Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Copyright Page

Opposite: Looking North from Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

Traversando la Maremma Toscana

Dolce paese, onde portai conforme

l’abito fiero e lo sdegnoso canto

e il petto ov’odio e amor mai non s’addorme,

pur ti riveggo, e il cuor mi balza intanto.

Ben riconosco in te le usate forme

con gli occhi incerti fra ‘l sorriso e il pianto,

e in quelle seguo de’ miei sogni l’orme

erranti dietro il giovenile incanto.

Oh, quel che amai, quel che sognai, fu invano,

e sempre corsi, e mai non giunsi il fine:

e dimani cadrò. Ma di lontano

pace dicono al cuor le tue colline

con le nebbie sfumanti e il verde piano

ridente ne le piogge mattutine.

Giosuè Carducci

Rime Nuove, XVI

Crossing the Tuscan Maremma

Sweet land, from whence I derive

My habit of pride and my scornful song

And this bosom where hate and love are never appeased,

When I return to you, my heart leaps after so long.

I rediscover your familiar forms,

And through uncertain eyes, through smiles and tears,

Follow the errant tracks of dreams

That lead to my youthful enchantment with you.

Oh, what I loved, what I dreamed was in vain,

After so much wandering, I never reached the end,

And tomorrow I’ll die. But from afar

Your hills fill my heart with hope,

Steaming with mist and the green plains

Lovely in the morning rains.

Giosuè Carducci

Rime Nuove, XVI

(Trans. Elena Giustarini)

1

WE FIRST SAW Podere Fiume, or “River Farm,” on a cold and rainy afternoon in January 1997. (Some people called the place Podere Bolseto because of the località in which it lay.) The plain two-story house had been built in the 1950s as part of the Ente Maremma program to stimulate the economy of Southern Tuscany. No one had lived in it for more than twenty years. The downstairs consisted entirely of animal stalls, in the largest of which (the one that would become our living room) there were concrete feeding troughs it would take three weeks to demolish. A crumbling outdoor staircase led to the apartment upstairs—four rooms tiled in terrazzo. In the big kitchen there was a Zoppas wood-burning stove barely tall enough for a child to cook at, a 1950s cabinet-and-counter unit in yellow and blue Formica—this latter empty save for a drinking glass from a long-past promotion for Acqua Panna bottled water—and a carved stone sink.

Three doors opened off this kitchen. One led into a green bedroom with a print of a nondescript Madonna hanging on the north wall, one into a pink bedroom that reminded a friend of ours of Pompeii, and the third into a biscuit-colored bedroom that contained a coarse straw bed and a stuffed wading bird. There was also a minute bathroom. No closets. Doves had built nests between the windows and the boiled-spinach-green shutters.

The Old Kitchen, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

The house sat on the crest of a softly proportioned hill, on about two acres of land, one acre of which was given over to forty olive trees and as many fruit trees: apricot, pear, nectarine, white peach, and three varieties of plum. At the base of the poggio a tree-lined rivulet—dry during the summer months—curved alluringly. (It was because of this rivulet that the house had been named Podere Fiume.)

From upstairs one could see where a famous battle had been fought many centuries ago. One could also see the Monte Argentario peninsula, as well as the “skylines” of the villages of Saturnia and Montemerano, and the town of Manciano. Around us there was pasture land for sheep, farmland which produced hay, wheat, and sunflowers, and a couple of small vineyards. The trees were mostly oaks, pines, and chestnuts. (One of the most beautiful, even moving sights was that of a lone, gnarled, ancient oak in the middle of an expanse of pasture.) The sheep created the illusion of boulders cropping out from the grass. There were few of the cypresses which are the presiding genius of the land around Florence, for the Maremmani associate them with cemeteries.

We had not gone to Italy in 1993 with the idea of restoring any kind of property. In fact, when we went there—to Florence (having lucked out in finding an apartment on Via dei Neri)—we intended to stay for only one year. But that year flowed into another. The third year, with the vigorous encouragement of a journalist friend named Lou Inturrisi, we moved to Rome, where his friend Karen Wolman was renting her apartment on Via San Giovanni in Laterano. (Lou told us that Karen was “the potato-sack heiress,” but that we must pretend we did not know this.) We became friends with Karen’s architect, Domenico Minchilli, and his American wife, Elizabeth, a one-woman industry of books and articles about Italy. Soon, however, we grew tired of living in what an art historian friend called the “beautiful, infernal chaos” that was Rome, and when Lou was murdered (we gave evidence to the carabinieri on the very morning of Princess Diana’s funeral), we decided to look for a quiet place—not in Chiantishire, not in the environs of “Beverly Hills” (an area of Umbria so-called because its first American colonist was the artist Beverly Pepper). In Maremma, we hoped, we would be able to hear our own voices in the safe silence. As the crow flies, Semproniano, our comune, was pretty much midway between Rome and Florence. The closest train stations were in Grosseto and Orvieto. When there was no moon, the night sky was so dark and yet so clear that it seemed as if one could see every star.

Heiliger Hain (Holy Grove) (Etching by Max Suppantschitsch, 1865—1953)

Perhaps because man and beast had lived peacefully together under its roof, Podere Fiume had a good soul as well as good bones. Indeed, as we walked through it that first afternoon, the idea that we would bring the house back to life suddenly seemed natural, even inevitable. Podere Fiume spoke to us from its spirit, not its splendor—there were no frescos beneath the plaster, no Etruscan necropoli in the oliveto (olive grove).

Necropoli Etrusca del Puntone (Seventh Century B.C.), Saturnia (Photo by MM)

As it happened, the owner, a local farmer and bon vivant with the extraordinary name of Loando, had had a stroke a few days earlier and was in the hospital in Pitigliano. We made an offer which, by the end of the day, he had accepted from his bed. To our mild surprise, we jumped the bureaucratic hurdles successfully and more or less gracefully, and on the first day of spring, Podere Fiume legally became ours. We celebrated the occasion, as is the custom, by having lunch with its former owner, our respective notaries, the real estate agent, and Domenico at the restaurant of a small hotel in Poggio Capanne, the proprietors of which some Roman friends affectionately called I Puffi—the Smurfs.

We had come to this part of Italy together for the first time in the autumn of 1993. We needed to get out of Florence for a few days, and we wanted to “take” the famous thermal waters at Saturnia. These sulfuric springs, which gush out of the earth at 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 degrees Fahrenheit), were famous even in Roman times for their curative properties. On windy days the smell of sulfur carries all the way up to the village of Saturnia, said to be the oldest in all of Italy. It was to these springs that injured Roman soldiers were sent to be healed after battle. In the twentieth century, a hotel channeled the waters into a modest series of pools and artificial waterfalls, which in turn flowed down through an old and crumbling stone water mill to form the natural falls known as the Cascate del Gorello.

Roughly speaking, the Maremma corresponds to the province of Grosseto, which occupies the southwest corner of Tuscany. “Maremma” means “marsh;” and for centuries this was exactly what the area was. A few rich, noble families had divided the land among them. The people, poor and accustomed to hardship, were small in stature. Women traveled on donkey back. In fact, our neighbor Ilvo’s younger sister, at the age of nine, had been dragged to her death by a donkey whose lead she had tied around her waist. Alas, such tragic accidents were common. This was, in effect, the Wild West of Italy, home to the butteri (cowboys) who tended herds of horned Maremmana cattle. (Seeing a horse tied in front of a bank or a bar was still not so unusual in our time.) There were also brigands. The painter Caravaggio was murdered in Maremma, at Porto Ercole. Even during the age of the Grand Tour, the twin threats of brigands and malaria dissuaded all but the most adventurous traveler from stopping here. Nor was the Maremma spared anything of Fascism or the Second World War. Bombs destroyed much of Grosseto, the principal city. Tera-cle, the real estate agent under whose aegis we bought Podere Fiume (Greek, or at least Magna Graecia, names are common here), recalls witnessing, at thirteen, the shooting of an entire family by the Camicie Nere (Black Shirts) because they had given refuge for a few weeks to an English soldier. The father of our friend Brunella was beaten when he refused to sing the Fascist hymn (“Giovinezza”) at school.

Balilla in Marcia (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure, edited by Massimo Gennari)

Things started to change in the 1950s, after the threat of malaria was eradicated, and habitable and arable land was claimed from the newly drained marshes. In addition, the government bought up most of the land from its owners and distributed it among the tenant farmers whose families had been working it for generations. This program not only provided funding for hospitals and schools, but also put up houses for the farmers, more or less identical and cobbled together from stone, brick, and blocks of porous and ever-so-slightly radioactive volcanic rock also used by the Etruscans.

Now the Maremma is relatively prosperous: many an abandoned podere has been converted into an agriturismo (country bed-and-breakfast); vineyards produce sangiovese grapes for Morellino di Scansano. Much of the area has been given over to an enormous national park. Wild boars, roebuck, and chamois abound in the forests; Maremmana sheepdogs—tenaciously loyal, with thick, ivory-colored coats—guard huge flocks on many of the farms. In contrast to Umbria, there is almost no industry; the people still make their living from agriculture. In the summer, when the afternoon temperature regularly reaches a hundred degrees, the older farmers tractor by moonlight. Even after midnight we could hear the cool hum of their machines moving slowly over the fields.

Living there was rather like living between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries: modern inventions made aspects of life easy, but remnants of ancient ways endured. There were village festivals celebrating the gathering of the hay, and religious processions commemorating salvation from the Black Death in the 1400s. Ancient trades that the Industrial Revolution did much to destroy were practiced still. Gods and goddesses that predated Christ were worshipped (though often obliquely). There, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, one burned branches of laurel to invoke the protection of benign deities in the coming year. There, when one moved into a house, one waved branches of myrtle in each room to chase out evil spirits.

2

AFTER WE SETTLED on settling in Maremma and A before we found Podere Fiume, we looked at about twenty houses that were for sale. Each of them seemed to have an insuperable flaw Finally we did see a house that we quite liked. It was one of a row of attached houses built in the thirties, in a tiny borgo just north of Montemerano. (One of these houses belonged to the Toscanini family.) The owner was a Roman real estate agent whose wife, an architect, had restored the small yet high-ceilinged rooms with care, building a reading loft in the bedroom, carving a room for dealing with what Mussolini called “gli elementi della natura” from a thick wall, adding a terrace on the roof. In the living room a new fireplace had been installed—on the model of the one that originally was there, but smaller. In front of the house there was a big garden with a grass lawn (rare in this part of the world), stone paths, roses, and an ancient oak tree.

In reality, this house fit our fantasies better than it did ourneeds. For example, it had only two bedrooms, which meant that one of us would have to do without a study and work in the living room or at the dining table: not a big deal, but something to consider. The living room was far too small ever to hold a piano. There were no closets. And yet, and yet . . . the view from the terrace was so splendid, did it really matter if there weren’t enough closets? After all, one didn’t buy a house in Italy for the sake of storage space. Both our families had excesses of storage space, and what had they done with it? Stowed away boxes filled with creased sheets of Christmas wrap-pingpaper, fondue sets, Tupperware bowls missing their lids, ancient blenders, and televisions that actually had dials. What need had we of closets?

And so we paid a visit to the real estate agent who had taken us to see the house—his name was Marco Rossi, which in Italy is like being named John Smith—during which we expressed some timid interest, then inquired as to how we might proceed. He smiled, then took out a thickly stuffed file from his desk. Because he liked to be completely up front with his clients, he said, he wanted to make sure that we were aware from the beginning of certain piccoli problemi with the house—nothing serious, no; still, worth knowing about.

He opened the file.

The first “little problem” had to do with the garden. Although it was for sale along with the house, and had the same owners as the house, the patch of land that led from the front door to the gate belonged to someone else. How was this possible? The piece of land in question was about the size of a large sofa. Marco Rossi explained that the land around the house had originally belonged to a widow who had died intestate. As she had eighteen legitimate heirs, the land had been divided into eighteen parcels. Seventeen of the owners had agreed to sell when the real estate agent and his wife had bought the garden, but one had held out. One always holds out . . . Not that it mattered in this case. The owner of the sofa-sized patch was very nice, actually a friend of his, Marco Rossi said, and he had no objections to the owners of the garden trespassing on his land in order to reach it.

Marco Rossi turned another page in his file. “Little problem” two, he said, concerned the cantina (basement). It did not belong to the owners of the house, but to an old woman who lived down the street, and though she would be willing to sell it, she wanted thirty-five million lire (at that time about twenty thousand dollars). The old woman told Marco Rossi to reassure us that if we chose not to buy the cantina, she was certain that someone else would—perhaps even someone in the borgo who would like to convert it into a playroom for their children. Old Italian women often are subtle practitioners of the art of blackmail.

Anything else?

Just one more “little problem”: if we bought the house, we would have to buy it as two separate apartments, the upstairs and the downstairs. This was merely a technicality. As there were two ofus, it even could be perceived as an advantage: we could each buy one apartment.

We went back to Rome with photocopies of the documents relating to the three “little problems.” The next day we called Ada, a real estate agent we had met the summer before in San Francisco, where she was vacationing with her girlfriend, Maura. At a restaurant, they had appealed to us for help in translating the menu and then for advice on where they could go to get married. (This was in the days before same-sex marriage was legalized—and then just as quickly illegalized—in California.) Ada invited us to her apartment, where we gave her the photocopies. It took her about ten minutes to get through them. The reason the house was being sold as two apartments, she said, was because the major “renovation”—nothing less than the construction of the staircase linking the two floors—had been done without a permit. The electricity, the plumbing, and the roof terrace had also gone in without permits. In short, the whole house was illegal. If we bought it, and the illegal works were discovered, we could be compelled either to undo them or to pay an exorbitant fee in exchange for a condonno (certificate of approval).

“You could buy that house,” Ada said, “but I wouldn’t. I like to sleep at night.”

So we didn’t.

When we told Domenico about this adventure, he said, “Oh, that’s pretty common. In one house I did, I put in a swimming pool without a permit. When the inspector came, we covered the deck with sheets of sod and said that it was a holding tank for water.”

3

Paestum hurts; it is the only place I know that would move one to tears. A desolate fever-haunted plain with wild shaggy bullocks roaming about in the brush; then lovely mountains; on the other side the sea asleep naked; and near the shore the temple of Neptune, the oldest thing in the world—impressionally at least; older than Greece and Assyria, as old as the oldest Egypt; so solemn and serene and sweet that one burns with shame; what have I done with my life? It hurts and consoles one at once. HARRY BREWSTER SR., from a letter to Ethel Smyth (1893)

NOTHING TELLS YOU more about a people than their homes. In Maremma, the interior ideal was dazzling white walls, shiny granite floors kept mirror-bright thanks to the chamois-bottomed slippers that many casalinghe (housewives) wear indoors, a ceremonial dining room (but rarely a living room), no lamps but bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a mix of inherited rustic furniture with decidedly “modern” pieces that spoke of a remote and faintly unreal urban world. Many homes had only two books: the Holy Bible and the telephone directory. Some, however, had three books: the Holy Bible, the telephone directory, and a hagiography of Silvio Berlusconi that he himself had sent to every Italian household before an election.

Italy has gained general prosperity only since the Second World War. A common phenomenon was to see an old woman dressed in black being driven to the weekly outdoor market by her son in his Jeep Cherokee. The once poor tried to prove their affluence by living among new things, even if they were not so fine as the old ones, yet there was more to it than that: one did not have to look at too many Italian interior-design magazines to see that the country was continuing its long struggle to free itself from an oppressive inheritance. Like most Americans in Italy, we didn’t want to furnish our house in massive, dark furniture any more than most Italians did, but we weren’t prepared to go to the other extreme, the cruel minimalism of Milan design.

To a one, the outstanding artisans who worked on Podere Fiume—Magini the carpenter, Pepe the black_smith, Luca and Pierluigi the marble cutters, Sauro the stonemason, and the Rossis (door and window makers)—were incredulous when we told them that we wanted una casa d’epoca (a house from once upon a time). We wanted rough terra cotta floors, exposed beams, and a pietra serena fireplace. We wanted to construct a future based on our own private notions of comfort and incorporating a factitious past. (Perhaps Americans want old houses because we do not have enough history, whereas Italians want new ones because they have too much of it.) We wanted visitors to take it for granted that Podere Fiume’s origins were medieval, or, if not medieval, then still far in the past.

For some inexplicable reason, many people in Semproniano, kept apprised of our house’s progress by Sauro and his wife, Silvia, were preoccupied about the color we would choose to paint the interior walls. Gigliola, who owned the bakery, urged us to paint them white. “Con bianco non si sbaglia mai” (“You never go wrong with white”), she said. Sauro, too, advised white. Living in the country with a wire-haired fox terrier, however, could any color be less practical?

