by Bill Barich
pappardelle sulla lepre, broad noodles with hare sauce
arselle, delicate clams steamed in stock
lombatine, grilled veal chops
spinach
mixed salad
pecorino and fruit
a liter of chianti
cappuccino
The bill, with service included, came to less than twenty dollars. Feeling expansive, I asked our waiter if he knew the conductor’s cousin. The waiter had never heard of him, but the gangly man had. “Angelo?” he said. “Sure, I know him.” Angelo’d had a fight with the boss and now he worked at another trattoria, across the river.
Suddenly, it was summer. The changeover had nothing to do with the calendar. The calendar said it was May, but the morning haze suddenly vanished, and it was hot all day long. Even Arcetri had smog. The wildflowers wilted, the ground wasn’t damp anymore. I sat outside the villa, naked to the waist, like a wrist-wrestler, reading Italian poetry in translation. Salvatore Quasimodo. Eugenio Montale. Then Giuseppe Ungaretti, the son of Tuscan peasants who’d moved to Egypt and opened a bakery in Alexandria.
I know a city
that every day fills to the brim with sunlight and in that instant everything is enchanted
From Ungaretti, I went on to Henry David Thoreau. I took this as a sign of homesickness. Thoreau infuriated me one minute, then gripped me the next. He was an American, talking to himself, chanting truths he wanted to believe in.
I remember an afternoon late in the month when I walked through the field and stood among the olive trees and stared at the villa, not quite believing that I’d ever lived in it.
I phoned the woman who knew about real estate things and told her we’d be leaving in June. She had a client in mind for the villa, a painter who’d decided to leave his wife for the girl who’d been modeling for him since she was a child. The girl was a young woman now. I thought this was a fine story. I developed an elaborate fantasy about the model, her long shiny hair, her perfect complexion, her breasts, her legs, but when she came to see the house, she turned out to be round and totally suburban, with plans for redecoration in hand.
Florence, how you deceive!
The train station at Santa Maria Novella was swarming with people. The porter I hired to carry our bags tried to overcharge us. There was a mix-up about seats, and then an argument about something else. I was fed up with the rudeness, the clamor, glad to be leaving. I thought I’d never want to see Florence again, but then the train pulled away, and I recalled the afternoon when we’d sat on the roof of the villa, lost in glorious imperfection.
Sfida at the Hippodrome
Ippodromo “Le Cascine,” in Cascine Park, in Florence, would fit into the back pocket of any major racetrack in the States, but I still got very confused the first time I went out there. I caught the No. 38 bus on Pian dei Giullari. The bus wasn’t very crowded, since it was two o’clock in the afternoon and almost everybody in Italy was eating or sleeping off the effects of having eaten. The only other passengers were a Dominican friar and the pantaloni man, who is legendary around the bus stop. He’s about eighty years old, and he always has an elaborate bandage of gauze, cotton, and adhesive tape over one ear. He’s known as the pantaloni man because whenever he sees a woman wearing pants of any kind he berates her for covering up her legs, which are a gift from God. Some people think the pantaloni man is crazy, but if so he’s crazy like a fox. I never heard the friar speak to anybody, in all the times I saw him on the bus.
We had a pleasant ride down the hill, without any of the near-accidents that can enliven a No. 38 run. Pian dei Giullari is only as broad as an alley in some places, so if the bus driver is flirting with a girl or singing he has to apply the brakes rather quickly to keep from hitting the cars that come speeding up the hill. In Arcetri, the auto horn is essential equipment, and you get the feeling sometimes that a Klaxon should be attached to the hood of every Fiat. Riding a bus through the city center is not as dangerous, but it’s often more frustrating because there are more obstacles to contend with—dogs, cats, daring pedestrians, horse carts, other buses, and the odd wandering chicken. Once, I was on a downtown bus that couldn’t squeeze between two cars parked opposite each other on a ribbon of twelfth-century street. After we’d waited about ten minutes, stuck in the channel, three men got off the bus and carried the smaller car onto the sidewalk. Their return was greeted with applause.
