Bella Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  PRIMAVERA

  BITTER GREENS OF TUSCAN SPRING

  SFUSO: LOOSE WINE

  FOLLOWING SPRING: THE PALMS OF SICILY

  A SICILIAN MENU

  RESURRECTION

  FOLLOWING SPRING: THE WATERY VENETO

  DEEPER INTO THE COUNTRY

  THE ROOT OF PARADISE

  SPRING KITCHEN

  CIRCLES ON MY MAP:

  MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE

  FROM A YELLOW BOOK:

  THINKING OF TRAVEL

  AP

  BREATHING ART

  MAD JULY: THE HUMMING URN

  LOST IN TRANSLATION

  ANSELMO'S IDEA OF TOMATOES

  COLD

  RITMO: RHYTHM

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACCLAIM FOR BELLA TUSCANY

  AN EXCERPT FROM UNDER MAGNOLIA

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Acknowledgments

  My great thanks to Peter Ginsberg, my agent, and Charles Conrad, my editor at Broadway Books. Special thanks to Dave Barbor, my foreign rights agent, and Douglas Stewart, both of Curtis Brown Ltd. Working with William Shinker, Trigg Robinson, Kathy Spinelli, Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Pei Loi Koay, and the entire staff at Broadway Books has been a pleasure. To Ann Hauk and Jon Chick, many thanks.

  Many friends were important to me while I was writing this book: Josephine Carson, Susan MacDonald and Cole Dalton, Ann and Walter Dellinger, Robin and John Heyeck, Kate Abbe, Rena Williams and Steve Harrison, Todd Alden, Toni Mirosevich and Shotsy Faust—you're welcome to pull up a chair at my table anytime. All thanks to my family and to Ed's—Bramasole's portone always will swing open to greet you.

  The people who live in Cortona have given me this book; all I had to do is write. Special thanks to Donatella di Palme and Rupert Palmer, Giuseppina Paolelli, Serena Caressi, Giorgio Zappini, Giuseppe Agnolucci, Ricardo and Amy Bertocci, Nella Gawronska, the Molesini family, Riccardo and Sylvia Baracchi, Giulio Nocentini, Antonio Giornelli, Lucio Ricci, Edo Perugini, and to our great neighbors, the Cardinali family: Placido, Fiorella, and Chiara. We are fortunate to have landed in their midst. With tremendous gratitude, I thank il Sindaco, Ilio Pasqui, and il Consiglio Comunale di Cortona for conferring on me la cittadinanza onoraria, honorary citizenship.

  My thanks to the editors of National Geographic Traveler, Attaché, San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, the Lands' End catalogue, and Within Borders for publishing portions of this book in their pages.

  FOR EDWARD

  Preface

  STEPPING INSIDE THE FORNO, I'M SUDDENLY SURrounded by the warm aromas of just-baked bread. “Welcome back,” a Cortona woman greets me. Maybe I look dazed, having arrived last night from California, a twenty-hour ordeal, because she asks, “What do you do for jet lag?”

  “I usually just wait it out. I'm so happy to be here that I don't notice it very much—just get up at four in the morning for a few days. What do you do?”

  “I stare at the sunset. Then the body knows.”

  I merely smile, but mentally I make a little bow to her. Maybe it's a small world, maybe we're in a global economy, and maybe we're slowly melting into one pot, but everyday life is still radically particular in rural Italy. Cut a slice anywhere: It remains purely Italian.

  When Beppe, who helps in our garden, tells me, “La luna è dura,” the moon is hard, and that we must harvest the onions today, I'm reminded that the moon holds sway. “But we must wait,” he continues, “and plant lettuces quando la luna è tenera,” when the moon is tender.

  Walking down into town for coffee, I see a waiter bring out a bowl of water for a customer's dog. Overhead I hear, “Buon giorno, una bella giornata,” good morning, a beautiful day. An ancient man, who has slipped into a happy dementia, leans from his second-storey window, waving and shouting. Everyone greets him with equal enthusiasm. Shop owners are sprinkling water around their entrances with watering cans, nipping into the bars for a quick coffee, their shops untended, the doors open. After a leisurely half-hour with a cappuccino and a novel, I start to pay and am told that Simonetta has paid. Simonetta? The very quiet woman who owns a profumeria where I sometimes buy soap and lotion. This gentle courtesy happens frequently.

