Elisa Scarton

Elisa Scarton Detti is an Australian journalist who came to Tuscany for a year, and, yes, fell in love and decided to stick around. Not one to keep amazing holiday destinations to herself, she now writes a blog and travel guide about the infinitely beautiful Maremma, Tuscany (www.maremma-tuscany.com).

Articles by the author

COMMUNITY

Experiencing the grape harvest in the Maremma

Summer’s over and thoughts in the Maremma turn to vino without exception. The annual vendemmia, or grape harvest, is an all-encompassing state of mind. Even if you’re not a wine ...

THINGS TO DO

Notes from the Maremma: Summer 2019

Summer in southern Tuscany isn’t just about melting by the seaside before chowing down on more seafood and gelato than is medically advisable. It’s also about those envy-inducing balmy nights ...

COMMUNITY

Maremma: an authentic experience

You make the almost three-hour drive from Florence south into country Tuscany because you’re looking for authenticity. It’s a cliché, I know. Travel writers have used the word to describe ...

THINGS TO DO

Ticketing tussles over Saturnia springs

For decades, Maremma in southern Tuscany wasn’t on most tourists’ radars. Like so much of the countryside, it attracted a few in-the-know Italian tourists and some intrepid Germans looking for ...

COMMUNITY

The last Jewish nonna in Pitigliano

Pitigliano’s last Jewish nonna is a survivor, an advocate, a local celebrity and pretty much exactly what you’d imagine an Italian grandmother to be like. It’s wet and windy Thursday ...

COMMUNITY

Striking truffle gold in southern Tuscany

Ask around and the city folk of Florence will tell you the Maremma, in the region’s south, is rural and, let’s be honest, a little backwards. If you ask the ...

FOOD + WINE

What’s up with Tuscan bread?

A lifetime ago, I was on a train with a presumptuous Australian teenager who thought her eight months in Tuscany qualified her to speak authoritatively on all things culinary. I ...

COMMUNITY

There’s no place like home: A less-popular take on small town Tuscany

Why four young Tuscans decided to buck the trend and make a go of it in their very small hometown.   Fresh out of university and very recently married, I ...

COMMUNITY

Perks and pitfalls of small-town Tuscany

Moving to the Tuscan countryside is almost every foreigner’s dream, but is it really as idyllic as it sounds? I chatted to three generations of locals to find out. Buffet ...

COMMUNITY

What makes Tuscan men so attractive?

Caught up in the romance of the holiday season, Elisa Scarton Detti hits the streets of Manciano in southern Tuscany to find out what makes Tuscan men so darn attractive. ...

COMMUNITY

Not the lady mayoress

If you want to be mayor in small-town Tuscany, you better stick to the status quo and, more importantly, you better not have a foreign-born wife. It may not have ...

COMMUNITY

When a Kennedy came to town

Once a wild and foreboding place, Manciano is on its way to becoming southern Tuscany’s hottest postcode and the locals are anything but starstruck. It all started with Caroline Kennedy. The ...

COMMUNITY

Why Tuscans live forever

The secrets to longevity aren’t diet and exercise after all: just ask Tuscany’s oldest residents. On any given day in southern Tuscany, slacks are straightened, ties tied and jumpers pulled ...

THINGS TO DO

The man behind the red suit

Every Christmas village needs a Santa, even in a small southern Tuscan town where not so long ago that job was filled by another senior citizen. In the years before ...

THINGS TO DO

Saturnia: Paradiso or Inferno?

Sometimes you can really can have too much of a good thing. Just ask locals in the southern Tuscan town of Saturnia. Residents here are in the midst of a ...

FOOD + WINE

The queen’s salami: Salumificio Mori in Torniella

High in the hills in a small Maremman town, there’s a butcher who makes salami for Buckingham Palace. But you would never know it.   Anywhere else in the world, ...

COMMUNITY

The water diviner

In a part of Tuscany where old wives’ tales are canon, don’t be surprised to meet a modern-day water diviner.   Small Tuscan towns like mine are made up of ...

THINGS TO DO

A spring walk in the Maremma

Walking in the Maremma is as natural as cantucci and vin santo.     One of Tuscany’s most beautiful holiday destinations outside Florence is mainly countryside: the fields and hazy ...

THINGS TO DO

A winter road trip in Monte Amiata

  It seems unlikely, but winter is the most peaceful time to visit one of Tuscany’s tallest mountains, Monte Amiata, and the area around it. Although it’s only mildly cold ...

ART + CULTURE

Tuscany’s newest archaeological discoveries

Thousands of years have passed since the Romans left, but we’re only now unearthing some of their greatest treasures. You can’t wield a shovel anywhere in Italy without stumbling on the sort of ruins that would have archaeologists in other countries turning green with envy. At

THINGS TO DO

A siren’s call: Tuscany’s most beautiful beach

Tuscany isn’t just about food and culture; it’s also home to Italy’s most beautiful beach for 2015.   When it comes to travel destinations, Tuscany is a bucket-list perennial, a siren’s call in the back of our minds. We cannot—

COMMUNITY

Orbetello devastated

It was an otherwise perfect summer in southern Tuscany. Endless days of sunshine and warm weather. Plenty of tourists, holidaymakers and food festivals to keep everyone busy.   And then, in the last week of July, the corpses of a thousand fish washed up on the shores of Orbetello Lagoon. &

COMMUNITY

Foraging for asparagus in the Maremma

It’s a beautiful spring afternoon in southern Tuscany, and we are once more on a mad rush into the woods. While locals and tourists alike are preparing to stroll the streets of Florence or Rome, we’re donning our thickest boots and giving our neighbours dirty looks

NEWS

Flooded flashbacks

Southern Tuscany is cleaning up for the second time in two years after floods on October 14 claimed two lives and caused millions of euro in damages. Residents are calling it a ‘bomba d’acqua’ (water bomb) as 140 millimetres of rain and hail drenched the Maremma

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