“Ah, la sprezzatura!” Luigo nodded wisely.
“Eh?” I blinked at him.
“Allora, bella.” He poured himself a beer, pushing a plate of aperitivo at me. “Well, la sprezzatura is a sort of pretending not to care…what’s that word?”
“Nonchalance?” I suggested.
“Esatto, brava!” He regarded me with approval. “Okay, so it was in a book published in fifteen-something. It was called something to do with courtier…” I chuckled. Luigo went on. “Okay, I don’t remember all the details, but you can go and ask your Internet. What’s important is this idea that to be a perfect gentleman, you have to be, erm…”
“Nonchalant?” I suggested again.
“Brava!” he said. “So you see?” As if it was all very clear indeed.
“I need to know more,” I said, and he sighed.
“Okay, so in the Renaissance, you know how rough the Tuscan aristocracy were?” I agreed. “This guy wrote this book saying they should show restraint, that this was the way to go from being strangers to friends.” Seeing me frown, he continued. “So the handshake, for example, well, that’s sprezzatura—it was a way for people to show themselves unarmed. The start of a cautious friendship.”
“So you are saying that he’s being this thing—sprezzatura?” I asked.
“More than anything, I am saying that la sprezzatura is a good approach to a new friendship,” he said enigmatically. “You might want to employ a little of it yourself.” And with that he went back behind the bar to serve a clutch of customers who had just walked in.
I investigated further. The author Luigo had referred to was Baldassare Castiglione, who had indeed written a book called The Book of the Courtier in 1528. La sprezzatura was a sort of code that advised restraint and gentleness in court behavior—it laid the foundation of what has become accepted gentlemanly behavior and attempted to regulate the wild ways of the Florentine aristocracy, who were far too apt to run one another through with swords.
Certainly this Bernardo seemed to be the very definition of la sprezzatura, showing no very overt signs of interest other than that he continued to ask me out. As his son, Alessandro, lived with him, we mostly met during the day when he was at school. A couple of weeks of midmorning coffees and going to exhibitions gave me the chance to practice la sprezzatura, keeping my restraint, the space between us. It was easy to do, as I was not possessed by the same wild attraction to him as I had been with Dino, but slowly, calmly, every time we saw each other, I enjoyed his company more, and he too became more relaxed and more amusing each time and I began to see that under the rough exterior lurked a gentleman.
Then one evening, after another concert at the Teatro Comunale, when he had, miraculously, not fallen asleep, I found myself sitting in his car outside my building, locked into one of those conversations that begins innocuously and then somehow eats up the whole night. He managed to turn the not-inconsiderable dramas of his life into a big joke—his childhood in a castle in Chianti, the trials of his broken leg, the failure of his marriages—painting their twists and turns with lighthearted strokes, and I found myself laughing more than I had in ages. He didn’t stop entertaining me until the early hours when he left because he had to be up in just a few hours to take Alessandro to school.
* * *
—
Every time I passed Dante I was reminded by the stone book in his hand: by writing his great works he had made the Tuscan dialect the official language of Italy. Until then it had been a hodgepodge of dialects, with Latin as the official language.
Florentine was certainly fruity, and Bernardo’s language was colorful and peppered with Tuscan curses, many of which made no sense. The first time I heard him exclaim “Maremma maiala,” I was perplexed. “Pig from the Maremma?” I quizzed him and he laughed. Where Dino had taught me amorous phrases, Bernardo now taught me how to swear. Maremma maiala was followed up by porca troia (“pig whore” was the translation Bernardo offered for that one), porca puttana (from what I could make out, the same thing), porca miseria (“pig misery”). When I asked for a phrase that did not include pigs (“I am Muslim, you know,” I had joked), he taught me che palle. Meaning literally “what balls,” it was a wonderful catch-all curse that could be applied to almost anything, from something boring (accompanied by a teenage eye roll) to a real insult.
