THERE is a sign in a vast old paper mill by the side of the road in Fabbriche di Casabasciana on which is scrawled in green paint, trote vive - live trout. You get out of the car (often in the driving rain), try not to get flattened by the juggernauts that thunder up and down the Brennero, and ring on a bell that is hanging off its wire under the sign.

Just as you're about to give up Ennio arrives in his three-wheeled Ape (meaning bee; Vespa means wasp) and lets you into the warehouse with a rusty key.

Everything inside, including large pieces of ancient and discarded furniture, smells of damp and mildew. The echoing interior is lit by one tiny fluorescent strip on the ceiling.

The river is diverted into the warehouse in all kinds of large and leaking pipes and the live trout thrash around in shallow tanks, seeming to know when Ennio is going to put his net in. He bops each one quickly on the head and guts them with a pair of scissors, rinsing them in the torrent, popping them in a plastic bag, weighing them on old grocer's scales and charging you not much at all. This is Tuscany.

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BACKGROUND

• Family fun in Rome

• Rimini returns from the brink

• Tuscany is no dream

• Welcome to Venice, the theme park

• Trying Italy's heel for size

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Tired of the hordes and high prices of Tuscany? Escape the crowds at these six historic towns

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Because if you've ever sat under a cypress tree that twinkled with candle lanterns, seen an apricot sunset go down beyond the medieval villages dotted on a distant hillside, sipped your glass of chianti as the crickets started to sing and watched as the olive groves disappeared around you in the engulfing darkness... then you were probably staying at an English person's house.

It's not that the villages don't exist or that the sunset isn't a lovely colour or, indeed, that the crickets don't sing. It is, of course, possible to hire a house in a cypress grove and sleep in a 10th-century bell tower, eat homemade pasta every night and drink local wine until you half believe that you are in a Bella Toscana tourist board sales video. But you will probably be paying a fellow Brit for the fantasy.

The Tuscany I live in is wild and rugged, full of deserted villages and strange boarded-up towns with only a café singing with fruit machines.

My house, near Bagni di Lucca, is up a one-track road through a deep chestnut forest, and our village, in which more than half the houses are empty, is the dead end at the top. We are at high altitude and we have violent electric storms that cut the power, or heavy roof-leaking rain that seems to make your bones wet.

Very often the village is in a cloud and you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. Romantic? Definitely. But a long way from endless fields of sunflowers and locals arguing charmingly about porcini.

There are fabulous restaurants. You can find them in any guidebook (La Mora near Lucca, Buco di San Antonio in Lucca). They are full of Brits. The little places you just pop into to be served wonderful food, cooked by someone whose family have owned the restaurant since 1410, now exist only in the fevered imaginations of the English. At the best restaurant in Bagni di Lucca, Del Sonno, the chef is from Sheffield.

The real Tuscan diet, especially for children, involves an awful lot of chips and Coca-Cola. From our village, Brandeglio, you can walk, in a couple of hours, up the track and over the mountain to another village, Boveglio.

There is one restaurant in Boveglio, and on weekends flashy cars block the narrow roads because people have come from Milan hoping for a country experience. The restaurant - like every other restaurant in Italy - serves crostini, quick pasta dishes and roast meat. And chips. And Coke. It's a weird place with a tree growing through the middle of the room, and the decor is Soviet Union 1978. The food isn't great, but the odd time warp of the place is what you've come for.

And it is beautiful. There are cherries in spring, fireflies in June, damsons for jam in summer and in autumn, the forest is full of people picking mushrooms and chopping wood for the winter. There's a restaurant in Casabasciana (Villa Aurora) where the bloke makes a pasta sauce with rose petals from his garden and another in Vico Pancellorum (Buca di Baldabo) where they do rabbit and hare and other wintery things. I love the craggy, bleak Wuthering Heights remoteness of it - better than an ice-cream in a hot market packed full of sunburnt tourists any day.

Double Shot by Anna Blundy is published by Sphere (£7.99).

Need to know

Return rail fares from London to Florence start at £114pp with Rail Europe (0844 8484070, www.raileurope.co.uk).

True Tuscan treats

Ristorante Del Sonno (146 Viale Umberto, Bagni di Lucca, 00 39 0583 805080, www.ristorantedelsonno.it) is the most comforting restaurant in the area and makes the best pizzas, possibly in the whole world.

Ristorante Buca Di Baldabo' (11 Via Prati, Vico Pancellorum, 00 39 0583 89062) is a big Soviet-style dining hall with a wild boar's head on the wall, but it is very light in summer and the food - ancient Tuscan stuff - is wonderful and hearty.

Villa Aurora di Franceschi Ferdiando (Localita' Corona, Fabbriche di Casabasciana, 00 39 0583 85600): the owner makes a pasta sauce out of rose petals from his garden, and the views across the mountains at sunset are gorgeous.