Bella Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

  Zucchini with Mint

  — Thinly slice or grate eight slender zucchini. If you grate, squeeze out the liquid. Quickly sauté in hot olive oil with some minced garlic. Stir in chopped parsley and mint, season with salt and pepper. Serve warm or at room temperature.

  Lemon Pie with Roasted Almonds

  I'll never forget the lemon pie of Erice. The crunch of almonds added a wonderful complement to the familiar, luscious textures of lemon meringue pie—the flaky pastry, airy meringue, and the creamy lemon custard. The almonds of Sicily have a perfume and a complex aftertaste. Because fresh nuts make all the difference, at home I order pecans from the South every fall and store the bags in the freezer. I can taste a change in the texture after a couple of months, but still, the nuts keep much better in the freezer. In San Francisco, we have access to fresh walnuts and almonds from California groves through the Saturday farmers' market. Here's my grandmother's lemon pie, enhanced with the Sicilian touch of almonds—and further enhanced when served with the fragrant Moscato of the islands off Sicily. Actually, it's my grandmother's sister Besta's recipe. Besta was otherwise known for her fuming blackberry cordials, which my father refused to drink for fear of going blind.

  — Beat the juice and zest of four lemons with 11/2 cups of sugar. Mix 2 T. melted butter with 4 T. flour, 1/4 t. of salt. Beat 4 egg yolks. Whip the yolks into the butter and flour and whisk in the juice and sugar. Gently pour in 2 cups of hot water, beating all along, and place on a moderate flame. Cook the custard until very thick, stirring constantly. Keep the flame adjusted so that the mixture cooks but doesn't boil. When thick, add 2 T. cream. Slightly cool. Separately beat 4 egg whites until stiff, whisking in 2 tablespoons of sugar at the end. Toast 1 cup of halved almonds in a 350-degree oven for five to seven minutes, shaking once or twice. Nothing is as easy to burn as nuts! Sprinkle them with a little sugar. Pour the lemon filling into your favorite baked pie shell, arrange nuts on top, then spread the egg whites in a swirling pattern and bake at 350 degrees until the meringue browns.

  Resurrection

  BEPPE STOPS DIGGING AND COCKS HIS HEAD. “Senta,” listen, he says, “Il cuculo.” He removes his wool cap and runs his hand over his tight gray curls. “They arrive for Easter.” The light two-note call of the cuckoo repeats. “Exactly on time this year.”

  With forbearance, Beppe is planting lavender along the walk to the lake view, where earlier he and Francesco installed five new cypress trees. Planting cypresses is important work but mere flowering bushes do not interest him. At his place, he and his wife hold to the separation of campo and cortile, field and courtyard. Flowers—woman's work. He's fast. Is it knowing exactly how to angle the shovel so that three or four movements are all it takes? I shake the plant from the plastic pot, and place it in the hole. Quickly, he pushes the shovel back and forth; it's done. While I seem to have to use my whole body to dig, I see him work with his shoulders, not with his lower body. Sort of the opposite of Latino dancers, who stay so still above the waist but are all action below. He lifts the shovel and shoves hard. No leaping on and off, wiggling it back and forth, no back-wrenching lifting of heavy soil. He raises it as easily as I lift a wooden spoon from cake batter. Whack! Down through the dirt. On to the next one.

  Beppe was born in the isolated mountains east of Cortona. He has taken us to his now-abandoned childhood home, an aerie in a tiny borgo consisting of a cluster of small, almost windowless stone woodcutters' houses. All his sixty-odd years he has worked the land. Unlike Francesco who is tough (at eighty), wiry, and works with a concentrated vengeance, Beppe's way of working fascinates me. He's upright, and lean. His corduroys and sweater suspend loosely from him as though from a clothes hanger. He works with no wasted motions at a steady pace. I especially like to watch him swing the scythe through long grasses. His rhythm is like a pendulum; he could be marking time in a book of hours rather than cutting weeds.

  At ten he pauses and takes a sack from the back of his new green Ape. Time for spuntino, a snack. He also takes out a jug covered with woven osier, which he fills with well water. He upends it and takes a long swig, proclaiming it “Acqua buona,” as he always does.

