At ease with silence. Until he wants to talk. As though he’s been saving stories, his is a soliliquy, an old monk’s soft chanting. He tells us that when his parents passed on he stayed alone here for a few years before he rented a postwar apartment in the new town, a kilometer or so down the road. He was the last person to have lived in this house full-time, its having since been used for storage and sometimes to house the extra hands the Luccis hired during the olive and grape harvests. He hasn’t worked for the Luccis or even set foot in the house for more than thirty years. What he doesn’t say is as eloquent as his spoken story. He rests between phrases, leaving time for us to listen to the silent parts.
“Would you like to see how it’s been restructured upstairs?” I ask him.
He walks the rooms with us. Barlozzo’s family kitchen was where our bedroom is now. He runs his hand over the new drywall where the fireplace once was. The two other bedrooms were a pantry—la dispensa, he calls it—where, from great oak beams, his father set the wine-washed hind legs of his pigs to swing in the cool, dry breezes of a winter and a spring until the haunches shriveled into the sweet, rosy flesh of prosciutto.
“We hung all sorts of things from these beams,” he says, “figs and apples threaded on strings, whole salami, tomatoes and chiles dried on their stems, braids of garlic and onions. There was always a pyramid built up of round, green winter squash, each one piled on the other, stem-side down, and they’d last that way from September til April. The walls were lined with wide board shelves sagging with the weight of peaches and cherries and apricots preserved in jars, sotto spirito, under spirits. When things were good, that is.”
Having understood him to say “Santo Spirito,” I tell him I’d surely like to have the Holy Ghost’s formula for putting up cherries, and it’s the first time I hear him laugh.
We show him the two bathrooms and he just shakes his head, mumbling something about how shabbily the Luccis put things together. He talks about claw-foot tubs and exposed brick walls. He laments that the Luccis ignored the mountains of old handmade terra cotta floor tiles that sit in their sheds and cellars all over the valley, opting for the sheen of factory-made ones. The distinctiveness of the old farmhouse has been disgraced.
“È una tristezza,” he says, “proprio squallido come lavoro. It’s a sadness, an absolutely squalid work. The Luccis did everything as cheaply as they could with the state’s allotment.”
Though we don’t understand the meaning of this last sentence, Barlozzo’s facial expression and the bold period he’d placed at its end make it clear this is not the moment to seek further. His cruelly honest take on the house smarts, and yet I share it with him. I remind myself that we didn’t come to Tuscany for a house.
THE SUN HAS gone to wash the other side of the sky and the light is blue over the garden when we go out to sit on the terrace. It’s just past seven and Barlozzo is still in soliloquy mode, talking now about the history of the village. Like all good teachers, he begins with an overview of his subject. “The last of the hill towns on the southern verges of Tuscany as it gives way to Lazio and Umbria, San Casciano is precisamente, precisely, 582 meters above sea level, built on the crest of a hill that divides the valleys of the river Paglia and the river Chiana.” It’s thrilling to be sitting in the midst of what he describes, and I want to tell him this, but so deep is his own captivity in the story that I stay quiet. “Old as Etruria and likely older yet, the village grew up under the Romans. It was the baths, the healing, theraputic waters that sprung from the rich argillaceous soil of the place that attracted the upper-bracket Romans, put the village on the map.” And when the Empire built the Via Cassia—a most grandiose feat of construction that connected Rome with Gaul—San Casciano dei Bagni, San Casciano of the Baths, now more accessible to travelers, became the watering hole of such personages as Horace and Ottaviano Augustus.
“Toward the medieval epoch, baths gave way to wars and invasions between the Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the territories from Siena clear to Orvieto. And so it wasn’t until 1559, when the village entered under the protectorate of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, commanded by Cosimo dei Medici of Florence, that the baths of San Casciano returned to fame, attracting all of crowned Europe and their courts. This royal traffic inspired some of the more ornate constructions in and surrounding the village.” All that history right outside our door. Though I still look at Barlozzo as he proceeds, my mind flits about, needing to rest from his docent’s lessons. It’s enough for now to just imagine that we can bathe in the same warm spring where an Augustus once did.