* * *
—
Bernardo was in my apartment and my fridge was empty. Earlier that day he had taken me to a photography exhibition and, as I clicked my way around in my high-heeled boots, there was a flirty feeling between us. Dropping me home, he told me that Alessandro was out with his mother that night so he had a free evening. I invited him up to the apartment. I was speaking with Kicca on Skype when he arrived and I kept the video call on so that she could meet him—I needed her opinion.
Bernardo, like Guido the Dramatic Idraulico, was astonished, then delighted, to see Kicca’s disembodied head on my laptop on the kitchen table when he came in. Then, just like Guido, he sat down and started talking to her rapidly—the Italian default setting, the curiosity in people, the sociability, the volubility. Soon they were laughing, and I searched the apartment for something that would do for dinner.
When Bernardo saw me doing this he got up and headed to my fridge. “Posso?” he said, and when I nodded, he opened it to find it virtually empty. I had not been to the market and I apologized.
“Non ti preoccupare,” he said, getting busy filling the pasta pot with water. Fifteen minutes later, we sat down, with Kicca still on the laptop, to a steaming dish of pasta con aglio, olio, e peperoncino—pasta with garlic, oil, and chili, a Roman classic, Kicca told me, “the best fast food there is!”
It was simple but also somehow creamy and tasty. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t come across such a handy dish before, made of the basics that existed in any Italian kitchen, even mine. I would add it to my repertoire. By the time I was making us coffee, Kicca had hung up and Bernardo and I were alone.
Suddenly I knew that Bernardo was going to kiss me. Having thought a few times over the past weeks that we were going to be just friends, tonight I was very aware of him as a full-blooded Italian male.
Yet I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of getting involved with someone with quite so much baggage, so I failed to cooperate. Every time I could have stood close, I ducked away. I busied myself around the apartment and he followed me around like a confused puppy. Finally I decided to at least try out his kisses and joined him on the sofa.
And what kisses they were—long and lazy, deep and luxurious. I liked them, and I kissed him for the rest of the evening, until it was time for him to go. Every time his hands moved on to my body, I steered him back to my lips, and he didn’t insist. After hours of kissing—more than I had since being a teenager—my lips throbbed. So many kisses. Very fine kisses they were too—that much I knew. What I didn’t know was how I felt about him yet.
I called Kicca back. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you tonight,” she said.
“Was it so obvious?” I asked.
She laughed. “Well, yes, there is such chemistry between you…”
“There is?”
She laughed again. “So what happened? I thought he would end up staying the night…”
“Well, no, he can’t because of his son. And, well, we kissed. But that’s all.”
“How come?” Kicca seemed surprised.
“I wouldn’t let it go any further.” I shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
“Darling,” she said, “I think you are in denial. You told me he was not attractive and that you weren’t attracted to him. But he’s great, and really quite handsome, like a Renaissance painting! There was a real spark between you. I really liked him. He seems like a grown-up. You know what he said about his marriages?” I shook my head. “He said—there comes a time when you have to put your balls on the table…”
“What does that even mean?” I cried. The Italian obsession with balls had me m
ystified. It seemed like there was no situation in which a reference to their balls—even touching of—was inappropriate for an Italian man. Kicca laughed again.
“Well.” She scratched her head. “I guess it means he has the guts to confront his mistakes. He said about his marriages that the first thing he had to do was accept his failure, to digest it, and once again to put the balls on the table in order to go on…”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, you see! So he’s got guts and I am risk averse. We’re so different. He’s all messy with his life and, well, you know me…”
“Neat in every way”—she laughed—“a true Virgo.”
Kicca knew me and my perfectionist ways well. She knew that before setting off on a drive, I would carefully decant mineral water from a large bottle into a small one for the journey. She knew that I couldn’t sleep at night if my bills weren’t paid, that I had never been a day late with my rent, and that no email was allowed to languish unanswered in my inbox for more than a day. She knew that my favorite domestic chore was washing up, for which I had to wear a pair of rubber gloves.
