A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  There is a proscenium of sorts built up on cinder blocks. A tasting panel composed of four gentlemen who sit in front of a white-clothed table set with six clear glass bottles, each filled with the oil of a different consortium and labeled with a number. A line of glass tumblers is arranged before each man and, with the pomp of a Burgundian auction, the tasting begins. The judges are retired farmers, and since farmers hardly ever retire in these parts, I guess their average age to be near ninety. All wear hats against the cold, most of them the typical colbacco, a rabbit-lined wool cap with earflaps. One braves the night in a fedora. The first oil is poured into their glasses and the four dip their wizened, rough old beaks in to whiff the oil’s perfume. They look at it in the dim light of the parking lot lamps and write impressions on yellow pads. They taste it, drink it in some cases. They write more impressions. They taste it on a piece of grilled bread and write again. There is no wine allowed on the dais, and I know this fact will cause a speedy finish to the event. Sure enough, the six oils are dispatched, smelled, tasted, drunk, and judged in as many minutes. The winner is announced and there is great cheering, whistling from the foot-stomping crowd. The oil from Piazze’s consortium is the unanimous winner. Barlozzo says that’s because it was the only one entered, that all the bottles held the same oil and that those ancients wouldn’t know the difference between two oils if one of them was from Puglia. Or Greece, for that matter. Still he goes up to congratulate the judges and the mill owner. His fondness for his neighbors is as clear as is the false sarcasm he uses to hide it.

  Attention is turned back to the dais as the mayor is announcing the winners of the evening’s raffle, the proceeds of which are destined to cover the costs of whitewashing the interior of the chapel of Sant’Agata. The premiums are ported up onto the dais on the beefy shoulders of eight men, and the sight of the four whole mortadelle— each of them weighing in at twenty kilos—tantalize the screaming crowd into frenzy. First prize is two whole mortadelle, second prize, one whole mortadella, third prize, half a mortadella, fourth prize, the other half of the third prize.

  A mandolin accompanies a whiskey voice torching out the evils of false love, and we wander toward the wine, served almost boiling from ceramic pitchers into styrofoam cups. Holding the hot things with two hands, sipping gingerly, we are warmed. We find seats at the communal tables, each of us in a different place. On one side, I’m snuggled close to the butcher who is wearing neither his cleaver nor his modish belt this evening; on the other side is a Roman who says he comes each year for this sagra on a bus with thirty-five other Romans. People at the table chide him for remaining a city slicker when life is so much more wonderful in Piazze. There is no trope, no satire but only a sincere desire to convince the Roman of what they believe.

  More bruschette and jugs of wine drawn from barrels are passed about the tables, and now the beans are ladled out into white plastic bowls, the good spicy scent whipping our hungers. “Evviva, i fagioli,” shout the men as if they’d struck gold. “Eureka, the beans.” Stewed and plumped to silk in the old cauldron, their flavor explodes in the mouth, then comforts, nearly like an unexpected kiss does from lips placed hard on the nape of the neck. A piece of bread, another spoonful of beans, now some wine, each food exalting the other. Beans and bread and oil and wine. So what does it mean to be poor? I ask myself once again.

  BARLOZZO TOOTS HIS horn at 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, ready to drive us to Norcia to hunt for black diamonds. Truffles. There in the southeastern part of Umbria close to the region of Abruzzo, the mystical tubers grow not so deep beneath the roots of oak, hazelnut, and birch trees. A local zealot called Virgilio—the duke’s old chum—will lead us up into the hills. We meet him at the appointed hour and place. Wrapped in the traditional black wool cape of the trifolau, truffle hunter, a short-brimmed leather hat perched at an almost foppish slant, he and the camouflage-jacketed duke are an unlikely couple. We leave Barlozzo’s truck in a field and climb into the back of Virgilio’s pickup to sit among coils of rope and empty wine demijohns while he and the duke pass a grappa bottle back and forth up in the cab. As we begin our hike, Virgilio tells us he’s been digging truffles for sixty years, that by now he can sense them even when it’s this cold, as long as the ground isn’t frozen. He says that his dog, Mariarosa, is nearly superfluous. “I’ve outlived generations of fine truffle-hunting bastards and I paid attention to every one of them, learned from them. The last one before Mariarosa was eighteen years old when she died. And as her senses dimmed, mine seemed to grow keener, as though she’d signed hers over to me. And so when she passed on, I just thought I’d carry on alone. That is until Mariarosa began following me one day. A small, bright bastard, just as any good truffle dog must be, she’s more faithful than a wife,” says Virgilio, who now seems tired from such a long soliliquy.