  At Matteo and Gabriella's frutta e verdura, I see the first basket of hazelnuts still in their ruffs. The season is changing and soon all the luscious peaches and peppers of summer will give over to citrus and cauliflower, an entirely different selection. “Look,” Matteo says, “the green walnut.” He cracks it, carefully peels the skin, and hands me a smooth piece, the color of ivory. “You must eat them in three or four days. After that they are too dry.” The taste of green walnuts is not unknown to me. When I was a child, our cook Willie Bell used to squeeze the juice and rub it into my hands if I got ringworm or poison ivy. The new walnuts are gold balls, slightly damp. “Very good for low blood pressure,” Matteo continues, “but don't eat too many or you'll have a rise in temperature.”

  And so another day begins in this Tuscan hilltown. I came to Italy expecting adventure. What I never anticipated is the ab-solute sweet joy of everyday life—la dolce vita.

  Under the Tuscan Sun, my first memoir, chronicled the discovery of Bramasole, an abandoned house situated beneath an eighth-century B.C. Etruscan wall. Getting to know the superb hilltown of Cortona, the excitement of cooking in a foreign country, the intense labor of rescuing a house from ruin and the land from brambles, and meeting the people here—these pleasures paralleled the deeper pleasure of learning how to live a new life. Even the name of the house drew me here: Bramasole, something that yearns for the sun, and, yes, I did.

  I walk from window to window, taking in the view: When I wrote the last line of Under the Tuscan Sun, I wrote the first line of Bella Tuscany. I knew I was at the beginning of my experience of Italy, the inner experience as well as the outer. Views—they are so various. From my upstairs window, I see a green sweep of the Apennines. As the wooded slopes angle toward the valley, olive orchards begin, and mellow stone farmhouses with tile roofs anchor each farm to the land. There is no entrance of time into this view, except for a turquoise postage stamp far below, the swimming pool of friends. Looking out—looking into Italy! North, south, east, west is the allure of the whole country. I know more now, after several seasons of travels. I've been to the heel, to Sicily, to the watery reaches of the Veneto, those revealing extremes of this country. I've fallen in love with Verona, the Basilicata and Marche regions, Bellagio, Asolo, Bologna, and more and more with the castle towns around Lago Trasimeno, which I can see from my land.

  Travelling the circles, concentric from Bramasole, enlarges my perception of the endless complexity and richness of this country. At the same time, my travels bring me back to this rose and apricot house facing the valley. Because it seems like paradise, I continue to work to make it so. Gardening is something I always enjoyed on a capricious level. I was interested not so much in gardening as in the effects of gardening—the flower beds that bloomed on cue and the design of the yard—where to place big pots and how to see a fine range of colors from the windows. I bought flats of just-about-to-bloom flowers, and plopped them in the ground. Now I am a convert. I've fallen into the sustained rhythm of the garden. I compost the coffee grounds and the potato peels. I've learned to double-dig.

  With two men who know everything about the land, Ed and I have created extensive herb and vegetable plots. We acknowledge the distant future by planting chestnut, cypress, and evergreens—trees for the long haul—as well as the more winsome and immediate pomegranate, cherry, and pear trees. No trip to a nursery ends without the purchase of still another fragra
nt rose. Rain reactivates another fragrance, the acrid, steamy smell of sheep dung, delivered by a canny Sardinian shepherd to the second terrace just above the living room. We can't move the stuffed bags, so when it rains, we move to the other side of the house.

  Buying a house seven thousand miles from home once felt like an enormous risk. Now we just live here. How to quantify happiness? Any loved house you've personally slaved over feels like an extension of yourself. Many people have told me that when they arrived in Italy, they've surprised themselves by thinking, I'm home. I, too, had that sensation when I first came here. By now, that feeling has magnified. And, as for a loved one, I have that scarier feeling, I can't be without you. Meanwhile, the house just stands here, indifferent, facing the changing light and weather.