EACH MORNING, WE walk early, while the sun is still rising. We find the Roman springs, which gurgle up soothing and very warm waters in which we soak our feet or, when we like, much more of us. The still cool air and the hot water are delicious taken together before breakfast. There are few paths among the meadows and moors and so walking becomes a swashbuckling causing my thighs to burn as they did during my first Venetian days among the footbridges. A rogue breeze ripples up every now and then, intruding upon the stillness. Sometimes it becomes a wind, announcing the rain, which soon blows down in sultry sheets against us, the force of it carving tiny rills in the warm earth. We take off our boots, then, and squish in the mud like the two children we never were but can be now.
When we can’t bear to wait for breakfast any longer we move fast as we can through the brush, over the fields, back up to the house, arriving breathless, hearts pounding, bodies sweating out the juicy scents of grass and thyme. I feel as though we are living in a summer camp directed by obliging absentee counselors who look smilingly and from afar upon genteel eroticisms. We bathe and dress and head up to the village.
Within a few days, we are setting rituals. As we pass the baker’s, he, or sometimes his wife, meets us on the road in front of their shop with still-warm cuts of pizza bianca wrapped in thick gray paper. Made from bread dough stretched thin, swathed in olive oil, dusted with sea salt then heaved into the oven beside his bread, it bakes in a minute or two. He pulls it out on his old wooden peel, slashes at it with a thin knife, and sets the thing, peel and all, on a table by the door. The whole village wakes to its perfumes. We devour the pizza, the first course of breakfast, during the thirty-meter trek up to the Centrale. Once installed at the bar, our cappuccini—caldissimi e con cacao, very hot and with a sprinkle of bitter chocolate—are set before us, the tray of croissants slid within reach. There will never be a substitute for Pasticceria Maggion’s warm, crisp cornets fat with apricot marmalade with which I’d buttered my hands and chin daily for three years on the Lido. But these will do. And I feel that I will, too. I was mistaken about the adventuress. The mettle, the suppleness. All my parts arrived from Venice to Tuscany, entire. I still savor things. A kiss. A breeze. The trust is still at work here. And just as it happened in Venice, an exciting sense of place rescues me from nostaglia.
Here, right here, along this road where I gather wild fennel stalks, passed the Roman legions. It is the ancient Via Cassia, now Strada Statale Numero 2, and right here beside it, in this field where we’ve made love and drunk our sunset wine, the Romans surely laid fires among the Etrurian stones and cooked their porridge of farro and slept a cheerless sleep. We seem to be always in a dazzle. We drive to Urbino and say, That house is where Rafaello’s mother was born. In Città della Pieve, we say, That church is where Il Perugino worked. We wander about in Spoleto and say, This is the gate at which Hannibal was stayed by the spoletini tribes. In the woods just beyond our own garden, we say, That band of Sunday stalkers will take two wild boar this morning, practicing the same rites and rituals of medieval hunters.
In nearly each village and commune and fraction of a borgo, there will be one ruin to redeem its humbleness, one fragment of a wall, one painting, one chapel, one grand church, a tower, a castle, a lone and everlasting umbrella pine defending a georgic hill, a half a meter’s worth of a tenth-century fresco still discernable from among the millennia of transformations surrounding i
t. Preserved, revered, now it is a bit of frostwork ornamenting a pharmacy, a chocolate maker’s kitchen. Passages, imprints, traces that, like us, ache to be touched and never forgotten.
We learn a little each day. We stop along every roadside frantoio and taste olive oil until we find one we like enough to fill our twenty-liter spigoted terra-cotta vase, called a giara. At the usage rate of one liter a week, the supply will serve until December, when the new oil will be pressed. We haul the oil vase in through the stable door and set it in a dark, cool corner.
This is the land of Chianti Geografico. Though the wine here is built from the same grape varietals and with much the same methodology as it is in the Chianti itself, these vines lie outside the designated Chianti regions and must bear a different classification. We set out over the hills, our supply of just-scrubbed and sparkling five-liter bottles clinking about in the trunk, and knock on every vineyard keeper’s door on which there is the invitation degustazione, vino sfuso, tasting, barrel wines. We swirl and sip our way through the afternoons and finally settle on one from Palazzone to be our official house red.