Podere Fiume from the South (Photo by MM)

From reading interior magazines, we had become familiar with the paints made by the English company Farrow & Ball. The colors not only had memorable names but came with stories, an appealing idea to writers: Calamine (“... colours like this one appeared regularly in country house anterooms and boudoirs from the 1870s on into Edwardian Times”); Charleston Gray (“The Bloomsbury Group used this colour extensively, both in interior decoration and on canvas”); India Yellow (“First available in England in the eighteenth century, this pigment was produced by reducing the bright yellow urine of cows fed on a special diet of mango leaves”); Ointment Pink (“Found in the dining room at Calke Abbey and the library at Kedleston ... and yes, similar to the Regency scheme in the entrance hall and staircase at Castle Coole”); Sugar Bag Light (“... very like the blue of paper used for lining drawers in the late eighteenth century”). One cannot judge a paint only by its name, however, and in the end we settled on Single Cream. For the trim work, we chose the elegantly concise String (“One of a series of pale, earth-pigment-based colours, which have been in continuous use either as an off-white with brighter colours or as its own colour with a brighter white”).

The Master Bedroom, Podere Fiume (Photo by Simon McBride)

After about three weeks—long weeks indeed, since by this point we had only to have the walls painted before we could move in—the paint arrived, by truck, from England, and Sauro began applying it. We had vacated our apartment in Rome on March 6 to oblige the new tenant, who was pregnant, and since then we had been leading a peripatetic existence in the expectation that the house would be finished in mid-April. From March 6 to April 9 we had rented a house in Saturnia. Podere Fiume not yet being habitable on the 9th, we went to Verona (April 9 to April 11), the Villa d’Este at Cernobbio (April 11 to April 14), and then to Domenico and Elizabeth’s vacation house in “Beverly Hills” (April 14 to April 24). Since our homelessness owed, at least in part, to Domenico’s overly optimistic estimation, they didn’t charge the exorbitant weekly rate that they usually charged other Americans.

It was during this stay that Sauro called us to say that he was painting the house and that he wasn’t so sure about the color. “It’s a little on the orange side,” he said. We suggested the color might be less intense once the paint had dried. If it didn’t, we’d drive over, have a look, and go from there.

The color was not less intense once the paint had dried. As it turned out, Sauro had in fact understated how orange the color actually was. It was the hot orange of certain curries. According to the label on the can, this was not Single Cream but Harissa.

After that, urgent calls were made, profuse apologies tendered, and a promise extracted from the one Italian in the shipping department at Farrow & Ball that the proper paint would be sped on its way to us that very afternoon. But in the meantime, where were we to live? The day before, Elizabeth had informed us that we would have to clear out of their house that weekend: they were coming to Beverly Hills and bringing guests. To make matters worse, the May ist holiday was approaching: one of the most traveled holidays of the Italian year, during which hotel rooms are virtually impossible to come by. If push came to shove, we’d have to sleep in our rental car.

Thence from Beverly Hills to Saturnia (April 24 to May 1); from Saturnia to Paestum (May 1 to May 2.—we were lucky enough to find a hotel); from Paestum to Lecce (May 2. to May 3); from Lecce to Asolo (May 3 to May 6); from Asolo back to Saturnia (May 6 to May 7); and finally, on May 7, to Podere Fiume. All told, we drove more than fourteen hundred miles. Sauro had re-primed the walls and painted them Single Cream. The bedroom closets, however, we left as they were as a tribute to the episode.

TMM, Paestum (Photo by DL)

4

OF ALL THE craftsmen who worked on Podere Fiume, the most entertaining was Pepe, the blacksmith. He was a short, chubby, balding, and slightly foppish Roman—he had been known to wear an ascot even while soldering—who always seemed as rumpled and stale as if he had just come off a long-haul flight. In a single sentence he could tell you about the giardino d’inverno (winter garden) he had built for the designer Valentino and lament that he had not had una bella cagarella (a good shit) in ages.

Pepe was a fixture at a certain bar on Via Cavour, not far from his studio near Trajan’s Forum, and there he insisted on buying a coffee for each and every friend of his who happened to walk in or whom he might have chanced to encounter and co-opt on the way. Each of his visits—and he made no fewer than five of them a day—cost him a minimum of fifteen thousand lire. So that he would not need to have cash on him always, he kept an account at the bar and settled it once a month. Pepe’s minimum of fifteen thousand lire a day came to two and a quarter million lire a month. Multiplied by twelve, one calculates that Pepe spent fifteen thousand dollars a year on coffee.

Like all true artisans, Pepe was self-dramatizing. His work, he would say, was not like anyone else’s. Although certain things might look simple, such as the wrought-iron brackets for the curtain rods, they required enormous effort and concentration to make. For this reason, he could hardly be expected to work more than two or three hours a day: only an automaton could work eight or ten hours a day. If lunch was particularly satisfying, perhaps he would be able to put in another half hour’s work during the afternoon. In any case, he must have a short rest first.

Still, in six months, he managed to complete all our iron work: grates for the downstairs windows, three sets of doors, arched doors for a winter garden, railings for the stairs (a design copied from a terrace on a crumbling building in the Monti neighborhood of Rome), and finally, the curtain brackets and rods. Although Sauro and his assistants, Giampaolo and Fabio, were able to install the window grates and doors, Pepe insisted that he had to come up to install the railing himself.

We duly set Pepe up at an agriturismo run by Sauro’s cousin, but it would not do for him. Instead he decamped to the Locanda la Pieve, Semproniano’s one hotel, where all of his meals could be—and were—placed on account. (At the agriturismo, only breakfast was provided.) During the three days he was there, he worked a total of eight hours. Because Sauro and his crew put in a good ten hours a day, five (and sometimes six) days a week, they did not quite know what to make of Pepe and his ascots. They concluded that he was simply un personaggio (a character).

5

MAGINI, THE CARPENTER, was a voluble Roman in his mid-seventies: proud of his work, and justly so, though rather bored after more than a half-century’s labor. For him, food was much more interesting than wood. He was the archetypal paterfamilias and really lived for those occasions when all of his family, unto its furthest ramifications, were gathered at his table. Whenever we saw him about the work he was doing for us—to calculate the proper height for the countertops, or to design a credenza for the kitchen, or to copy an eighteenth-century Venetian bookcase that had secret doors on the sides—it always happened to be just before or just after lunch. While he lacked the urbanity of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he shared her Belgian detective’s attitude toward eating well. In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Poirot reflects, “I am not in tune with the modern world. And I am, in a superior way, a slave as other men are slaves. My work has enslaved me just as their work enslaves them. When the hour of leisure arrives, they have nothing with which to fill their leisure. The retired financier takes up golf, the little merchant puts his bulbs in his garden, me, I eat. But there it is, I come round to it again. One can only eat three times a day. And in between are the gaps.”

Magini’s shop was on the outskirts of Rome and, like every shop of this sort, had a girlie calendar on the wall. Close by was a canteen where we had lunch with him and Domenico once (September 2.3,1997). The subject of conversation was food. Domenico was saying that according to an article he had just read, fried squid had more cholesterol than practically anything else, even eggs. At that moment the waiter came up and announced that the piatti del giorno (day’s specials) were spaghetti alla carbonara and calamari fritti. No one ordered the fried squid but we all ordered the spaghetti, which was delicious and beautiful beyond words: pasta the color of a marigold, flecked with transparent confetti of pancetta, presented in a white bowl. “Please don’t tell Elizabeth I had this;” Domenico asked. “She’s on the cabbage soup diet.” The cabbage soup diet was in fashion that year. Emma, the younger of their two daughters, recently had remarked, “Mommy looks as if she is going to have a baby out of her bottom.”

If you’d had a look at Magini’s arteries, you would have been worried. He himself, however, lived as if there was no tomorrow In fact, he told us, the previous Sunday he and his wife had made tortellini a mano (by hand) for a small family lunch: seven hundred tortellini for ten people. Seventy tortellini per person. One thought of Blake’s proverb: “Enough—or too much.” One also thought that Magini’s indifference to his lipids and so on might not be so foolish after all. This was the year after an airplane en route to Paris had blown up over Long Island, killing every man, woman, and child aboard. How many of those souls had denied themselves eggs, or ice cream, or fried squid the day before they flew, believing that low cholesterol would assure them a longer life?

6

BECAUSE WE HAD been living for half a dozen years in furnished or semifurnished apartments when we bought Podere Fiume, the only furniture we owned was a cornflower-blue sofa and a pair of leather library chairs, which we intended to put in the living room; a desk with chesnut legs and a top of Ligurian pietra serena; a Bokara carpet; four neo-Gustavian chairs with unupholstered seats; and a bed. This is how we came to meet Olimpia Orsini.

An interior designer of some repute in Rome, Olimpia also owned a little shop that she refused to call a shop—it was her “studio,” she insisted—on Via del Boschetto. (She referred to herself not as a “designer” but as an “interior,” which, considered together with the fact that she had taken a degree in psychology, was appropriate.) A few months after we met her, she transferred her shop to a small street just off Via Marguta, where some of the most expensive antique stores in Rome are located, and had business cards printed on which she gave her address as “Vicolo dell’Orto di Napoli (Via Marguta).” Such a street name must have seemed an augur of good things to Olimpia, who was from Naples. Her age was difficult to determine—anywhere between forty-five and sixty, we figured. She had long dark-blond hair, wore Chanel suits in even the most inclement weather, and smoked incessantly.

After we moved to Podere Fiume, we asked Renato, the aristocracy-obsessed owner of the antique shop at the Terme di Saturnia, if he knew her. “The Countess Orsini?” he asked excitedly. The Orsinis, he reminded us, were a noble Tuscan family; an Orsini had built the fantastic and eerie statuary garden at Bomarzo; there was an Orsini stronghold not far from us, in Pitigliano.

To these Orsinis, Olimpia bore the same relation that Tess does to the d‘Urbervilles: that is to say, none at all. In fact, Olimpia was not her real name—it was Marilena—and even this Elizabeth had discovered only because she had happened to glimpse her carta d’identità one afternoon when it was lying on the desk of her shop. Her husband, Puccio, was a retired Alitalia pilot—“the sort of man,” Domenico said, “who always has four or five million lire in his pocket”—and such was his devotion to Olimpia that, rather than relaxing in his retirement, he spent most of his time driving around Rome on a Vespa doing commissions for her. “Puccio,” she might instruct, “take these chairs over to Luigi’s workshop.”

“Si, bella,” he would answer, strap a pair ofgilt-trimmed armchairs onto his Vespa, and zoom off. (They had a son in his early twenties whom we never saw. “I could never have a daughter,” Olimpia told us. “I like being the only hen in the coop.”)

That Olimpia had wonderful, eclectic taste was indisputable. Her shop was always full of curious and unlikely pieces: Venetian mercury mirrors edged with seashells, bronze lamps with classical figures in high relief, chairs upon the legs of which mermen and mermaids disported themselves, panels of antique wallpaper and toile de Jouy, a leopard skin with taxidermied head draped nonchalantly across the back of a dormeuse. Olimpia upholstered all the furniture in her shop in the plainest muslin. Nothing was dark, and no wood was wood-colored. Chairs that she brought into the shop in dreadful condition, grimy from years of neglect, she would “refresh” simply by stitching some thousand-lire-a-meter cotton on to the worn cushions and slapping the wood with white paint. In her fondness for white, if in no other regard, she echoed Gigliola. Both women echoed the famous English designer Syrie Maugham. (Olimpia’s failure, however, to replace the old horsehair-and-straw stuffing in some of these chairs considerably distressed Luigi, the upholsterer, who considered them unhygienic.)

From Olimpia, we ended up buying a couple of side tables and a derelict but magnificent eighteenth-century carved-wood-and-gesso sofa from Venice, which had managed to escape the attentions of her paintbrush only by virtue of its extraordinary color—the most subtle of gray greens. We also bought a pair of white armchairs that were intended for the winter garden—a room occupying an arcaded space where farm equipment was formerly stored. (These chairs were something of a wish fulfillment for MM, who, when being taught perspective in high school art class, had drawn, in one-point perspective, a chair in the very style of those we’d bought from Olimpia. Although the drawing was done in dark gray pencil, his mother helped him to frame it with a mat the color of one of the stripes of the fabric that covered the seat and back of the chair that had been his model.) Unfortunately, their stuffing smelled, and Tolo displayed from the very beginning a great fondness for sleeping on them. We asked Olimpia if she would buy them back or, short of that, sell them on our behalf, which she did in four days.

7

ONE BLUSTERY AFTERNOON, Sauro came by to do some small work. When he arrived, we had a candle burning in a pewter candlestick on the mantel of the fireplace. Sauro looked at it quizzically.

“A candle!” he said. “Did you have a power outage?”

“It’s for atmosphere;” we answered. “It makes a nice light.”

With an affirmative “Hmm!” Sauro took his tools upstairs.

Atmosphere—the sort embodied by a candle burning on a blustery afternoon—meant less to him than it did to us. His own house was a far cry from the Italian country house of dreams, where worn armchairs and wooden footstools sat gathered around the immense fireplace that in dreams is always ablaze and crackling, giving the house a center around which to cohere. Podere Fiume, however, had no fireplace when we bought it. In the kitchen, which would later become DL’s study there was only the little Zoppas wood-burning stove. Perhaps because he came from Bari and had been educated in California, Domenico understood our longing for the hearth that in English is paired with home. In his own house in Beverly Hills, he had put fireplaces not only in the living room and dining room, but also the kitchen and two of the bedrooms. “When we’re there in the winter, it’s so nice and toasty,” he said, taking as much pleasure in his command of American idioms as in the toastiness itself.

DL’s drawing—made after we bought Podere Fiume but before we began working on it—of how he wanted the living room to look. Except for the fireplace, this was what it looked like upon completion.

As it happens, there is a considerable market for antique fireplaces and fireplace tools in Italy. Even in big cities there are shops that deal exclusively in old attrezzi: wrought iron pokers; Renaissance andirons; enormous cast-iron plaques decorated with heraldic motifs or mythological figures, to be mounted on the back of the fireplace to throw heat forward; medieval hooks from which to hang the pots in which hundreds of years ago cooks prepared stews of meat and onion and borlotti (a variety of cranberry bean).

Our fireplace came from a man who salvaged them from villas in the Mugello, the mountains between Florence and Bologna. It was made of pietra serena and had the year of its making incised on one of its flanks: 1803. It consisted of six pieces of stone: a mantel, a plinth that held up the mantel, and four side pieces to support the plinth. As a base (the poetic hearth), Sauro hauled in some enormous sassi (stones) that were the same color as the fireplace and that a friend of his had chiseled to make fit together. Once constructed, the fireplace measured a meter and a half by a bit more than a meter.

The Living Room, Podere Fiume (Photo by Simon McBride)

At this point it was midsummer—a blazing midsummer at that—and hardly the moment to be building a fire. And so for a few months we filled the fireplace with old and patched copper cooking pots; dried wild artichokes; and even, for a few weeks, the television set; all the while waiting for the cold weather to come. (Country life knows its apogee in winter.) Already we had a complement of attrezzi. Between the house and the uliveto, a cord of wood was stacked. As a housewarming present, our friend Piero had even given us a pronged potato-roasting device designed to be fit into the embers.

In December, the time for fires came. We put logs into the embrace of the andirons; around their feet went the kindling. We lit a match and stood back. Fire! Smoke! Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? We threw open the windows. Perhaps there was not enough wind outside to make the chimney draw. But the next day—even though there was more wind—the same thing happened.

Presently (December 16, 1998), Domenico drove up from Rome with Magini to meet with Sauro and assess the situation. After conferring among themselves for quite a while, they built a fire. This time a beautiful blaze leapt, the smoke following orders and going exactly where it was supposed to. Domenico gloated, just a little—and a little too soon, for just then the smoke turned around and billowed into the room.

The problem, Domenico concluded, was quite simply that the opening was too big for the room. Why had he not considered this possibility before the fireplace was put in? “A fireplace like that, you need a chimney that’s twice as high,” Sauro said—why had he not said this while building it?—and proposed to install an electric fan that looked like a serrated chef’s toque at the top of the chimney. But no, Domenico said, the solution was just to make the opening smaller, perhaps by attaching a large panel of copper or wood to the back side of the mantel. But no, Magini said, the solution was to drape a curtain over the fireplace, far enough away from the fire, of course, so that it wouldn’t ignite!

As far as we were concerned, none of the proposals on offer was going to do. By chance, however, DL had come across an article about a Danish company called Morsø that made wood-burning stoves. In the illustration accompanying the article, one of these stoves—black cast iron and with an image of a squirrel embossed on its side—had been placed inside a big fireplace very much like our own. When we told Domenico what we were considering, he cried, “How can you do that?” as if the mere idea of a stove injured him personally. “A country house without a fireplace . . . that would be terrible! I couldn’t imagine my house in winter without a fire going!” We reminded him that in the case of his own house, he was seldom there in the cold months. We, on the other hand, had the whole winter before us, and could hardly spend it in a haze of wood smoke, our throats sore, our eyes burning, the furniture becoming sooty. “But that doesn’t mean you should do something drastic,” he said. “We just have to study the problem . . . ” (In Italy, as everywhere, “study the problem” is synonymous with “put off the solution.”)

It was apparent that we had to take matters into our own hands. We found a dealer in wood-burning stoves in Grosseto. His shop was full of immense high-tech models, all gleaming chrome and superb efficiency. Mostly he dealt in the sort of small stoves that Sauro, Ilvo, and Delia kept in their kitchens, and in the summer he sold pizza ovens. Nonetheless we asked him about Morsø. “Quello col scoiattolo!” (“The one with the squirrel!”) he said, his eyes lighting up like those of the chef at a Chinese restaurant when, to his delight, a customer asks for crispy duck with taro root instead of chow mein. Not only did he know it, the Morso distributor was a friend of his. If we wanted, he could have the stove for us in three days.

