In Maremma

by David Leavitt

  Then the examiner himself arrived. He was a short, misshapen, corrupt-looking man with hair like a Brillo pad. In his arms he carried a thick briefcase which, we soon learned from Signor Antonio, contained the licenses for all the examinees who were waiting for him. Before beginning his work, though, he first had to be taken to the bar for coffee by Signor Antonio and his cohort of other “instructors.” While they were in the bar, an order for the exams was worked out. There were twelve examinees. We were to go seventh and eighth.

  The long and the short of the exam is that one of us passed, the other failed. The one who failed was the first one of us to go, and the first American of the day as well. (All of the Asians had already failed.) Halfway into the exam, the misshapen examiner began delivering himself of anti-American invective to Signor Antonio, who was in the car to man the second set of brakes. “Americans think they can come into Italy and get whatever they want,” he said. One did one’s best to maintain one’s cool. “They have to be taught,” he continued ominously. One called attention to two cars that had just run a stop sign, and was ignored. “This American;” the examiner said, then broke off to call Signor Antonio’s attention to a poster for a female candidate in the upcoming election called Monica Ciccolini and made a deeply rude remark about her person, as well as the similarity of her name to that of the Italian porn actress and politician Cicciolina. Signor Antonio, meanwhile, had joined cause with the examiner and put in his oar about Americans—even though we had paid him one hundred thousand lire apiece to advocate for us.

  Why one of us passed and the other failed was a caprice, for the system was designed so that the examiner did not have to be accountable for his decisions. If a passing surge of antipathy towards Americans was his reason for failing one of us (who passed the following month), the examiner would face no reprisals. We recalled once again what Pina and Giampaolo had said about the sadism of the Fascists; for all its rhetoric about noi (us), Fascism was deeply divisive. The populace was to be kept down, made anxious and insecure, even tyrannized, with the state transformed into an almost Homeric god. In the person of the driving examiner, we met that same sadism: a false and repellent pride in being Italian—and in not being Japanese, or Indian, or African, or Canadian—the implications of which were given weight by the then-recent movement of some citizens in the rich, Northern part of the country to secede and form a new nation called Padania; by the rise of Neo-Fascism in the raiment of Forza Italia; by the constant pressure of the Catholic church to sustain a culture of conformism. Nor was the irony of this scene being enacted in the Olympic Village, a forty-year-old monument to an ideal of fraternity, lost on us. For though the Italians were vocal in criticizing their government, the fact remained that Italians had the system they had chosen, the system they wanted.

  There is no charm in any of this. The cloud has no silver lining. One is not made a better person for having had the experience. But cynicism is not the answer; nor, for that matter, is romanticizing bureaucracy—a thing to look at unflinchingly, and to be made angry by, and finally to grieve for.

  An Italian driver’s license, hard won.

  14

  SEMPRONIANO, HOME TO about six hundred souls, sits more than six hundred meters above sea level, overlooking the valley of the Fiora. The oldest and highest part of the village is medieval (until a few decades ago it was called Samprugnano and its residents Sam-prugnanesi ), a clutter of dark stone houses piled on their hill like luggage at a train station. Then, down from the piazza, the village flattens; the streets widen. It is here, in modern apartment buildings that could not be more remote from the medieval houses of their ancestors, that most of the Sempronianini live today.

  Semproniano, 1911 (from Samprugnano 1900-1963: Storie e Figure)

  Semproniano had no sights of great historical interest, which was one of the reasons we were so fond of it. Indeed, the Blue Guide to Tuscany (second edition) had only this to say of the village:Semproniano (trattoria la Posta, 6km S at Catabbio) is a small town situated high up (600m) and clustered round the ruins of its Castle built by the Aldobrandeschi. In the nearby Romanesque church of Santa Croce is a Renaissance holy-water stoup and a very expressive wooden medieval Crucifix. In the Borgo is the Pieve dei Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio with a tall bell-tower. Among its 17C paintings is the Madonna of the Rosary by Francesco Vanni (1609), originally painted for the cathedral of Pitigliano. The oratory of the Madonna delle Grazie, on the outskirts of town, has recently been restored [as it happens, by Sauro], and its decorated Baroque interior is typical of the district.

