Volterra is not the tourist mecca like it’s cousin San Gimignano, a mere 15km away as the crow flies. However, take the bus, and 90 minutes after leaving San Gimignano you pass a sign which says, “San Gimignano 12km. Volterra 14km”. You have to love the Italian public transport system.

It’s not too surprising that the tourists flock to San Gimignano at the expense of Volterra. It has less of the fairytale quality, and more of the imposing fortress look.

Kids chatter, joke and tease as they head off to schools. Men smoke, and drink hurried cups of espresso before heading off to work. Those who don’t lull around the bus station. Blue-rinsed “nonnas” link arms with each other and stroll deep in conversation. Walking past the Volterra elementary school. Inside the old, slightly forbidding walls I heard the exuberant chattering of children. In a walled city of cobblestone, where do they play?

In comparison to the tourist-driven economy of its neighbor, the glances are not so welcoming while still being far from hostile. Their own lives are less linked, on the whole, to the tourists, and it shows.

Not that my time in Volterra wasn’t to be savoured. It was.

And much of that was due to my “home” for three days: San Lorenzo, a working olive farm a nerve-jangling 5km walk along a steep and busy road from Volterra.

Miranella is its Queen.

She reminded me of Tom Bombadil out of the Lord of the Rings. San Lorenzo is her kingdom, her world, her life. And everything revolves around her. From those who work for her (more family than employees – it appears) to Molly the dog and her fellow cohorts.

There are three, possibly four and they come and go as they please.

At dinner they visit tables and wander in and out of the kitchen. No food and safety regulations here. Miranella is somewhere between 50 and 60. She has long brown hair which is greying slightly and left unadorned in a fashion which says, “I’m too busy for that”. Her skin is the color of olive oil, only aged darker by the sun.

San Lorenzo has 1050 olive trees which means it can produce, 1050lt of olive oil, all going well. She lost her entire crop last year through fruit-fly.

There’s also a garden which is about 50metres by 20metres supplying Miranella’s kitchen with the freshest of produce. It’s Italy’s litany of life: Only fresh will do.

My room is next to a deck that overlooks just one of the valleys that surrounds Volterra.

Mornings are silent until your body catches up with the rhythm of life there.

As the sun begins to rise a dog barks across the valley. There’s the occasional muffled noise somewhere within the farmhouse. And that’s all. The road to Siena is less than 600m away. Nothing. There are so many trees, olives and cyprus, that noise doesn’t travel unlike those long, flat and quiet Australian highways where Goondiwindi residents can hear a double B leaving the Captain’s Mountain Roadhouse.

The house is heavy with age, and stone, and large wooden beams and rendered brick and thought. Volterra was my few days of solitude while my wife Helen and three other Goondiwindi-ites – Lois Phillips, Barb Thomas and Catherine Day - walked from Sam Gimignano to Siena, and apart from the occasional text to say they were on a “pub crawl” here and “that food was to die for” there I’d been free, and while I wouldn’t admit it, just a tad “lonely”.

That is until the communication junkie within me went through withdrawl and came out the other side.

We are alone so rarely I mused as I sat watching the sun come up. I was not just in exile, but in an isolation tank. Or so I felt. But what a “tank” Tuscany is. Isolated? An elderly couple sat at a table on my “private” terrace. There were 17 other guests, a mouse who paid a visit the night before, and of course Molly the dog, who guarded my back after finishing her morning rounds.

To my right a road wound its way down, then up into Volterra.

To my left was a hill shaped like a giant Sunbeam iron covered in trees. In the middle the land rolled down into a valley cross-hatched by shadelines.

Somewhere below a tractor labored, hidden by trees and the color of autumn.

I sipped a glass of Muscadello di Montalcino while eating crusty day-old bread with a peppering of pecorino cheese.

And I couldn’t remember when I was so alone with my thoughts.

Life. We rarely have time to sit and think. I had a whole day to do just that. To think about what’s important. About what I should aim for in life and about how we’re going to get there?

The end result of all that introspection was dinner with Miranella 10 hours later where she demystified the mystery of pasta. In a manner of speaking… My fellow classmates were mother and daughter Lisa and Maureen. Maureen was from Boston. Lisa lived in Ireland and Italy was the “meet-half-way” holiday.

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food was simple but marvellous, highlighting that you don’t need a 1001 ingredients to produce wonderful food.

We flattened slices of turkey breast, slapped on pork sausage meat and a sprinkling of rosemary, fennel and garlic, rolled it up, stuck in tooth picks, braised it a pan which could cook small children and threw it into an oven straight from witch’s cabin out of Hansel and Gretel. Dessert was little more than diced apples, flour and sugar and eggs thrown haphazardly into a tray and baked with disregard for an hour.

The result? Sensational.

More care was given to the pasta and under Miranella’s expert tutelage we managed to produce enough ravioli for 20 paying guests. And no-one threw it at us when Miranella announced like a proud aunt that we were to thank for dinner. Or blame, I wondered.

It didn’t seem to matter after bottles of clear-skinned red wine appeared at our table while Maureen, Lisa and another American couple discussed the “need for Obama to win” . After a bottle or three I even added a view or two.

At midnight we staggered off to various parts of the farmhouse swearing to cherish truth, justice and liberty and after one last verse of “beneath the southern cross I stand”.

My day, I realised as I fell into bed with the mouse who had decided on another visit, had begun with an angel and isolation and ended in company and the devil: “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil”.

( Shakespeare, Othello.)

The introspection of the day couldn’t give me an answer to what that might possibly mean.

But at least I knew another great day would follow. Italy offers nothing less.