The No. 38 dropped me at the Porta Romana, an old gate of the city which rises, stone by noble stone, to form a huge arch. There’s always a great deal of automotive confusion around the arch; minor smashups involving major discussions are commonplace. One afternoon, I watched a crushed motorcycle explode, shooting flames into a sky already sulfurous with exhaust fumes and smoke from olive branches that had been pruned from trees and set to burning on the hillsides. Firemen arrived about a half hour after the explosion and sprayed chemicals on the ashes. They wore elaborate brown uniforms that made them look like gnomes from the Tyrol. Uniforms are even more popular in Italy than they are in America, perhaps because the country is even more desperately in need of leadership.
From the Porta Romana, I took a No. 13 bus across the Arno River to the eastern end of Cascine. The hippodrome was about a mile away, down a wide, tree-lined boulevard. Cascine has none of the vastness of New York’s Central Park, nor is it as lush and wild as Golden Gate, in San Francisco; instead, it’s ineffably small-town, like a frame clipped from a Frank Capra movie, with lots of benches, picnics, bicycles, ice cream, and old dudes in hats and suspenders playing cards at folding tables set up in the leafy shade. There are plenty of familiar urban distractions around (noise, smog, dopers, prostitutes, a discotheque), but a fundamental innocence still manages to shine through. As I walked along, I had the sense that I was revisiting some place from my childhood, or from a childhood I had imagined. I bought a can of beer from a street vendor, who popped the top and stuck a straw through the opening. The vendor had cold sodas, too, and potato chips, and also a three-tiered lazy Susan on which he’d arranged little slivers of coconut. Water from a spigot at the top of the lazy Susan spilled over the slices, creating a miniature version of the tropics. Farther on, I passed a big, hairy-armed man who was carving rosemary-scented meat from the roasted carcass of a pig and stuffing generous portions into hard rolls. The pig’s head was prominently displayed, like some symbol of the genuine.
The hippodrome proved to be built on the same intimate scale as Cascine. It has a small concrete grandstand that probably doesn’t accommodate a crowd of more than a few thousand. Because admission is cheap (less than two dollars a ticket, except for special events), some patrons treat the hippodrome as an extension of the park, visiting it as they might the children’s zoo or the curious monument to the Maharajah of Kolhapur, an Indian prince who was cremated in Cascine in 1870. I saw a surprising number of young mothers pushing along bambini in strollers, heading for a playground near the grandstand, where there were swings and slides. The bambini came in both varieties, but it was tough to tell which was which, since all of them were bundled in thick wraps that obscured every bodily feature except their eyes. Florentines live in constant fear that their kids might catch cold, so most apartments in the city are sealed airtight until summer, when the temperature outside begins to approximate that of a pizza oven.
Racing in Florence began during the Middle Ages. The earliest races were similar to those held in nearby Siena, where horses and riders representing the city’s various wards competed over a treacherous course winding through cobbled streets jammed with spectators. The prize was (and is) an expensive, elaborately embroidered palio, or banner. In Siena, the most spent and degraded nags around were recruited to run—they went out of control so frequently that in 1262 the Sienese Council passed a resolution stating that jockeys could not be held responsible if their mounts killed or maimed any members of the crowd—but the Florentine contests were usually more gentle, featuring what one fifteenth-century writer called “
the most excellent racehorses in the world.” The first English thoroughbreds were probably imported into Italy in 1808 by a Neapolitan prince for use at his stud farm in Sicily, and soon thereafter thoroughbred racing was introduced in major cities all over the country. Roger Longrigg, the racing historian, says that by 1827 there was an annual meeting in Florence at a course about a mile from town. These English horses were judged so superior that they had to give thirty pounds to Tuscan horses and fourteen pounds to horses from other regions of Italy.
The first race of the day wasn’t scheduled to go off until three o’clock, and that gave me time to stroll down to the rail and inspect the track. The rail was only as high as my waist. There was no mesh or chain link on top of it; if a horse happened to race very wide, you could almost reach out and touch him. Beyond the rail, two racing strips, both turf, ran parallel to each other; one of them had hurdles for jumping. The turf looked grim—tufted and beat up after a hard winter. The infield had no tote-board, no buildings, not even an ornamental pond for waterfowl. Instead, it was dotted here and there with neatly trimmed hedges that might once have been part of a steeplechase course. Past the hedges, I could see some stables, then a block of modern apartment houses, and then the Apennine Mountains. The mountains were as striking as the San Gabriels rising from the backstretch of Santa Anita, but they had to compete for attention with the wonderful dome that Filippo Brunelleschi designed during the Renaissance for Florence’s great cathedral. The dome was visible off to the right, soaring into space and dominating the city’s skyline.
