The Arizona of Leonardo da Vinci and Monna Lisa

It may seem incredible, but who dreams of visit the famous American "Mountain Valley" can find something like that even here, in Tuscany.
Obviously, nobody has the pretensions to find in these lands, the boundless extent of the Arizona's deserts, so scenically modelled by the erosion of the elements and by the elapsing of time. Who is passing through the Upper Arno Valley, between the provinces of Florence and Arezzo, remains strongly impressed by the peculiarity of the landscape, characterized by the strange constructions of earth that stand solemnly and sometimes disquietingly among the expanses of the olives and of the vineyards, perhaps near an ancient Romanesque church.

We are in the land of the "Balze", the "crags", that dominate a large part of the territories of Reggello, Pian di Sco, Castelfranco di Sopra, Terranuova Bracciolini, Loro Ciuffenna. The "Balze" are, in substance, natural sculptures, gullies and pinnacles that can reach the height of a hundred of meters with the most eccentric shapes, sometimes as sharpened pyramids that sustain great stones thath remain suspended in the air to challenge every phisical law. Phenomena due to the millenary and silent action of the waters, that stand out in a landscape otherwise so green of that part of Tuscany. Even inflaming in the light of the sun that goes behind the Chianti hills to die.

The shape of the Balze, that sometimes borders the incredulity, has always stimulated the fantasy of the inhabitants that had called them in several ways: "smotte", "zolle", "lame", even "piramidi delle fate", "fairies' pyramids". The great Leonardo da Vinci, that passed through here many times and that was really impressed by these sculpture of earth, had already understood that there were nothing of supernatural in them and that it depended simply by the spectaculare erosion of the water. Perhaps, he was more deeply impressed. In fact, if we observe with attention the backgrounds of some of his paintings, as the "Rocks Virgin", the "Vergine delle Rocce", we note that they look surpresingly like the Balze landscape. And if we venture to go only a little forward, that bridge that you can see in the large scenery that seems celebrate the cycle of the water behind the enigmatic Monna Lisa's smile, recalls the one, Romanesque-style and still perfectly functioning, the Buriano Bridge that crosses the river Arno, only a few kilometers far from here.

Is that true or only a legend? The only thing we know is that these natural monuments are the product of the drying up of a large lake that, till some hundred of thousands years ago, occupied the entire valley included between the massif of Pratomagno and theChianti mountains. The action of the waters in the time made the rest. You only have to observe the surfaces of one of the several gullies to read with evidence the geological strata, yellow of the clay, lower, and the brown of the pebbles in the upper section.

Leonardo da Vinci realized the reason of the presence of great quantities of fossils and shells in the Balze. But what had the poor farmers thought when, ploughing their fields with the oxes, found in their hands even bones of elephants or of other unknown animals. No problem, probably they should have said, with the fishes that, as the Bibles tells, are the evidence of the Flood. But the elephants? So began the legend according to which, Hannibal, the terrible Carthaginian general, during his assaul course against the hated Rome passed through the Arno Valley with his army and the pachyderms came from Africa. And near Incisa he ordered, the legend tell, to build a bridge to cross the river Arno.

Nowadays we know that once the elephants really lived here. And in good company with bears, tigers and rhinoceros, in the bargain. Definitely, the Arno Valley was a large and luxuriant savannah that has leaved abundant traces. No wonder if exactly in this site the new-born science of paleontology took its first uncertain steps. The Danish Niels Stensen, that italianized his name in Nicola Stenone, was the first that, in the seventeenth century, analizing the stratigrapy of the Balze supposed the presence of the desappeared lake, even if was only with the studies of the Tuscan Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti that we had the scientific evidence.

Who is fond o paleontology, however, can find a lot of interesting material collect during the centuries in the near Paleontological Museum of Montevarchi. An other way to travel in a unique land, the Balze territory, among the signs of the time that flies rapidly or, perhaps, on the tracks of the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and of Monna Lisa.