The stove fit perfectly inside the fireplace. Piero’s little device for roasting potatoes went into a drawer somewhere. Something had to be sacrificed.

“A smaller wood-burning stove in the fireplace opening is the owners’ choice for an easy and economical way to heat the room,” Elizabeth wrote in her book.

Fire on a November Afternoon, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

8

The Italians are adorable but au fond they lack mystery. Life is exquisite in Italy but in the end atrociously boring. The French are occasionally nasty but at least they have depth.

FREDERIC PROKOSCH,

THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT (1968)

THE MOST USEFUL thing anyone living in Italy can learn is how to be bored because Italy is the most boring of all European countries: boredom is the nettle among its laurels.

Sundays are boring days in Italian cities because all the shops are closed (although, poco a poco, this is changing). The summer is boring because all the movie theaters are closed (the American experience of spending a hot afternoon in the dark of a super-airconditioned multiplex is unknown here), and for at least a month (August) everything is closed. (Truly it is like a month of Sundays.) And just how boring after dinner can be was brought home to us by an advertisement we saw one summer in Rome: a dramatic alternative to the ritual of cena, passeggiata, and gelato (dinner, walk, and ice cream) was proposed: cena, passeggiata, and grattacheccha (dinner, walk, and grated ice flavored with syrup; essentially a snow cone). Every February, there is the obligatory settimana bianca (white week) in the Alps or the Dolomites. Christmas is always spent with i tuoi (relatives) and Easter with chi vuoi (whomever you want). In Rome you eat gnocchi on Thursday and fish on Friday. In all of Italy you can find delicious fried sweets during the Carnival season, but only during the Carnival season. In short, it is not so much the ritualization as what might be called the “habitualization” of Italian life that makes it so boring.

Giuseppe Novello, from Il Signore di Buona Famiglia (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1934): “When even the sour-cherry ice is finished.”

And yet there one grows to love boredom, even to cultivate it. In a boring country, you find that you are content more often than happy, since we make our own contentment and happiness makes itself. In Florence, the name given to that sense of being overwhelmed—and even made unwell—by beauty is Stendhal syndrome. One could suffer from a similar malady there. Beauty was one of its causes, though not the principal one: its principal cause was the sense of colliding with a happiness in the cosmos that seems endless, that comes almost as a breeze, or a descended magical cloud. This is boredom’s antonym.

9

IN OUR PART of Tuscany, there were sagre (festivals) celebrating, among other things, acqua cotta (cooked water), chestnuts, strawberries, strozzapreti (a fresh pasta made without eggs), snails, fava beans and pecorino, artichokes, bruschetta, tripe, panzanella (bread salad), grapes, capitone (eel), and polenta. One sagra was very much like another, however. Our most memorable was our first. DL is speaking here.

Florence, late summer: all over the city bright yellow posters advertise a festival of tortellini and wild boar to be celebrated in the town of Ronta. I take this as a sign that the fall has nearly arrived—and about time, too: August was brutal, the Arno a malarial trickle, the city emptied of its inhabitants, an art-historical amusement park roamed by bands of grim-faced tourists. But now the August tourists have left, the Florentines have come stumbling back from the seaside, and fresh rain is flushing the river. It is no longer so hot that the switching on of a lightbulb is painful. Indeed, it is even possible to contemplate wearing sweaters.

The season of work is also fast approaching, so in preparation for a book I want to write, I have become engaged in looking for images of Tiresias, that mythical seer who came upon two copulating snakes and hit them with a stick, after which he spent seven years living as a woman. Ovid made Tiresias famous, as did T. S. Eliot, but according to my art historian friend Andrea, only one Italian painter, Giulio Carpioni, ever depicted him on canvas. Naturally I’m curious to see the picture. “Is there a book?” I ask.

“Yes, one, but written by an art historian who brings terrible luck. A boy took this book on an airplane and the plane ha caduto.”

“But how do you know—”

“You must never say the name of this art historian, and if anyone ever says his name in your presence, you must touch your coglione.”

I pause to digest this information. “Do you have a copy of the book?” I then ask.

“Per carità! I wouldn’t dare.”

Well, I would. So I go to Libreria Internazionale Seeber on Via Tournabuoni and ask the very knowledgeable clerk if he knows the book. “Yes,” he says, “it is by _________________.” (I touch my coglione.) “We had one copy, but it sold three months ago. We were glad to have it out of the store.”

“And will you be getting any more?”

He looks at me as if I’m mad to suggest he take such a risk, so I thank him and leave. Poor Carpioni! I’m thinking. What a fate, to have been studied by ! And poor , who must live his life in exile, shunned by his peers, denied entry to the myriad conferences and congresses, the enjoyment of which, as far as I can tell, is the chief summertime occupation of the academic world. Why, right now just such a conference is taking place in Florence: an international gathering of statisticians, one of whom calls me up when I get home from the bookstore; it seems that twenty years ago, in Paris, she introduced my brother to his wife. We meet for coffee at the Cantinetta Verrazzanno. “At this moment there are three thousand statisticians in Florence;” she tells me. “If you threw a stone in the Piazza della Signoria, you’d probably hit a statistician, and believe me, you’d have my blessing.” I smile. It occurs to me only later that even her joke is in its way statistical.

On the way home I buy focaccia, tomatoes, and figs, but as is often the case in Florence, the need to prepare dinner is obviated by a phone call. It is our friend Paolo Fiume, who invites us to drive with him to the tortellini and wild boar festival in Ronta.

And so it is that we find ourselves, two hours later, sitting outdoors among the feasting citizens of Ronta (which locality, if you are curious to look it up on a map, you will find near Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello hills). The atmosphere is one of jocularity verging into violence. Colorfully decked-out women run back and forth, bearing meat on plastic plates; their husbands fill old water bottles with acrid-tasting wine; their sons and daughters don’t help at all, they just scream and sing and eat. And eat.

Of the Italians, the English writer Edith Templeton wrote in The Surprise of Cremona: “I cannot make them out; they seem to be so much happier than the other nations I know” This was in the years just after the Second World War, when the country was going down the toilet. Now it is going down the toilet again—in Florence, just a few months back, a bomb ripped a hole in the history of art—and still the funghi porcini festivals and pignoli (pine nut) festivals continue. “We are happy for no reason at all,” Mrs. Templeton’s friend tells her, “and it is a very pleasant state to be in. Now, what is it you want to know?”

What do I want to know? Just that: how to be happy for no reason.

Meanwhile a boy of alarming beauty alights from a long table near ours, a table populated exclusively by boys of alarming beauty. “Dov’e vai?” one of his friends calls to him. “A vomitare!” he answers cheerfully, and disappears into the night.

10

ILVO AND DELIA, with their son Fosco, had lived on the farm next to ours for most of their lives. During the Second World War, Ilvo had left for a time: he had fought in Sicily, where he met several Americans, then spent a couple of years in a British prisoner-of-war camp near Banbury. Otherwise they had been here and were by and large self-sufficient.

Every winter they killed a pig, which gave them enough meat not only to stock their freezer but also to make prosciutto, sausages, mazzafegato (so called not because it is made from liver but because it is so fatty that it “kills the liver” of the person who eats it) and pancetta. Each spring they planted an extensive orto (kitchen garden): carrots, potatoes, celery (the aromatic leaves of which were its particular glory), onions, garlic, basil, red and yellow and in some cases lilac-colored little peppers, and parsley. (According to Rosaria, the only doctor in Semproniano, women used to eat parsley in large quantities when they wanted to abort.) In the spring, Ilvo walked up and down the dirt road on which our houses were located, looking for stalks of wild asparagus, pencil thin and so delicate they needed barely to be cooked. (Hunting for wild asparagus was a community activity in March: driving along, you’d see people of all ages and kinds scanning the roadside, reaching into the underbrush—the prudent among them with gloved hands. March was also the month when the vipers emerged. Should Ilvo share some of his wild asparagus with us, we’d make a carbonara using eggs from Delia’s chickens, grana padano, pancetta) and the wild asparagus.

The sheep that Ilvo and Fosco tended produced enough manure to fertilize their olive trees, which gave them plenty of oil, as well as their orto and flower garden. From the sheep’s milk, Delia made pecorino and fresh ricotta. Their surplus milk they sold. Each year, just before Easter, a big truck chugged down our road to theirbarn, where Ilvo waited for it along with a dozen trussed lambs, which the truck then carried away to the city. In the fields, Fosco planted—depending on the season—hay, wheat, sunflowers, or favette, a feed for bestiame (farm animals).

Only on Thursday—market day—would Fosco take his parents into Semproniano. The rest of the week, they depended for the staples they did not themselves produce on a brigade of traveling vendors who passed by once or twice a week. These included Rolando, the baker, his truck always stocked with loaves of dry bread, dry jam tarts, and dry marzipan cakes; the Boutique del Pesce, the side of which opened to reveal all manner of fish and shellfish spread out on ice; a grocer offering sausages, cheese, pasta, and dry goods; a tiny old man who sold potatoes out of the trunk of his car; a handsome youth who drove up once every two weeks from Naples with crates of oranges or artichokes; and a Moroccan and his young son whose van was filled with shoes.

Ilvo and Delia were never less than generous with what they had. If, for instance, we went over to “borrow” some eggs (their shells were so frail that the merest pressure of a finger broke them) they’d invite us in for a slice of warm crostata and a glass of grappa. (Delia concocted a grappa flavored with coffee beans and the peel of mandarin oranges.) We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, a big room that was cool in summer and warm in winter.

Delia did all of her cooking on a Zoppas like the one that had been in our house when we bought it. One morning, when we went over to pay Fosco for pruning our olive trees, we found Delia standing at the kitchen table rolling out dough for gnocchi. She asked us to stay for lunch. This surprised us, since Italians, despite their reputation to the contrary, are rarely spontaneous. Though it was hot out, she served not only gnocchi with ragu, in big bowls, but grilled pork chops and slices of fried liver. Then came a salad of cucumbers from her garden. When we complimented her on them, she gave us about twenty—small and fanciful as calligraphy, softer than their supermarket cousins, and run through with a watery pulp of sweet seeds.

When lunch was over, we asked Delia why she made gnocchi on a Wednesday; after all, the Roman tradition is to eat gnocchi only on Thursdays: giovedì gnocchi, ven-erdì pesce, they say.

“Accidenti!” Delia said, which basically means, “I’ll be damned!” “Here we don’t do that.” Delia had been to Rome perhaps half a dozen times.

Still, she was in her own way worldly and shrewd. There was not much in world politics that escaped her ken. Thus when the wife of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, appeared on her kitchen television one morning (this was in the middle of the war in Kosovo), she remarked, “I don’t like that woman. She looks mad.” An editorial in that morning’s International Herald Tribune had said the same thing.

Delia also had strong opinions about local politics. It was to her that we turned when something of a local nature perplexed or maddened us: for instance, the mosquitoes so tiny they could actually fit through the holes in our window screens. “What are they?” we asked. “How long will they last?”

“Oh, the little ones—piccini piccini? We call them cugini.”

Ilvo smiled. “Now you see what we really think of our cousins;” he said.

11

SOMETIMES IN THE morning, on the way to Semproniano, we’d encounter a sheep jam. They had a way of appearing when you least expected them, and in the most inconvenient of places: on the other side of a harrowing hairpin turn, say, or on a bridge. We’d hit the brakes. Tolo, agitated by the rich odor of manure and urine, the music of bleats and baas, would start to bark madly, then try to dig his way through the back window. Meanwhile we’d idle. What else can you do when faced with a flock of forty ewes and a ram or two, their backs draped with coils of yellowing wool, like dreadlocks? Sometimes the sheep were alone; more often someone was leading them—an elderly farmer driving an equally elderly three-wheeled Ape (bee) or a woman on a Vespa (wasp). With a smile the shepherd or shepherdess would signal us forward—not to drive around but into the herd.

The first time we did this, it seemed no less weird than dangerous. With every centimeter we’d move forward, we’d anticipate the moment when the car would touch the sheep, lambs’ legs would flatten under the wheels, wool would fly. And yet, at the crucial instant, the flock always did part, as the Red Sea parted for Moses.

That was what passed for traffic there, in that valley where not a stoplight was to be found for miles and miles in any direction.

12

WHEN WE NEEDED or longed for “the city,” we went to Florence. Although Semproniano and Manciano were not far apart, people from Semproniano tended to regard Florence as their city while people from Manciano tended to regard Rome as theirs. Only once or twice during the years we lived in the country did we go to Florence for more than the day.

The drive, via Scansano, Grosseto, Siena, and Poggi-bonsi (the skyline of San Gimignano in the distance), took close to three hours, so we always left before dawn; before the Bar Sport was open. This meant we usually had our first coffee somewhere on the outskirts of Siena. If Tolo was with us—Signer Pepe, his groomer, was in Florence—we’d get a plain croissant for him. (He would have liked to have had a caffe latte, too.) From there it was just an hour to Florence.

Returning to a place where you have lived is faintly troubling, no matter how attached to it you are. We’d begin at Robiglio on Via dei Servi, where one found the best coffee and pastries in Florence. The baristi were named Marco and Marco. Duly fortified, we’d split up and do what we’d come to do: go to the bank (the wife of the director of which owned the apartment we had rented on Via dei Neri); go to the library of the British Institute to do research for whatever projects we were working on at the time; get our hair cut; look around in bookstores (the Paperback Exchange and the Libreria Internazionale Seeber and Feltrinelli) and music shops; buy Corn Flakes at Pegna and boxer shorts at the men’s shop in the building where we had lived; maybe meet for lunch at Yellow Bar on Via Proconsolo, where the actor who played the carriage driver in the film A Room with a View often had lunch—or, if we were meeting friends either from the city or out of town, at Coco Lezzone, famous for its farfalle con piselli and arista di maiale (roast pork stuffed with rosemary and whole cloves of garlic) and, it was said, for being Prince Charles’s favorite restaurant in Florence; and if it was winter, before leaving, we might have a hot chocolate with whipped cream at Rivoire on Piazza della Signoria—to fortify us for the drive home.

13

IN MARCH 2000, this article appeared in Italy Daily, a supplement to The International Herald Tribune. It says much about the poetry and madness of Italian bureaucracy:

Highway police arrested ten people late Wednesday in Pescara, charging them with running a fraudulent drivers’ school that sold drivers’ licenses for up to five million lire each. Another thirty-two people were accused of participating in what authorities described as a cooperative that drew clients from around Italy, some of whom were reportedly almost blind. Italians frequently complain that obtaining a drivers’ license in Italy is difficult without attending costly schools. Foreign residents in Italy for more than one year are also expected to attend the schools and obtain a national license, regardless of their driving record.

For us, the long process of getting licenses began shortly after we bought Podere Fiume. To live in the country, one has to have a car, and to own a car in Italy, one has to have an Italian patente di guida (driver’s license). This is simply the law. (To own a car you also have to be a legal resident of Italy, which is attested by the issuing of a carta d’identità, which requires you to have a permesso di soggiorno obtained from the questura of the province in which you wish to be resident, which requires you to have a visa, which you have to obtain in person from the Italian consular office closest to your official American residence: in DL’s case Los Angeles, in MM’s case Miami.) If you didn’t have an Italian driver’s license, your only options were either to ask an Italian friend to buy a car for you, then sign a document giving you the right to drive it, or to bring in a car from another country—yet if you did this, after four months you would still be obliged to replace the foreign license plates with Italian ones, which required an Italian license.

Many countries have reciprocity agreements for licenses with Italy; the United States, unfortunately, is not one of them, since there is no federal driver’s license, and it would be bureaucratically untenable for Italy to make separate agreements with each of the fifty states. As a result, even drivers who, like us, had had licenses for almost a quarter of a century were compelled to take the driving test. In Italian.

Wanting advice, we called Elizabeth, since we knew she had gotten an Italian license several years earlier. “Oh, it was easy,” she said. “I just paid someone to take the test for me.”

“But how can someone take it for you?”

“Only the oral part. What you do is you pretend you don’t speak English and explain that you’ve brought along a translator. Of course he isn’t really a translator. You mumble to him, and he answers all the questions. It costs about two million lire.”

Neither of us was particularly keen to pay two million lire to a “translator.” Nor did we believe that we needed one, even if Elizabeth had. After all, we both spoke Italian. We were good drivers.

A lawyer explained to us how we ought to proceed. Since obviously we didn’t want to go to a driving school, we needed first to get in touch with an agente. An agente was basically someone who made his living mediating between bureaucracies and human beings. Little of a practical nature could be done here without one, since the system was so baroque that learning to negotiate even a small region of it required years of study.

The agente our friend recommended was named Bruno. He wore wraparound sunglasses and had a cashmere coat. To obtain licenses, he said, we would first have to complete a pratica (form). This would cost two hundred thousand lire. After that we would take an eye exam from a doctor who would then affirm that we were both in good health. This would cost one hundred and fifty thousand lire. After that, Bruno would make an appointment for us to take the oral exam. If we passed it, he would make an appointment for us to take the driving test—the one behind the wheel.

