Last year, we had some leftover airline credit on Norwegian Airlines. On the day it was set to expire, in a panic, I asked my 4-year-old son, Holt, where we should go.

“I love pasta!” he said. “But not with red sauce.”

In retrospect, perhaps I should not have organized an entire trip around trying to prove to my 4-year-old that he did, in fact, like pasta al pomodoro;

Lo scenario è da cartolina con i calanchi che si alternano ai campi coltivati a grano e quella strada che si inerpica a serpentina sulla collinatra due filari di cipressi, che tanto sfondo ha fatto a chi cerca di cogliere un pezzo autentico di Toscana, immortalarlo e proporlo all'attenzione del mondo.

La storia comincia nel 1924 quando i Marchesi Antonio e Iris Origo acquistano l’azienda agricola La Foce in Val d’Orcia con il castello trecentesco e la villa in cui fanno realizzare un parco spettacolare dall’architetto inglese Cecil Pinsent (1927-39). Il territorio è poverissimo e gli Origo sognano di migliorare la situazione agricola e le condizioni di vita dei contadini.

DopoLavoro La Foce is a restaurant, lodged in a building that formed part of the grounds of Anthony and Iris Origo‘s estate in Val D’Orcia. It was originally the place where their farm workers could gather after work, to share a glass of wine and play a game of bocce (bowls) in the shade of the lime trees.

Au sud de Sienne, le Val D’Orcia abrite La Foce, chef-d’oeuvre d’équilibre du paysagiste anglais Cecil Ross Pinset. Un jardin associé au Dopolavoro, un restaurant où l’on déguste les produits de ce paysage.

Iris Origo was a 22-year-old newlywed Anglo-American heiress — as rich, brilliant and innocent as a Henry James heroine — when she and her husband, an Italian nobleman, decided to buy La Foce. “Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom,” Origo wrote in October 1923 of her first view of the rundown 3,500-acre estate southeast of Siena; it was “a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.”

The Dopolavoro was built in 1939 as a social club for workers on the Unesco-listed La Foce estate. Newly restored, with an open-plan country-chic look, a lovely big terrace at the back and views of Monte Amiata from the front, the bar and restaurant makes a good stop-off in the magnificent Val d'Orcia.

Luce. Grandi vetrate. Toni pastello chiari. Foto d’epoca, quasi tutte in bianco e nero. Bancone di mattoni. Sembra minimalista lo stile scelto da Benedetta Origo e da sua figlia Katia, che lo gestisce, per il nuovo ristorante de La Foce, la storica fattoria della Valdorcia.