In these stony old Tuscan towns, I get no sense of stepping back in time that I've had in Yugoslavia, Mexico, or Peru. Tuscans are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring the past along with them. If our culture says burn your bridges behind you—and it does—theirs says cross and recross. A fourteenth-century plague victim, perhaps once hauled out of one of the doors of the dead, could find her house and might even find it intact. Present and past just coexist, like it or not. The old Medici ball insignia in the piazza until last year had a ceramic hammer and sickle of the Communist party right beside it.
I walk through the short connecting leg of street to Piazza Signorelli, named for one of Cortona's hometown boys. Slightly larger, this piazza swarms on Saturday, market day, year round. It hosts an antique fair on the third Sunday in summer months. Two bars' outdoor tables extend into the piazza. I always notice the rather forlorn-looking Florentine lion slowly eroding on a column. No matter how late I go into town, people are gathered there; one last coffee before the strike of midnight.
Here, too, the comune sometimes sponsors concerts at night. Everyone is out anyway, but on these nights the piazza fills up with people from the nearby frazioni and farms and country villas. In this town of dozens of Catholic churches, a black gospel choir from America is singing tonight. Of course, this is no spontaneous Baptist group from a Southern church but a highly produced, professional choir from Chicago, complete with red and blue floodlights and cassettes for sale for twenty-thousand lire. They belt out “Amazing Grace” and “Mary Don't You Weep.” The acoustics are weird and the sound warps around the eleventh-and twelfth-century buildings surrounding this piazza, where jousts and flag throwers have performed regularly, and where on certain feast days, the bishops hold aloft the relics of saints, priests swing braziers of burning myrrh, and we walk through town on flower petals scattered by children. The sound engineer gets the microphones adjusted and the lead singer begins to pull the crowd to him. “Repeat after me,” he says in English, and the crowd responds. “Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus.” The English and American forces liberated Cortona in 1944. Until tonight, this many foreigners may never have gathered here since, certainly not this many black ones. The choir is big. The University of Georgia's students from the art program in Cortona are all out for a little down-home nostalgia. They, a smattering of tourists, and almost all the Cortonese are crushed into Piazza Signorelli. “Oh, Happy Day,” the black singers belt out, pulling an Italian girl onstage to sing with them. She has a mighty voice that easily matches any of theirs, and her small body seems all song. What are they thinking, this ancient race of Cortonese? Are they remembering the tanks rolling in, oh happy, happy day, the soldiers throwing oranges to the children? Are they thinking, Mass in the duomo was never like this? Or are they simply swaying with the crude American Jesus, letting themselves be carried on his shoulders by the music?
The piazza's focus is the tall Palazzo Casali, now the Etruscan Academy Museum. The most famous piece inside is a fourth-century B.C. bronze candelabrum of intricate design. It's remarkably wild. A center bowl fed oil to sixteen lamps around the rim. Between them, in bold relief, are animals, horned Dionysus, dolphins, naked crouching men in erectus, winged sirens. One Etruscan word, tinscvil, appears between two of the lamps. According to The Search for the Etruscans by James Wellard, Tin was the Etruscan Zeus and the inscription translates “Hail to Tin.” The candelabrum was found in a ditch near Cortona in 1840. In the museum, it is hung with a mirror above so you can get a good look. I once heard an English woman say, “Well, it is interesting, I suppose, but I wouldn't buy it at a jumble sale.” In glass cases, you see chalices, vases, bottles, a wonderful bronze pig, a two-headed man, many lead soldier-sized bronze figures from the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., including some in tipo schematico, an elongated style that reminds the contemporary viewer of Giacometti. Besides the Etruscan collection, this small museum has a surprising display of Egyptian mummies and artifacts. So many museums have excellent Egyptian exhibits; I wonder sometimes if anything from ancient Egypt ever was lost. I always visit several paintings I like. One, a portrait of the thoughtful Polimnia wearing a blue dress and a laurel crown, was long thought to be Roman, from the first century A.D. She's the muse of sacred poetry and looks quite pensive with the responsibility. Now she's believed to be an excellent seventeenth-century copy. The museum has not changed the more impressive date.