Now the comedy began. First, we went to take the eye exam. The doctor who administered it turned out to be practically blind. (Perhaps he’d gotten his license in Pescara.) He could barely read our passports through his thick glasses or the clouds of smoke from his cigar. So far as we could tell, he was able to give the exam only because he had memorized the chart.

Once we received the necessary certificates, Bruno made an appointment for us to take the teoria—the “theory” portion, given in the form of an oral exam. When? we asked. In a little more than two months, he told us. Two months! He shrugged—there was a long waiting list—and added that in France the wait was usually four months. Then he gave us foglie rose (pink slips of paper) permitting us to drive during the interval. He also gave us a manual of road regulations to study, along with a book of sample written tests. These tests had a reputation forbeing almost sadistically difficult, mostly because they exalted the principle of the trick question. An example:

When encountering this sign,

1. One must decrease speed

TRUE

FALSE

2. One must drive with prudence

TRUE

FALSE

3. It is forbidden to pass

TRUE

FALSE

One and two are true. Three, however, is false. When driving through a cunetta (dip in the road) it is, in fact, legal to pass, even though, quite obviously, one would be unwise to do so.

Fortunately, we were not going to have to take the written quiz; a fact that did not in any way mitigate our anxiety. For two months we studied. Both of us, by nature, are studiers, and in fact, it proved to be well worth doing. After years of driving in Italy, we finally learned the meaning of certain enigmatic road signs:

Obviously it is important to know what signs mean, just as it is important to know the basics of giving first aid after an accident. On the other hand, the many pages of the manual devoted to precedenza (right of way) demonstrated amply why this part of the exam was known as “theory.” After all, a drawing such as the one below, illustrating an intersection of five streets at which there is neither a stop sign, a stop light, nor a yield sign, and requiring the testee to adduce the sequence in which the various cars should give way to one another, has little to do with reality. Intersections of this sort, quite simply, do not exist, and even if they did, in Italy “right of way” belongs to the speediest, the most aggressive.

Even so, we were determined to master the theory of precedenza, not only because we had to, but because, as theory, it had its own mysterious allure. Likewise we memorized the rules of passing (the most ignored of all on Italian roads), the basic mechanical principles of the car engine, and where it was and wasn’t permissible to park. We learned what the croce di Sant’Andrea means, and what distinguished railroad crossings con barriere from those without.

At last, the morning of the test arrived. Having spent the night before in Rome, studying furiously in a hotel lobby, we drove out very early to the Motorizzazione Civile (Motor Vehicles Authority), the offices of which were located far from the center of the city, on the Via Salaria. Like many municipal buildings in Italy, the Motorizzazione was an imposing, ugly structure, its very architecture seemingly designed to bully and offend. The walls were of dirty stone, and there were NO DOGS signs posted everywhere. Inside the light was greasy. There was a distant sound of traffic, a smell of gasoline. The testing room was a large and windowless trapezoid, cluttered with chair-desks of the sort more commonly found in high schools. In a sort of antechamber, a United Nations General Assembly of examinees sat waiting. Most of them were accompanied by instructors from their driving schools, who quizzed them on precendenza even as they waited.

DL was summoned first to the exam room, along with another American, a language teacher from Chicago who had already failed the test once. They spoke in English while the examiner, a prematurely elderly young man, read through their pratiche. With the language teacher, all appeared to be in order. Then the examiner opened DL’s file, placing his medical certificate alongside his passport. For several minutes he looked from the certificate to the passport, the passport to the certificate. Then he closed both and pushed them across the desk.

“The medical certificate says that you were born in 1971,” he said. “The passport says you were born in 1961.”

DL laughed. “Oh, that’s a mistake. I’m not surprised—you see, the doctor who gave me the eye exam was blind.”

No laughter. Not even a smile.

“Also your passport says that you were born in Pennsylvania, USA.”

“That’s true.”

“But your medical certificate says that you were born in Pittsburgh, USA.”

“That’s also true. Pittsburgh is the city. Pennsylvania is the state.”

“But they don’t agree. They must agree.”

Here the language teacher entered the fray, assuring the examiner that DL was not lying: Pittsburgh really was a city in Pennsylvania. He went on to explain, with the remarkable calm of a teacher, that in America, the state of birth is always given on passports, just as in Italy the city of birth is given. No doubt the doctor put down the city in order to remain in accordance with Italian rules.

“But they don’t agree,” the examiner repeated. “The documents must agree.”

“Pittsburgh is the second largest city in Pennsylvania;” DL threw in hopefully.

It was no use. The examiner was intractable. DL was ordered out and told to make a new appointment.

When he told MM what had happened, MM looked at his own documents, and discovered the same discrepancy: his medical certificate said that he had been born in Biloxi, while his passport said that he had been born in Mississippi.

We went to Bruno’s office. He was as implacable as the examiner was intractable. First he looked at the medical forms. Then he looked at the passports. “Well, the examiner was right,” he said after a moment. “This is the doctor’s fault. The documents must agree.”

We thought about it. We grew calmer. Of course the documents must agree, we acknowledged. There was no reason to be angry with the examiner. He had ragione. He was just doing his job.

Only hours later, once we were back at Podere Fiume, did we realize what really happened that morning: for a few moments we thought like Italians.

Six weeks later, we returned to the Motorizzazione and this time actually took the test. MM went first, along with an Arab and an Albanian. For forty-five minutes, DL watched through an open door while the candidates sat hunched across the desk from the examiner, who made diagrams with his hands in the air. Not a word could be heard, though if one watched carefully one could see, intermittently, that MM was laughing.

“Did you pass?” DL asked anxiously, when the three men emerged.

“Sono promosso” (“I am promoted”), he said.

It was now DL’s turn. While he and two other candidates—both Romanian—responded to questions in the trapezoid-shaped room, MM answered the questions of those who had yet to be tested. Tension fostered an atmosphere of intimacy. For a time MM, the Tunisian woman who worked at the Saudi Arabian embassy, and the elegant lady from Bangladesh formed a little community. Worriedly they listened while he told them what had been asked (why is it dangerous to drive quickly on a curve?) and what had not (nothing about precedenza; a sigh of collective relief). A quarter of an hour passed. All at once one of the Romanians came flying out of the room, as if he had quite literally been ejected. “Ha bocciato,” a driving teacher murmured darkly.

“It’s the second time, too,” said another.

Half an hour after that, his countryman stormed out. He too had failed. DL was now alone with the examiner. Another quarter of an hour passed—by now the women were beside themselves—when at last he came out.

“Anch’io sono promosso,” he said—which meant only that he too had won the right to take another test.

A few days later, we were talking with Pina and Giampaolo, who ran our favorite restaurant in Maremma—Il Mulino in Semproniano—about the driving test. “Why do they make it so hard to pass?” we asked.

“It goes back to Fascism;” Giampaolo said. “In those days, the state was sadistic. The idea was to make private life as difficult as possible, to discourage independent thinking.”

“And to encourage corruption,” Pina added. “Bribery. This way, people who worked for the state could make extra money.”

The Fascist attitude also led to the invention of a whole industry: the industry of the agente.

How odd that we were having this conversation in Tuscany, on a hilltop not far from the sea, on that lovely peninsula that was for centuries, quite literally, the mother of invention! After all, Italy gave us Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo, and Marconi. Now most of that energy had been eaten up by the exigencies of contending with bureaucracy—contending with it, or evading it. If there were no longer poets in Italy, it was because bureaucracy had slain or absorbed them.

One month later.

To take the “practical” driving exam, we first had to meet someone called “Signor Antonio” in the Olympic Village in Rome. Since we had to be there at eight AM, we left home at five. (How pointless it all seemed, driving to Rome in the dark to take a driving exam!)

Although we had never been there before, getting to the proper piazza in the Villaggio Olimpico proved to be a piece of cake. Since we arrived at seven thirty, there was time for us to have a coffee before meeting up with Signor Antonio. Light was beginning to creep into the sky, which had an orange cast, later than it seemed it should have. This was the sirocco, that African wind that carries with it the sand of the Sahara, and that would worsen as the morning progressed, so that by the time we took the exam, it would be necessary to use headlights.

Having had our coffee, and not finding Signor Antonio, we walked around. It was in the summer of 1960 that the XVII Olympic games were held in Rome, and in addition to the dormitories for the athletes, which were now depressing apartments (according to a placard, one had recently been “de-ratted and disinfested”), other reminders of the event included an unmown park strewn with hypodermics; a granite obelisk bearing the five interlocking rings representing the Olympics; and streets named for the participating nations, many of which (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union) no longer existed. There was also a grimly lit pharmacy with a gigantic sign in its front window announcing a special on “Incontinence Diapers.”

Presently Signor Antonio arrived, in a white Fiat 600. We exchanged pleasantries, after which MM drove, then DL. After half an hour, we were through—or so we thought—for we had been given to understand that Signor Antonio was the examiner. But he was not. Instead, he explained, he simply worked for one of the more than five hundred driving schools in Rome; his function was not to conduct the exam but to give us a quick “lesson”—which we thought was the exam—and to provide the car for the real exam. In Italy, one cannot legally take the exam in one’s own car. In Italy, one has to take the exam in a car specially outfitted with two sets of brakes—one for the driver and one for the forward passenger. (In retrospect, we thought of all the questions we should have asked. But then again, when the agente tells you, “Meet Signor Antonio at the Villaggio Olimpico,” why would you think to verify that he was the one who would dispense the license?)

Then the examiner himself arrived. He was a short, misshapen, corrupt-looking man with hair like a Brillo pad. In his arms he carried a thick briefcase which, we soon learned from Signor Antonio, contained the licenses for all the examinees who were waiting for him. Before beginning his work, though, he first had to be taken to the bar for coffee by Signor Antonio and his cohort of other “instructors.” While they were in the bar, an order for the exams was worked out. There were twelve examinees. We were to go seventh and eighth.

The long and the short of the exam is that one of us passed, the other failed. The one who failed was the first one of us to go, and the first American of the day as well. (All of the Asians had already failed.) Halfway into the exam, the misshapen examiner began delivering himself of anti-American invective to Signor Antonio, who was in the car to man the second set of brakes. “Americans think they can come into Italy and get whatever they want,” he said. One did one’s best to maintain one’s cool. “They have to be taught,” he continued ominously. One called attention to two cars that had just run a stop sign, and was ignored. “This American;” the examiner said, then broke off to call Signor Antonio’s attention to a poster for a female candidate in the upcoming election called Monica Ciccolini and made a deeply rude remark about her person, as well as the similarity of her name to that of the Italian porn actress and politician Cicciolina. Signor Antonio, meanwhile, had joined cause with the examiner and put in his oar about Americans—even though we had paid him one hundred thousand lire apiece to advocate for us.

Why one of us passed and the other failed was a caprice, for the system was designed so that the examiner did not have to be accountable for his decisions. If a passing surge of antipathy towards Americans was his reason for failing one of us (who passed the following month), the examiner would face no reprisals. We recalled once again what Pina and Giampaolo had said about the sadism of the Fascists; for all its rhetoric about noi (us), Fascism was deeply divisive. The populace was to be kept down, made anxious and insecure, even tyrannized, with the state transformed into an almost Homeric god. In the person of the driving examiner, we met that same sadism: a false and repellent pride in being Italian—and in not being Japanese, or Indian, or African, or Canadian—the implications of which were given weight by the then-recent movement of some citizens in the rich, Northern part of the country to secede and form a new nation called Padania; by the rise of Neo-Fascism in the raiment of Forza Italia; by the constant pressure of the Catholic church to sustain a culture of conformism. Nor was the irony of this scene being enacted in the Olympic Village, a forty-year-old monument to an ideal of fraternity, lost on us. For though the Italians were vocal in criticizing their government, the fact remained that Italians had the system they had chosen, the system they wanted.

There is no charm in any of this. The cloud has no silver lining. One is not made a better person for having had the experience. But cynicism is not the answer; nor, for that matter, is romanticizing bureaucracy—a thing to look at unflinchingly, and to be made angry by, and finally to grieve for.

An Italian driver’s license, hard won.

14

SEMPRONIANO, HOME TO about six hundred souls, sits more than six hundred meters above sea level, overlooking the valley of the Fiora. The oldest and highest part of the village is medieval (until a few decades ago it was called Samprugnano and its residents Sam-prugnanesi ), a clutter of dark stone houses piled on their hill like luggage at a train station. Then, down from the piazza, the village flattens; the streets widen. It is here, in modern apartment buildings that could not be more remote from the medieval houses of their ancestors, that most of the Sempronianini live today.

Semproniano, 1911 (from Samprugnano 1900-1963: Storie e Figure)

Semproniano had no sights of great historical interest, which was one of the reasons we were so fond of it. Indeed, the Blue Guide to Tuscany (second edition) had only this to say of the village:

Semproniano (trattoria la Posta, 6km S at Catabbio) is a small town situated high up (600m) and clustered round the ruins of its Castle built by the Aldobrandeschi. In the nearby Romanesque church of Santa Croce is a Renaissance holy-water stoup and a very expressive wooden medieval Crucifix. In the Borgo is the Pieve dei Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio with a tall bell-tower. Among its 17C paintings is the Madonna of the Rosary by Francesco Vanni (1609), originally painted for the cathedral of Pitigliano. The oratory of the Madonna delle Grazie, on the outskirts of town, has recently been restored [as it happens, by Sauro], and its decorated Baroque interior is typical of the district.

In short, no Caravaggios, no Giottos, no Della Robbia babies. Brunelleschi never worked here; neither did Leonardo. And yet the town had sat on its hill for a long time, and at certain times of the day, it looked as if it might have been painted by Giorgio di Chirico. (To understand di Chirico well, you have to know Italy on a summer Sunday afternoon, when everything is shut up.)

Alfred Pellegrini (Recollections and Collections): “There are two streets: a high road and a low road. When the townspeople are not sleeping, eating, or working, they take walks. When it is warm, they walk the high road for the cool breezes. When it is cold, they walk the low to be protected from any breezes.”

Semproniano had one bar—the Bar Sport—and it was here that we began the day, in the Italian fashion, with a cappuccino. Miranda and two of her sons, Alberto and Stefano, ran the bar. The boys’ father had been killed in a hunting accident several years before. In contrast to his brother, Alberto was vain, and never came to work looking less than immaculate: he was always scrupulously shaved, cheeks glowing, hair perfectly cut, dressed in a blazing white shirt and pressed black pants. Stefano was more relaxed. He was engaged to Samantha, whose father owned the principal bar in Saturnia.

With Alberto, we had a lighthearted relationship. For instance, when we came into the bar in the morning, he’d smile at us and say, “Mazzafegato?” “Mazzafegato,” MM would reply, and be handed, instead of a sausage, a Danish pastry filled with cherry jam. DL opted for a Danish pastry with “bechamel” (pastry cream), or sometimes “capers” (raisins). Occasionally Alberto would tell us that since he had run out of cow’s milk, he would have to use latte d’oca (goose milk) for our cappuccini. Presently he might complain about the tropical fish in his aquarium, which had failed to live up to his expectations of them: they weren’t at all interesting, and if they didn’t start to comport themselves better, he planned to fry them and eat them.

The Bar Sport at about eight in the morning was the place to be in Semproniano. Rosaria, the doctor, was usually there, having just dropped her daughter off at school; because she was the doctor, Stefano told us, she hadn’t paid for her own coffee in years. If we needed her to look at something, she’d take us into the second room of the bar, fitted out with pinball machines and a pool table, for a consultation. This was very kind of her, for it meant that we didn’t have to wait for an eternity to see her in her clinic, where the elderly began jockeying for appointments early and in considerable numbers—many of them, Rosaria told us, not because they were unwell, but because they were lonely.

The other regulars included Stefano, the owner of a local abattoir (every so often he’d bring a delicacy, such as a fresh sheep’s heart, for Tolo); a man with moles who looked as if he’d just stepped out of a painting by Breughel; and a man who looked exactly like the man on the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in a Monopoly set. There was also a coterie of old ladies known as le donnine who stopped in while doing their shopping and fought over the bill (“un terremoto”—“an earthquake”—Alberto said), and finally the few taciturn old Maremmani who took their espresso, at any hour, corretto (with liquor; literally “corrected”). On quiet mornings you might encounter three of them sitting on the three bar stools, asleep.

After breakfast came shopping. The Piazza del Popolo, around which most of the shops were clustered, was also a genial meeting place. (One of the neat, though not surprising, things about tiny Italian towns is that their piazze often bear the same names as the great ones in big cities.) Here we would often run into Sauro’s wife Silvia, peripatetic in her pumpkin-colored Fiat 500, buying bread after taking her son Ettore to school. (Silvia resembled no one so much as Mrs. Tasmanian Devil in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Sauro was the spitting image of Barney Rubble.) Perhaps she’d have stopped at the Bar Sport to get her lottery ticket from Alberto, in the hope that she too would have the luck enjoyed by the anonymous Sempronianina who had recently won two hundred and two million lire (about one hundred thousand dollars at that time) in the SuperEnalotto.

