Little White Cloud

If New Zealand is the land of the long white cloud, then Tuscany is the land of the little white cloud. The landscapes in the Val d’Orcia have a surreal quality, especially in spring. Surrealism (literally ‘beyond reality’) was an artistic movement which began in Paris in the early 20th century, and was made famous by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 described it as “pure psychic automatism”. This little white cloud is real but it has qualities of the surreal; a strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny.