by Iris Origo
From a purely agricultural point of view, besides, the situation is even more complex. We cannot yet tell what part agriculture will play in the new industrialised Italy, nor indeed in the general economy of Europe. We may hope that, whatever form it may take, some of the basic work done in the last forty-five years, and recently brought up-to-date by mechanisation, will not have been wholly wasted, but we can be sure that, whatever developments there may be, they will take place within a new, perhaps a better, social pattern.
As for ourselves, we have been singularly fortunate. For forty-six years we have had the work we wanted, in the value of which we believed, and in a setting which has become more and more dear to us. And if we cannot foresee the future—what right have we to expect to do so, in this rapidly changing world?
* * *
Two other aspects of our personal life at La Foce have not yet been described: the making of a garden, which began as soon as we had any water, and the foundation of a permanent children’s home in what used to be the nursery-school. During the war, as I have said, we used this for refugee children from Genoa and Turin and, when we had returned them all to their families, safe and sound, we felt that we should like to keep the home going for a similar purpose. Like every other country through which the War had passed, Italy at that time had a large number of orphaned, abandoned, illegitimate or under-nourished children—and it was for these, or for the children of refugees in concentration camps, that the home was then used. My intention was to keep it small enough to be as much like a family and as little like an institution as possible, and for this reason I have never accepted more than twenty children—both boys and girls, between the ages of four and twelve. But I soon realised that, whatever we might do to make it homelike and welcoming, the greatest need of most of the children was for parents of their own. Many of them came from broken homes; some from sanatoria for tuberculosis (clinically cured but in need of a long time of convalescence) others from large, impersonal institutions where they had never had quite enough of anything: space, food, toys, instruction or love. (Some of the smaller ones, when first they arrived, shrank away from a kiss, expecting instead a blow.) Many showed the obvious symptoms of insecurity and instability that are the fruits of ‘institutionalisation’: nightmares, bed-wetting, backwardness, fits of temper or of fear; all had a deep craving for affection. Some took several years to become normal children again; others, under the wise guidance of the home’s directress, Signorina Vera Berrettini (who was already in charge of the home during the war) recovered with remarkable speed. As soon as they were ready, I tried to find adoptive homes for them—at first in the U.S.A., through the International Social Service, with which I had already worked for several years, and recently, owing to a change in Italian adoption laws and also in the attitude to adoption in this country, in Italy. This, indeed, has now become the chief purpose of the Casa dei Bambini, which has now existed for twenty-six years.
Lower garden, 1939
Of the children who are not adopted, the boys go on to boarding-schools when they are over twelve and, later on, are prepared for some profession or trade, but return here for their holidays and consider this their home—and often come back at Christmas and Easter, long after they are grown up, sometimes bringing with them their fiancées or their wives. Some have branched out into the world: one, after a successful career in the hotel business, is now helping to run some galleries of modern art; one is a prosperous business-man in America; two are working in the Fiat works in Turin; others have become accountants or clerks or, according to their ability, have learned various trades. One—half Chinese by origin—cannot bear any job in which he is not entirely independent, and so runs (very successfully) merry-go-rounds at fairs, but comes back to La Foce every year, to celebrate his birthday. “Where else would I celebrate it?” he says. Only one—the son of an alcoholic, sub-normal father—has failed to keep a job or make a life for himself. Of the girls, two have had their weddings at La Foce, others have become teachers or trained in the hotel-school at Chianciano, or have got other jobs in Florence. The greater part have married, and sometimes bring their babies to La Foce. But the happiest stories are those of the children who, while they were still quite small, found adoptive families of their own. Looking back, I remember—among many others—Pietro, a little half-blind foundling from southern Italy, who, at the age of five, could not even talk, and who is now the happy, independent fourteenth son of a large American family. I remember Jean, who came to us from Tunisia, unable to speak any language but French, and who is now also happily adopted in America; Paolo, a little boy of seven, whom the large institution in which he lived had described as ‘a-social and un-adoptable’, and who, after two years at La Foce, is now settled and happy with Italian parents in northern Italy. I remember Andrea, the son of an alcoholic mother who arrived here so frightened and dazed that he could hardly speak, and who is now completely reassured and secure after being adopted into a warm, extrovert, cheerful large Florentine family. I remember Giovanni, a bigger boy, so emotionally crippled by his mother’s total rejection of him that for years he refused to consider attaching himself to any other family, but who has now found one in which he is taking the place of their own only son, killed in an accident. This long procession of children, renewing itself as surely as the succession of each year’s crops, has perhaps been the most rewarding of all the gifts that La Foce has brought us.