She knew all of this about me and she loved me anyway. So I could tell her anything.
“Kicca, I’m just not sure if this is what I want. I mean, you know I am a cat—”
“A Persian cat,” she cut in.
“And he’s a dog! I can’t see how it could work. So that’s why I just kissed him. And, my God, my lips are sore—I haven’t kissed so much in decades…”
“Good kisser?” she asked.
“Actually, excellent, otherwise I would have thrown him out earlier—”
“Darling,” she cut in, “I know you’re scared. After Dino, I am scared too—Dino didn’t just happen to you, you know. But don’t punish this guy ’cause of Dino. I don’t think he’s like that at all—I have a feeling he’s genuine. And eventually you have to take a chance on someone new…”
* * *
—
Two days later, on a particularly beautiful Saturday morning, I was in Bernardo’s car, throwing caution to the wind. I had accepted his invitation for lunch at his house in the country and he had driven to Florence to pick me up. He hadn’t told me much except that Alessandro was going to his mother’s for the weekend and I hadn’t asked how I would be able to get back.
We followed the river as it cut through a wide valley, the bank alongside us patchworked by allotments, the gardens whose produce filled the markets of Florence. Hills rose up around the valley, light illuminating fields, olive groves. We drove through the town of Pontassieve, named after a bridge built over the Arno in the sixteenth century, the place where the River Sieve flowed into the Arno. From here, Bernardo told me, we entered the valley of the River Sieve, a part of Tuscany that was still relatively unknown.
We followed the river to Rufina, a prosperous-looking place that, Bernardo said, grinning broadly, he loved for its lack of medieval walls, Renaissance fortresses, towers, or historic churches. “Here we have factories, not hilltop castles,” he said and laughed. Having grown up in the Pesa valley just south of Florence, with its splendid villas, turreted castles, and refined, cultivated countryside—the picture-perfect Tuscan landscape that Dino had taken me to—Bernardo was in love with the lack of sophistication in this part of the province, its wildness, its wooded hills that rose up into the Apennines, its lack of pretension.
We drove out of Rufina and passed through another tiny hamlet. The air already felt different as we turned off onto a slip road with a sign for Monte Giovi—Jove’s Mountain. The road passed under the arch of a railway bridge so small that I breathed in as we drove through, and then over the River Sieve along a short, low bridge. Dragonflies darted on the surface of water so clear that the rocks on the riverbed were visible; the banks were wooded with beeches and oaks full of birdsong. As we crossed the bridge, the road narrowed, becoming steeper, with twists and turns. I had the sense that we were leaving the ordinary world behind, entering an enchanted land of forests, soaring hills, and mist-filled valleys. The road climbed, it was nothing like Chianti. It was big country—the sort of looming mountains that could be filled with wolves—squeezed dramatically into a small space, rucking up into steep hills and ridges over which fell dazzling beams of sunlight. The more we climbed, the more unreal it became, the road lined by chestnuts, pines, Mediterranean oaks, and beeches, all backlit by the slanting sun.
After about five minutes, we had ascended high enough to see below the glistening river weaving through the jewel-green valley. Here we swung off the road into a vast sloping vineyard. We turned off the asphalted road onto a wide dirt track that cut through the vineyard into dense woods. Having climbed partway up Jove’s Mountain, we were now traversing into the belly of one of its valleys. There was a vineyard on our left rising sharply uphill, and another on our right tumbling downhill. A group of red mailboxes was placed by the entrance.
“Welcome to Colognole,” Bernardo said, his eyes dancing. “This is the hunting reserve of the estate.” He pointed up the hill to our left, where I could just make out the yellow walls of a large villa with a stone turreted tower perched above the vineyard. “That’s the big house, and here are woods full of animals, and the vineyards and olives, so you see.”
We drove slowly along the track and entered a dappled forest. There were bushes thick with undergrowth and wildflowers, a sloping coppice filled with large yellow sunflowers facing the sun. Everything sparkled in the brilliant light.
