Under the Tuscan Sun

by Frances Mayes

  Tarquinia is out of Tuscany, a few miles into Lazio. It gets ugly along the way, industrial and crowded. I'm less able to visualize the Etruscans here than in the green and dreamy Maremma. Traffic annoys us after so many empty roads. Soon we're in the busy town of Tarquinia, where hoards of items from the tombs are exhibited in a fifteenth-century palazzo. Staggering, amazing, fantastic, and worth the trip alone are two terra-cotta winged horses from the fourth or third century B.C. These were found in 1938 near the steps leading to a temple, now just a two-level base of square limestone blocks. The horses must have been ornaments. I wonder about their connection to Pegasus, who started the flow of the sacred Hippocrene with a dash of his hoof, who always is linked with poetry and the arts. These are fabulously vigorous horses with muscles, genitals, ribs, perky ears, and feathered wings. The chronological arrangement of the museum is useful for sorting out when there were Attic influences, when they began using stone sarcophagi, how design changed. Everything from cinerary urns to perfume burners makes you feel the creative energy and spirit behind these objects. Several tomb paintings have been brought here to prevent deterioration. The tomb of the Triclinium, with its prancing musician and young dancer swathed in what looks like a chiffon throw, would melt the heart of a stone. In almost any museum, I fade after a couple of hours and can wander by with a glance at something that would have stopped me for minutes when I first arrived. We resolve to come back, though, because there is so much to linger over.

  The field of tombs could be any field, the necropoli like outhouses attached to sheds. The structures built over tombs open to the public are simply entrances with a flight of steps leading down. The tombs are lit. We're disappointed to find that only four a day are open. Why? No one seemed to know; they're on a rotation system, that's all. Now we know we'll come back because the Hunting and Fishing Tomb is not on view today. We see the Lotus Flower one, with decorations that have almost a Deco style, then the Lionesses one, famous for the reclining man holding up an egg—symbolic of resurrection, as in Christian belief, the shell like the tomb broken open. Dancers cavort here, too. I notice their elaborate sandals with straps crossed and wound around the ankles just like the ones I'm wearing—did the Italians always love shoes? We're lucky to see the Jugglers' tomb, rather Egyptian looking, except for what appears to be a Middle Eastern belly dancer about to go into her act. In the two-chambered tomb of the Orcas remains, amid much faded scenes of a banquet, a startling portrait of a woman in profile with a crown of olive leaves.

  After a quick bite, we drive the few kilometers to Norchia, which we've heard is the site of many recent finds. It does not appear that anyone has been about in decades. The broken sign points up to the sky. After we wander about, a farmer points us in the right direction. At the end of a dirt road we park and set out along the edge of a wheat field. A few meters down the path, we encounter a severed goat head covered with flies. Here, indeed, is a sign—a primitive one of sacrifice. “This is getting spooky,” I say as we step around it. The terrain becomes precipitous. We're climbing down and all I can think about is the climb back up. A few rusted hand railings indicate we're going in the right direction. The declivity becomes sharper; we're skidding, holding on to vines. Haven't we seen enough of these tombs? When it levels out, we start to see the openings into the hillside, dark mouths, vines, and brush. We venture into two, breaking through impressive spiderwebs with sticks. Inside, it's as black as, well, a tomb. We see slabs and pits where the bodies and urns lay. Vipers must coil here now. We walk about half a mile along this level. The tombs are more numerous than at Sovana and poke into the hillside at various levels. There's an oppressive feeling of danger I can't identify. I just want to leave. I ask Ed if he thinks this is a weird place and he says, “Definitely, let's go.” The way out is as awful as I expected. Ed stops to empty dirt out of his loafer and a sliver of bone falls out. We come to the place where we saw the goat head; it is no longer there. When we get back to the car, another one is parked near us. A young couple is kissing and rolling around with such intensity that they don't hear us. This dispels the bad aura and we head back to the hotel, saturated with Etruscan voodoo.

  Ah, dinner, the favorite hour. Tonight it's Caino, which we expect to be the gastronomic highlight of our trip. Before driving into Montemerano, we take a little detour to Saturnia, perhaps the oldest town in Italy if Cortona isn't. It would have to be if, as legend has it, Saturn, son of sky and earth, founded it. The warm waterfall, legend also tells us, first poured forth when the horse of Orlando (Roland in English) pawed the ground with his hoof. A town on Via Clodia has to be older than anything I can grasp. I practice saying “I live on Via Clodia,” imagining a life on such an ancient street. The town is shady and active, not at all lost in time. A few highly bronzed people from the expensive hotel near the falls seem to be looking for something to buy but the shops are plain. They settle at an outdoor café and order colorful drinks in tall glasses.