Disparaging the charmless anonymity of American supermarkets, which sacrificed the personal touch on the altar of efficiency, we would then go to the frutti-vendolo for fruits and vegetables, to the panetteria for bread, to the macelleria for meat, to the salumeria for cheese, to the edicola, which sold, in addition to cigarettes, teen idol magazines and those maddening marche da bollo (stamps) that Italian bureaucracy required one to affix to every official document. In the edicola there was a single revolving bookcase displaying, alongside the latest works by Danielle Steel and John Grisham, translations of Proust, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf.

One morning, waiting for our International Herald Tribune, we ran into Maria Pia, mother-in-law of Rosaria. Having recently learned that we were writers, she told us that as a girl she had loved to read, but that her mother had warned her that reading would make her go blind. In those days, she said, most people were too poor to buy their own magazines; instead, every month, the women in the village would pool their resources to buy a single copy of Grand Hotel, which would be passed from hand to hand over the course of a month. (Grand Hotel, the first issue of which was published in 1946, featured the old-fashioned genre known as the fotoromanzo: a soap opera in pictures arranged like a comic book.)

Next to Pietro’s edicola was Carlucci’s, the larger of the town’s two grocers, which opened right onto the piazza and faced Gigliola’s panetteria. It was to Carlucci’s that we went for basic provisions: mozzarella from Caserta (Silvia’s home town; we once witnessed her stealing the Caserta phone book from the Bar Sport), Acqua Panna (to be drunk out of the glass Loando left at the house), and, when nostalgia for America got the better of us, a Kit Kat bar or a box of M&M’s. Three generations worked at Carlucci’s: Sirio, Aldo (Sirio’s son), and Gianni (Aldo’s son-in-law).

Chianti Roses in the Acqua Panna Glass (Photo and Roses by MM)

Aldo himself was a repository of local history. From him we learned that once upon a time, at Christmas, a kind of bocce, with the victor receiving a small purse, was played here; except that instead of bocce balls one used a panforte, a traditional rock-hard cake from Siena. Once upon a time, when the tombola (an Italian version of Bingo) was played in Semproniano, dried beans were used to cover the numbers, since tombola cards pre-equipped with little plastic windows had not yet been invented. We also learned that the old cure for bronchitis was to drink red wine into which a glowing hot iron had been plunged.

With his thick hair and pencil-thin mustache, Aldo looked like a 1950s Italian film star going to seed. His father, Sirio, who was in his seventies, had cold blue eyes and an impressive nose. Years ago, he had directed an orchestrina in the town. His wife, Elda, was a beauty then, and loved to dance. Though she remained beautiful, occasions for dancing—at least the sort of dancing that Elda liked—were now all too rare. Occasionally, we also ran into Aldo’s grandmother, a vigorous and keen-eyed woman of ninety-six whom nothing got past, and probably never had. She’d greet us jovially, and always remembered our names.

We used to buy our meat in Saturnia, but gave up, as a consequence of the many locals and tourists who shopped at the macelleria there. As the customers had a tendency to buy tiny quantities of many different meats—a single slice of prosciutto, one sausage, half a chicken breast, two etti of ground beef (a little less than half a pound)—we often found ourselves having to wait as long as forty-five minutes to be served. We also discovered that where food was concerned, un po’ (a little) could mean quite a lot indeed. For instance, one afternoon a large woman from Bologna asked for “un po’ di salsiccina.”

“Quanti?” the butcher, Vito, asked.

She hesitated. “Eighteen.”

Impatience, then, first prompted us to try Andrea, a younger butcher who had set up in Semproniano. His macelleria provided an altogether more pleasant (not to mention speedier) experience. Like most Italian artigiani, Andrea took great pride in the quality of his meat, all of which was raised at a small azienda a few kilometers from Semproniano. Among his specialties was an extraordinarily good pancetta from just over the hill in Cortevecchia, and capicollo, a fennel-seasoned salami made from the neck of the pig. That Maremman taste was not necessarily ourtaste, however, was brought home the morning we saw displayed in Andrea’s gleaming glass case the brains, lungs, heart, and liver of a lamb, to be eaten fried. This was a favorite dish of Maria Pia’s.

The most distinguished person in Semproniano was the pharmacist. She was in her late sixties and always dressed with sober elegance, her hair drawn into a chignon. When she had no customers, she would read—always a work of literature or philosophy—at a lectern in her study off the pharmacy proper. She had an adopted son, Antonio Russo, who was a year older than us and whom we met a couple of times. (Once we had dinner with him and Signora Idia at Il Mulino.) He was an investigative journalist at that time (2000) documenting the war in Chechnya—in particular the atrocities committed against the Chechen people by Russia. During one of his trips to Chechnya, he was captured, subjected to tortures recognizable as those practiced by military special forces, and murdered. His body was found off a small road near Tbilisi, Georgia. (The library in Semproniano was named for him: Biblioteca Comunale A. Russo.) His mother bore this ultimate grief with the dignity of a queen.

On the Fibbianello, the road that linked Semproniano and Saturnia, was a small refuge for injured or abandoned animals run by a local branch of the World Wildlife Fund. The occupants here included peregrine falcons, hawks, several varieties of owl, a tamed daino (fallow deer) who rubbed his velvety antlers against your leg, two wolves who were fed entire lamb carcasses and whose area of the refuge was littered with wool and bones, and a baby wild boar, whom Elda bottle-fed each day. There was also, curiously enough, a pair of obese raccoons who had stowed away on a ship from Canada, escaped for a while into the port city of Livorno, and were eventually brought here. When recently we brought some Canadian friends to see the refuge, Brunella, who volunteered there, asked them if they might be willing to repatriate their countrymen.

When we first started living at Podere Fiume, we attempted to have the mail delivered to a box at the end of the road, but this did not work out very well. Owing to the convolutions of the Italian postal service, mail for Podere Fiume had to be routed through Santa Caterina, quite a distance away on an extremely curvy road. In those days, the road between Santa Caterina and Podere Fiume was still unpaved, so as often as not the postman would not deliver the mail if it was raining, or if it was cold, or if he thought there was not enough to justify the effort. During a period when he was delivering the mail more or less regularly, the postman one day taped a note to our box informing us that he had seen a wasp crawl into the opening and therefore would not deliver any more mail to us until we met him at the mailbox and proved that we had removed the wasp’s nest from it. After that, on no fewer than three separate occasions, we found tarantulas in the box.

It was Maurizio, the postmaster in Saturnia, who proposed that we take a casella (box) there. That way, we would not have to worry about wasps or tarantulas. Moreover, we would get our mail at least two days sooner, since it would no longer have to be routed through Santa Caterina.

The first Christmas we had a casella postale, we gave both Maurizio and Florio, the Saturnia postman, a bag of coffee beans from Tazza d’Oro, a famous coffee shop near the Pantheon in Rome. Maurizio and Florio were at a loss: Maremmani are not ungenerous people, but they are unused to receiving presents. When we arrived at the post office to pick up our mail the next day, Maurizio loaded bottles of olive oil, wine, and grappa from his family’s farm into our arms. Everyone in that part of the world farmed at least a little.

15

PINA’S RESTAURANT WAS located in a former flour mill not far from Maria Pia’s house. There were eight tables, and a big fireplace that roared and crackled in winter (at midnight on New Year’s Eve, Pina threw laurel branches on it), and over the fireplace a portrait of Pellegrino Artusi, author of La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene and considered the father of Tuscan cookery.

The first time we ate at Il Mulino (this was in 1993), we were with a lawyer friend from Salerno who was offended when Pina addressed him familiarly (that is, with “tu” rather than “lei”) even though he had addressed her familiarly. Since English has no distinction between formal and informal modes of address, we weren’t offended. Besides, as our late friend Lou once pointed out, the formal mode of address is quite often used ironically—the “ironic lei,” he called it.

With Pina and her husband, Giampaolo, there was none of this. We all took to each other from the beginning. If on busy nights they had trouble finding a babysitter to take care of Martino, their ten-year-old son, and Margherita, their three-year-old daughter, the children would have dinner at our table. If we had been working hard in the garden in the cold months, Pina would make polenta with ragú and little rolls of veal filled with asparagus and mozzarella specially for us.

Pina was lean and sexy: usually she wore miniskirts and silk stockings, a crisp white coat, and, to finish off the ensemble, a towering and equally crisp chef’s toque. Except in August, and maybe also the end of July and the beginning of September, the restaurant was open only from lunch on Friday through dinner on Sunday. Like many Italians, Giampaolo owned a quantity of real estate (including two apartments with a view of the dome of St. Peter’s), which was how they could afford to keep Il Mulino open only on weekends.

Giampaolo and Pina, Il Mulino (Photo by MM)

On Wednesdays, Pina and Giampaolo drove all over the Maremma to find the best and freshest provisions—marzoli, a local truffle so called because it has its season in March, or vegetables from a secret market near the coast that operated like a speakeasy: if you knew who to say had sent you, you would be admitted to a room full of produce of incomparable savor—including such rarities, in Italy, as tomatillos, Chinese watermelons, yellow tomatoes, and sweet white corn to be eaten on the cob. Not far from this place was a farm that sold nectarines with carne bianca (white flesh), white eggplants that looked like mozzarella cheeses, sheep’s milk yogurt flavored with lemon or apricot or wild berries, tiny and pungent fresh goat’s milk cheeses decorated with peppercorns or juniper berries, and aged pecorino. Another farm, this one organic and run by Germans, sold a passata di pomodoro so flavorful you could eat it out of the jar as tomato soup. In June, these expeditions often concluded with lunch—invariably, spaghetti with chopped razor clams and wild fennel, then an espresso—at a beachside restaurant on the poorer side of the Monte Argentario. Pina was shrewd enough to keep a few secrets to herself, however. We never learned where she got her carrots, her lemons, her guinea fowls, or her lamb.

There was no written menu at Il Mulino. Instead Pina came to the table and described what she had on offer, and never troubled to write anything down. Sometimes she actually brought out a tray of raw meat to show you how beautifully marbled it was, how perfectly aged. And what choice! Among the first courses (tailored to the season), herb-laced pappardelle with a white rabbit ragú (the ragú was white, not the rabbit), or bucatini in a tomato sauce slow-cooked with lamb, the meat crumbling off the bone, or gnocchi made with a combination of potato and beetroot and dressed with a pumpkin sauce, or plain potato gnocchi served with guttus, a local version of gorgonzola made with sheep’s milk. Or what about spaghetti with those March truffles, or tortelli filled with fresh ricotta and borage? And then there were the minestre (soups): scottiglia (a broth of guinea fowl and pork poured over a subtle slice of olive oil—drenched toast), an ever-consoling pasta e ceci, or a virtuosic aqua cotta. And then, after that, there were the secondi to consider . . .

There were many regulars: a couple from a few doors down who jarred the most delicious honey; a lesbian math professor from Rome who brought both her companion and her dog; a man who, having worked in a Rome bank for thirty-three years and lost his wife—she developed a psychosis after giving birth to a stillborn child, was institutionalized and, after twenty-one years, committed suicide—found India, grew his hair long, and chanted mantras while he ate.

One day when we were having lunch there, a thrilling number of powerful black cars pulled up. One of them held a Milan judge prominent in the anticorrup-tion investigations called Mani Pulite (Clean Hands), the others his bodyguards. Before the judge entered, the bodyguards searched the dining room, the kitchen, and the storage rooms, located every means of ingress and egress, then posted soldiers bearing machine guns at each of them. The judge enjoyed his lunch without incident.

The thing about Pina was this: one warmed to her either at once or not at all. Over the years we learned to tell which of the newcomers would return and which would not. The ones who would not were those who found themselves at a loss for just what to do in a place where they were not specially fussed over simply because they had deigned to bring their custom. And so they’d get up and down from their tables. They’d take restaurant guides from the top of the enormous wooden chest and read them through until the food arrived. They’d pace in front of the restaurant, where sometimes Martino played with Margherita or rode his bicycle. We knew that tomorrow night these people would eat at one of the more famous restaurants in Saturnia or Montemerano, where they would be given a complimentary flute of champagne and be addressed as “lei.”

Pina and Giampaolo were orphaned when they were teenagers, which might have been why they knew how to make one feel that one belonged somewhere. Even their dog, Becky, was profoundly maternal, if in Giampaolo’s words “un po’ mignotta” (“a girl of easy virtue”). Once, when she had had an abortion, Becky was discovered in the piazza giving milk to a litter of orphaned kittens. Everyone gathered round. Tourists took pictures. Such a sight had never before been seen in Semproniano.

16

THE CHALLENGE OF writing about acqua cotta, the Maremma’s signature dish, is the same as the challenge of cooking it: how to make something out of next to nothing. In those years we witnessed the gentrification of some of the poorest Tuscan foods, with the result that soups such as panzanella and pappa al pomodoro and ribollita, once eaten only by farmers, fetched thirty dollars a bowl in New York restaurants. And acqua cotta—“cooked water”—is the poorest of them all.

According to Mauro, at the heart of every acqua cotta was the phrase “se c’era... ” If there was a carrot, you’d put it in. If there was a little ricotta, you’d put it in. The basic ingredients were humble: onion, celery leaves, olive oil, and old unsalted Tuscan bread. (These are just about the only ingredients upon which recipes for acqua cotta agree.) To this soup, however, most cooks add a little tomato; perhaps sprinkle some grated pecorino cheese on the bread. Grander ingredients—bietola (Swiss chard), a few porcini mushrooms, or slices of sweet red peppers; basil, sage, parsley, garlic, peperoncino—are facoltativo (optional), as is using broth instead of water. Finally—but this is very rare; indeed, one might almost call it putting on airs—some cooks throw in a few pieces of sausage.

Mauro, the Ironmonger in Semproniano (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure)

Despite occasional efforts at codification, acqua cotta remained, in our part of Tuscany, the subject of endless, if good-hearted, argument—much as in Amatrice people argued about whether a true Amatriciana was made with or without white wine, with bucatini or spaghetti. Thus while waiting in line at the butcher shop one morning, our request of the five women present for the “authentic” recipe for acqua cotta led to our being given five different “authentic” recipes. Sauro’s sister, the cook at the old-folks’ home in Semproniano, prepared a bizarre version of this soup that, baked in a Teflon dish, resembled more than anything a Thanksgiving dressing. (In fact, you had to eat her acqua cotta with a fork, which was plain wrong.) The extremely refined version that Pina made at her restaurant showed fidelity to the spirit rather than the letter of the soup, for she omitted the most essential ingredients, onion and celery, in favor of a nest of spinach laid in the broth and topped with a poached quail egg. According to Pina, acqua cotta was eaten all over Central Italy. In her authoritative collection of regional Italian recipes, on the other hand, Anna Gosetti della Salda firmly identifies Grosseto as the birthplace of acqua cotta. Her recipe is essentially one for mushroom soup. Ada Boni’s version of acqua cotta—which she gives as one word, acquacotta—is essentially one for bell pepper soup.

In the end, like its Emilian cousin, the famed ragú that in Bologna is served over tagliatelle, acqua cotta exists more as an ideal than a rigid recipe, as essential a piece of Maremman folklore as the butteri. And yet ... se c’era ... How far we’d come from Mauro’s poor childhood, from those days when there wasn’t enough flour, and pasta had to be made from ground chestnuts!

17

DURING OUR FIRST months in Semproniano, we were often asked if we were German. This was an understandable mistake: most of the foreigners who settled in this part of Italy were German. In reply, we would explain that we were Americans, at which point, inevitably, we would be asked if we came from ... where? It sounded like airshay. The town in question was Hershey, Pennsylvania, to which vast numbers of Sempronianini (among other Maremmani) had emigrated. Alfred Pel-ligrini: “After visiting Pitigliano, the hometown of their grandparents, friends from Hershey ... commented, ‘the only difference between visiting the Italian section of the Hershey cemetery and visiting the cemetery in Pitigliano was that we couldn’t smell the aroma of chocolate in Pitigliano.’ The names on the headstones were the same in both towns.”

That neither of us had ever been to Hershey surprised some of the older residents of Semproniano, for whom Hershey was “America.” At first the Sempronianini had gone to work in the city’s quarries; later, these immigrants built the chocolate factory that would employ more immigrants. Soon Hershey became known in Tuscany as the Perugia of America. And the Hershey connection persisted. Rosaria recalled that her grand-mother, who worked at the chocolate factory, used to return every few years bearing an umbrella filled with Hershey’s Kisses. It was the shape of the sweet that impressed Rosaria when she was a girl, not the taste; at Signora Idia’s gelateria, after all, you could get chocolate ice cream made with unpasteurized sheep’s milk. “So rich! Of course you can’t make it now. The law.” As a doctor, she had to approve of such regulations—and yet: “You should have tasted it. So cremoso. Really, you haven’t tasted ice cream at all until you’ve tasted ice cream made from unpasteurized sheep’s milk.”

Sempronianino in Hershey, Pennsylvania

(from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure)

One year Alfred Pellegrini, the son of Maremman immigrants and the owner of Alfred’s Victorian Restaurant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, led a tour of Hersheyites to Semproniano. They took cooking lessons at the Locanda la Pieve and ate every night at a different restaurant. The tour concluded with a dinner at Pina’s, which we witnessed from our usual table by the fireplace. As each course was brought to the table, Pina would describe it to Mr. Pellegrini, who would then translate, for although most of their parents and grandparents came from Tuscany, few of them spoke Italian.