Antonio, Benedetta and Donata
One other enduring pleasure, throughout the years, has been the making of our garden. In the year after our marriage, my American grandmother—somewhat startled to find herself, in mid-summer, in a house in which there was so little water, even in the baby’s bathroom—presented us with the wonderful gift of a pipe-line which, leading from a spring in the beech-wood at the top of our hill (some six miles away) brought us our first abundant water-supply. It then became possible to plan, not only new bathrooms, but a kitchen-garden and flower-garden, which gradually grew, year by year, in proportion to our means and to the water available. First, at the back of the house, I made a small enclosed Italian garden: a stone fountain with two dolphins and a small lawn around it, and a few flower-beds edged with box. A couple of years later, we made another larger terrace, passing through two pillars of travertine with ornamental vases into a less formal flower-garden, with wide borders of flowering shrubs, herbaceous plants and annuals, big lemon-pots on stone bases, a shady bower of wisteria and banksia roses, and a paved terrace with a balustrade, looking down over the valley, on which we would dine on summer nights when, just before the harvest, the whole garden would be alight with fireflies and the air heavy with nicotiana and jasmine. On the walls, in the spring, grow great clumps of aubretia and alyssum and, later on, rhyncospernum and climbing roses, and the grass is edged with daffodils and irises. Some steps—for the whole garden is on a fairly steep hillside—lead up to an avenue of cypresses and a rose-garden, while a wide pergola winds round the hill-side towards the woods. Finally, just before the war, we made another enclosed formal garden—designed, like the first, by our friend and architect Cecil Pinsent, with hedges of cypress and box and big trees of magnolia grandiflora, while the rest of the hill above has been gradually transformed into a half-wild garden with Japanese fruit-trees and Judas-trees, forsythia, philadelphus, pomegranates and single roses, long hedges of lavender and banks fragrant with thyme, mint and assynth, and great clumps of broom. Gradually, by experiment and failure, I learned what would or would not stand the cold winters and the hot, dry summer winds. I gave up any attempt, in my borders, at growing delphiniums, lupins or phlox, as well as many other herbaceous plants; and I learned, too, to put our lemon-trees, plumbago and jasmine under shelter before the winter. But roses flourish in the heavy clay soil, and so do peonies and lilies, while the dry hillside is where lavender thrives—a blue sea in June, buzzing with the bees whose honey is flavoured with its pungent taste, which also, in the winter, not only scents our linen but ki
ndles our fires. Every year, the garden grows more beautiful; even the war brought no greater destruction than the shelling of a few cypress trees. The woods were already carpeted, according to the season, with wild violets, crocuses, cyclamen, anemone alpina, and autumn colchicum, and among these I also managed to naturalise some other kinds of anemones, daffodils and a few scillas. But bluebells I have failed with, and the exquisite scarlet and gold tulips which grow in the fields round San Quirico, just across the valley, still stubbornly refuse to flower here.
The garden today
A path through the woods leads to a little chapel of travertine, with a churchyard round it, which we built in 1933, when our only son Gianni died, and here he is buried. At the time of his death in Fiesole—since the greater part of the eight happy years of his childhood had been spent at La Foce, and every inch of the house and garden, every field and tree, seemed full of his presence—I felt that I could not bear to come back. But we did return, almost at once, and I have always been glad that we did so. We have, of course, never ceased to miss our son—perhaps even more bitterly in old age than in youth. We have had many ups and downs and have made many mistakes. We have had periods of discouragement, in which we wondered if we had not taken on a task beyond our strength. There have even been moments in which, driving up the old winding road from Rome and catching a first glimpse of the grim towers of Radicofani, we have felt as if we hated the whole place and everything connected with it. But I do not think that either of us has seriously wished that we had chosen to live somewhere else, nor to lead another sort of life. The fascination of the Val d’Orcia held—and still holds.
Now we are both growing old and La Foce is too cold for us in winter. But it is still our home; we live there when we can. Antonio still takes an active part in managing the farm, and I still enjoy the children and the garden.
A friend, who has stayed with us in recent years, once wrote to me: ‘I sometimes think that your garden is like an allegory of life itself: one passes from the warm, sheltered house into the formal garden, with its fountain and flowers and intricate box hedges, then coasts the hillside under the pergola of vines. The view opens out on to tilled fields, the flowers become rarer; one passes into the path through the woods. Here it is darker; the wind stirs in the branches. A few steps more, walking uphill in the shade, and one has reached the still chapel, with those four stone walls around it.’
Up that path, when the time comes, we both hope to go.
The winding road today
1 Earth overcome gives the stars.
2 Verdiani Bandi, I Castelli della Val d’Orcia, p. 120, quoting the chronicler Malavolti. Subsequently the castle was occupied in turn by the troops of the Emperor and of the French and after the fall of Montalcino passed, like all the rest of this territory, into the hands of Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
3 ‘The man who wants good cheese, will feed his sheep on thyme.’
4 ‘Great cold in January, bad weather in February, March winds, sweet rain in April, showers in May, good reaping in June, good threshing in July, and the three rains of August—all with good weather—these are worth more than Solomon’s throne.’