  In short, no Caravaggios, no Giottos, no Della Robbia babies. Brunelleschi never worked here; neither did Leonardo. And yet the town had sat on its hill for a long time, and at certain times of the day, it looked as if it might have been painted by Giorgio di Chirico. (To understand di Chirico well, you have to know Italy on a summer Sunday afternoon, when everything is shut up.)

  Alfred Pellegrini (Recollections and Collections): “There are two streets: a high road and a low road. When the townspeople are not sleeping, eating, or working, they take walks. When it is warm, they walk the high road for the cool breezes. When it is cold, they walk the low to be protected from any breezes.”

  Semproniano had one bar—the Bar Sport—and it was here that we began the day, in the Italian fashion, with a cappuccino. Miranda and two of her sons, Alberto and Stefano, ran the bar. The boys’ father had been killed in a hunting accident several years before. In contrast to his brother, Alberto was vain, and never came to work looking less than immaculate: he was always scrupulously shaved, cheeks glowing, hair perfectly cut, dressed in a blazing white shirt and pressed black pants. Stefano was more relaxed. He was engaged to Samantha, whose father owned the principal bar in Saturnia.

  With Alberto, we had a lighthearted relationship. For instance, when we came into the bar in the morning, he’d smile at us and say, “Mazzafegato?” “Mazzafegato,” MM would reply, and be handed, instead of a sausage, a Danish pastry filled with cherry jam. DL opted for a Danish pastry with “bechamel” (pastry cream), or sometimes “capers” (raisins). Occasionally Alberto would tell us that since he had run out of cow’s milk, he would have to use latte d’oca (goose milk) for our cappuccini. Presently he might complain about the tropical fish in his aquarium, which had failed to live up to his expectations of them: they weren’t at all interesting, and if they didn’t start to comport themselves better, he planned to fry them and eat them.

  The Bar Sport at about eight in the morning was the place to be in Semproniano. Rosaria, the doctor, was usually there, having just dropped her daughter off at school; because she was the doctor, Stefano told us, she hadn’t paid for her own coffee in years. If we needed her to look at something, she’d take us into the second room of the bar, fitted out with pinball machines and a pool table, for a consultation. This was very kind of her, for it meant that we didn’t have to wait for an eternity to see her in her clinic, where the elderly began jockeying for appointments early and in considerable numbers—many of them, Rosaria told us, not because they were unwell, but because they were lonely.

  The other regulars included Stefano, the owner of a local abattoir (every so often he’d bring a delicacy, such as a fresh sheep’s heart, for Tolo); a man with moles who looked as if he’d just stepped out of a painting by Breughel; and a man who looked exactly like the man on the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in a Monopoly set. There was also a coterie of old ladies known as le donnine who stopped in while doing their shopping and fought over the bill (“un terremoto”—“an earthquake”—Alberto said), and finally the few taciturn old Maremmani who took their espresso, at any hour, corretto (with liquor; literally “corrected”). On quiet mornings you might encounter three of them sitting on the three bar stools, asleep.

  After breakfast came shopping. The Piazza del Popolo, around which most of the shops were clustered, was also a genial meeting place. (One of the neat, though not surprising, things about tiny Italian towns
is that their piazze often bear the same names as the great ones in big cities.) Here we would often run into Sauro’s wife Silvia, peripatetic in her pumpkin-colored Fiat 500, buying bread after taking her son Ettore to school. (Silvia resembled no one so much as Mrs. Tasmanian Devil in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Sauro was the spitting image of Barney Rubble.) Perhaps she’d have stopped at the Bar Sport to get her lottery ticket from Alberto, in the hope that she too would have the luck enjoyed by the anonymous Sempronianina who had recently won two hundred and two million lire (about one hundred thousand dollars at that time) in the SuperEnalotto.

