The man with his coat over his shoulders stops in front of the shrine with his handful of dried yarrow. He brushes out the shrine with the side of his hand. All fall, when I am busy with students, he will walk the white road, perhaps wearing an old knitted sweater, later a scarf around his neck. The man is walking away. I see him stop in the road and look back at the house. I wonder, for the thousandth time, what he is thinking. He sees me at the window, adjusts his coat over his shoulders, and turns toward home.
Scattered books go back to their proper shelves: my house in order. One final blackberry cobbler and I'm gone. A lizard darts in, panics, flees out the door. The thought of the future spins through me. What magnet out there is pulling now? I stack pressed sheets on the armadio shelves. Clearing my desk, I find a list: copper polish, string, call Donatella, plant sunflowers, double hollyhocks. The sun hits the Etruscan wall, turning the locust trees to lace. Two white butterflies are mating in midair. I walk from window to window, taking in the view.
Ben Tornati
(Welcome Back)
ON OUR FIRST MORNING BACK IN CORTONA, after several months in California, my husband Ed and I walk into town for groceries. First, I drop off film to be developed at Giorgio and Lina's photo shop. “Ben tornati,” Giorgio shouts, welcome back. Lina comes from behind the counter and all four of us exchange the ritual cheek kisses. Finally, I've learned to go to the right, then left, thereby avoiding head swivels or full-lip encounters. Lina wastes no time. In the confusion of other customers and the small space, I piece together, “We must go for dinner,” “In the country, but close,” and the ultimate praise, “She cooks like my mother.”
Giorgio interrupts. “Saturday or Sunday? I prefer Saturday but would make the supreme sacrifice.” He looks like an older, more mischievous version of Caravaggio's Bacchus. He's the town photographer, present at every wedding and festival, and is known to like dancing. Last summer we shared an all-goose feast with him and Lina—and, of course, about twenty others. Every celebration involves an infinitely expandable table. “The pasta with duck . . .” He shakes his head. “That duck squawked in the pen in the morning and came to the table at night.”
“What's the sacrifice?” Ed asks.
“Soccer in Rome.”
“Then we'll go Saturday.” Ed knows soccer is sacred.
We cross the piazza and run into Alessandra. “Let's go for coffee,” she says, sweeping us into the bar to catch up on news. She is newly pregnant and wants to discuss names. As we leave her and head toward the grocery store, we see Cecilia with her English husband and two magical little girls, Carlotta and Camilla. “Dinner,” they say. “Come when you can. Any night.”
When we arrive home with our groceries, Beppe, who helps us with the olive trees and the vegetable garden, has left a dozen eggs on the outdoor table. His fresh eggs cause any soufflé to hit the top of the oven. Our friend Guisi has left cenci, “rags” of fried pastry dusted with powdered sugar.
The next day, Giorgio—another Giorgio, who is Ed's good friend—stops by with a hunk of cinghiale, wild boar. We know well his wife Vittoria's vinegar marinade and slowly roasted loin.
“Did you murder this poor pig?” I tease. He knows I'm horrified that Tuscans shoot and eat songbirds, as well as anything else that moves, including porcupine.
“You like it! So you have the problem.” He tells us that his hunting group shot twenty boars this season. Later Beppe comes around again, bringing a rabbit.
And so it goes. One day back, and this is only a part of what happens. The return to Cortona always astounds me. The innate hospitality and generosity of the people visit my life like a miracle.