  Barlozzo takes on the character of Virgilio, grunting answers to our questions, sometimes looking off into the distance when we speak, not hearing us at all. Or is it that I can better recognize Barlozzo’s manner as it resonates in Virgilio? It hardly matters at this moment, in the powdered blue dawning of a Christmas. We tramp the mystical hills where once lived saints and serpents, and only our boots and our breathing and the cawing of some bird interrupt the whisperings of the snow. Mariarosa stops short by the roots of an oak, sniffs them. She barks then howls, prancing in ecstatic leaps, ears folded back in the wind, nose in the air. Mariarosa has found a truffle. Virgilio quiets her to a panting whine, kneels beneath the tree, gently scrapes away, with a trowel of sorts, at a point under some of the smaller roots. He uses the instrument as a shovel then, but takes only tablespoons of earth at a time, touching the place with long, searching, ungloved fingers and pulls up the truffle, shaking just some of the black, thick dirt from it, placing it carefully inside the canvas sack he wears across his chest. He feels about the spot once again, then covers it up, pats it as though in thanks, and walks on. He brings Mariarosa’s snout down to scent the place where the truffle was found, pulls her close into his arms for an embrace, takes a biscuit from his pocket. Her prize. With only slight variations, Mariarosa and Virgilio repeat this magical performance four, five, six times before he announces it’s time for his breakfast, that we’re welcome to join him. He hands Barlozzo the sack to inhale and inspect and we huddle about him, yelping and groaning for the joy of such bounty, naming the dishes they’ll grace over the next few weeks.

  “Calmatevi,” says the duke, “calm yourselves. We’ll see how many of them go home with us after they’re weighed and priced.”

  We settle ourselves around a table in a small osteria. It’s the last table, in fact, as the place is all abuzz with hunters, most of them stripped down to their woolen undershirts, at home in the smoky, steam-heated quarters, resting from their battles, quaffing liters of red, sitting in front of beefsteaks or bowls of thick soup and plates heaped with pasta. It’s just after eight in the morning. But we, too, have been on the road since 3:00 a.m., just as they were in the woods or on the hills by then, and so this sort of early feasting seems just.

  We begin with frittata di tartufi —a flat, thin, paper thin omelette, nearly orange in color from rich yolks given up by corn-fed hens—with fat black disks of musky truffle showing themselves all over it. In fact, it seems the eggs are merely transportation, a buttery, golden medium to get the truffles to the table. I reach for a first sip of wine but the duke stops me, says to wait. Cutting the great circle into four wedges, serving Virgilio and then us, delivering the last to his own plate with skill and pomp, he says, “Eat this immediately and with your eyes closed.”

  I slide down a bit in my chair, ravished and nearly disbelieving the sensations caused by an egg, a wild tuber, and a knob of sweet butter. Fernando sits dutifully with eyes still closed until the duke breaks the spell and says with glass raised, “Buon Natale, ragazzi. Merry Christmas, kids.”

  Even Virgilio seems pleased with our response to the first course of the breakfast, and he tells us, “This i
s the one truly perfect way to eat a truffle. The eggs are cooked over a low flame only to softness in good, white butter. And just at the moment they’re about to set, one slices the truffle over all, as much of it as one can buy or steal. Cover the pan for a few seconds to warm the truffle, to release its power. Bring the pan to the table. But that’s not the whole recipe. Everything else has to be just right, as well. No wine, empty stomach, ferocious hunger, fine company or no company at all. It’s like making love, one thing out of place and it’s all mechanical, no more exciting than potatoes and eggs.”