When the acqua cotta arrived, Mr. Pellegrini entered into a reverie about his grandmother, who had become angry at him when he had written in his cookbook that as a child he had always hated acqua cotta. The memory of his grandmother evidently touched Mr. Pellegrini deeply, for as he spoke of her his eyes grew moist. Pina, meanwhile, not realizing that his speech had long since moved beyond matters of gastronomy, kept interrupting to remind him that the spinach was organic.

Another incident stays with us. Although Giampaolo’s father was the concertmaster of one of the orchestras of RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane), his and Pina’s own musical tastes ran to jazz and sometimes reggae. After a couple of hours of Bud Powell, the people from Hershey indicated that they wanted Italian music for their last night. “Dean Martin!” an older member of the group shouted hopefully, which led Giampaolo to pull out the olive crate in which he kept his cassettes. With assistance from a few of the women, he sifted through them.

“Any Caruso?”

“‘O Sole Mio’?”

“How about ‘That’s Amore’?”

“Who’s Bob Marley?” one of the women asked, picking up a cassette.

“A rap singer,” answered her friend, who was wearing a brown cloche.

Giampaolo continued to sift. Maurizio Pollini playing the Chopin études, Victor de Sabata, Buddy Holly . . . It turned out that he did not own a single tape of Italian songs.

That same weekend—it was the beginning of porcini mushroom season—we went back to Il Mulino for Sunday lunch. At a nearby table sat four American men who, as it turned out, were also from Hershey, although not affiliated with the group from two nights before. After we helped translate Pina’s recitation of her menu, we got to talking with them: they were on a tour of Italy in search of relatives. Only after lunch was over did we exchange names. “Scott Reese;” one of them said, holding out his hand.

“Reese as in the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?” we queried.

His grandfather had invented it.

Later, we shared the story with various friends in Semproniano—Aldo and Gianni, Pina and Giampaolo—and were surprised at how little it impressed them. For example, although Aldo stocked Kit Kat bars and M&M’s, he had never heard of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. In any case, as we soon learned—and notwithstanding their acute devotion to Nutella, that chocolate and hazelnut paste that European children spread on their breakfast toast—most Italians disdain peanut butter on the grounds that it is bad for the liver. (Just as Americans are obsessed with their hearts, Italians worry endlessly about their livers.) Even more inconceivable, to our friends, was the idea of peanut butter as a sweet, to be combined with chocolate!

A few weeks later, when we returned from a trip to America, we brought a box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with us. “Il signore who ate here, the one called Reese? This is what his nonno invented,” we told Pina, who eagerly sampled one. “Well?” we asked.

“Discreta . . . ma non mi stupisce” (“Not bad . . . but nothing to write home about”).

This meant we got to keep the rest for ourselves.

18

ASTUBBORN LONGING for familiar things—even things at which, back home, one turned up one’s nose—became, with the passage of years, a distinguishing feature of expatriate life.

During DL’s twelfth summer, he and his mother discovered from a cooking show called The Romagno-lis’ Table that pasta could be served with a sauce that wasn’t red. The recipe in question was for spaghetti alla carbonara, and the next evening, with a sense of adventure, they prepared some. Of course they had to approximate: instead of pancetta or guanciale, it was salt pork, Creamette spaghetti, and “Parmesan cheese” from a green cardboard shaker. The olive oil was a pallid yellow and came from Spain—or was it Greece? Even so, as they ate that first carbonara, it seemed to them for an instant that they could hear the Tiber flowing outside their kitchen window.

When we first arrived in Italy, naturally, we disdained anything that tasted too much of America, exulting instead in the Italian-ness of the things we found at the grocery store: peppery olive oil, Parma ham, wheels of pecorino cheese that the salumiere cut with a wire. Though rarities in America at that time, in Italy such foods were ordinary; you could take them for granted.

In those early days every trip to the grocery store, especially a stroll down the pasta aisle, sent us into a rapture. We studied the classics of Italian cooking—Ada Boni and Pellegrino Artusi—in the hope of learning how to make every dish we prepared rigorously authentic. Italian cooking, a poet friend had told us, requires above all obedience to the rules; we offered out obedience and as a result became proficient cooks. Soon we could make ragú alla bolognese the way the Bolognese do, and arista di maiale the way the Tuscans do, and spaghetti alla carbonara the way the Romans do (as opposed to the way DL’s mother had had to do). Soon wonderful food became something we felt we could count on (a very Italian attitude). And then, one morning, about three years later, we woke up wanting . . . peanut butter. So we went out and bought some (a Dutch brand) and for a few days ate little else besides peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch.

In this way it began. We questioned other Americans and discovered that they, too, often fell prey to culinary nostalgia. On visits home we lorded our superior knowledge of Italian cooking over our friends and families, even corrected their errors. (“No, you never put Parmesan cheese on mushrooms!”) In Italy, we stole shamefacedly into the McDonald’s on Piazza di Spagna to savor a Big Mac in an invisible corner, and as often as not ran in to the director of the American Academy on the way out.

Memory, of course, was the real culprit. As Proust knew, flavor awakens the past, which is why the longing for certain foods so often encodes a more complex longing: for remote places, for childhood, even for the childhood longing for remote places. Longing for longing may seem like a snake eating its tail—and yet it was exactly the vague yearning for a Europe we had never seen that the flavor of Stouffer’s frozen Turkey Tetrazzini had called up in us when we were children, and that we now found ourselves wanting to recapture: that World Book daydream of some ur-Italian city in which gondolas sailed down a river lined with Tuscan castles, the Tower of Pisa bowed before the bay of Naples, and the Colosseum winked in the sunny distance.

When you live abroad, the ordinary and the mysterious trade places. What from a distance seem exotic, the very things in the pursuit of which you left in the first place lose their charm, while the alchemy of time and distance reveals in commonplace things—the things you took for granted—a surprising loveliness. This may be the secret joy and sorrow of expatriate life: by virtue of living in a foreign land, you throw not merely your history but your identity into relief. The past renders an unsuspected poetry. To prepare the foods of childhood becomes, in a very real sense, a brief trip home.

19

WHEN SHE MOVED to Semproniano, Pina made it her policy to cast her lot with those whom she perceived as the town’s misfits. These included Luciano, who rode his bicycle in endless circles around the village and had a reputation for being “not quite right.” When we asked Pina about him, her answer was decisive: “He’s right. It’s Semproniano that’s wrong.”

Pina’s assistant in the years when we first went to Il Mulino was a boy called Michele. He was fifteen then, very tall and skinny, with curly black hair. His sister, who looked just like him, was called Michela. Our first Christmas in Italy, we had Christmas Eve dinner (always a fish menu) at Il Mulino. It was raining, and as Michele didn’t have an umbrella, at the end of the evening he had to run home in order not to get drenched. How like a figure in a painting by Piero della Francesca he looked!

A few years later, he went off to do his military service, and was replaced by Maura. Maura—just a few years older—was already ubiquitous in the area. Though her only means of transport was a Vespa, nonetheless she managed to cover a great deal of territory. Indeed, she had been sighted as far away as Grosseto, where she went sometimes to look at ragazzi (boys). Yet her beau ideal was, and always had been, Michele.

Like Luciano, Maura was not well-liked in Semproniano. Hers was a sad story. Her mother died when she was very young, and she lived with her old father—a stronzo (shit) according to Pina—in a filthy and dilapidated podere not far from ours. The front garden (the one parallel to the street) was the final resting place of two broken front-loading washing machines, in which some of their chickens slept, and a still. A few years earlier, Maura’s older sister had gone to live in Castel del Piano, having first promised to come back for Maura—and, of course, she never did.

Maura’s physique was, to say the least, formidable. Giampaolo had once tactfully described her as having a “bellezza rinascimentale” (“Renaissance beauty”). To make matters worse for her, she possessed what he called a “grande fuoco sessuale” (“great sexual fire”). He and Pina counseled her to look for an older lover, a man in his thirties or forties who would appreciate what she had to offer, but Maura had eyes only for young men who would have nothing to do with her. Later she got a job cleaning the caserma (where the carabinieri lived) in Semproniano, which at first must have seemed like a dream come true. Erelong, however, she was delusa, for none of the carabinieri was any more interested in her than Michele had been.

Michele, in the intervening years, had completed his military service and come back to Semproniano. He had bought a car and put a Che Guevara sticker on the back of it. He had grown a beard and gotten a pretty girlfriend. Though he was kinder to Maura than some of the other boys, he still didn’t have much to do with her, preferring to hang out in the piazza with his friends. Because the Sempronianini, by necessity, have always been hardworking, the idleness of this new class of youth was particularly upsetting to the older people in the town. Last year, when we went to the consorzio agrario (agricultural consortium) to ask its sturdy proprietress if she knew of any young people we might hire to help us pick our olives, she asked us if she might hire us to help pick hers. “And when I think how hard we had to work when we were their age;” she said of the young people in the piazza, paring her thick fingernails with a scissors and then tearing the stubborn ends off with her teeth.

Semproniano’s refusal to accept Maura as one of its own, alas, was an illustration of the intolerance that often underlies Italian life: a bigotry that had no role in our American fantasies, and that explained in some measure the Italian hysteria over immigration and the influx of extra-communitari (Europeans from countries not belonging to the European Union) and Africans. In a Jewish retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, an old Jewish man is stranded on a desert island for twenty years. When at last he is rescued by an English ship, he takes the captain on a tour of the island, showing him the crops he has cultivated, the animals he has domesticated, the hut he has built, and so on. Finally he leads the captain to the middle of the island, where on two hills he has built two temples. “Forgive me, sir, for my ignorance of your religion;” the captain says, “but why two temples?” At this point the old man frowns and, pointing to the one on the left, says, “That one I don’t go to.”

The joke speaks volumes about life in Italy, where rivalries go back centuries, and an unfortunate, even a perceived unfortunate like Maura, had little chance of improving her standing with her own people. Thus Brunella had not walked into Carlucci’s or spoken to Sirio since the day many years before when she had forgotten her wallet and he had refused to let her take her groceries and pay him in the morning. By the same token, Giampaolo had not stepped through the doors of the Bar Sport in more than a decade. A dozen years before, when he and Pina had just opened their restaurant, Giampaolo had sent his brother to the bar to ask Miranda to recommend a place to eat in town. When she failed to suggest Il Mulino, Giampaolo began boycotting the bar. “That one I don’t go to” explained why it was that, in a town of fewer than six hundred souls, there were two bars, two groceries, two bakers, two butchers, and two olive presses. It also explains why Maura always had a look of suffering and resignation in her eyes when she bought her lottery card.

Late in September of 1994, Reginald and Margaret Green of Bodega Bay, California, lost their seven-year-old son Nicholas while driving along the coastal highway from Salerno to Calabria. They were sitting in the front seat of their rented car, and Nicholas and his sister were sleeping in the back. Being tourists (and not speaking Italian) the Greens didn’t know that this particular stretch of highway is notorious for banditry. Likewise, they didn’t understand why a car pulled up alongside theirs, or what words its driver shouted at them, or why, when they speeded up and the second car fell behind, one of the car’s occupants shot at them, hitting their son in the head. And Italy did not understand either: did not understand its own violence, simmering up from a feudal past; did not understand the Greens’ insistence that they didn’t hate Italy for killing their son; above all, did not understand their swift decision to donate all of Nicholas’s usable organs for transplant. At that time, organ donation was nearly unheard of in Catholic Italy, because it was perceived as a violation of the body. As a result, most people on transplant lists languished and died. But Nicholas Green’s parents had different attitudes, and so his heart and kidneys and liver and eyes were cut out of him, and helicoptered all over the south, and sewn into the bodies of other children. In response Italy venerated the Greens. While some Italian tourists beaten in Miami went into crippling debt to pay their hospital bills, the Greens were given medals by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arranged for them to be flown home on a military jet. At every café and restaurant people talked about Nicholas Green, and brooded, and blamed themselves. Subsequently the rate of organ donation shot up dramatically.

Around the same time, Moana Pozzi died of liver cancer. At thirty-two she was Italy’s second most popular porn actress, after Cicciolina, who had achieved brief worldwide fame as a result ofbeing elected to Parliament on the Radical party ticket. (Cicciolina subsequently married and divorced the American artist Jeff Koons.) Moana had a sturdy dignity at odds with the situations in which her films usually placed her. With her long blond hair, her severe, equine, almost masculine face, she looked more Scandinavian than Mediterranean. She was much loved in Italy: the national newspaper La Repubblica, in its obituary, emphasized her reputation as “a person of intelligence and sensitivity.” (Thanks to Moana, pornography had become almost respectable, so much so that her sister, Baby Pozzi, was following in her footsteps.) Then at the height of her career, according to the papers, she travelled to India and came back with liver cancer. (A link between journey and tumor was cryptically implied.) Five months later, she was dead.

But this was not the end of the story. According to her mother, Moana’s last wish had been to have her ashes scattered over the sea. The scattering was scheduled to take place, when at the eleventh hour a judge threatened to arrest the Pozzis should they go through with it: in Italy the dispersal of cremated human remains is criminal. They can be kept in urns or buried, but they cannot be scattered over the earth.

What do these two dead people have to do with each other? Catholic doctrine disparages the livingbody even as it reveres the dead body (even the cremated body). But Moana insisted life was the body, while the Greens willingly sacked the temple of their child’s body so that other children could live. Just as the Pope prepared to publish In My Own Words, the organs of life were scattered as ashes cannot be.

One thinks of that very Italian martyr, Santa Lucia, whose eyes were gouged out by the pagans, and who in paintings carries those eyes on a plate for eternity to revere. Now Italy has a new saint, who holds an empty plate. The eyes have gone to save a child from blindness.

In January of 1995, the Greens appeared on the cover of a magazine, wishing a happy new year to Italy. The press was still amazed that they had no desire for vendetta, did not cling to the notion that blood must have blood. In Italy, the very real consolations of revenge are not to be undersold.

That year a television program called Perdónami—“Forgive Me”—became extremely popular. People went on this show when they’d had disputes with loved ones, and could not seem to bring those loved ones round to making up with them.

One afternoon a very old man appeared on the show. His palsied face recalled that of Benedetto Croce. He wanted forgiveness from his sister for refusing to attend both his brother-in-law’s and their father’s funeral, which in Italy is pretty unforgivable.

Minicam in hand, Perdóname’s roving reporter showed up at the sister’s door. “These flowers are from your brother,” she said. “He asks that you accept them, and with them give him your forgiveness.” The sister, an elegant-looking woman in her fifties, looked pensive, and finally shook her head. “I cannot accept them,” she said. “What he did, it was too strong. He’s not bad at heart, but his character is bad.”

“His character is bad?”

“He gets too angry. He wouldn’t attend my husband’s funeral. He wouldn’t attend our father’s funeral. I’m sorry, but I cannot forgive him.”

The reporter made a few more efforts to persuade her, but the sister was adamant.

Back in the studio, the old man looks at the floor. “She’s proud,” he murmurs. “She’s too proud.”

“And what if I were to tell you;” the host says, “that your sister was here, in the studio, today?”

The old man lifts his head.

“Yes, she is here,” the host says. “Afterwards she had second thoughts. Let’s bring her out: Letizia.”

Now, like a long-lost aunt on an episode of This Is Your Life, in comes Letizia, beaming while the audience applauds. The old man stands; he embraces her. Tears stream down his twisted face. “She’s so beautiful,” he says to the host. “So beautiful.”

“How could I not forgive him?” the sister says. “He’s my brother.”

“But you must promise to control your temper, and not be so proud,” cautions the host.

“He’s bad in character, but his heart is good,” the sister says.

“I promise,” says the old man.

“Good,” the sister says. “Good. And tonight we’ll have supper together.”

Well, in Italy, this is the best news of all. The audience is in a euphoria of applause, it approves so wholeheartedly. Forgiveness—too often cheaply offered and accepted, passed back and forth like a single bunch of flowers that commerce has left listless—is stern, uncompromising, real as flowers (indeed, in its outer aspects, not unlike vendetta itself).

It’s winter, but there’s an intimation of spring in the air, like the scent of perfume lingering in a dead woman’s boudoir. Thus spring must have felt to the sufferers in the Inferno: a memory of sun that was almost a sunbeam, bleeding through layers of blackness to those who would never know the real sun again because they were not forgiven.

20

PIERO, WHO GAVE us the potato roaster, was a gentleman in his early seventies, with a corrosive yet humane humor. Like Aschenbach in Death in Venice, he rouged his cheeks. This was not because he was trying to attract the young, but because his health was failing and he did not want anyone to know just how unwell he was. (It seems apt that by profession he was a restorer of antique clocks.) In the years just prior to his death, Piero, who had enjoyed a lengthy career as a Don Juan, served as the nominal cock to a brood of elderly hens. We met them for the first time at a dinner that Piero gave on May 17, 1998: Aina, who, with her sweeping kaftans, heavily painted eyebrows, and gravity-defying hair, resembled more than anyone Agnes Moorehead as Endora on Bewitched; Sandra, who had been close to Wanda and Vladimir Horowitz, and expressed great perplexity when she learned that Wanda had left her money to “blind dogs” (presumably she meant seeing-eye dogs); Giovanna, who had survived “one of those US Air crashes” and spoke obsessively of the hip replacement she had had to have as a consequence; Gloria, who was fat, and whom Aina pointedly served smaller portions than she did her other guests at dinner parties; and Venetia, an Englishwoman who had met an Italian man named Pasquale in India, married him regardless of the fact that she could not speak Italian and he could not speak English, and settled in Maremma. Piero had infinite patience for these women, and they adored him—particularly after his second wife died.