  Caino, a jewel: two gracious small rooms with flowers on the tables, pretty china and wineglasses. With glasses of spumante, we settle into the menu. Everything looks good and I have a hard time deciding. They, too, have a combination of sophisticated choices and the rustic Maremma specialties, such as zuppa di fagioli, white bean soup, pasta with rabbit sauce, cinghiale all'aspretto di mora, boar with blackberry sauce. For our antipasti, we're attracted to flan di melanzane in salsa tiepida di pomodoro, eggplant flan with tepid tomato sauce, and mousse di formaggi al cetriolo, a mousse of cheeses and cucumber. We both want tagliolini all'uovo con zucchine e fiori di zucca, egg pasta with zucchini and squash blossoms, for first courses. After that, it's roast lamb for Ed and duck breast in a sauce of grape must vinegar for me. We take the waiter's suggestion for tonight's Morellino, the Le Sentinelle Riserva 1990 by Mantellassi. Praise Allah! What a wine. The dinner is superb, every bite, and the service attentive. Everyone in the small restaurant has noticed the young couple at the table in the middle from the moment they were seated. They look like twins. Both have that curly, magnificent black hair and hers has jasmine flowers caught in its ripples. Both have the sultry eyes my mother used to refer to as “bedroom eyes” and lips like those on archaic Greek statues. They're dressed out of Milan or Rome boutiques, he in a somewhat rumpled tan linen suit and she in a yellow puckered silk sundress that was melted onto her. The waiter pours champagne for them, an oddity in an Italian restaurant. We all avert our eyes as they toast each other and seem to disappear into each other's eyes. Our salads look as if someone picked them from a field this afternoon, and perhaps they did. We're falling into a deep relaxation and exhilaration by now, just what a vacation is supposed to be. “Would you like to go to Morocco?” Ed asks out of nowhere.

  “What about Greece? I never intended not to go to Greece.” Seeing new places always brings up the possibility of other new places. We're riveted again by the beautiful couple. I see the other diners discreetly staring, too. He has moved from his chair across from her to the one next to her and has taken her hand. I see him reach into his pocket and take out a small box. We turn back to our salads. We will have to forego dolci but with our coffee they bring a plate of little pastries anyway, which we manage to eat. This is one of the best dinners I've had in Italy. Ed proposes that we stay a few more days and eat here every night. The lustrous girl now is holding out her hand, admiring a square emerald surrounded by diamonds I can see from here. They both smile at everyone, who they suddenly realize has followed this engagement. Spontaneously we all lift our glasses in a toast and the waiter, sensing the moment, rushes in to refill. The girl shakes back her long hair and little white flowers fall on the floor.

  When we leave, the village is dark and silent until we get to the bar at the end of the street, where the whole town must be playing cards and having a last coffee.

  In the morning we drive over to Vulci, another ancient-sounding name, with a humpbacked bridge and a castle turned museum. The bridge is Etruscan, with Roman and medieval repai
rs and additions. Why it's so highly arched is impossible to know because the Fiora, little more than a mighty stream, runs far below in a gorge. But humped it is. Whatever road it once joined has disappeared, so the bridge has a strangely surreal aspect. The castle fortress at one end was built much later. A Cistercian monastery surrounded by a moat, it now serves as a museum, like Tarquinia's, full of astonishing things. Too bad the glass separates us from the objects. They are extremely appealing to the touch. I want to pick up each little votive hand, fawn-shaped perfume bottle, to rub the monumental stone sculptures, such as the boy on the winged horse. Here's the real news about the Etruscans—their art is fortifying, the remains of people who lived in the moment. D.H. Lawrence certainly caught that—but who could not, having seen as much as he did. Rereading him along the way, I'm struck often with what an ass he was. The peasants are dullards because they do not immediately see to the wishes of this obnoxious foreigner. No one is just waiting to take him miles into the country to see ruins. No one is equipped with candles the minute he asks. What an inconvenient country! The train schedules are unlike those at Victoria Station; the food is not to his liking. I forgive him now and then, when he totally disappears from the text and just writes what he sees.