  Disparaging the charmless anonymity of American supermarkets, which sacrificed the personal touch on the altar of efficiency, we would then go to the frutti-vendolo for fruits and vegetables, to the panetteria for bread, to the macelleria for meat, to the salumeria for cheese, to the edicola, which sold, in addition to cigarettes, teen idol magazines and those maddening marche da bollo (stamps) that Italian bureaucracy required one to affix to every official document. In the edicola there was a single revolving bookcase displaying, alongside the latest works by Danielle Steel and John Grisham, translations of Proust, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf.

  One morning, waiting for our International Herald Tribune, we ran into Maria Pia, mother-in-law of Rosaria. Having recently learned that we were writers, she told us that as a girl she had loved to read, but that her mother had warned her that reading would make her go blind. In those days, she said, most people were too poor to buy their own magazines; instead, every month, the women in the village would pool their resources to buy a single copy of Grand Hotel, which would be passed from hand to hand over the course of a month. (Grand Hotel, the first issue of which was published in 1946, featured the old-fashioned genre known as the fotoromanzo: a soap opera in pictures arranged like a comic book.)

  Next to Pietro’s edicola was Carlucci’s, the larger of the town’s two grocers, which opened right onto the piazza and faced Gigliola’s panetteria. It was to Carlucci’s that we went for basic provisions: mozzarella from Caserta (Silvia’s home town; we once witnessed her stealing the Caserta phone book from the Bar Sport), Acqua Panna (to be drunk out of the glass Loando left at the house), and, when nostalgia for America got the better of us, a Kit Kat bar or a box of M&M’s. Three generations worked at Carlucci’s: Sirio, Aldo (Sirio’s son), and Gianni (Aldo’s son-in-law).

  Chianti Roses in the Acqua Panna Glass (Photo and Roses by MM)

  Aldo himself was a repository of local history. From him we learned that once upon a time, at Christmas, a kind of bocce, with the victor receiving a small purse, was played here; except that instead of bocce balls one used a panforte, a traditional rock-hard cake from Siena. Once upon a time, when the tombola (an Italian version of Bingo) was played in Semproniano, dried beans were used to cover the numbers, since tombola cards pre-equipped with little plastic windows had not yet been invented. We also learned that the old cure for bronchitis was to drink red wine into which a glowing hot iron had been plunged.

  With his thick hair and pencil-thin mustache, Aldo looked like a 1950s Italian film star going to seed. His father, Sirio, who was in his seventies, had cold blue eyes and an impressive nose. Years ago, he had directed an orchestrina in the town. His wife, Elda, was a beauty then, and loved to dance. Though she remained beautiful, occasions for dancing—at least the sort of dancing that Elda liked—were now all too rare. Occasionally, we also ran into Aldo’s grandmother, a vigorous and keen-eyed woman of ninety-six whom nothing got past, and probably never had. She’d greet us jovially, and always remembered our names.

  We used to buy our meat in Saturnia, but gave up, as a consequence of the many locals and tourists who shopped at the macelleria there. As the customers had a tendency to buy tiny quantities of many different meats—a single slice of prosciutto, one sausage, half a chicken breast, two etti of ground beef (a little less than half a pound)—we often found ourselves having to wait as long as forty-five minutes to be served. We also discovered that where food was concerned, un po’ (a little) could mean quite a lot indeed. For instance, one afternoon a large woman from Bologna asked for “un po’ di salsiccina.”

  “Quanti?” the butcher, Vito, asked.

  She hesitated. “Eighteen.”

  Impatience, then, first prompted us to try Andrea, a younger butcher who had set up in Semproniano. His macelleria provided an altogether more pleasant (not to mention speedier) experience. Like most Italian artigiani, Andrea took great pride in the quality of his meat, all of which was raised at a small azienda a few kilometers from Semproniano. Among his specialties was an extraordinarily good pancetta from just over the hill in Cortevecchia, and capicollo, a fennel-seasoned salami made from the neck of the pig. That Maremman taste was not necessarily ourtaste, however, was brought home the morning we saw displayed in Andrea’s gleaming glass case the brains, lungs, heart, and liver of a lamb, to be eaten fried. This was a favorite dish of Maria Pia’s.

