NOTICED:UNDER THE TUSCAN DELUGE

Subway's "Tuscan" melt

My husband called me yesterday from Italy, where he is on a business trip, which is hard to bear. I’m dragging in the groceries in their various unsightly eco-bags from the car trunk and he is sitting down to a Negroni in an ancient piazza, watching the beautifully dressed people walk by.

Italy is so ideal, so picture-postcard perfect, that even though he’s jet-lagged and working, I have absolutely zero sympathy for him – or for that matter, the citizens of that country, who despite Silvio Berlusconi and garbage piling up in Napoli, get to live there all the time.

But lately I have begun to feel just a little bit sorry for a specific segment of the Italian population. So universally admired is the region of Tuscany, and so inspiring has each and every aspect of the Tuscan lifestyle become to North American product designers and developers, that if I were Tuscan, I would almost be embarrassed to be described as such.

Florence and Siena may boast the major art treasures of the Renaissance and the region’s wines may be so deep and ruby red that they’re admired as Super Tuscans, but one cannot help but feel some sympathy for the poor Tuscans when one discovers that “Welcome to Tuscany” is the new decor theme at Subway restaurants.

Yes, one can now enjoy Subway’s Tuscan Chicken Melt, a “delicious Tuscan seasoned chicken breast drizzled in olive vinaigrette and smothered in melted cheese,” in the newest of the chain’s 16,000 locations in 74 countries, which now boast “Tuscany gold-colour murals, realistic brick wall covering that suggests old-brick oven bakeries” and porcelain stone floor tiles in Pietro Vecchia beige.

In the words of Subway’s franchise brochure, “the natural building materials of the region – brick, clay, stone – express the beauty and relaxed feel of the landscape” – an impression that I always feel particularly intensely when I am shoving Crayola-coloured processed food down my gullet whilst overlooking a lot of parked cars in a suburban shopping plaza.

If that’s insufficiently Tuscan an experience, one could always pop into Arby’s on the way home (there should be one in that Tuscan-inspired stucco big box SmartCenter just off the highway ramp) for its Tuscan offering: the Tuscan Turkey on three cheese focaccia with savoury, glow-in-the-dark sun-dried tomato spread.

I, for one, place the blame squarely at the feet of Frances Mayes, the author of the mega-hit foodie memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, for the advent of Tuscan cat food. Sure, she did not include actual recipes for Fancy Feast’s new Tender Turkey Tuscany line (featuring flavours like White Meat Chicken Tuscany and Yellowfin Tuna Tuscany, in a savoury sauce with long-grain rice and garden greens), but she did make you feel that everything Tuscany was so damn fine that, hey, even pets should be allowed in on the action.

My recent discovery – on the less-discovered south coast of another bit of paradise, the island of Jamaica – that the newest 360-room all-inclusive Sandals mega-resort nearby was a Tuscan-inspired “European Village” was a bit of a buzz kill. But then, apparently, my preference for Caribbean style when in the Caribbean is so last century.

There we were, blissed out at this wonderfully intimate, old-school Jamaican hotel, but apparently the local style wasn’t charming everyone. As one of my fellow guests at the managers’ cocktail party, an unhappy woman who wrinkled up her nose at the codfish fritters, told me, she didn’t think she really liked Jamaica. “I’ve been to lots of places,” she boasted. “But I prefer Tuscany.”

Really, we must pity the poor Tuscans, for we know not what they suffer. Between the villa-buying Brits (who have turned it into Chiantishire) and the ugly North American visitors (who call extra virgin olive oil “evoo” and have all installed Tuscan-inspired kitchens and powder rooms back home), the place must be overrun by now.

And indeed, the June 2008 Harris Poll – a long-running independent opinion poll conducted by New York-based Harris Research – confirms my worst suspicions. Asked to choose any vacation spot outside the United States, Americans overwhelmingly picked Italy ahead of any other destination, and we know exactly where they’re headed on the boot.

According to the official Tuscany website, intoscana.it, the region now welcomes about 10 million visitors a year to trample through its small villages in their shorts and baseball caps, demanding cold Cokes and asking for the nearest washroom.

Maybe now that everything here, from our window treatments to the latest tuna salad recipe, is so very “Tuscan,” we can do them a favour this summer and just stay home.