  Remains of the Etruscan, then Roman, town lie out in the field—stone foundations and bits of floor, some with black and white mosaic, subterranean passageways and remnants of baths: a floor plan of the town, actually, so that you walk around imagining the walls around you, the activities, the views across to the bridge. Off to the side, we see the stark Roman remains of a brick building, walls, a few windows, and holes for beams to hold up a floor. Vulci, a lavish archeological area. Unfortunately, the area's painted tombs are closed today—another reason to return.

  We're amazed by the restaurants, too. Enoteca Passaparola, on the road leading up to Montemerano, serves robust food in a very casual ambience—paper napkins, chalkboard menu, plank floors. If there are cowboys left in the Maremma, I think they would head here. We order big plates of grilled vegetables and wonderful green salads with a bottle of Lunaia, a Bianco di Pitigliano made by La Stellata, another gorgeous local wine. The waiter tells us about the area's Cantina Cooperativa del Morellino di Scansano, then brings over a glass for us to taste. We find our house wine for the rest of the summer. At about $1.70 a bottle, it has a deep mellifluous taste that surprises us. More straightforward than the reserve Morellinos we've tried, this wine definitely stands up to be counted. We still have the backseat where we can pile a couple of cases.

  At the next table an artist draws caricatures of us. Mine looks like Picasso's Dora Maar. When we toast him and begin to chat, he opens a satchel and starts showing us catalogues of his shows. Soon we're nodding politely. He pulls out reviews, pours more wine. His wife looks not mortified but resigned; she's been to restaurants with him before. They're at the terme, taking the waters for his liver. I can imagine him cornering people there as they sip their measures of mineral water. He slides his chair over, leaving her at their table. I'm torn between the pleasure of the berry tart listed on the chalkboard and the pleasure of getting the check and leaving. Ed asks for the check and we exit. Up in town we have coffee, then on the way back to the car, we look in the window and see that Signor Picasso is gone. So we have the berry tart after all. The waiter brings us a complimentary amaro. “They come here every night,” he complains. “We're counting the days until he goes back to Milano with his liver.”

  Saturated with the Etruscans, well fed, pleased with the hotel, we pack and take off for Talamone, a high-walled town over the sea. The water must be pure here. It's clear as far out as I can wade and quite cold. At our modern hotel, there's no beach, just rocks jutting straight up, with concrete platforms on the water where you can sit in a striped chair and sunbathe. We chose Talamone because it is adjacent to the Maremma's preserved seashore, the only long stretch of Tuscan coast unblemished by development. Most sand beaches are a series of concessions for umbrellas and rows of chairs as deep as the beach is wide, leaving only a strip along the water for walking. Often these concessions have changing rooms, showers, and snack bars. Italians seem to like this way of being at the beach. So many people to talk to! And, usually, families or groups of friends are together. As a Californian, I'm unhappy to be surrounded. Beaches I grew up on in Georgia and my years of loving the raw windy stretches of sand at Point Reyes unequip me for the Old World beaches. Ed and my daughter like the umbrellas. They've dragged me to Viareggio, Marina di Pisa, Pietrasanta, insist it's just different; you have to get into it. I like to lie on the beach and listen to the waves, to walk with no one in sight. The Tuscan beaches are as crowded as streets. The Maremma preserve, however, even has wild horses, foxes, boar, and deer, according to the brochure. I love the smell of the macchia, the wild salty shrubs sailors say they can smell when still out of sight of land. Mostly there's nothing—trails with wild rosemary and sea lavender through sandy hills, the vacant beaches. We walk and sit on the beach all morning. Tyrrhenian, Tyrrhenian the waves say, that ancient sea. We've brought mortadella sandwiches, a hunk of parmigiano, and iced tea. Except for a small group of people down the beach, I have my wish to be in nature alone. What color is the sea? Cobalt is close. No, it's lapis lazuli, exactly the color of Mary's dress in so many paintings, with a tesselated sheen of silver. It's good to walk, after days of chasing sites in the car. I'm trying to read but the sun is blaring—perhaps an umbrella would be nice.