  Cortona

  1 September 1998

  Primavera

  FORTUNATE THAT CYPRESS SHADOWS FALL IN wide bands across the sunlit road; fortunate that on the first day back in Cortona I see a carpenter carrying boards, his tabby cat balanced on his shoulders, tail straight up, riding like a surfer. The carpenter tosses the wood on sawhorses and begins to whistle. The cat bends and leans as he moves—a working cat. I watch for a few moments then walk on into town for a cappuccino. Thank you, I think. Fortunate that yellow blazes of forsythia light the hills. After seven summers on this terraced land, Ed and I feel a rush of happiness on turning the front-door key. I'm enchanted by the rounded Apennines, this quirky house that takes in the sun, and the daily rhythms of life in a Tuscan hilltown. He's far in love with the land. By now he knows the habits of every olive tree.

  Fortunate. Otherwise, we might want to post a For Sale sign on the gate ten minutes after arrival because neither well pump is working: a grinding noise in the switch for the old well, a buzz for the new well. We peer into the cistern—at least there's enough water for a few days.

  When the pump went down into the new well six years ago, I never expected to see it again. Now, on our first morning, three plumbers are hauling up ropes, their heads down the well. It's a beast. Then Giacomo stands on the well wall, the others beside him. They're counting, uno, due, tre, giving the heave-ho. Soon they're stripped to their pants, cursing and laughing. Up it comes, and Giacomo almost falls backward. They carry it to the truck.

  The old well's pump—replaced just last year—they yank out easily. The contraption comes up with fig roots dangling and is pronounced dead on arrival. Why? They begin to dig for wires. By noon, the walkway is torn up, the lawn is carved into ditches and the mystery is solved. Mice have eaten the insulation around the wires. Why would they eat plastic when they can eat hazelnuts and almonds? The pumps have shorted out.

  The new well's pump, it turns out, is also dead. Fizzled. Kaput. By the third day, we have new pumps, new wires sealed with silicone, which the original electrician neglected to do, lots of water, a patched walkway, and a depleted bank account. If mice eat plastic, what's to keep them from eating silicone?

  Fortunate that we are served pheasant with roasted potatoes for dinner at the trattoria up the mountain, and that the early March dark spills forth a million twirling stars, because otherwise Ed's scrawled list might seem daunting: new grass, prune trees, build a shed for tools, remodel two old bathrooms, new septic system, paint shutters, buy desk and something with space to hang clothes, plant trees, extend garden.

  Primo Bianchi, a stonemason who has done extensive work here during our restoration, arrives to discuss the projects. He can start in July. “I was on your roof in January,” he tells us. “Your friend Donatella called and said there was a leak.” We've seen the dripping stain on the yellow wall of my study. “It was the wind. You lost some tiles. When I was working in the afternoon, the wind came again and blew down my ladder.”

  “Oh, no!”

  He laughs, pointing both forefingers at the ground, that gesture meaning Let it not happen here. Dark comes early in winter. I imagine him, his back against the chimney, sitting on the cold tiles, his pale blue eyes squinting at the road below, the wind standing his hair on end. “I waited. No one came by. Then a car but he did not hear me. After perhaps two hours a woman walked by and I called for help. This house was empty so long—she thought I was a spirit and let out a scream when she saw me waving on the roof. You need to think of a new roof soon.”

  He walks off a measurement of pipes we'll need for the new drainage system. It looks like a plan for trench warfare. “Hurry and order the furnishings for the bathrooms if you want everything here by July.”

  Fortunate that the place is restored—central heating, new doors, finished kitchen, one lovely bath, refinished beams, barrels of new paint, rebuilt stone walls, refitted cantina for oil and wine. Otherwise, these new projects might seem like restoration itself. “You may think you're through with old houses,” Primo tells us, “but they are never through with you.”

  Soft spring air, an elixir of joy simply to breathe in and out. Quick streams are opening on the terraces. I take off my shoes and let the cold, cold water bathe my feet. The rocky hillsides sprout ferns, glossy green. A new lizard runs across my toes and I feel the clutch of the tiny feet.

