attraction the ruins of a castle built in 1048. Civitella itself is a fortress town, built even before that castle, in the 7th century, as part of a series of fortresses around the territory. During World War II, 244 people, most from Civitella, along with dozens more from nearby towns of Cornia and San Pancrazio, were massacred by German forces for the death of two of their own soldiers. The castle itself was used by Germans as headquarters during the war and it was eventually bombed by Allied forces. If you walk around the town, you'll find stark reminders of that awful act from long ago. But nowadays, it's mostly a quaint and quiet community where nothing much happens. If you stay in the town's B&B, Antico Borgo , below is what you wake up to when you first open your windows. (Helpful traveler tip: if you plan on staying at the B...

We were lost, hopelessly, almost irretrievably lost. My friend from California had been driving us around for several hours, all three of us having gotten very little rest after our arrival in Rome. At that point, we had been up almost 48 hours with hardly a wink on the planes we took. We were searching for Civitella in Val di Chiana, a tiny little town in the hills above the Tuscan city of Arrezzo and it was a task more difficult than we thought. The directions we received were not very clear and it didn't help our cause that the signs around this area of Italy weren't very clear, either. Once you leave the city, the Tuscan towns pretty much all look the same. Pretty, but identical. And even when we stopped to ask for directions, the language barrier was worse than we had anticipated. Hours later, our Italian friend finally decided to meet us at a nearby hotel, easier to find than the bed and breakfast in which we were to stay. By the time we checked in to Antico Borgo—the B...