“Was she bad? Was she superbad?” My three-year-old son Cormac is talking about Medusa, the witch of Greek myth who turned men to stone. The day before, we were in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria standing for an hour in front of Cellini’s statue of Perseus holding Medusa’s severed, anguished head in one hand, a sword in the other. It is clear that this antique violence is the only image he will take away from 10 days in Italy.

Today, I’m cycling east of Buonconvento in the Tuscan hills with my son in an attached chariot. My wife and daughter are ahead on their own bikes. The fields are plowed in lines, after taking the tobacco, bean and wheat harvest. At the top of every rise, a reddish palazzo sits with feudal pomp. It is October, a few weeks after the grape harvest, the first day of hunting season, and the soft pop of distant shotguns accompanies our dialogue about morality.

“She was superbad.”

We pass a field of black sunflowers, twisted like wrought iron into their winter shape, and drying vines where the Sangiovese grapes were recently taken to make the Chiantis, Brunellos and Vino Nobiles of the region.

“Why?”

“When she looked at people, they turned to stone. And she had snakes on her head.”

“Bad snakes?”

“Very bad. She couldn’t wear hats.”

We turn onto a road, freshly paved, almost untravelled, a rare prize. Pheasant are loudly flushed out of the bushes by our passing. After two hours, we climb a steep hill in the lowest of the 27 gears of my hybrid bicycle and stop for an elaborate lunch in a hill town: pasta with truffles, crostini with porcini and pecorino, the local cheese made from sheep’s milk, and a bottle of Vino Nobile to celebrate my Armstrongesque victory on the last, lengthy hill. Every town is on a hill, every arrival a triumph.

The next day, heading toward Siena, we continue our five-day symposium on good and evil.

“Why did he hold up her head? Was it to show the other witches?”

“Exactly.”

The historic colours of Siena are black and white. You see it on the horizontal marble striping of the pillars inside its cathedral, a 14th-century gem that contains work by Michelangelo, Donatello and Nicola Pisano. The colours represent an unyielding moral divide: You ascend to the clouds or descend into darkness. You are good or superbad. Over the centuries, the area has been host to every megalomaniac with a grudge. Hannibal slaughtered the Romans outside nearby Cortona, sitting on his sad, one-eyed elephant, the last animal to die, somewhere outside Florence. Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, and Hitler, whose Luftwaffe strafed the church walls of a cathedral in Pienza, leaving divots in the sandstone, have all been through. Each brought a new moral certainty, like the sharply divided world of a three year old. And this world is being depressingly revisited, Christian righteousness, infidels and emperors all part of the current political climate, antiquity revived in its narrow glory.

Eating lunch at the Campo, the grand piazza at the centre of Siena, we observe the foreign students who are lying in piles under the pale afternoon sun, spending their parents’ money, drinking beer and dreaming about art.

“So Perseus was a good guy?”

“He saved the village.”

“Can I have a sword?”