  Perhaps it’s not so much that Virgilio is prone to silence as he is to saving his breath for plucking straight into the pith of things.

  IT’S NEARLY DARK when we pull into the drive at Palazzo Barlozzo. The village is twilit, asleep beneath the fogs. I stand at the edge of the garden to look at her, watching as the windows, one by one, turn golden. Fernando and Barlozzo are making some sort of plans for later but I’m not listening. I throw a kiss to the duke and walk up the stairs, aching for a warm bath.

  There’s a tree in the tub. There are six-foot evergreens in jute sacks leaning in the bedroom, in the front entryway, on the landing, there are five of them in the stable and the whole place smells, feels like a forest, and I love it. Fernando is laughing and grinning close behind me as I discover his gifts.

  “I told the vivaio to deliver them this morning. I left the key for him and a bottle of wine. Aren’t they wonderful? After Epiphany, we’ll plant them all along the farthest boundary of the garden and they’ll be beautiful. It was the best present I could think of for us. Un gesto simbolico, a symbolic gesture, I guess. We’ll transplant them like we did ourselves,” he tells me.

  I kiss him hard and long and then kiss him again. We take our bath, rest a bit, then dress and go downstairs to open some wine, but the duke is already there with a fire lit and the horrid, carbonated wine he calls vino da festa, festival wine, sitting in a bucket. A tall, fat silver fir, its tip bent by the too-low rafters, sits in a black metal stand in front of the kitchen door.

  “I didn’t know where to put it, so I just stood it there in the meantime. I know you’re going to scream at me for killing a tree, but this is the first Christmas when I’ve felt like it was Christmas in a very long time and I really cut it down for myself and only brought it here because your place is bigger than mine,” he says, grinning.

  I tell him it’s glorious and all of a sudden I feel like it’s Christmas, too, and Fernando must as well because he’s racing out the door to the barn to look for our decorations box from Venice. The search is futile and we think it must have stayed on the Albanians’ truck, but it hardly matters, because the tree, the trees themselves, are perfect.

  We sit there in our own private woods, we three alone in custody of the sour wine and the great dark fir tree and its kin, all of them ornamented only by the fire, their scent intoxicating our little parish, intoxicating us. We sit like this, staring and fascinated, not saying very much at all. I’m thinking that not a single sweetmeat did I bake, no gingercakes, no sugarplums, no pie, no roast, no wassail bowl. Save the trees and the truffles, no presents. Neither has there been agony nor temper nor fatigue nor a thin graciousness sipped with the eggnog. This is a good Christmas.

  I struggle to get behind the big tree, trying to enter the kitchen to search some small tidbit to put before the men, but Barlozzo is saying, “Since we’re due at Pupa’s by eight and it’s already seven, hadn’t we better head up to the bar? Oh, and by the way, Floriana sends her good wishes, says she’s doing just fine.

  “Merry Christmas,” he says in his proud English with the bedouin accent.

  I think I’m beginning to like that he tells me only half his sentiments, while another part of them he simply lets me know.

  The One and Only True Bruschetta: (brew-sket’-ah)

  What It Is and How to Pronounce It

  The almost universal mistaken pronunciation of bruschette by foreign visitors to Italy sometimes causes chagrin, but most often just quiet laughter from waiters and Italians who are dining close by. But whatever name one gives it, honest country bread, sliced not too thickly and roasted lightly over the ash of a wood fire, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, and then sprinkled with fine sea salt, is a primordial gastronomic pleasure that is Tuscan to its core. The addition of chopped, fresh tomato is wonderful, especially in high summer, as is the perfume of a fat clove of garlic rubbed into the hot bread. But Tuscan purists will tell you that bread and oil and salt compose the best bruschette of all.

  To make bruschette at home, find (or make) a dense, crusty loaf, slice it no more than half an inch in thickness, set it under a hot broiler or over a charcoal or wood fire, and toast it lightly on each side. Drizzle the hot bread with oil, sprinkle on sea salt, and serve immediately as part of an antipasto or, better, all by itself with a glass of red wine.