OVER A DECADE AGO, I BOUGHT BRAMASOLE, A GONE-TO-RUIN house in the Tuscan countryside, and began to spend part of each year there. Slowly, the abandoned olive trees have responded to pruning, plowing, and organic fertilizer. Slowly, the house has awakened from its long slumber and seems itself again, festooned with trailing geraniums and filled with the furniture we have brought in piece by piece from antique markets. Because we loved the restoration process, we have begun another project. Last summer we were picking blackberries with our neighbor Chiara and spotted a stone house where Little Red Ridinghood might have visited Grandmother. We crawled through brambles and found a nine-hundred-year-old structure, so old it had a stone roof. Not long after, we began a historically correct restoration, which drains the coffers but is so exciting. We love the land, especially during the olive harvest every fall, which culminates in a trip to the mill to press our year's supply of pungent green oil. This September, we bought another grove just below us and acquired 250 more of these magical presences, the olive trees. At the corner of the grove, embedded in a stone wall, Ed spotted a slender marble column. We pulled it out of the wall and saw letters engraved. I scrubbed and found incised a memorial to a young soldier who fell in World War I.
We are now accustomed to such finds; the land has a long memory here, constantly giving us something from the past and constantly renewing for the future. Even the ancient grape vines continue to rebound on Bramasole's terraced land. Last October, we made wine, with Beppe's help. Our yield—twelve bottles. When we opened the first one, we thought twelve probably was more than enough, but we like tasting the flinty, sour wine that comes straight from the dirt on our steeply terraced land. When Riccardo heard of our bad wine, he brought us a hundred new vines. Now a friend with a backhoe has dug a deep trench along a terrace. Beppe will tell us when we can plant.
Living here, I've intensely reconnected with nature. The land, we've learned, is always in a state of lively evolution. The lane of cypresses and lavender we planted is beginning to look as though it has always been there. The slender cypresses, just my height when we planted them, now look like those exclamation points we see punctuating the Tuscan landscape. Between them, the lavender's amethystine radiance lights the path. Roses, marguerites, lavender, pale yellow petunias, and lilies on our front terraces have made the ivy and blackberry jungles just a memory. The biggest change is grass. Grass is not Tuscan. We lived with a mown and watered weed lawn for several years. Lovely in spring and early summer, it looked forlorn in August. No amount of precious water kept it alive. One September week, with the help of three neighbors, we unrolled miles of sod trucked from Rome. The irrigation system looks like the Chicago Fire Department's command central. Neither of us understands it completely. Now, a few years later, the clovers and tiny flowers have staged a comeback—grass giving over to weed again.
When we had to disguise a large gas tank for our heating system, we nudged it against a hillside and had a stone wall built in front of it. I asked the masons to incorporate an old window from the house and to build a shrine at one end. They made the top of the wall irregular, and now it looks like a remnant of an old house. The top is planted with lavender, which draws thousands of white butterflies. We were all amused at this little folly. While the workers finished, I slapped cerulean-blue paint inside the shrine, the traditional background for all the shrines in this area. I already had a della Robbia–type ceramic Mary and Jesus ready to hang, but as the paint dried, the workmen began exclaiming, half ironically, half seriously, over the “miracle” in the shrine. “Don't tell the pope,” they advised, “or the pellegrini [pilgrims] will arrive by the hundreds.” I had no idea what they were talking about. “Look what has happened.” I looked.
Faintly, but surely, I saw the white wings, face, and flowing robes of a hovering angel. An accident of the thin paint. I quietly propped my ceramic Mary in the corner and left the “miracle” to preside over the pomegranate and hawthorn.
A few weeks later, at the height of red-poppy season, a dozen white poppies sprang into bloom beneath the shrine. In all the fields rampant with bloom in Tuscany, I'd never seen a white poppy, nor had the workmen, who'd moved on to another project. We joked and stared.
Many local people believe that this area is hot in spiritual spots. “Can't you feel something on the steps of San Fran
cesco's church?” I've been asked. Well, no. Nothing. But I consider the rogue white poppies and the cloudy angel, and I venture a small belief in that direction.
Now we are having a new stone wall built so that I can plant a cutting garden. Above that level, at the end of the vegetable garden, we sow hundreds of girasole seeds every year. The sunflowers, just the height of a friend's nine-year-old girl, fill my house with their sunny presence.