Appealing family crests emblazoned with carved swans, pears, and fanciful animals cover the side of the Palazzo Casali. The short street below leads to the Duomo and the Museo Diocesano, formerly the Chiesa del Gesù, which I sometimes pop into. Upstairs, the treasure is the Fra Angelico Annunciation, with a fabulous neon orange-haired angel. The Latin that comes out of the angel's mouth heads toward the Virgin; her reply comes back to him upside down. This is one of Fra Angelico's great paintings. He worked in Cortona for ten years and this triptych and a faded, painted lunette over the door of San Domenico are all that remain from his years here.
Just to the right of Palazzo Casali is Teatro Signorelli, the new building in town, 1854, but built in a quasi-Renaissance style with arched portico, perfect to shade the vegetable sellers from sun or rain. Inside is an opera house straight out of a Márquez novel: oval, tiered, little boxes and seats upholstered in red, with a small stage on which I once witnessed a ballet troupe from Russia thump around for two hours. It serves now as the movie theater in winter. Midway through the movie, the reel winds down. Intermission. Everyone gets up for coffee and fifteen minutes of talk. It's hard, when you really love to talk, to shut up for an entire two hours. In summer, the movies are shown sotto le stelle, under the stars, in the town park. Orange plastic chairs are set up in a stone amphitheater, kind of like the drive-in with no cars.
Off both of these piazzas, streets radiate. This way to the medieval houses, that to the thirteenth-century fountain, there to the tiny piazzas, up to the venerable convents and small churches. I walk along all of these streets. I never have not seen something new. Today, a vicolo named Polveroso, dusty, though why it should be more or less dusty than others was impossible to see.
If you're in great shape, you'll still huff a little on a walk to the upper part of town. Even in the mad-dog sun right after lunch, it's worth it. I pass the medieval hospital, with its long portico, saying a little prayer that I never have to have my appendix out in there. At mealtimes, women dash in carrying covered dishes and trays. If you're hospitalized, it's simply expected that your family will bring meals. Next is the interminably closed church of San Francesco, austerely designed by Brother Elias, pal of Saint Francis. At the side the ghost of a former cloister arcs along the wall. Up, up, streets utterly clean, lined with well-kept houses. If there are four feet of ground, someone has planted tomatoes on a bamboo tepee, a patch of lettuces. In pots, the neighborhood hands-down favorite, besides geraniums, is hydrangeas, which grow to bush size and always seem to be pink. Often, women are sitting outside, along the street on chairs, shelling beans, mending, talking with the woman next door. Once, as I approached, I saw a crone of a woman, long black dress, black scarf, hunched in a little cane chair. It could have been 1700. When I got closer, I saw she was talking on a cellular phone. At Via Berrettini, 33, a plaque proclaims it to be the birthplace of Pietro Berrettini; I finally figured out that's Pietro da Cortona. A couple of shady piazzas are surrounded by townhouse-style old houses, with pretty little gardens in front. If I lived here, I'd like that one, with the marble table under the arbor of Virginia creeper, the starched white curtain at the window. A woman with an elaborate swirl of hair shakes out a cloth. She is laying plates for lunch. Her rich ragù smells like an open invitation, and I look longingly at her green checked tablecloth and the capped bottle of farm wine she plunks down in the center of the table.
The church of San Cristoforo, almost at the top, is my favorite in town. It's ancient, ancient, begun around 1192 on Etruscan foundations. Outside, I peer into a
small chapel with a fresco of the Annunciation. The angel, just landed, has chalky aqua sleeves and skirts still billowing from flight. The door to the church is always open. Actually, it's always half open, just ajar, so that I pause and consider before I go in. Basically a Romanesque plan, inside the organ balcony of curlicued painted wood is a touching country interpretation of Baroque. A faded fresco, singularly flat in perspective, shows Christ crucified. Under each wound, a suspended angel holds out a cup to catch his falling blood. They're homey, these neighborhood churches. I like the jars (six today) of droopy garden flowers on the altar, the stacks of Catholic magazines under another fresco of the Annunciation. This Mary has thrown up her hands at the angel's news. She has a you've-got-to-be-kidding look on her face. The back of the church is dark. I hear a soft honking snore. In the privacy of the last pew, a man is having a nap.