5 These ‘rogations’ were divided into major and minor, the major being held on April 25, the date at which there is a danger of the wheat being invaded by rust; the minor (which corresponded to the Roman Ambarvalia) on the three days before Ascension Day, when the wheat is beginning to ripen. Virgil describes them in the Georgics, and Cato, in his De Agricoltura, quotes the prayer recited by the garlanded peasants. The prayers at the quattro tempora were incorporated into the Christian ritual in the third century by St. Calistus.
6 ‘St. Mark, our advocate, see that no worm enters our chestnuts, and that each kernel bears three nuts; pray for us.’
7 This story, with several other local sayings, I owe to an old neighbour of ours, Clemente Bologna, who took a great interest in local customs, and who also, in his lands in the Maremma, had become a friend of the famous brigand Tiburzi.
8 ‘Sad is the house, where the hen clucks and the cock is silent.’
9 Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, p. 230.
10 Ser Lapo Mazzei, Lettere di un notaio a un mercante, October 27, 1407.
11 Paolo di Messer Pace da Certaldo: Il libro di buoni costumi, paras. 102–3.
12 Giovanni de Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi (1393–1421), pp. 235–6.
13 ‘We work all the year round, They rest and doze in the shade—Why should we give them half the crops, When all the toil is ours?’ (Quoted by N. Tamassia, La famiglia italiana nei secoli XV e XVI.)
14 ‘A nut-tree’s shade [under which nothing grows] and a master’s shadow, Are two buggering shadows.’
15 ‘The Master’s affection is like new wine in the flask:
Good for one evening, and sour the next day.’
16 ‘My grandfather’s wood, my father’s olive-grove, and my own vineyard’.
17 Jacopo Mazzei: Firenze rurale, ed. Jolanda de Blasis, p. 643.
18 The sowing, in the first year, of barley and oats interspersed with lupins and alfalfa; in the second and third years, of only lupins and alfalfa; in the fourth, of wheat. In the fifth the soil was to lie fallow, while in the sixth we would sow white and red clover, in the seventh clover only; in the eighth, wheat again.
19 In some areas, the results of the bonifica agraria were wholly good. In others, where each family was assigned far too small a plot of land, and far too flimsily-built a house, it soon became evident that the farmers could hardly extract a bare living from the land assigned to them. Many attacks, some justified, were consequently made upon these projects, yet—looking back upon them fifty years later—I think it can hardly be denied that the basic work was valuable. Not only through drainage, irrigation, and the extirpation of malaria was all this land turned into farmland, but the work, however imperfectly done, did imply a social advance.
20 The state subsidies were highest for re-afforestation and the prevention of land erosion.
21 War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943–1944, reissued by Pushkin Press, 2017
22 Hitler Speaks, a record of political conversations with Hitler in 1933 and 34, by Hermann Rauschning (author of Germany’s Revolution of Destruction), London, 1939.
23 Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, New York, 1941.
24 Milan, November 1, 1936.
25 March 6, 1938
26 May 7, 1936.
27 September 30, 1938.
28 ‘Within the frontiers of Italy, the Italians are born anew, Mussolini has created them for the war of tomorrow’ and ‘Duce, Duce, who will not know how to die?’
29 This was New Herrlingen School, at Bunce Court, Faversham, in Kent, of which the creator was Miss Anne Essinger.
30 A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939–1940, published by Pushkin Press, 2017
31 The American Ambassador in Rome, William Phillips, had been my father’s closest friend and was my godfather.
32 “The only qualities left to them are those that don’t pay.”
33 “Even courage, by itself, is a quality that doesn’t pay.”
34 ‘All your possessions will meet their death,
Even as you will …’
DANTE: Inferno, XVI, 20.
Epilogue
“I don’t know where to go.”
“Neither do I. Let’s go together.”
IGNAZIO SILONE
The pattern is set now—though not all set down—and I am looking back upon my life. What do I see? For every life is not only a string of events: it is also a myth.
First of all, perhaps, one should ask: is it possible to see one’s own life? “What the devil then am I?” cried Carlyle at the age of eighty, as he was drying his old bones after his bath. “After all these eighty years I know nothing at all about it.”
To ‘see’ one’s life (though the end is lacking—and perhaps that is why it is so difficult: perhaps, when the end has
come, the pieces may fall into place and form a pattern) one should surely try to look back upon it with as much detachment as if it were someone else’s. Humboldt, I think, was saying something of this kind when he spoke of history as ‘a landscape of clouds’. ‘The man who is within it, can see nothing. It is only by looking at it from some way off, that he can perceive how clear and various it is.’ It is the experience of the traveller whose plane has broken through a bank of clouds and who looks down upon a vast, billowy sea, constantly changing its shape, forming new valleys and new peaks.
A friend of mine whom I asked if he could look back as detachedly as this upon his life replied that he had succeeded in doing so in regard to every part of it except the immediate past. He vividly remembered both what he saw and felt up to a few years ago, but could no longer identify himself with his own past emotions, any more than if they had belonged to a character in a novel or a play: “The stage setting is still there, but the lights have gone out.”