I have many plans for other projects—a third fountain, a raspberry patch, a chestnut fence for wild hot-pink rugosas to sprawl over.
The house and garden's changes over a decade (our first years we only hacked and cleared) parallel the changes in our lives among the Italians. Once we were the stranieri, the foreigners, who'd been crazy enough to take on a house abandoned for thirty years. Now we just live here. It is a commonly accepted idea that when Americans move to a foreign country, the local people never really accept them. Equally mistaken is the assumption that these expats regard all locals as amusing stereotypes. Cortona is home. We did not intend to make such a spiritual shift but it happened. We have a tribe of Italian friends and everyone we know there is vividly singular. Our neighbors are as close as family. What luck—the intense sense of community that we once observed in this small hilltown now includes us. We are comfortable in a wider, deeper sense than I ever dreamed.
My realization of the profound change in my life happened at the ceremony when I was made an honorary citizen of this noble town. No one does ceremonies like the Italians. I followed a group in medieval dress with trumpets blaring across the piazza. The carabinieri in their spiffy uniforms escorted me into the fourteenth-century Town Hall. Thrilling. The horror was that I had to give a ten-minute speech in Italian. I was so scared. But then I looked out at all my friends in the audience, smiling, holding flowers, pleased.
The event symbolized just how wildly unexpected my life had become. We are changed by place. I'm fascinated to the core to learn how fundamentally different Italy is; to learn that the world is not small; that they are not like us. I am so happy for that.
When I first came to Cortona, I used to think, What can I give back? I thought in terms of tutoring or helping to raise money for scholarships. I had no idea that I was about to write three books about a new life in that place, and that the unexpected response to those books would startle not only Ed and me but our adopted town as well. When Under the Tuscan Sun was published, I never imagined that anyone in Cortona would read it. Originally published in a tiny edition, I expected it to go forth in the world as my books of poetry had done—to extended family, colleagues, and friends and perhaps to friends of friends. Still, I changed names out of a respect for privacy. After the books appeared in Italian, people would pull me aside and say, “But why did you change my name?” Now, often, someone will tell me of an experience in World War II, or something about old wheat festivals, or a personal story. “You can write about it, can't you?” each one asks. This quite significant for me.
When travellers who had read my books began to come to Cortona, the merchants and the citizens were thrilled, not only for the economy but because those travellers who seek out a place because they have read a book are interested in the culture, art, and history. Everyone dreads oblivious or obnoxious tourists. Cortona has extremely few of those. At our house, we frequently see people in the road below, sketching or taking a picture or visiting with others they've met on the walk from town. If we're outside, we chat. I've met more people in the last five years than I met in my entire previous life. Local artists sell paintings of our house in the shops in town. It's still a shock to see Bramasole hanging on a restaurant wall but I have not minded any of this. I'm flattered that someone would walk a mile to see something I wrote about. Rather than causing a problem, which many people assume, the books actually wove us more deeply into the rich fabric of everyday life. “Where's the house of that American writer?” I heard someone ask the policeman. “Get in the car—I'll take you there,” he answered. We have heard endless stories of travellers who have been invited to dinner, picked up on the road, offered a glass of vin santo. The openness and generosity we experience here are offered as well to strangers of three nights.
“Come on, it can't be as idyllic there as you say,” I'm often scolded.
“It's even better,” I reply. If only I could do justice to the beauty of living among the Cortonesi.
NOW DISNEY HAS COME TO TOWN.
For much of the fall, I have been travelling on a book tour for my novel, Swan. Ed has been here since the very first scouts arrived to look for a villa that could be transformed into a replica of our house, Bramasole. He has sent photos of the piazza transformed by snow for a Christmas scene and of the six-foot diameter cake with Under the Tuscan Sun spelled out in berries, which was served for the kick-off party at a gorgeous villa. Everyone in the photos looked dazzling, especially to me, dashing through awful airports in order to stand in long lines, while I headed for a different city every day.
