Local ambassador stories: Fiorenza Aureggi, Cetona

Life in Cetona like a fairy tale

"I deeply love Cetona, I have always wanted to live here since I was a child. It is a place that exerts a very strong attraction on me, that's why when I was 30 years old I left Rome to come here and I would make this choice again a thousand times without thinking about it! Cetona is home and my Roman soul has been well reconciled with the Cetonese spirit."

Fiorenza Aureggi's voice as she tells her story, that of her family, and the bold decision to leave the city to live in the country is serene, confident, and full of enthusiasm.

"My origins are from Cetona, both my maternal grandmother and paternal great-grandmother were from here, so I have always felt a sort of call to my roots. Both went away, the first married in Florence and the other in Rome, but both kept their respective homes of origin in the village, so much so that every year with their families they returned to Cetona to spend the vacations, but at different times, until they crossed paths in 1947. So it was that my father and mother, then teenagers, spent an entire summer together, falling in love."

Cetona as a silent witness to a love that broke out between two young people who, after the vacations were over, continued to see each other occasionally, as one lived in Rome and the other in Florence: "The long-distance relationship went on until they decided to get married and my mother went to live in the capital. Cetona has always been the focal point of the whole family, the place where my brother and I grew up and spent vacations."

Fiorenza lived in the Valdichiana Senese town during the period of the 1970s when many celebrities crowded Piazza Garibaldi for the renowned "Premio Rocca di Cetona" Film Festival: "Those were wonderful times, I remember the 'hunt' for Giuliano Gemma, Ottavia Piccolo and Massimo Ranieri and other artists and actors.I still have all the diaries in which I wrote down what was happening here."

Fiorenza says that it is as if there is a magic that unites her family in Cetona: for three generations everything has been in harmony, over the years the choices have always been made very naturally, as if there was a thread of destiny that slowly led to taking certain paths, first to her grandmothers, then to her parents and finally to herself: "I chose to return to the place from which my grandmother was forced to leave because of poverty, that same place where my father in the mid-1970s bought a small farm, where there were also three Chianina cows. Cetona was the important point of origin not only for me but for the whole family."

Fiorenza, recounts with great passion her father's love of the majestic and gentle Chianina breed of cattle, so much so that he set up an important herd. It was precisely to follow the farm, and also because she felt that famous call of her roots, that she moved here permanently in '88:

"I went to live in a farmhouse in the country, every morning I would open the window and see the green hills, I really felt like I was living a fairy tale. Since then many things have changed, I live in the historic center and I like to observe the alleys that tell the stories of the past and retrace with my mind the extraordinary moments experienced here, always with the great love for the area."

Fiorenza's place of the heart: Mount Cetona

"From the mountain you can enjoy an incredible landscape, the woods, the cross on the summit ... and then I remember the stories that my grandparents used to tell me about the mountain, when I think back on it I go back to being a child, I like it and I am comforted by it."

The place the local recommends: the Galleria gli Archidoro, the Civic Museum for the Prehistory of Mount Cetona, the Archaeological Nature Park of Belverde, the Hermitage

"I would definitely recommend the Galleria gli Archidoro, a wonderful journey into the world of the feminine that is deeply affecting, through the art of Fausta Ottolini and Tazio Angelini.A fantastic exhibition, so much so that the first time I went there I was even moved; it is a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered.Then there is the Museum in the center that is a real feather in the cap, the archaeological sites on Mount Cetona and the Hermitage of Santa Maria in Belverde, where there are beautiful paintings by artists who stopped in Cetona on their way to paint the Cathedral of Orvieto."

Fiorenza Aureggi, Roman by birth, Cetonese by choice