From Sergio and several other garden farmers, we shop for each day’s vegetables, herbs, fruit. Our egg supply is secured. We buy bread flour in ten-kilo paper sacks, buckwheat and whole wheat flour in two-kilo sacks from the miller in town. We are still deciding who will become our macellaio di fiducia, butcher of confidence, though the tall young man in Piazze who wears a cleaver slung from his Dolce e Gabbana belt appears to be winning us over. There’s a cooperative in Querce al Pino where other necessaries wait. And for help beyond the table, the local lavanderia is much more than a laundry. The services include dry cleaning and dressmaking; a fabric shop and a knitting factory sit under the same busy roof. The proprietress also sells her famous cordials and tonics, rustic poteens elicited from a still that often purls along beside the steam presser. Her husband is the village shoemaker, her son the auto mechanic, her son’s wife the hairdresser, and all their enterprises are neatly clustered about the modest square footage of their yard. Thus we have achieved essential maintenance. This is good. This is how I’d wished it would be.
One morning on our way up to the bar, we catch Barlozzo breakfasting outside the henhouse. We watch as he cracks an egg into his mouth, takes a modest swig from a bottle of red, wipes his mouth with his handkerchief, places the wine back in his sack and is about to head up the hill. We yell to him to wait for us and, once up at the bar, he swallows another wine chaser while we sip cappuccini. He tells us all that milk we drink is going to kill us.
Dispensing with invitations and acceptances, Barlozzo simply takes on the habit of visiting each afternoon at four. And we take on the habit of waiting for him. Between us, Fernando and I call him il duca, the duke, yet we never use that name with him directly. But in his honor, we’ve christened the house Palazzo Barlozzo, and each time we call it that, his face ruddies like a boy’s. I’m never sure if it’s in pleasure or discomfort.
Barlozzo and Fernando are easy together, as one might expect Gary Cooper and Peter Sellers to be easy together. Barlozzo instructs Fernando on how to care for the olive seedlings he’d planted a few months earlier when we’d first decided to rent the house. They discuss a vegetable plot, but Barlozzo says most of the land assigned to the house slopes down toward the sheepfolds and that the patch that was his mother’s kitchen garden is where the Luccis put up the ugly cement-block structure they refer to as “the barn.” He says what’s left of the garden is just too small to do much other than plant some flowers. But when Fernando tells him I’ve been begging him to construct a wood-burning oven out there, Barlozzo, the thin set of his Tuscan lips taking on a slight upward pitch, says, “I’ll take you to see a friend of mine in Ponticelli. He’ll cast the canna fumaria e la volta, the chimney and the vault. And there’s plenty of old brick around that we can use to line the oven chamber and to build up a hearth wall all around it. We’ll use clay and sand to insulate and . . .”
He proceeds, touched, I think, by the fascination he’s causing in Fernando’s eyes. Has my husband found a hero? Like two nine-year-olds, as nine-year-olds once were, they call for paper and pens and sit cross-legged on the floor scratching out primitive designs not so different from the ones an Egyptian might have drawn for the first ovens a few thousand years ago.
We tell Barlozzo about our hunts for communal ovens all over the north of Italy when I was researching my first cookbook. Our favorites were the communal ovens in some of the smaller villages of the Friuli, ovens that are still lit at midnight each Friday with vine cuttings and huge oak logs so the Saturday bake can begin at dawn. We tell him about the official maestro del forno, the oven master, a man whose social and political position is second only to the mayor. The oven master maintains the oven and schedules the baking times, which begin at sunrise and end just before supper. Each household has its own crest of sorts to identify its bread—a rough cross, or some configuration of hearts or arrows slashed into the risen loaves just before they’re slid onto the oven floor. And then, so as not to squander the waning heat after the last bake, people arrive toting terra-cotta dishes and iron pots full of vegetables and herbs bathed in wine, a leg of lamb, once in a while, or hefts of pork with small violet-skinned onions and rough-cut stalks of wild fennel to braise in the embers all through the night and then to rest awhile in the spent oven, breathing in the lingering aromas of wood smoke. On Sunday morning before mass, the older children in each family come to fetch Sunday’s lunch, some of them wrapping their prizes in linen, carting them to church for a priest’s blessing.