  The most distinguished person in Semproniano was the pharmacist. She was in her late sixties and always dressed with sober elegance, her hair drawn into a chignon. When she had no customers, she would read—always a work of literature or philosophy—at a lectern in her study off the pharmacy proper. She had an adopted son, Antonio Russo, who was a year older than us and whom we met a couple of times. (Once we had dinner with him and Signora Idia at Il Mulino.) He was an investigative journalist at that time (2000) documenting the war in Chechnya—in particular the atrocities committed against the Chechen people by Russia. During one of his trips to Chechnya, he was captured, subjected to tortures recognizable as those practiced by military special forces, and murdered. His body was found off a small road near Tbilisi, Georgia. (The library in Semproniano was named for him: Biblioteca Comunale A. Russo.) His mother bore this ultimate grief with the dignity of a queen.

  On the Fibbianello, the road that linked Semproniano and Saturnia, was a small refuge for injured or abandoned animals run by a local branch of the World Wildlife Fund. The occupants here included peregrine falcons, hawks, several varieties of owl, a tamed daino (fallow deer) who rubbed his velvety antlers against your leg, two wolves who were fed entire lamb carcasses and whose area of the refuge was littered with wool and bones, and a baby wild boar, whom Elda bottle-fed each day. There was also, curiously enough, a pair of obese raccoons who had stowed away on a ship from Canada, escaped for a while into the port city of Livorno, and were eventually brought here. When recently we brought some Canadian friends to see the refuge, Brunella, who volunteered there, asked them if they might be willing to repatriate their countrymen.

  When we first started living at Podere Fiume, we attempted to have the mail delivered to a box at the end of the road, but this did not work out very well. Owing to the convolutions of the Italian postal service, mail for Podere Fiume had to be routed through Santa Caterina, quite a distance away on an extremely curvy road. In those days, the road between Santa Caterina and Podere Fiume was still unpaved, so as often as not the postman would not deliver the mail if it was raining, or if it was cold, or if he thought there was not enough to justify the effort. During a period when he was delivering the mail more or less regularly, the postman one day taped a note to our box informing us that he had seen a wasp crawl into the opening and therefore would not deliver any more mail to us until we met him at the mailbox and proved that we had removed the wasp’s nest from it. After that, on no fewer than three separate occasions, we found tarantulas in the box.

  It was Maurizio, the postmaster in Saturnia, who proposed that we take a casella (box) there. That way, we would not have to worry about wasps or tarantulas. Moreover, we would get our mail at least two days sooner, since it would no longer have to be routed through Santa Caterina.

  The first Christmas we had a casella postale, we gave both Maurizio and Florio, the Saturnia postman, a bag of coffee beans from Tazza d’Oro, a famous coffee shop near the Pantheon in Rome. Maurizio a
nd Florio were at a loss: Maremmani are not ungenerous people, but they are unused to receiving presents. When we arrived at the post office to pick up our mail the next day, Maurizio loaded bottles of olive oil, wine, and grappa from his family’s farm into our arms. Everyone in that part of the world farmed at least a little.

  15

  PINA’S RESTAURANT WAS located in a former flour mill not far from Maria Pia’s house. There were eight tables, and a big fireplace that roared and crackled in winter (at midnight on New Year’s Eve, Pina threw laurel branches on it), and over the fireplace a portrait of Pellegrino Artusi, author of La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene and considered the father of Tuscan cookery.

  The first time we ate at Il Mulino (this was in 1993), we were with a lawyer friend from Salerno who was offended when Pina addressed him familiarly (that is, with “tu” rather than “lei”) even though he had addressed her familiarly. Since English has no distinction between formal and informal modes of address, we weren’t offended. Besides, as our late friend Lou once pointed out, the formal mode of address is quite often used ironically—the “ironic lei,” he called it.