Florentines are not a modest people. When they undertook the task of building their cathedral, they did so as much for civic pride as for religious reasons, vowing to create “the most beautiful and honorable church in Tuscany.” Construction started in 1296, and the project was completed early in the fifteenth century, when Brunelleschi solved various technical problems relating to the dome’s size and weight; other architects had not been able to devise a plan to support it on the drum of the cathedral. Mary McCarthy has said that Brunelleschi’s dome “is the way a dome ‘ought’ to be done.” It seems somehow to embody the Platonic ideal of domeness. Its simple, straightforward, elegant lines suggest that Brunelleschi arrived at its form only after discarding every other possible form. It has about it the spirituality of deep meditation—of a truth perceived, then rendered. It seems absolutely lacking in ego; in its purity, it abolishes the very notion of a Brunelleschi. This isn’t true of Michelangelo’s work, which has about it an ineradicable quality of self-aggrandizement. Michelangelo wanted to be God; Brunelleschi was willing to serve.
I could have stayed at the rail for quite a while, staring at the dome and letting my thoughts float into the ether, but eventually I was pulled toward the paddock by the ambulatory action of the crowd. I got my first taste of confusion when I stopped along the way to buy a program, Galoppo e Trotto. Galoppo refers to flat racing, and Trotto refers to harness racing. (The generic term for all types of horse racing is ippica.) Galoppo e Trotto was supposed to give me invaluable information about handicapping, but I thought it was even less useful than the semi-abstract racing papers I’d been buying in England. It told me very little about the horses entered in the day’s eight races except for their weights (in kilograms), where they’d placed in their last two outings (most of them had been running at Pisa, the other major track on the Tuscan circuit), and who was riding them. Furthermore, the program was in Italian. I hadn’t brought my twenty-pound Garzanti English-Italian dictionary with me, so I was certain to miss important nuances in the text. As a supplement to the program, I picked up a free tout sheet that the hippodrome had printed. It listed the favorites of the press and also the favorites of Carmine Cocca, a jockey who was going to ride in five races. Cocca had nominated just two of his mounts to win. My confusion increased. Not only was I in a foreign country, ill-informed and barely able to speak the language—the jockeys were playing with my mind.
The paddock at Cascine consists of two brick buildings roofed with the familiar red-brown tiles you see all over Tuscany. Between the buildings, there’s a sort of shed where owners and trainers can have an espresso while they’re waiting for the action to start. Florentines can’t stand to be separated from coffee for very long, so bars are always cropping up in unlikely spots—in the basement of the central library, for instance, or at the Church of San Miniato. I stood by the paddock fence and watched the horses going round—or some of the horses. Only three of the five entrants in the first race were on parade; the two others were sequestered in numbered stalls. It didn’t help to look them over, though, because the numbers bore no relation to any numbers on the program—they were too high. Apparently, trainers were under no obligation to match stall numbers with program numbers; they were putting their charges in any stall they chose. To complicate matters further, the program numbers were not the same as the horses’ post positions; Doroty, the No. 1 horse, was breaking from the two hole in the starting gate, while Temezio, the No. 4 horse, was breaking from the three hole.
I had such trouble unscrambling numbers and statistics that I failed to get a bet down. That was probably fortunate, since the race was something of a mess. The horses were all two-year-olds, and they were very green. None of them had ever raced before. Pisanino, who might have had a measure of donkey blood, was so reluctant to be saddled that his trainers had to take him to a special stall that’s a thoroughbred’s equivalent of a padded cell. It has a door to insure privacy. For a minute or two, Pisanino could be heard kicking at the walls, but finally he emerged with a saddle on his back, looking chastened. The horses seemed uncomfortable in the starting gate, and there was some bumping around when they were released from the machinery. When they came into the home turn (the race covered just four furlongs), they went so wide that I was sure they’d wind up in the grandstand, but only poor Porto Alegre lost control. Apparently, nobody had ever taught him to change leads, so instead of wheeling into the stretch he kept running on in a straight line until he collided with a hedge. His jockey was briefly airborne. Both horse and rider came walking past the grandstand a bit later; they were scratched and bedraggled but still alive.