Bernardo pulled down his window. “You feel it,” he asked, sniffing loudly, “how clean is the air?”—he pronounced it “hair.” “Is no pollution ’ere, just mountain hair, capito?”
That must be why everything is so dazzling, I thought, squinting. I could see the Apennine Mountains ranged purple on the horizon beyond the river, peaks laid over one another, soaring against the blue sky.
On a straight stretch of the track, with the hillside slanting up abruptly to our left and a vineyard dipping dramatically downhill to our right, Bernardo slowed down. “There,” he said, pointing down the hill. “That’s my house.”
Sitting below us was a large stone house perched on top of a hill that rose up out of the river valley. Behind the house on the other side of the valley the hillside ascended, terraced in parts, thick with woods, the odd house nestling in the slope. Bernardo’s house crowned the surrounding slopes, long and rectangular, with gray stone walls, a roof of terra-cotta tiles. All along the front, I could make out fences and, in between them, running on little legs, small dogs rushing up and down. Suspended as the house seemed on this knoll, the dogs looked like they were floating in midair. Tall acacia trees boughed over the house, bright yellow leaves dancing in the breeze. It was quite a sight.
I turned to Bernardo. “Wow,” I said. “That’s huge.”
“Nooo.” He laughed. “That’s not huge. You should see the castello where I grew up. This is a simple country house. My first wife and I took it a long time ago; it was just a shell. We built everything—the kennels for the dogs, the runs outside, we made all that.” I examined his strong profile against this backdrop, the scarf wrapped around his neck, his head held high, thick curls backlit by the sun. He had never looked more relaxed to me, more settled in his skin.
He followed the track, taking a last sharp bend, driving over fallen leaves, down an even rougher and narrower track shaded by trees. There were thick woods on one side. Bernardo pointed to a clearing where a collection of beehives stood in a row. Boarded on the other side by the vineyard, the track led us to tall wooden gates, which Bernardo jumped out and opened, driving the car in, then getting out and closing them behind us. The car crunched up the gravel drive; there were large fenced runs on either side with dogs running up and down them and barking excitedly. Out of the front door of the house itself came a white dog, rushing up as we got out of the car. She reminded me of a small pig, walking as if on trotters, making snorting noises. At seeing Bernardo, she jumped up as if she had springs in her paws, turnin
g herself around in tight little circles of elation, even bucking like a pony. She pointed her long muzzle up in the air and emitted a sound that could be described only as singing—a melodious sort of howl, a charming welcome-home song. And then she flung her muscular body at Bernardo, who hugged her and kissed her long nose.
“This is Cocca,” he introduced us, and the white dog came waddling over to me, wagging her tail. I patted her strong neck, caressed her soft muzzle. She was a miniature English bull terrier and she was Bernardo’s dog.
“They are all my dogs, I breed them all,” he said, indicating the runs. “But Cocca, she is my love. She lives in the house with us, she’s part of the family.”
“Well, then,” I said, “I hope she likes me.”
“Oh, Cocca is an angel,” he assured me as she poked my legs with her wet nose. “She is sweet to everyone. That’s why I called her Cocca—she’s a coccolona.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, you will see!”
I looked at the white dog and Bernardo moving around the yard, and, with their funny walks and strong Roman noses, I giggled at the resemblance between dog and owner.
Colognole had a long yard with flowers in large terra-cotta pots placed around it. Outside the house, there was a collection of smaller runs, but across the yard, down a fenced-off slope that had stone stairs built into it, there was a large bank of grass with trees, leading down to a row of large, high-fenced dog runs bordering the vineyard in front of the house. Behind the house, there were more spacious dog runs, and outside their fences, an orchard of chestnut trees and, beyond, the valley fell down to the river and the road that had brought us from Rufina.
It was delightful. The acacia trees provided shade, breezes rustling through their leaves. A long table and benches sat outside the house to the left of the front door; along the wall there were bright red geraniums, in sporadic flower.
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