  While he pauses, I haul water out to the twenty-five lavender plants. “Un bel secchio d'acqua, signora,” he calls to me. Idiomatically, he probably means just a good amount, but I hear him literally, a beautiful bucket of water, which makes the carrying easier. Beautiful water, I silently tell the plants, loosen your tight roots, trauma is over, you're home.

  The car is full of five-gallon marguerites to be planted in the rose garden. I won't ask him to help me plant the smaller bedding flats or the geraniums for all the pots. The cosmos and hollyhock seeds I've started in the limonaia don't get his attention. He wouldn't refuse to help me plant, but he would be in mortal pain. I unload two marguerites. “Would you mind helping me with these big ones?”

  To my surprise, he smiles. “Ah, Santa Margherita.” She is the loved patron saint of Cortona and still lies in a glass coffin in the church at the top of this hill. We intersperse her white flowers, about to bloom, with the well-established lavender and roses, softening the line of thorny roses just coming into leaf, and hiding their scrawny legs. Contrary to usual practice, which is to grow roses by themselves, I'm going to try filling the beds profusely and see what happens. “Venerdì sera,” Friday evening, “at nine, a procession commencing at Santo Spirito goes up to Santa Margherita,” Beppe tells me. “A long procession.”

  Today is Maundy Thursday. The shops in town are filling with life-sized chocolate hens, huge eggs wrapped in bright foil with prizes inside, a mild display compared with Sicily. “What do you eat on Easter?” I want to know. But I'm thinking, what does “maundy” mean?

  “Tortellini, a good shoulder of lamb, potatoes, spinach, insalata, a little wine.” Beppe heads up to the olive terraces to help Ed, relieved to quit the fiori, I am sure. I bring more beautiful water to Santa Margherita's namesakes. I open the trunk and take out lobelia, ageratum, snapdragons, dahlias, and the ashen-lavender flowers no one knew the name of. I have a bag of sunflower seeds and packets of creeping thyme, trailing nasturtium, and morning glory. Ed will help me plant them tomorrow. Beside a climbing yellow rose on the main wall (called the Polish Wall because it was restored by Polish workers), I plant the bush with velvety, purse-shaped pink flowers. No one at the nursery knew the name of them either.

  Death is coming again to the pinned body on the cross. Strange, I always thought it was important whether or not I believed in the factual truth of “on the third day He rose.” My hand around the ball of pale roots, crescents of dirt under my nails, I'm content to believe or not, but to feel a rise in my blood as the sun makes tracks across the equator bringing back my favorite season, the long summer days.

  Maybe we were smart enough to make the gods. What better way to explain the darkest moment of the year and how it swings toward light, except by the metaphor of a birth. How to face the incredible rejuvenescence of spring except in a story of a miraculous rising. “Well,” I'm quoting myself aloud to the drooping leaves of the nameless pink plant,

  . . . if there's a God dotting lines along spheres for the sun

  to cross, good. And if not, we are more

  than we know. I can hold the windflower and

  the crucifix nail in mind at once. I wanted truth

  and find we form the words we need from flesh.

  I dig a hole for a gray-green santolina, which they used to toss on the cathedral floors in the Middle Ages to keep down the human smells.

  I splash water around the roots. “Rise,” I command.

  Hail—banging my tender new plants, hopping off the stone wall like popcorn. This tempestuous weather for Good Friday—where is primavera now? The hail stops and wind drives rain sideways against the house so that it seeps in my study window, soaking my notes on Sicilian history into swirls of blue ink that look more like tide pools than facts about the Normans. Several louvers sail into the linden tree
s, smacking the stone wall. From the bedroom window, I watch columns of rain “walking” across the valley, heading straight for us. When sun breaks through, we dash out the door, trowels in hand, plant flowers until rain starts to pelt again and we're driven back to the front door, where we dry out under the balcony.

