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Tuscan Utopia: Villa La Foce with Kate Bolton-Porciatti
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The Origos’ life was far from rose-tinted: their young son died of meningitis and during the Second World War, they put themselves at great personal risk by sheltering orphaned and refugee children, partisans, Italian Jews, and escaped Allied prisoners of war.
In this seminar, we will leaf through Iris Origo’s deeply moving memoirs – War in the Val d’Orcia and A Chill in the Air – in which she recalls the “unending stream of human suffering” that transformed their rural Utopia. Today, though, the gardens at La Foce bear witness to the Origos’ determination to offer hope and life even during the darkest of times, and a Summer Music Festival founded by her cellist grandson celebrates the memory of one of Italy’s great ex-pat women.
Led by cultural historian Kate Bolton-Porciatti this seminar recounts the compelling narrative of La Foce over the last century. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with an insight into one of Tuscany’s great cultural landmarks – which is also a featured filming location on television shows such as Succession.
Kate Bolton-Porciatti is a professor of Italian cultural history and music at the Istituto Lorenzo de'Medici in Florence, where she teaches BA and MA courses in the humanities. She also lectures at the British Institute, Florence, and at the Chigiana Music Academy in Siena. Kate has published extensively as an academic and a journalist; she is a music critic for BBC Music and a travel writer for The Daily Telegraph, UK. Before moving to Italy permanently in 2005, she was a senior producer and broadcaster for BBC Arts & Classical Music in London and has won prestigious Jerusalem and Sony Awards for her programs. She did her M.Phil. thesis in Italy, exploring the musical culture of early Renaissance Florence.
This conversation is suitable for all ages.
90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.
Kate Bolton-Porciatti always has a well prepared presentation that includes videos that make it very easy to put oneself into the environment she is describing. This one is no exception. I would recommend anything she does without reservation.
La Foce in southern Tuscany is the work of an American/English woman and her Italian husband (with some help from Mussolini), both with money and wanting to make a meaningful life. Kate takes us to the beginnings of their lives in the 1920s to what was a moonscape and now is a most delightful "typical" Tuscan landscape. In the interim they brought education and sustenance to a whole region, And Kate delights the viewer with photos and stories of wonderful interest, In a way, as Kate says, it was the first Under the Tuscan Sun.... Don't miss this one!
This story is a celebration of a family’s determination and success in creating better lives for an entire peasant community in Tuscany and protecting them during WWII. It is also a story of renewing barren land and creating great beauty. My thanks to Kate Bolton-Borciatti for bringing us this!
Kate did a great job of giving context to an unusual pace and story in a part of Tuscany not as well known as perhaps it should be!

This was such a beautiful presentation of a really remarkable story. I'd never heard of Iris Origo before but now I must read her books and see the Villa La Foce. I like the little videos that Kate Bolton-Porciatti has made - you feel almost like you're there.