  Primavera, first green, and the wet grasses shine. A European spring, my first. I only have read of Proust's chestnuts flowering, Nabokov's linden lanes, Colette's double-red violets. But no one ever told me about quince, their sudden pink flares against stone walls. No one said the spring winds can turn murderous. No one mentioned lilac, and somehow during my summers in Italy, I never noticed the heart-shaped leaves. Now I see the Tuscan hills spattered with enormous white or smoky-lavender bushes. Near our house, a hedge of lilac leads to an abandoned farm, and in the rain I cut wet armfuls to fill all my pitchers and vases. More than any flower, the mesmerizing perfume seems to be the very scent of memory, hauling me back to college in Virginia and my first breath of lilac, which didn't grow in the warm latitude of my childhood home in Georgia. I remember thinking, How could I have lived eighteen years without knowing this? I had a terrible crush on my philosophy professor, married with three children, and over and over I played Harry Bellafonte, Green grow the lilacs all sparkling with dew. My dorm window overlooked the James River through a tangle of brush. Springtime is here and it's here without you. That my professor wore drip-dry shirts I crassly blamed on his wife; that he combed a long strand of hair over his pate I tried to ignore.

  Violets, the suffocatingly sweet-scented ones, bloom along the spontaneous springs. Naturalized double daffodils, tromboni in Italian, mass along the terrace edges. The faint mists of hawthorn (biancospino, white thorn, or, locally, topospino, mouse-pricker) drift along the upper terraces and, below, the fruit trees continue to outdo themselves. We won't mow—the luxurious grass is overtaken by white camomile and marguerites.

  What is this happiness that keeps coming in waves? Time, the gift of time, the free running of time—and Italy owns so much of it. Being from the South, I'm used to people talking about The War Between the States as though it were a decade ago. In the South the long dead and buried are talked about, too. Sometimes I thought Mother Mayes would come walking in the door again, bringing back her powdery lavender scent, her spongy body I could feel beneath the voile print dress. Here, it's Hannibal. Hannibal, who passed this way and fought the Roman Flaminio in 217 B.C. All the hilltowns celebrate jousts or weddings or battles which occurred hundreds of years ago. Maybe having so much time behind them contributes to the different sense I absorb in Italy. Gradually, I fall into time. At home in California, I operate against time. My agenda, stuffed with notes and business cards, is always with me, each day scribbled with appointments. Sometimes when I look at the week coming up, I know that I simply have to walk through it. To be that booked-up, blocked-in feels depleting. When I make the weekly list of what needs to be accomplished, I know I'll be running double-time to catch up. I don't have time to see my friends and sometimes when I do, I'm hoping to cut it short because I need to get back to work. I read about an American doctor who pumps
her breasts in freeway traffic so she can continue to breast-feed her baby and still keep up with her medical practice. An ad in The Wall Street Journal offered engagement rings by telephone for couples who don't have time to shop. Am I that bad?

  Sabbatical, what a civilized idea. All jobs should have them. This year both Ed and I have this blessed time-out, which, combined with summer vacation, gives us the chance to spend six months in Italy. Since this is my first leave in twenty years of teaching, I want to bask in every day. To wake up—without having to go anywhere—and wander the terraces to see what is coming into bloom seems like paradiso. Soon the wild irises will open. Their pointy, bruise-blue heads seem to push up taller as I watch. Narcissi, just on the verge of glory, run rampant. Already, yellow light emanates from the buds.

  I am, every day, shocked by something new and shocked that this house and land, which I thought I knew from my summers and Decembers, continue to astound me. We stepped off the plane in Florence on March 15 to seventy-degree weather and it has held, except for occasional blasts of wind. Now, the pears are turning from flower to leaf. As white petals drop or flurry—I remember hearing “peach-blow” as a child—new leaves shoot out with force. That energy has swollen the limbs of all the old fig trees and the branches of the spindly pomegranate we have just planted.

  Happiness? The color of it must be spring green, impossible to describe until I see a just-hatched lizard sunning on a stone. That color, the glowing green lizard skin, repeats in every new leaf. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . .” Dylan Thomas wrote. “Fuse” and “force” are excellent word choices—the regenerative power of nature explodes in every weed, stalk, branch. Working in the mild sun, I feel the green fuse of my body, too. Surges of energy, kaleidoscopic sunlight through the leaves, the soft breeze that makes me want to say the word “zephyr”—this mindless simplicity can be called happiness.