  In the morning we move on to Riva degli Etruschi, coast of the Etruscans. We can't get away from them. This beach does have the rented chairs but, since it joins the preserve, it's not as crowded. We're able to take a long, long walk on the beach followed by a siesta in our tiny individual cottage. We're near San Vincenzo, where Italo Calvino summered. The town shops sell rubber beach balls, rafts, and sand pails. At evening, everyone strolls around buying postcards and eating ice cream. Beach towns are beach towns. We find an outdoor restaurant and order cacciucco, a big fish stew. Several kinds of fish, filleted at the cart, are piled in a large white bowl and a hot broth is poured over them. The waiter spreads creamy roasted garlic on slices of toasted bread and we float them in the soup, breathing in the heady aroma. Two fierce little bug-eyed lobsters eye us from our bowls. The waiter keeps coming around, ladling in enough to keep the bread afloat. When he brings the salad, he wheels over a cart of olive oils in crocks, clear bottles, colorful ceramic ones, dozens of choices for our salad. We ask him to select for us and he pours from on high a thin stream of pale green oil onto a bowl of red and green radicchio.

  En route to Massa Marittima, we detour to Populonia, simply because it is close and it sounds too ancient to miss. Every little pause makes me want to linger for days. In a café where we stop for coffee, two fishermen bring in buckets of fish, their night's catch. Lunch is not for hours, unfortunately. A woman from the kitchen starts writing up the menu of the day on a blackboard. We drive on into town and park under an immense fortress, the usual castle and wall like those in old books of hours. Ah, another Etruscan museum and I must see every object. Ed is through, for now, with anything that happened before the last millennium, so he goes off to buy honey from bees that have buzzed around in the coastal shrubs. We meet in a shop where I find an Etruscan clay foot for sale. Whether it's genuine or fake, I don't know. I decide to think about it while we take a walk but when we come back to buy it, the shop is closed. As we leave, I see a sign to an Etruscan site but Ed presses on the accelerator; he's tombed out.

  Last overnight—the town I have chronically mispronounced. The accent, I find, is on Marit'tima. I've said Maritti'ma. Will I ever, ever learn Italian? Still so many basic errors. Once close to the sea, the town gradually became surrounded by silt, which eventually filled in, leaving Massa Marittima far inland but with a sense of outlook as it rises high over the grassy plain. We could be in Brazil, a remote outpost that appeals to magic realist novelists. It's two towns really, the old town and the older town, both
austere, with deep shadows and sudden sunlight. We're a little tired. We check in and for the first time, our room has a TV. A World War II film, faded and in odd Italian, is on and we get hooked. A village, occupied by Germans, depends on an American soldier hiding in the countryside to help them. They must evacuate. They pile everything on a few donkeys and set out, for where we don't know. I doze. Someone is trying to open the shutters at Bramasole. I wake up. Another soldier is in the hayloft. Something is burning. Is Bramasole all right? Suddenly I realize this is our one day in Massa Marittima.

  In two hours, we've covered every street. The Maremma keeps reminding me of the American West, its little out of the way towns the freeway missed by fifty miles, the shop owner staring out the window, the wide sky in his gaze. Certainly the piazza and fabulous cathedral are nothing like the West—the similarity is under the skin of the place: a loneliness, an eye on the stranger.

  EN ROUTE HOME, WE PAUSE AT SAN GALGANO, LOVELIEST OF ruins, a graceful French Gothic church that lost its floor and roof centuries ago, leaving the open-windowed skeleton to grass and clouds. A romantic wedding could take place here. Where the large rose window was, only the imagination can color the space scarlet and blue; where monks lit candles at side altars, birds nest in the corners. A stone stairway leads nowhere. A stone altar remains, so disassociated from Christian function that human sacrifice could have taken place on it. The place fell into ruin when an abbot sold the lead in the roof for some war. Now it's a home for several cats. One has a litter of multicultural kittens; several fathers must have contributed to the ginger, black, and striped pile curled around the large white mother.

  Home! Hauling in the wine, throwing open the shutters, running to water the drooping plants. We settle the wine into crates in the dark wedge of closet under the stairs. The spirit of all the grapes we saw ripening, now bottled and mellowing for those occasions we hope to celebrate. Ed closes the door, leaving them to dust and scorpions for now. Only a week away. We missed the house and come back understanding the next few circles around us. Qualities those of us with northern blood envy—that Italian insouciance and ability to live in the moment with gusto—I now see came down straight from the Etruscans. All the painted images from the tombs seem charged with meaning, if we only had the clues to read it. I close my eyes and look at the crouching leopards, the deft figure of death, the endless banqueting. Sometimes Greek myths come to mind, Persephone, Actaeon and the dogs, Pegasus, but the instinct I have is that the tomb images—and the Greek ones—each came from further back, and those further back came from something even earlier. The archetypes keep appearing and we find in them what we can, for they speak to our oldest neurons and synapses.