  By evening the air clears. We're stir-crazy and go into town for a prosecco. The streets are packed—everyone from miles around has come in for the procession of the stations of the cross. We try four trattorie before we find a table at the cozy Osteria, where opera arias fill the small room, and I can have the strozzapreti, priest-strangler, pasta with a cream and hazelnut sauce. The waitress, Cinzia, seems always amused. She gestures with her hands constantly, lights the candle with a large swoop. The owner glides around serenely. Once I asked her if she was local and she said no, she was from Castiglion Fiorentino, five miles away. Ed is about to order a bottle of wine but Cinzia puts her finger to her lips, raises her shoulders almost to her ears, and points with her other hand to a Chianti that is half the price. The other, a 1994—she shakes her head and ticks her finger at him. Ed orders the homey beef braised in red wine, a true casalinga dish. We split a chocolate charlotte and think with longing of the peach charlotte they make in summer.

  Down the hill to Santo Spirito, a church I've never seen open. The doorway is outlined in lights and as we arrive, eight robed and hooded men are hoisting the crucified figure of Christ onto their shoulders. They look scary to me; I flash on the robes worn by the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, I once saw a Klan meeting around a bonfire. “What is that?” I asked my mother. “A bunch of old fools,” she answered. “And there are no fools like old fools.” I remember I've seen these odd peaked hoods in Italian paintings, worn by plague doctors along with bird-beak masks. Behind them, eight women are shouldering a figure of grieving Mary, who looks to weigh about a ton. They walk out, accompanied by people carrying torches and we join the procession up Via Guelfa. The town band is playing a tinny dirge. As we go, more people join us.

  At each church, we stop. More sacred figures are brought out and blend into the procession through the darkened town. Some people sing with the music and many carry candles, sheltering the flame with a cupped hand. Through roving clouds, the full moon comes and goes. I have the strange feeling of having slipped behind a curtain of time and entered a place and ceremony both alien and familiar to me. The music sounds atonal, shrill, almost something you could imagine hearing after death. The faces of the people stay private, except for the teenagers who are jostling and jabbing each other. We're all bundled in shapeless raincoats and scarves, further erasing connections with present time. Without the signs of haircuts and glasses, we almost could be in the fifteenth century.

  For most local people, this service is one of their yearly rituals. I'm short on rituals myself, especially ones involving torches, hoods, and the agonized Christ aloft in the streets. Good Friday, I realize, is major. In the South of my particular childhood, all emphasis was on Easter Sunday, with the main event for me being my carefully chosen new dress and shoes. I remember the thrill of a blue organdy with hand-embroidered daisies around the hem and on the ends of the sash.

  When they start to climb through upper Cortona, along the steep way of the stations of the cross made in mosaic by Gino Severini, and on to Santa Margherita, we drop out and go to a bar for coffee. The raw wind has numbed my ears. How can they carry those beams on the shoulders? Quite quickly it seems, we hear the mournful music again and we rush uphill to join at San Marco, then wind back to the piazza, where the bishop delivers a long sermon. It's almost midnight by now and we have a mile to walk back to Bramasole in the dark so we leave the throngs of people who have more stamina than we.

  Into the spirit of the Easter festivals, we decide to drive over on Easter Saturday to Sansepolcro, Piero della Francesca's hometown, to see his stupendous painting of the resurrection. The countryside between here and there rolls—green valleys and wooded hillsides, a curvy road interrupted by few villages, bucolic Tuscany. Roadsides are flush with dandelions and purple wildflowers, the first poppies are springing out in the grasses, wisteria is climbing over pale stone farmhouses. In this blissful landscape, we are suddenly stunned to see a tall African woman, dressed in tight striped pants and a revealing red shirt, standing on the roadside. Around the next bend we see another, this one equally statuesque and curvaceous. She stares. Every few hundred feet these women are stationed along the road. They stand or sit on wooden crates. One eats from a bag of potato chips. Then we see a parked car, with no woman near her crate. This is surreal. Prostitutes out in rural Italy. Some of the women are regal, with elaborate plaited hair and full red lips. All are wearing red and black.

  Who would stop? Surely not local men, who might be seen by their neighbors. And this isn't exactly the autostrada. How many delivery trucks could there be? We must have passed fifteen women just poised on the side of the road, more women than cars. Bizarre and disturbing because this makes no sense in the Arcadian valley of the upper Tiber, which appears in the backgrounds of paintings, this dreamy route known as the Piero della Francesca trail.