Though Aina professed to be above gossip, she gave us an ear full of it about Piero before asseverating, “Of course, I don’t believe a word of it.” This is what she said:

After finally obtaining a divorce from his first wife, with whom he had been on bad terms for many years, Piero moved to Poggio Capanne, a village near Saturnia, with his second wife, a German noblewoman named Beatrice. (“She was a lamb.”) There they lived in what he described as “a kind of Eden.” One evening at a party [Aina was also present] Beatrice and Piero had a squabble, after which, to get back at him, she flirted with some other men. His amour propre wounded, he slept elsewhere. When he returned home the next morning, she was dead. The doctor said she had had a heart attack and fallen down the stairs. No autopsy was performed, however. In fact, she was buried with unseemly haste.

All the women in Piero’s circle seemed thrilled to the marrow by the very suggestion that he might have murdered his wife in a fit of jealous passion, even if they insisted publicly that he could not possibly have been capable of such an act. And yet, Aina hinted, he had appeared to feel remorse as well as grief after Beatrice died, so one could not help but wonder if, after all . . .

“He gave me her clothes,” she added. “You know Beatrice had a tiny figure. They certainly wouldn’t have been of any use to Gloria.”

Aina was a piece of work—sometimes delightful and sometimes extremely trying, but always fascinating. Her father, Paolo Emilio Pavolini, was a philologist; hence her Finnish name. Her half-brother was the powerful Fascist Alessandro Pavolini, whose corpse was hung upside down along with Mussolini’s, Claretta Petacci’s, and others’ in 1945. (Alessandro Pavolini also initiated the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.) As a child, Aina had been introduced to Umberto Giordano, the celebrated composer of the operas Andrea Chénier and Fedora, who prophesied a career as a femme fatale for her.

Aina had lived all over the world—in England, in Sierra Leone, and for many years in Hanover, New Hampshire, as a Dartmouth English professor’s wife. She was perfectly brilliant in her own right. At the time we had the most to do with her, she was translating into English (from the French) Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s novel The Fortunes of Wangrin. One of her regular visitors was the late English literary critic Frank Kermode. (It was after taking him to the airport in Rome early one morning that she told us she had seen a tapir on a rarely travelled stretch of road. She probably had. We ourselves once saw a turquoise snake in Maremma.)

We seemed to attend more of Aina’s dinner parties and luncheons than anyone else’s. It is remarkable, in retrospect, that she could maintain such a hectic social schedule living, as she did, in the middle of nowhere. MM’s date books record dinner on Saturday, June 6, 1998 (7:30); dinner on Monday, September 21, 1998 (Rosh Hashanah, 8:15); drinks on Sunday, October 4, 1998 (6:00); dinner on Saturday, November 14, 1998 (7:00); dinner on Saturday, December 5, 1998 (8:00); lunch on Tuesday, December 8, 1998 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception) (1:00); lunch on Wednesday, March 10) 1999 (12:30); dinner on Thursday, May 27, 1999 (7:30); dinner on Thursday, July 29, 1999 (7:30); drinks on Monday, September 6, 1999 (6:00); dinner on Sunday, September 26, 1999 (7:45). At very few of these were we the only guests. We in turn took her to dinner at Il Mulino (Friday, July 31, 1998, at 8:00) and to lunch at Bacco e Cerere in Saturnia (December 26, 1998, at 12:00), where the owner’s son flirted with her. We also invited her to pick apricots from our trees and had her over for drinks when MM’s mother was visiting (Tuesday, August 11 1998, at 6:00).

Usually at her dinners and luncheons, Aina served her “famous Parsi eggs” or a mousse made with tinned halibut. (The latter dish put us in mind of the Monty Python movie in which all the guests at a dinner party die from eating salmon mousse made with tinned rather than fresh salmon.) She’d invite us to arrive an hour before her other guests so that we could speak with her only in English, talk about books, reflect on how we found ourselves where we were—and, sometimes, move something incredibly heavy up or down the perilous stairs of her house for her. Among the other things we had in common with Aina just then were financial straits (hers worse than ours). We had spent most of our money restoring a place, whereas she was trying to raise money in order to restore a place: a dipendenza (outbuilding) that she wanted to be able to rent as a vacation house.

The Dining Room, Podere Fiume

(Photo by Simon McBride)

The dinner parties were disconcerting. There would always seem to be one person who could not speak the language of the table. If there were eight guests, seven could speak Italian and English, but one only French. All her guests having arrived, Aina would disappear for long tracts of time to put the “finishing touches” to the dinner. Since the dining room and living room were downstairs, and the kitchen upstairs, there was much social awkwardness. Her dining room chairs were the most uncomfortable in Christendom, conceived, it seemed, to induce flatulence.

At some point we had a falling out with Aina. It may have had to do with the fact that when at last we invited her to dinner on King’s Day (January 6, 1999, at 7:30), when DL’s father and stepmother were visiting, she arrived wearing a gorgeous black dress and exquisite—really magnificent—pearls. She had a gash on her head—she had fallen, she said—inexpertly bandaged.

According to a Tuscan tradition, on King’s Day a witch called La Befana brings coal to the children. In fact the coal is trompe l’oeil, hard lumps of blackened sugar. In her black dress and bandages, Aina was La Befana that year, bringing not coal but a bag of her household trash that she asked if we’d be good enough to take to the poubelle when we went in to Semproniano the next day. Since she was so pressed for money, she said, she had to ration the gas in her old Range Rover.

21

ONE AFTERNOON IN May—DL had just woken from a nap, and was getting a glass of water—Tolo, who was outside, started barking with uncharacteristic persistence and agitation. DL walked into the garden and found Tolo poised in front of the grate that covered the main gas pipe. A noise like that of steam escaping made DL wonder whether perhaps the pipe was leaking or had burst, yet there was no smell. Instead an enormous snake sat behind the grate (if “sit” is the right verb for what a snake does when it is not in transit), hissing with all its might.

“Oh my God,” he muttered, in that eerily calm, toneless voice that terror elicits, which brought MM to the window The snake might have been a frustone—a large but harmless species that eats mice and things of that sort—or it might have been a viper (although in Tuscany vipers tend to be small and slow, which this snake clearly was not).

We put Tolo inside and called Ilvo: having lived in Maremma for more than seventy years, he knew which snakes to give a wide berth. “Aha,” he said. “Non è un frustone. È un aspide.” An asp. Heretofore we had understood that the only snake in Maremma besides those mentioned above was the enormous viper that fed by wrapping its body around the back leg of a cow and drinking her milk, leaving her calf to starve. In John Cheever’s story “Clementina,” the Italian donna of an American family tells the children in her charge a folktale:

The story they liked best was of the young farmer in Nascosta who was married to a beautiful woman named Assunta. When they had been married a year, they had a fine son with dark curls and a golden skin, but from the first he was sickly, and he cried, and they thought there was a spell on him, and they took him to the doctor in Conciliano, riding all the way there on an asino, and the doctor said the baby was dying of starvation. But how could this be, they asked, for the breasts of Assunta were so full of milkthey stained herblouse. But the doctor said to watch at night, and they went home by asino and ate their supper, and Assunta fell asleep, but the husband stayed awake to watch, and then at midnight he saw in the moonlight a great viper come over the threshold of the farmhouse and come into the bed and suck the milk from the breasts of the woman ...

The asp was more than a meter long. After we dispatched it, Ilvo invited us over to his house for a grappa. He told us that once, many years ago, he had encountered a pregnant viper on his doorstep. No sooner had he killed it with his pitchfork than it burst open and thirteen cuccioli (babies) writhed out. Viper cuccioli are so venomous, Ilvo went on, that their mothers, in order to avoid being done in by their offspring during labor, climbed into the trees and quite literally dropped them onto the ground or onto the heads of unlucky passersby. This was why you had to be sure to wear a hat when you took a walk in the woods.

One windy June afternoon when we were still living in Rome, we were walking through the Forum when we found ourselves being rained upon bywhite myrtle flowers. Another afternoon in the Forum, during the winter, we had seen half of a smallbronze-colored serpent twisting furiously upon the ground. There was something in both happenings that evoked Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Was the serpent from the union of the copulating snakes that transformed Tiresias into a woman? Were the myrtle flowers transformed lovers’ tears?

22

TOLO WAS BORN in Scansano—in Maremma—on August 18, 1997, and spent the formative first months of his life in Rome. Notwithstanding his having an English father, Champion Harrowhill Hunter’s Moon, he was an Italian dog. There just were three puppies in his litter (his mother’s first)—two males and one female. Tolo’s brother died shortly after being born.

If we had not been about to move to Maremma, we would not have felt that it was right for Tolo to come live with us—which he did on November 29, 1997. A fox terrier deserves better than life in an apartment. These dogs need scope. From The New York Times (February 9,1908):

Inspired by the recent attempt of robbers to effect an entrance to the famous Apollo Gallery of the Louvre Museum, the Directors of that institution have decided to follow the example of the Paris police and organize a special corps of trained watch dogs... “We shall, in all probability, use fox terriers for the purpose” [said M. Homolle, Director of the National Museums], “as they seem to be the most alert and sagacious.”

For the first few months of his life, however, life in the caput mundi was okay with Tolo. There he learned to be a cane signorile.

Tolo in Maremma: La Caccia (Photo by MM)

Once we settled in the country, Tolo became the doggiest dog in the world—patrolling the olive grove, chasing wild cats up trees, barking at the sheep, fighting with weasels, murdering hedgehogs, following the shadows of butterflies across the lawn. When he was about a year old, he disappeared. We drove along every road for kilometers looking for him, called neighbors asking them to be on the qui vive, and prayed. Our greatest fear was that he had been poisoned: people who own sheep, in order to protect them from the predations of wolves, will put out meat laced with poison. Many blameless dogs have died from getting to this meat before the wolves. A couple of days later, one of the neighbors did call: Tolo was at his house, along with a gang of other male dogs, since there was a female Maremmana sheepdog in heat. The next morning, we took Tolo to Marco, one of the veterinarians in Semproniano, to be castrated.

He was a perfect traveller and a welcome guest at places where many people were not. Among the hotels at which he stayed were the Principe di Savioa in Milan, the Villa d’Este in Cernobbio, and the Villa Cipriani in Asolo. Sometimes meals were delivered to him by room service at the hotel’s initiative—a cotoletta milanese or fegato alla veneziana. He went to Vienna and to the South of France, to Amsterdam and Brussels, and to America.

What Christopher Hibbert wrote of King Edward VII’s fox terrier, Caesar, could be written of Tolo:

Despite the ministrations of the footman whose duty it was to wash and comb him, Caesar ... was often to be seen with his mouth covered with prickles after an unsuccessful tussle with a hedgehog. The King loved him dearly, took him abroad, and allowed him to sleep in an easy chair by his bed ... He could never bring himself to smack the dog, however reprehensible his behavior; and “it was a picture,” so Stamper, the motor engineer, said, “to see the King standing shaking his stick at the dog when he had done wrong. ‘You naughty dog,’ he would say very slowly. ‘You naughty, naughty dog.’ And Caesar would wag his tail and ‘smile’ cheerfully into his master’s eyes, until his Majesty smiled back in spite of himself.” Devoted as he was to the King, though, Caesar showed not the least interest in the advances of other human beings who bent down to fondle him, disdaining to notice the staff when he accompanied the King on an inspection ...

Tolo was happy in Maremma—in many ways happier than we were. He took his days and his dreams as a birthright.

23

Trama di Maggio, olio per assagio.

Trama di Giugno, olio per lavarsi il grugno.

Olive blooms in May, oil just to taste.

Olive blooms in June, oil to wash your face.

OF THE MANY agricultural rituals that defined the Maremman year—the cutting of the hay in May, the threshing of the wheat in July, the vendemmia (grape harvest) in the autumn—none meant more than the November pressing of the olives. Oil, after all, is the foundation of Maremman life; unlike their cousins to the north, the people here almost never used—indeed, barely comprehended—butter, which no doubt contributed to their famous longevity. (Rosaria told us that heart disease was almost unknown in Semproniano.) Nor did the making of the oil lack its element of pageantry. When the young oil arrived, the people of Semproniano would greet it with the sort of exuberance that the French save—inexplicably—for Beaujolais nouveau. Because it had such a peppery kick, the new oil was never used for cooking but instead drizzled over a salad or a bowl of zuppa di ceci. The best way to serve the new oil, however, was to pour some onto a piece of grilled, unsalted bread that had been rubbed with garlic: this was the famed bruschetta, so commonly imitated and so rarely gotten right, even in Tuscany. For bruschetta must be subtle, which is the point so many restaurateurs miss. The fact that the Florentine version is known as fett’unta—“greasy slice”—attests to its comparative coarseness.

For a long time, Semproniano had one tourist attraction, the Olivone, an immense olive tree more than two thousand years old. Before Podere Fiume was finished, we visited the Olivone twice, sitting each time for a few moments under its capacious and maternal limbs.

We spoke of how, when we lived here, we would bring all our friends to see it. Then on May 10, 1998—the evening of American Mother’s Day—someone torched the Olivone, burning it to the ground. The town went into mourning. In particular the children, who had a tradition of walking to the Olivone for a picnic on the last day of school, grieved the tree’s passing. Ettore, Sauro’s nine-year-old son, asked if he could borrow one of our computers to write an essay called “The Olivone, Burned and No More.” For months afterwards, every time we ate at Il Mulino, Martino urged us to write a book about the Olivone. (The arsonist, alas, was never arrested, though his identity is known.)

In Italy, politics often matter on a local level far more deeply than they do nationally. Almost immediately after the Olivone burned, dark rumors began to spread that one or another of the two political parties vying for control of the town (it was an election year) had been responsible for this barbarous and selfish act. As it happened, the mayor, who had won the previous election by one vote, was a member of the far right Alleanza Nazionale. One afternoon (Friday, November 13, 1998), to our great surprise, he knocked at our door and introduced himself. For about ten minutes he outlined his plans for the coming year: the new library to which he hoped we might donate some books, the new sports ground, the roads he was going to have paved (ours included). Apparently he didn’t realize that while we were residents of Semproniano, we were not Italian citizens and therefore could not vote. Afterwards, rather delighted by his visit (there is always something grand about a mayor), we walked over to tell Delia and Ilvo that he had been by to see us. (He had not been by to see them.) “Fascistone,” Delia said. As we soon learned, they, like all our friends here, were lifelong Communists, and were worried lest the mayor, with promises of paving, should lure us to his side.

DL at the Olivone (Photo by MM)

In the end the mayor won the election—by far more than one vote. Our friends said that he had done so by spreading lies throughout the countryside, telling the farmers that if they voted for the Communists, the ambientalisti (environmentalists) would set wolves loose to kill their sheep. Then the whole area could be made over into a preserve. Some hinted that it was in order to head off such a transformation that the Olivone was burned—a scenario we thought paranoid at the time, but that now seems highly probable.

Oliveto, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

To Ilvo and Delia, the burning of a two-thousand-year-old olive tree was murder. In a town where oil was life, this great mother of a tree was looked to not only as a source of sustenance but a force of good. When Pina offered us oil made from the olives of the Olivone, we accepted it with an almost mystic wonderment, not because the oil tasted any different from any other local oil but because it came from the Olivone, which was born before Christ.

Afterwards we tried to console ourselves with the knowledge that each of our own trees, though mere striplings, had the potential to grow into an Olivone. We had thirty-eight, which was just enough to produce a year’s worth of oil for two hungry people and a dog.

The Kitchen, Podere Fiume, “Our” Olive Oil on the Counter to the Left (Photo by Simon McBride)

In Maremma no one picks olives before November 2 (All Souls’ Day), by which point the green has begun mottling into black. This is why Tuscan olive oil is so justly famous; Umbrians and Apulians, by contrast, wait for the fruit to fall before they gather it, which makes their oil more acidic. Usually it took us about three weeks, working six hours a day, to harvest our olives. Once we were done, we’d pack them in plastic crates and haul them to one of the two frantoi (olive presses), this one located in a warehouse behind the consorzio agrario. In the room through which you entered, tons of olives, either loose or in burlap bags through which a little moisture was already seeping, waited to be weighed and pressed. There would be at least one truck parked outside, bearing the immense crop of one of the larger aziende, a thousand kilos in comparison to which our five crates seemed meager. Still, we gave them to the frantoiano to weigh, and he told us to how much oil we were entitled, using as the basis for his calculations a mysterious algorithm that took into account not only the quantity of olives but their relative oiliness in comparison to other years (on average, about twenty percent of the weight of the fruit). We’d nod acceptance of his terms. Then he’d take our olives and throw them onto the pile with all the others, for generally speaking only huge crops were pressed individually; in the case of small harvests, the olives of several different families would be mixed together, which meant that one could never say truthfully, “This oil is mine,” though of course everyone said it anyway.