The second race on the card was more interesting. It gave me an opportunity to make the kind of sucker bet that invariably costs me money. Every race at Cascine has a name (Premio Ghiberti, Premio Hogarth), and this one was called the Premio Fantasio—the Fanciful Prize. Salvador Dali was entered in it. Dali was a strapping seven-year-old with a powerful frame. The groom who was walking him around the paddock had hair dyed a pumpkiny shade of orange. Over Dali’s eyes, a black rectangle of cloth was draped; it covered his eye sockets and reached almost to his nose, so that he seemed ready to face a firing squad. I’d never seen anything like the cloth before; as a device to prevent skittishness, it put blinkers to shame. I wondered if the cloth would be removed before Dali went to the post or if he’d run with it on, transforming (as his namesake had done) the ordinary into the surreal. In any case, Dali was an exact fit for the phenomenology of the moment, and I decided to back him with a few thousand lire.
This wasn’t so easy to do. If I’d been willing to part with ten bucks, I could have bet with one of the bookies who occupy wooden booths along the perimeter of the grandstand, but I was thinking more in the nature of a fiver, which was below the bookies’ self-imposed limit. I had to go inside and bet with the Florentine version of a pari-mutuel system. It was totally non-electronic, with no flashing bulbs to indicate odds; I had no idea what price I might be getting on Dali. I approached a counter where twenty or thirty would-be bettors were waving notes at clerks who stood in front of several large pegboards with hooks; each hook had tissue-thin tickets impaled on it. (The best and classiest paper in Italy is reserved for wrapping cheese and cold cuts in delicatessens.) There was no queue, no semblance of order. You had to push or be pushed forward to give birth to your transaction, just as at an Italian bank. I fumbled a little when my turn came. It was difficul
t to remember a) to speak Italian, b) to ask for Dali by program number, not post position, and c)to count my change. Somehow, though, I got a ticket. I didn’t realize at the time how lucky I was; later in the day, after a similar bout of push-and-shove, I was denied my wager by a clerk who shrugged and said he was out of the ticket I wanted.
As it happened, my faith in Salvador Dali as horse of the moment was badly misplaced. He ran without his black veil and just barely finished the race. His tongue was hanging so far out of his mouth that I thought he might trip over it. I was about to throw my ticket away in disgust when, by chance, I noticed that I held not Dali’s number but the number of Fontaineriant, the winner. Whether the error was the clerk’s or my own, I don’t know, but I was overjoyed to collect earnings I didn’t deserve. The occurrence seemed, in true Tuscan manner, weird and beautiful all at once.
For the rest of the afternoon, I drifted around the grandstand, feeling good, with cash in my pocket and the sun on my face. I made a few more bets (or tried to), but I was really more interested in soaking up the atmosphere. Once I started to relax, my confusion gradually seeped away. Italy can be a terribly frustrating country for pilgrims raised on notions of efficiency. Nothing seems to work right, by American or British, or even French, standards; that anything works at all is considered something of a blessing. If you complain to a Florentine about the outrages you’ve experienced—unpredictable bus service, random mail delivery, surly waiters and clerks, cabbies who invent surcharges—he will smile ruefully and nod in agreement while simultaneously thinking what a fool you are to expect so much from life. To enjoy Italy, you’ve got to do a backflip into a more luxurious sense of time and learn to appreciate the simple, mundane turning about of human beings, beyond any concerns of history or politics. The people I saw in the grandstand had a marvelous presence—a physical fluidity that was precisely a result of the release from temporal pressure. They seemed less interested in the actual running of a race than in the possibility of discussing it afterward; they gathered in knots, like little families, and argued and laughed and touched each other as the world—wherever that was—went about its business.