In Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel, The Baron in the Trees, the book’s main protagonist, a nobleman’s son called Cosimo, climbs into a tree in the family’s Italian garden. He clambers through the branches into the forest beyond, to live out his adventures in the canopy, running from the oaks to the olives to the beech trees in a childlike wonderland. It is both a fairytale and parable, and an elegy to arboreal paradise before we cut it down. “I don’t know if it’s true that, as you read in books, in olden days a monkey that left Rome jumping from tree to tree could reach Spain without touching the ground,” observes the book’s narrator.

I first read The Baron in the Trees a few years ago, and it affected me deeply at a time when environmental anxiety was dominating the news. This trip I’m making to Italy, for better or for worse, feels like a brief escape from that climatic malaise.

The Maremma reaches along the western coast of central Italy, taking in part of Lazio and part of southern Tuscany. It is known for its protected natural park, reclaimed marshes, and low-lying hills or poggi. North of the town of Grosseto, the forest drapes down over these hills to flank the 16th-century country estate of La Pescaia where I’m staying. As I meander through the woods astride a strong black Maremmano horse, Calvino’s fictional landscape returns with a curious realness, as if it were only yesterday that I was held in his storyteller’s grip.