  12

  Supper Made from Almost Nothing

  January arrives brooding. But we’ve settled nicely into winter, our tricks against the cold performed with ease so there is the illusion, at least, of warmth about the house. Fernando continues to read and work toward the planning of the “journeys project,” as he’s taken to calling it, while I write and edit and write some more. The village is quiet as a vapor. Even the bar seems in slumber, things barely stirring there except for an hour or so in the early mornings and for as long again at aperitivo time. Everyone is in recovery from the intemperance that began in September with the vendemmia, swelled into October with the chestnut and wild mushroom festivals, mounted, then, in November and early December with the olive harvest, all of it clinched in the keeping of the sweet, quiet rituals of a rural Christmas. Now, a long, delicious rest.

  Fewer people come to Friday nights, muzzled up with their fires and televisions against the crisp ten-meter walk to the Centrale, but we persist in the ritual until the evening when we find absolutely no one in the bar except Tonino, deep in lesson planning for his Saturday class at the high school. Determined to dine out this evening, we just cart our basket back to the car, drive up to the overlook on the Celle road, indulge in the extravagance of leaving the heater on, open one window a crack, and set up for supper. The old BMW becomes an instant dining room. Always ready in the boot is a basket fitted with wine glasses, two of our most beautiful ones, plus two tiny Bohemian cut-crystal glasses, napkins made from the unstained parts of a favorite tablecloth, a box full of odd silver, a wine screw, a good bottle of red wine—always replaced immediately after consumption—a flask of grappa, a Spanish bone-handled folding knife, a pouch of sea salt, a small blue-and-white ceramic pepper grinder, plates of varying size, a tiny plastic bottle of dishwashing liquid, two linen kitchen towels and paper towels. Warm enough now, we turn off the heater, close the window and open the wine. Snow falls and swirls thick about the windows like curtains. Lifting the lid from the pot of sausages braised with white beans and sage and tomatoes, we decide to use it as a communal dish. We eat hungrily, digging for the pieces of sausage, feeding them to each other. There’s half a sponge cake, split and filled with apricot jam and spread with hazelnut cream. We cut it with the Spanish knife, evening it out, then evening it out a little more, until only a strangely shaped wedge of it remains. Too ugly to keep, we say, and we eat that, too. A sip of grappa in the Bohemian glasses.

  ONE EVENING, WE convince Pupa to close her doors and come to supper with Barlozzo at our house and, over a soup of ceci and farro, the duke begins to talk about la veglia. Once la veglia was a way for farmers and their families to gather of an evening in the pitch of winter. Often one farmhouse was separated from the next by kilometers and, in winter, the only time neighbors saw each other was by plan. Apart from its promise of a supper of relative plenty, la veglia was hungrily anticipated to indulge social appetite. “And so folks would trudge through the snow with whatever they could spare from their pantries,” he says. “Someone brought the end piece of a prosciutto, another a wild hare trapped i
n the gloaming of that morning, someone else lamb, another some part of whatever beast he’d been able to hunt, each one placing his offering into a cauldron set over a blazing fire. Cabbages, potatoes, herbs, heels of wine, and drops of oil flavored the great stew, which they called scottiglia. And while it all braised in symphony, people warmed themselves by the hearth, passed around a bulbous-bottomed wine flask in which white beans had been braised in the ash of yesterday’s fire with herbs and oil and wine. Each one poured out a few beans onto his thick slice of bread, quaffed his wine, took a turn reciting Dante or telling ghost stories while they waited for supper. It was here that the old passed down stories to the young, saving history the way their elders had saved it for them. And when the last smudge of la scottiglia was finished, the wine jugs hollow as drums, the host, if he had them to spare, would pull blistering potatoes out from the cinders, giving one to each child for his coat pocket, a hand warmer for the long walk home over the frozen hills. It was understood that the potato was to be saved and, mashed with hot water or a little milk, eaten for breakfast.