Finally, on arriving in Cortona late in the filming, I find the town charged with cinematic energy. It seems surreal that all this has anything to do with me. Exciting, astonishing, exhilarating, shocking—all those, but mostly surreal. The Villa Laura, which Ed now calls Bramasole Due, was, like our house, abandoned for many years. I have some resistance to it, thinking loyally that the real Bramasole is more poetic and sacred. Diane Lane looks like a fairy princess. On the set, she's reenacting the day when I was scrubbing down the walls and finding a fresco, the storm when an owl perched on my windowsill, even the feasts I cooked. She's playing me. What a strange expression. What a surprising turn in my private writing life. How will this take a place in my history? I wonder.
Audrey Wells, the director and screenwriter, seems as if she could be a daughter of mine. Like my daughter, she's intense and brilliant, shy about her beauty. We spent a few days together before she began the screenplay, and then I waited to see how she would transform my pages into the visual world of film.
When the screenplay arrived, I couldn't touch it for a whole day, then I read it straight through, captivated by her wit and her ability to isolate an incident and pare it down. Though much had been changed, I felt the spirit of the book was intact, and even enhanced by her vision. Reading lines to Ed, I laughed out loud. She added an Italian lover for the Frances character. “Too bad I missed that,” I joked to Ed.
Everyone says, “What will this movie do to your book?” But there on my study shelf, the English Under the Tuscan Sun leans on the French, Estonian, Hebrew, Chinese, and other translated editions. The film is another translation, and at the same time, will have a fate of its own.
I'm fascinated by the symbiotic process of a Hollywood movie company interacting with the people of this walled hilltown. But the Tuscans are anciently sophisticated—nothing shocks or throws them or even wows them. They are not star-struck. I begin to think there are books to write or movies to make about this movie being made. The young assistant to the Italian producer soon starts a romance with the gorgeous local travel agent. Diane Lane, the star, is seen shopping for antiques along the main street. Partners of crew members enroll in Italian classes. Restaurants begin to give discounts to actors and staff. The mayor offers the keys to the city and finds spacious offices for the production group. Placido and Fiorella, our neighbors, have feasts at least once a week which include us, producer Tom Sternberg, and his assistant. Johnny, Audrey's husband, spends an afternoon falconing. Laura Fattori, the Italian line producer, falls for Cortona and starts to look at thirteenth-century apartments in town.
Half the town seems to be in the movie as extras and the other half seems to be working on it. We see Piero, a famous stonemason in his late eighties, all dressed up in the piazza. We're afraid someone has died, but no, he says, he is about to be filmed in a street scene. We take many friends to marvel over the Bramasole set, which is now painted the color of the original, with fresco-covered rooms and extensive outside stone walls c
reated out of resin by the set staff from Rome and then fastened to wooden frames. Even the expert Placido is fooled until he taps the stone and hears a hollow sound. I covet the long marble kitchen sink from a convent. A garden of pergola and lemon trees is plugged in overnight. Friends and family from the U.S. come over to witness this miracle event. We all ride over to Montepulciano to see a medieval pageant scene filmed in the piazza. Hannibal over the Alps! What massive movement of equipment, how many moving-van trucks, what huge organization to set up meals for the crew and cast, how many miles of electrical cord! For one scene, a fiberglass fountain is erected in Cortona. While waiting for Ed to come out of the post office, I hear a tour guide tell her group, “This is Cortona's famous baroque fountain now under restoration.” The Atlas figure in the center of the fountain has quite a large piece of male equipment. In fact, crowds are gathering. Someone complains about the dignity of the town to the mayor and the next morning the Disney people are out there sawing away.
When books go out into the world, they take on a life. Sometimes that life is a quiet and dusty one, waiting in the nether regions of library stacks. I have books of poetry like that. With others, the book's life is one of surprise because the book keeps on making its way, on its own, into intriguing and larger spaces. I have been pulled along in the wake of Under the Tuscan Sun with great joy.
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