  I like to come to Sansepolcro. On the way we stop either at Anghiari, for its pitched medieval streets, or at Monterchi, an intact and tiny hilltown with a shady piazza. Piero della Francesca's mother was from Monterchi so the presence of his painting Madonna del Parto, Mary about to give birth, has a personal significance. No longer in the cemetery chapel, the painting is now housed in a building of its own just below the town walls. It has lost some of its former allure because it is now behind glass, and it has lost the tension that came from its location in a place of death. But, still she is staring down, not only remote and austere, as some have described her, but with a quiet inward focus. I don't know of another painting of the Madonna about to give birth. Her hand rests lightly on her stomach. Has she just felt the first mild contraction? It's an unnerving painting—the moment women recognize, when nothing ever will be the same again.

  We're so used to hills. The town named for the Holy Sepulchre is flat. It's easy to imagine Piero della Francesca walking diagonally across the piazza. His work was here, in Urbino, and in Arezzo. He was a strictly provincial person creating art at the highest level. Walking on Sansepolcro's level streets, feeling the linear perspectives of the piazza, and the shadows cutting across upright buildings, I can sense how the town layout influenced his vision.

  In the Museo Civico, which we usually find almost empty, some Italian tourists have had the same urge to visit today. It's a typical regional collection, except that the local painter was Piero della Francesca and three of his major works hang in a room of their own, among rooms of prehistoric axes, collections of small boxes, and a couple of dozen other paintings, some of which are quite interesting in themselves but suffer from proximity to Piero. A plump little boy pulls and pulls on his mother's arm, begging to go eat. She's trying to look at the art. He pulls again and she knocks him sharply on the skull with her knuckle and points to a devil in one of the paintings.

  Ed and I look first at the Madonna della Misericordia—same face as Mary in Monterchi but wearier, tighter. She has gathered many under the protection of her outspread cloak. A standard image in Italian painting, it must have been comforting when the Guelphs and Ghibellines were pouring boiling oil on each other and warring mercenaries ripped around the countryside pillaging and burning. There's still comfort in it.

  The plump little boy leans against his mother's leg, pulling her skirt around him. The room empties, except for a man looking earnestly at Piero's San Giuliano, with his puzzled—or is it lost—expression.

  Ed and I sit down in front of the famous Resurrection. Christ, emerging from the tomb, is draped in a chalky pink shroud, while below him, four guards are sleeping. The second one from the left, the security woman tells me, is a self-portrait of Piero. He looks the soundest asleep of all. “And look,” she points at his throat, “gozzo.” I have no idea what that word is
but see immediately: goiter. I've always admired Piero's necks on women. Odd to see that his own had an unnatural bulge. When he lived, the local water lacked iodine. He must have been a man of no vanity not to have edited the disfiguring goiter from his portrait. Behind Christ, we see a landscape, sear on the left, and coming into spring on the right. The composition is simple, the power palpable. “His foot looks as big as yours,” I tell Ed. The body is lovingly painted. A muscular man in his physical glory. I wonder if T. S. Eliot had this image in mind when he wrote the line, “In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger.” He has raised himself with force from the sepulchre. The pallor of the tomb is not on his flushed cheeks and sensuous lips.

  Kenneth Clark's often-cited perception of this painting is close to the heart of its strange emotional magnetism: “This country God, who rises in the grey light while human beings are still asleep, has been worshiped ever since man first knew that the seed is not dead in the winter earth, but will force its way upwards through an iron crust. Later, He will become a god of rejoicing but His first emergence is painful and involuntary. He seems to be part of the dream which lies so heavily on the sleeping soldiers, and has Himself the doomed and distant gaze of the somnambulist.”

  “He emanates the same mystery as his Madonna del Parto,” Ed notices. Yes, he's looking at what we can't see.

  Driving home, the women along the road are still out, casing cars as they pass. I can read nothing in their eyes. The tragedy, surely there is one, does not show. We turn off to take a shortcut and are relieved not to pass these women again. There are violets, hawthorn, plum trees, and quince to see, spring waterfalls slushing over the rocks, and bare deciduous trees glowing red with buds. They don't erase the brutal fact of women for sale along the road nor do they erase the flip-side connection with the stations of the cross.