Behind San Cristoforo is one of the staggering valley views, cut into diagonally by a slice of fortress wall, amazingly high. What has held them up all these centuries? The Medici castle perches at the top of the hill, and this part of its extensive walls angles sharply down. I walk up the road to the Montanina gate, the high entrance to town. Etruscan, too; isn't this place ancient? I often walk this way into town. My house is on the other side of the hill and from there the road into this top layer of Cortona remains level. I like to go through the upper town without having to climb. One pleasure of my walk is Santa Maria Nuova. Like Santa Maria del Calcinaio, this church is situated on a broad terrace below the town. From the Montanina road, I'm looking down at its fine-boned shape, rhythmic curves, and graceful dome, a deeply glazed aquamarine and bronze in the sun. Though Calcinaio is more famous, having been designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Santa Maria Nuova pleases my eye more. Its lines counter a sense of weight. The church looks as though it alighted there and easily could fly, given the proper miracle, to another position.
Turning back from the gate toward town, I walk to the other treasure of a church, San Niccolò. It's newer, mid-fifteenth century. Like San Cristoforo's, the decorations are amateurish and charming. The serious piece of art is a Signorelli double-sided painting, a deposition on one side and the Madonna and baby on the other. Meant to be borne on a standard in a procession, it now can be reversed by the custodian. On a hot day, this is a good rest. The eye is entertained; the feet can cool on the stone floor. On the way out, almost hidden, I spot a small Christ by Gino Severini, another Cortona boy. As a signer of the Futurist manifesto and an adherent to the slogan “Kill the moonlight,” Severini doesn't readily associate in my mind with religious art. The Futurists were down on the past, embraced velocity, machines, industry. Around town, in restaurants and bars, I've seen posters of Severini's paintings, all color, swirl, energy. Then, over a table in Bar Sport, I noticed that the modern Madonna nursing a baby is his. The woman, unlike any Madonna I've seen, has breasts the size of cantaloupes. Usually a Madonna's breasts look disassociated from the body; often they're as round as a tennis ball. The Severini original in the Etruscan museum just escapes being lugubrious by being tedious. A separate room devoted to Severini is filled with an interesting hodge-podge of his work. Nothing major, unfortunately, but a taste of the styles he ran through: Braque-like collages with the gears, pipes, speedometers the Futurists loved, a portrait of a woman rather in the style of Sargent, art school-quality drawings, and the more well-known Cubist abstractions. A couple of glass cases hold his publications and a few letters from Braque and Apollinaire. None of this work shows the verve and ambition he was capable of. Of course, all the Futurists have suffered from their early enthusiasm for Fascism; baby went out with the bathwater. They've suffered more from the tendency we have had, until recently, to look to France for the news about art. Many astounding paintings from the Futurists are unknown. For whatever reasons, Severini, in his later years, returned to his roots for subjects. I think there's a microbe in Italian painters' bloodstreams that infects them with the compulsion to paint Jesus and Mary.
As I leave San Niccolò, walking down, I pass several almost windowless convents (they must have large courtyards), one of which is still cloistered. If I had lace needing of repair, I could place it on a Catherine wheel, where it is spun in to a nun to mend. Two of the convents have chapels, strangely modernized. On down the hill, I encounter Severini again in a mosaic at San Marco; if I climb this street, I'm on a Crucifixion trail he designed. A series of stone-enshrined mosaics traces Christ's progress toward the Crucifixion and then the Deposition. At the end of that walk (on a hot day I feel I've carried a cross), I'm at Santa Margherita, a large church and convent. Inside, Margherita herself is encased in glass. She has shrunk. Her feet are creepy. Most likely, a praying woman will be kneeling in front of her. Margherita was one of the fasting saints who had to be coaxed to take at least a spoon of oil every day. She shouted of her early sins in the streets. She would be neurotic, anorectic today; back then they understood her desire to suffer like Christ. Even Dante, it is believed, came to her in 1289 and discussed his “pusillanimity.” Margherita is so venerated locally that when mothers call their children in the park, hers is the name most often heard. A plaque beside the Bernada gate (now closed) proclaims that through it she first entered the city in 1272.