Now the upward pitch of the Tuscan mouth has nearly reached into a smile, so I ask Barlozzo about the communal oven in San Casciano. “Actually, there were two village ovens once. One of them was in the meadow, which is now the soccer field, and the other is still sitting behind the tractor repair shop on the road to Celle. But there hasn’t been a communal oven in use since before the second great war. And the smaller ovens most of us built in our yards are mostly squirrel dens now, or pigeon nests, or rests for tools and flowerpots,” he says, as though he can’t quite recall why or when that became so.
Barlozzo suggests that we three work on the oven every morning, beginning at ten, breaking at one for lunch and avoiding the afternoon heat. This is good, because it’s exploration we want to do in the early mornings. But I suspect Barlozzo already knows this and thus has set the plan to accomodate us.
As we work one morning, I ask him why this can’t be the new communal oven, why we can’t fire it up on Saturday mornings and invite the San Cascianesi to bake their bread. “Because the San Cascianesi don’t bake their bread. No one bakes bread anymore. Neither inside the house nor outside. Almost no one. We’ve got two perfectly fine village bakers who keep us supplied. People just have other things to do these days. All that’s part of the past,” he says.
This sounds like a reprise of Fernando’s early tirades in our Venice kitchen when I wanted to bake bread or roll out my own pasta or construct some six-storied confection slathered in butter creams. He’d tried to cool my desires with the same arguments, saying that no one bakes bread or desserts or makes pasta at home. Even grandmothers and maiden aunts queue in the shops, then sit in the cafés with their cappucini all morning, he’d assured me back then. Was that the same man who, now, can’t wait to get his hands into the bread dough?
“And so why are you helping us with this oven if all this is only ‘part of the past’?” I want to know.
“I’m helping because you need help,” he says. “Because from everything I’m learning about you two, it appears that what you want most is the ‘past.’ I’m hoping all this isn’t just some folkloric interlude for you two. I’m hoping you’ve got your feet securely on the ground. What I mean is, you’ve come here from another life and yet you seem to expect to step into this one just as it used to be in the nineteenth century. As though it were waiting for you, as though it were Utopia. Or worse, as though it were Sy
baris. Well, there is no Utopia here, never has been. And you must know what happened to Sybaris? The past here was sometimes brutal and tragic, just like the present can be.”
The swiftness of his exit leaves a chill behind in the burning light of noon.
I am startled neither that the old duke knows Greek history nor that he would finally get round to digging into our souls. He cuts off all receiving channels, except to bid us “buon pranzo, good lunch” over his shoulder as he takes the shortcut through the back meadow up toward town. Barlozzo’s questions were both oblique and semantic. He can be sharp as a scimitar, even though I don’t believe he means to cut. We watch him for a while and then look at each other, both of us a bit mystified. We’ve trespassed upon Barlozzo. Though it’s been he who has pursued us in his often vulpine manner, he who loves to talk and preach, to plumb his history before such a new and eager audience as we are, he will not suffer our sidling up too close to him or upon his memories. Barlozzo is a man with boundaries, confines unsusceptible to our pressing for even the smallest part of him that lies beyond them.
THOUGH DISAPPOINTED, NEITHER of us is surprised at 4:00 when no knock sounds on the stable door. Fernando says the duke is staying away for the sake of showmanship—un colpo di teatro, a theatrical move. We pretend not to notice when the afternoon becomes evening without sign from him. A long time to keep his audience waiting, I think. We’re out on the terrace, changing our shoes and just about to start up to the bar for apperitivi, when the duke rounds the back of the stable.
“Avete benzina per la machina? Do you have gas in your car?”
“Certo,” Fernando tells him. “Ma, perchè? But why?”
A Thousand Days in Tuscany Page 4