Having deposited our olives, we followed the frantoiano into the next room, where the machinery itself was located. This consisted of a huge tub and a stone grinding wheel, operated not by hand, as in the last century, but by a sophisticated system of gears. For sheer scale, it was daunting. The wheel was easily twice the size of the Bocca della Verità in Rome.

As for the tub: if you fell into it you would certainly be crushed in a matter of seconds. At the bottom, a muddy sludge of olive residue shifted and churned, while from its side a stainless steel pipe led to a series of distillation tubes and then to a tap from which a stream of oil was always pouring. The oil was such a deep shade of green that you could not see light through it unless you held the bottle up to the sun. It gave off a slightly mulchy odor. This was the cold-pressed “extra virgin” oil for which Tuscany is famous. Later, the pulp would be pressed a second time, producing a paler oil; later still, the crumbly residue, by now the texture and color of potting soil, would be forced, thanks to the addition of certain chemicals, to yield yet a third grade of oil, almost colorless and used chiefly for deep frying.

Signorina Ivana Kislingher (Miss Argentina 1954) at the Bocca della Verità

Next the frantoiano—Paolo) who in the summer worked at the Bar Sport, and in the spring did construction at the Terme—asked us if we wanted to take our oil then or wait until “our” olives were pressed. We told him that now would be fine, at which point he began to fill our thirty-liter stainless steel oil urn. One of our neighbors, a farmer with a lot of land, walked in and greeted us. We would have felt intimidated by his bigger harvest (this is the curse of masculinity) had not a tiny old man followed him in. In his right hand he held a straw basket containing at most twenty olives, in his left a biberon—a baby bottle.

“Buona sera.”

“Salve.”

“Buona sera.” Jovially the old man greeted our neighbor, Paolo, and us. (Like the Olivone he was indiscriminate in his beneficence.) And who was he? An inmate at the local casa di riposo (rest home), tending for memory’s sake a single, potted tree? Perhaps. We never asked. Instead we admired the aplomb with which he handed his basket to Paolo, who weighed the olives before throwing them onto the heap. In a few hours they would lose all identity, they would be ground along with ours and our neighbor’s and a dozen other people’s, pulp and stone, into the great democracy of oil, and the old man would hand Paolo his biberon to be filled: just a few drops, mind you, yet enough to remind him of that green mother whose milk tasted of pepper, and whose blighted home now smelled of smoke and gasoline.

24

THE LAST CHRISTMAS of the 1900s was a quiet affair in our part of the world.

In Semproniano, the only public decorations were a modest tree in the piazza, elsewhere a few lights, a nativity scene. Most of the shops put up decorations, but not too many; Brunella, who ran the frame shop, had made a charming tree of gilded chicken wire covered with gold bows and white lights for her window. One exquisitely blue morning, a few days before Christmas, we were in town at about ten o’clock, and as we were walking to the Bar Sport, a Christmas tree made of persimmons at Carlucci’s collapsed. All the good citizens in the Piazza del Popolo at once fanned out to catch the fruits as they rolled hither and thither. The next time we went to town, the persimmons—which in Maremma were eaten with ricotta and shavings of dark chocolate—were gathered in baskets festooned with red bows.

For two years in a row, we had lunch with Ilvo and Delia on Christmas Eve: a soup of chickpeas and tagli-olini, then fried baccala (salted cod). The third year, however, we had lunch with them a few days before Christmas, and on this occasion, DL helped Delia in the kitchen, since he was keen to learn how to make gnocchi. For a second course, there was baked chicken and rabbit; and then, as always, dessert, coffee, and grappa.

On Christmas Day, we went to Semproniano. Usually the townspeople dressed up and turned out in the piazza. This year, however, Christmas morning was cold and wet, and the only people at the bar were the old men who had no family; or at least no family who wanted to celebrate the holiday with them. Loando’s son lived in Vienna. Rather than Christmas music, Stefano was for some reason playing techno.

Later on, the day got better. At Pina’s, our Christmas lunch began with fettuccine di pollo (ribbons of chicken breast “cooked” by being soaked in lemon juice) and a salad of radicchio and apple. For the first course, there were Pina’s classic tagliatelle al ragú (the pasta flavored with bitter chocolate) and tortelli di baccala dressed with clams and herbs; then capon stuffed with prunes and chestnuts. All the while, the fire roared in the fireplace, and Martino, who had recently turned nine, told us that he would take the order for dessert. He did, and we were served a nest of fried chestnut tagliatelle dusted with powdered sugar and pomegranate seeds.

Lunch lasted from one o’clock until five o’clock (the so-called “blue hour” here during the winter). Back at home, we called our families across the ocean.

Before we moved to Podere Fiume, we spent several Christmases at the thermal spa in Saturnia, soaking in the mineral waters with their delicious stink of sulfur. We always played the tombola, which, because it is Italian, you can win in many more ways than you can win at Bingo. In those days, the tombola was played at Saturnia every night between Christmas and New Year’s, and if truth be told, it was probably the thing we liked best about going there.

To play the tombola, you rent cards on which are printed twenty numbers from one to ninety. These cards have little plastic doors over them that as the numbers are called you either flip open or slide down. The scoring is as follows: the first person to get two numbers on the same line calls out “ambo” and wins a prize; then the first person to get three numbers (terno); four numbers (quaterna); five numbers (cinquina); and finally the whole card (tombola). The calling goes on until a second person covers all his numbers, and this prize is known as the tombolino—the little tombola. At Saturnia you played not for money but things: the grand prize was a six-kilo Maremma ham.

In preparation for the tombola, we settled ourselves and our cards at a green felt-covered pentagonal table. Our nearest neighbors were two elderly ladies who were playing the tombola simultaneously with an interminable game of gin rummy.

The calling began. One number, two numbers. Suddenly MM leaped up and called: “Ambo!”

Expressions of slight resentment greeted this amazingly quick victory, in particular from our elderly neighbors. MM stepped up to the podium, where the master of ceremonies (actually the bartender) confirmed his numbers and announced that for the ambo, he had won a bottle of suntan oil and a body.

“A body?”

“Yes,” one of the ladies said in English. “A body is ... a leotard.”

The calling started up again, and as swiftly as MM had won the ambo, a pretty young girl sitting with her mother won the terno. Her prize consisted of a wild-boar salami and two bodies.

“The bodies are really piling up tonight.”

Two numbers later, MM was leaping up again. “Quaterna!”

“You very lucky tonight,” the bartender said in English, as he reeled off what MM had won: a panforte, another bottle of suntan oil, a book of photographs of the Maremma, and a body—“but a different body from the first one.”

MM sat down. Another number was called. “Cinquina!” he shouted.

No one showed much in the way of good tidings as the bartender recited MM’s latest round of prizes: a pan d’oro (a variety of Christmas cake), a torrone (a variety of Christmas candy), a jogging suit, another bottle of suntan oil, a jar of sunblock, and a bottle of dessert wine. (No body this time.)

Fortunately his luck degenerated after that. When the tombola was called, the winner was an old man referred to by our neighbors only as “the engineer.” Because he had won the tombola both the year before and the year before that, some corruption was suspected. Might the infamous tangenti (bribes) that had brought down the Christian Democrats have also affected the innocent tombola?

As for the tombolino, it was a tie between a gentleman in a black suit (“part of the Swiss contingent,” one of the ladies remarked derisively) and a young girl who was at the hotel in the company of an extremely aged man—whether her grandfather or lover no one could quite determine.

The next day—Christmas Day—we arrived early to claim our table.

“Ah, the lucky Americans,” said the more loquacious of our gin-playing (and drinking) companions. “Are you going to steal our prize from us again?”

Apparently not. As the game began, neither of us got anywhere. Ambo, terno, quaterna, cinquina passed us by. (The engineer won twice.) Then it was time for the tombola . Suddenly—magically—one of DL’s cards started filling in. “Mark,” he whispered, “I only need three numbers! Two numbers! One number! Thirty-eight!”

“Trentotto,” the bartender called. “Thirty-eight.”

“Tombola!”

He had won the ham.

“You young people are too lucky,” our neighbor said. “Luck should be for the old. A beautiful ham like that!”

25

NO HOUSE is ever really finished, or finished for long. The workmen leave, months pass, you cook and spill olive oil on the terra cotta and play with the dog. Spiders build webs; you brush them away and perhaps leave a fingerprint. Candle wax melts onto the mantel. Soon you notice that the long drying of the plaster has left tiny fissures on its surface, that a little wine has stained the marble top of a table. Everywhere there are things you haven’t done: one room lacks a bracket for keeping the shutter open, in another a hole still needs to be drilled for the hanging of a picture. Somehow you never got around to having curtains made for one of the rooms, so you Scotch-tape an old blue bedsheet to the beautifully wrought curtain rod. Yet for all that, the house is more beautiful, not less. In the words of Margaret Drabble, it has “weathered into identity.”

When we were first restoring Podere Fiume, we resolved to buy a clothes dryer, which is something of a rarity in Italy. (Italians—as generations of painters and photographers have happily recorded—prefer to dry their clothes out of doors.) For years, in Florence and then in Rome, we had missed having a dryer, especially on those afternoons when an unexpected rainstorm washed our sheets all over again. But then the appliance arrived, and though, for a while, we indulged in an orgy of drying, soon we found ourselves missing the smell of clothes that had dried under the sun, noticed that whenever we ran the dryer, the lights in the house dimmed to about half their usual brightness. Presently we took to hanging things out again, and used the dryer less and less. Toward the end, we barely used it at all.

We moved there to capture a dream less of Italy than of being foreigners in Italy, figures in a Forster novel. And yet Italy has a way of refusing to remain only a background. It grows into you, just as you grow into it. You begin to doubt dryers. After seven years, in ways you could never have predicted, you become Italian.

26

WE LIVED IN Podere Fiume as if we’d retired from the world. In many respects it was a good existence, but not for two men in their thirties. We grew restless. We travelled more and more. We changed. Our part of the Maremma changed. The Terme, once one of the most wonderful places in Italy, was destroyed by greed. (The old pools and waterfalls were incorporated into an expensive aquatic park.) Fosco put his farm on the market and moved his parents into an apartment in Semproniano. Ilvo died during the summer of 2001 and was buried on one of the hottest afternoons of the year. Although we did not attend the funeral, we joined the procession to the cemetery. Not knowing the custom, we wore dark suits. With the exception of Ilvo’s family and the old ladies of the village, the other mourners wore the clothes they worked in because back to work they would go after the good man was laid to rest.

On July 25, 2001, we were in a car accident. The rear of our car was pushed in more than two feet. The impact left an impression of the other car’s license plate in our bumper. Someone must have been looking out for us that day, because our car still ran—not too safely, to be sure, but it ran well enough to get us home.

We put the car in the body shop in Grosseto and rented a Fiat for the duration. Since it was early August, and Italy goes on vacation for the month, we had no hope of getting our own car back until the end of August or even early September. After a month, the owner of the body shop called to tells us the car was ready, and that we could pick it up the next day. We said we’d be there after lunch and we were. It was September 11, 2001.

We stopped to have coffee at a pasticceria in Grosseto. “Le torre gemelle,” the girl behind the counter said to us. We didn’t understand what she was talking about until we did.

27

12 May 2002

David and I sold Podere Fiume Friday afternoon and left Tuscany for the anonymity of the Hilton at the Rome airport on Saturday. Yesterday, then, was the first time since July 1993 that we have neither owned nor been renting a place in Italy—a strange sensation, if a welcome one. Walking around Rome last night, only a visitor here, I was happy ...

THE LAST NIGHT we slept in Podere Fiume, we did so as the guests of its new owners. It was the anniversary of the burning of the Olivone.

28

WE ONLY WENT back once.

In July 2003—Americans again, living in Gainesville, Florida—we decided to rent an apartment in the seaside town of Otranto in Puglia. This was the sort of holiday we would never have taken when we lived in Maremma (likewise, since moving to Gainesville, we have not once been to Disney World), and while we had a very good time swimming in the Mediterranean and eating ricci di mare (sea urchins; literally “sea hedgehogs”) and drinking the very sweet Pugliese iced coffee, what we enjoyed most about the holiday was the awareness that for the first time in years we were just tourists. No longer did we have an Italian bank account or an Italian phone number or an Italian television. Since we were renting a car, we did not even have to use our hard-earned Italian drivers’ licenses; the American ones did just fine. A remarkable feeling of freedom buoyed us, even as the holiday ended and we drove diagonally across the Italian boot, first to Rome and then to Semproniano, where we had made plans to rent a house called Il Kremlino from Graziella, the realtor who had arranged the sale of Podere Fiume.

Well, Rome was just fine. As we had hundreds of times before, we walked the streets around the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna, looking at the marble plaques memorializing the many foreigners who had sojourned here: Goethe, Lord Byron, Shelley ... But then the next morning, as we drove up the coast toward Grosseto—a drive we had made hundreds of times before—an unexpected anxiety beset us. Officially we were delighted to be returning to the village that for five years we had called home. Yet when we had called Pina the night before, she had told us that she and Giampaolo were just about to close Il Mulino for a week and go on vacation. Il Mulino closed! Where would we eat? Though we pretended it didn’t matter, the truth was that both of us felt abandoned.

We arrived in Semproniano late in the afternoon, at the hour when in the summer the sun is at its peak and the streets are empty. At the Bar Sport, where we were to meet Graziella, Stefano greeted us affectionately. All was well, he told us, nothing had changed since our departure; very little happened in Semproniano, it was really quite a dull place, he and his girlfriend were looking forward to their next holiday, far afield—Mauritius perhaps, or Laos. Then Graziella arrived and swept us up in her exuberance and walked us up the hill to Il Kremlino, a narrow medieval stone tower the three floors of which were connected by perilously steep staircases ... As it happened, before leaving we had sold or given quite a few of our things to Graziella and her German partner, Klodwig (in Italian, Clodoveo), and now, to make us welcome, they had ranged some of these things around the house, including a set of cereal bowls that a local ceramist had made for us, bearing our names ... And why was it, in that stern Kremlin with its terrifying steps, that our anxiety was getting more intense by the minute? Why was it that at the sight of the cereal bowls—Mark, David; merely our names—we wanted to hurl them out the window?

The sun had begun its descent. Figuring that we should get the ordeal over with, we got into our rental car and drove to Podere Fiume. From Graziella we had learned that the new owners—a couple from Milan—had of late begun work on the landscaping that we ourselves, nearly bankrupted by the renovations, had had neither the means nor the stamina to undertake.

The drive was pleasant. Curves don’t change; they seemed to embrace us, so often had we navigated them. Down a hill we went, and across a stream, and up another hill, and down again, and then Podere Fiume came into view. There was the gravel drive along which Tolo used to run. There was the mailbox in which tarantulas had nested. There were the sheep. There was the olive grove.

We got out of the car. No one was at home. Even so, we could see that a lot of work was in progress. A swimming pool was being dug. Flowerbeds had been planted and trees staked. Hesitantly—after all, we were trespassing—we peered in the windows. Little had changed. We had sold the house furnished and, so far as we can tell, the only thing the new owners had done to make their mark was to cover the sofa and the chairs with white canvas slipcovers. A good idea, in summer. Why hadn’t we thought of that? But beyond that, though, there really wasn’t much to look at. Finally we stepped back and for a few minutes just gazed at this house into which we had put so much of ourselves, this house in which we were once naive enough to imagine that we might live, at peace, forever: life as a perpetual sigh of relief at arrival. And yet from this house—much to our own surprise—we had lightly, easily stepped away. From this house, without once looking back, we had moved on.

A few months earlier, in Miami, we had eaten lunch at a Chinese restaurant with DL’s Aunt Molly, who was then in her early nineties. Most of our American acquaintances, when we first told them that we had sold our house in Italy, had reacted with disbelief: how could we have voluntarily given up what was a culturally recognized, officially sanctioned Dream—the Dream of Tuscany? Some were angry with us, others treated us as if we were survivors of a tragic loss. Molly, however, had a different view. We’d sold the house? “Great! Move on!” We’d sold the furniture? “Who needs it? You can buy new furniture!”

It was as if—in her exuberance, her focus on the future, above all her willingness to let go—this very old woman, over spring rolls and wonton soup, was giving us the blessing we needed.

Thank you, Molly. You were a wise woman. May you rest in peace, never looking over your shoulder.

At Podere Fiume, the sun was setting. We could think of no good reason to stay any longer—not here, not even in Semproniano. The next morning we would continue on to Florence.

But we did do one thing. In Rome, DL had had some of his shirts washed at the Green Colosseo laundry, the owner of which still remembered us from the years when we had been her regular customers. Through one of the buttonholes of the shirt he was wearing, the tag was still looped: LEAVITT D. and the date arranged in the Italian way (day/month/year instead of month/day/year).

Carefully he removed and unfolded the tag. Then he knelt down, dug a hole with his hands, and buried it: the frailest plaque imaginable, likely to degrade within weeks, but at least the Maremman soil would remember his name.

Poppies between Podere Fiume and Saturnia (Poppies to Make Them Sleep) (Photo by MM)

Copyright © 2011 by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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eISBN : 978-1-619-02024-5

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