The major street off the Piazza della Repubblica leads to the park. The Rugapiana is lined with cafés and small shops. The proprietors often are sitting in chairs outside or grabbing an espresso nearby. From the rosticceria, tempting smells of roasting chicken, duck, and rabbit drift into the street. They do a fast business in lasagne at lunch and all day in panzarotti, which means rolled bread but loses something in the translation. It's rolled around a variety of stuffings, such as mushrooms or ham and cheese. Sausage and mozzarella is one of the best. Past the circular Piazza Garibaldi—almost every Italian town has one—you come to the proof, if you have not intuited it before, that this is one of the most civilized towns on the globe. A shady park extends for a kilometer along the parterre. Cortonese use it daily. A park has a timeless quality. Clothing, flowers, the sizes of trees change; otherwise it easily could be a hundred years ago. Around the cool splash of the fountain of upside-down nymphs riding dolphins, young parents watch their children play. The benches are full of neighbors talking. Often a father balances a tiny child on a two-wheeler and watches her wobble off with a mixture of fear and exhilaration on his face. It's a peaceful spot to read the paper. A dog can get a long evening walk. Off to the right, there's the valley and the curved end of Lake Trasimeno.
The park ends at the strada bianca lined with cypresses commemorating the World War I dead. After walking along that dusty road toward home for about a kilometer, I look up and see, at the end of the Medici walls, the section of Etruscan wall known as Bramasole. My house takes its name from the wall. Facing south like the temple at Marzabotto near Bologna, the wall may have been part of a sun temple. Some local people have told us the name comes from the short days in winter we have on this side of the hill. Who knows how old the name, indicating a yearning for the sun, might be? All summer the sun strikes the Etruscan wall directly at dawn. It wakes me up, too. Behind the pleasure and fresh beauty of sunrise, I detect an old and primitive response: The day has come again, no dark god swallowed it during the night. A sun temple seems the most logical kind anyone ever would build. Perhaps the name does go back twenty-six or so centuries to the ancient purpose of this site. I can see the Etruscans chanting orisons to the first rays over the Apennines, then slathering themselves with olive oil and lying out all morning under the big old Mediterranean sun.
Henry James records walking this road in his The Art of Travel. He “strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the outer circuit of the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; they glared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on a blue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective the vague Etruscan past . . .” A blue eye-glass? The nineteenth-century equivalent of sunglasses? I can see Henry peering up from t
he white road, nodding wisely to himself, dusting off his uppers, then, no doubt, heading back to his hotel to write his requisite number of pages for the day. I take the same stroll and attempt the same mysterious act, to throw the powerful light of the long, long past into the light of the morning.
Riva, Maremma:
Into Wildest Tuscany
FINALLY, WE'RE READY TO LEAVE BRAMASOLE , if only for a few days. The floors are waxed and gleaming. All the furniture Elizabeth gave us shines with beeswax polish and the drawers are lined with Florentine paper. The market supplied us with antique white coverlets for the beds. Everything works. We even oiled the shutters one Saturday, took each one down, washed it, then rubbed in a coat of the ubiquitous linseed oil that seems to get poured onto everything. The can of mixed garden flowers I flung along the Polish wall bloom with abandon, ready to bolt at any moment. We live here. Now we can begin the forays into the concentric circles around us, Tuscany and Umbria this year, perhaps the south of Italy next year. Our travels are still somewhat housebased: We are ready to stock a wine cellar, to begin to build up a collection of wines associated with places where we have enjoyed them with local food. Many Italian wines are meant to be drunk immediately; our “cellar” under the stairs will be for special bottles. In the cantina off the kitchen, we'll keep our demijohn and the cases of house wine.
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 16