Seggiano, Tuscany — August 14, 2024

August 14th, Seggiano. We drove a back road in Tuscany with the window cracked, and the same tree kept lining every fence: tall, slender, dark green spires standing in rows along the dry grass. Cypress. I used to think they were just scenery. Then a friend out here told me the old Tuscans planted them as living property markers — slow-growing, narrow, almost impossible to mistake for a wild tree, and they live for centuries. So when you see a straight line of cypress along a field, you're often reading a boundary somebody drew a hundred or two hundred years ago, still holding. We pulled off at a hilltop place above Seggiano — hills folding into haze, an old stone villa with a tower out across the olive groves — and I sat there a while thinking about that. Some fences are wood. Some are wire. And some are a row of trees, quietly outlasting the people who planted them. Next drive through Tuscany, watch the cypress lines. They're usually telling you something.