“Not interested.” He pulls inside the gate and stops in the dirt forecourt, scattering chickens. A woman in the old-fashioned black dress comes out, bent as a comma. She is older than Cortona. When we are introduced, she grabs my hand in her dry, hard one and does not let go as we walk around the property. As if anticipating that she soon will enter a silent eternity, she talks nonstop. I can barely look at the adorable bunnies she has scrooched together in a pen. “She sees something different when she looks at them,” Ed says. “She sees them roasting in the pan with fennel. She's not focused on their soft ears.” She tours the orto, where vegetables are thriving, looks in on two cows, flings open the lower doors of the house. Ah, a completely unrestored house, with the mangers and cantina still intact. Wine-making equipment crowds every square centimeter, dozens of rotting straw-covered demijohns, oak barrels, and bottles. In a small, immaculate room, she shows me a corner table where she still makes pasta when it's hot up in her kitchen. Jars of tomatoes line the shelves. A straight chair with a cowhide seat stands by the door to catch a breeze and her mending and knitting lie in baskets. Since she is crushing my ring into my fingers in her grip, I wish she would let go, and, at the same time, I am flattered by her instant attachment. “I think she wants us to buy the house,” Ed whispers in English.
“Yes, and it's no later than 1750 in here.”
Upstairs, she opens the rooms where her parents lived until they died. Their iron bed with a white bedspread dips on either side, conjuring the bodies of the two grim-faced sepia photographs framed on the wall. Bed. Chair. Armadio. A commode for the vaso da notte, the chamberpot. Her room is the same, with the addition of a lugubrious framed print of Christ, with dead palm branches tucked behind, and a yellowing oval photo of her husband as a young man. Fierce-eyed, tight-lipped, probably in his wedding suit, he stares toward the bed they shared as they grew older and older, older than he could have imagined when the camera caught the hot gleam in his eye. In a water glass floats a set of false teeth with plum-pink gums. His?
Like most Italian kitchens, hers looks and smells recently scrubbed. Even the faucets are polished. Inevitably, she pulls out the vin santo and pours, then she brings out biscotti. They are stone-hard; perhaps they were made in 1750. She is wonderful to behold. Since she's talking mile-a-minute to Anselmo about going to live with her daughter, and how the place is too much for her, I get a chance to look at her darting eyes full of intelligence, her hair tied under a black scarf. Her thin body is all force. I feel the indentations in my fingers where she squeezed—at least she had to let go to serve the wine.
She closes the gate behind us and waves until we're gone. Four feet eight inches at most, she's a whirling dervish of energy. I wish I knew her life story. I wish I could watch her make pasta and buttonholes. I wonder what she dreams.
“I hate for her to leave and live in an apartment in Foligno. Who will buy the place?” I ask as we drive away.
“She is asking twice what it's worth. I don't think she wants to sell.”
“I loved it. The manger could be a fabulous living room with doors opening onto a terrace.”
“I like that upstairs loggia,” Ed says.
Anselmo shakes his head. “You never know what foreigners will like. She'll probably sell to some crazy foreigner.”
“Be prepared for a six-hour feast,” our friend Donatella tells us. “Giusi has set up a kitchen in the whole barn so six cooks can work.” Her sister, Giusi, helps take care of our house when we are not here. The sisters are opposite. Donatella has an angular, dark beauty, somewhat like the Mona Lisa's, and an ironic humor. You can look way into her black eyes. Giusi in America would be Homecoming Queen. She could captain any pep squad. She's pretty, sociable, and upbeat. They are sisters and best friends. Each time we arrive at Bramasole, they've left flowers in the house, and the kitchen stocked with fruit, coffee, bread, and cheese so that we don't need to dash out if we are tired from the flight. Both are excellent cooks, who learned directly from a mother who still makes her own ravioli.
Giusi's two young sons are taking their first communion. This calls for a feast. We have not seen Giusi for weeks because she has been preparing the festa. After the service, around eighty people gather at the house in the mountains Giusi and her husband, Dario, share with his parents. Dario's sister and her family live in another house on the property. They are close to self-sufficient for all their food. The family takes care of a large vegetable garden, raises chickens, rabbits, lambs, and geese. The men hunt, keeping a supply of wild boar at the ready.
Everything they produce, and a lot more, goes into the first communion dinner. When we arrive at noon, the party is in full swing. Giusi gives me a tour of the house. For almost two years she has endured an extensive remodeling. She's kept the warm feel of the ancient farmhouse, but has installed lovely bathrooms, stone stairs, and an up-to-the-minute kitchen, which, of course, includes a wood-burning stove for cooking. Every knob and surface gleams. Every window sparkles. Outside, the prosecco already is flowing and women are passing trays of crostini, Tuscan antipasti of rounds of bread spread with various toppings: porcini mushrooms, spicy cheese, and chopped, seasoned chicken liver. Under a white tent, they've set a U-shaped table under balloons and twisted colored-paper streamers. The two boys are seated at the head, flanked by their parents. We've peered in the barn where many hands are at work. A table down the center is crowded with fruit tarts, enormous bowls of salad greens. Each woman has on a flowered dress. The barn whirls with color and motion. They're still chopping and peeling, putting the finishing garnishes together. For each plate, spring leeks, carrots, and asparagus are deftly tied in bundles with a blade of chive. I'm surprised to meet Guisi's mother. Young and red-haired, she looks nothing like her daughters. She has made cappelli del prete, pasta called priest's hats, for eighty-odd people.
As we soon find out, there are two pastas. Everyone is served a large helping of tagliatelle with a rich sauce of cinghiale, the wild boar. Many have seconds of this and I'm wiping the edge of the plate with bread for every drop of the delicious sauce. Then comes the priest's hats with four cheeses. And seconds of that. The efficient army of women swoops down and replaces our plates after each course. Someone in the barn is washing dishes like mad. Lamb with the vegetable bundles comes next, their own lamb roasted in the outdoor oven. In the distance we can hear sheep and cows, who don't yet know they will not always dwell in the lush pasture below but will be appearing on these same flowered plates. Two spotted puppies are passed around the table, petted and rocked. In earlier years it would have been babies, but with the Italian birthrate the lowest in Europe, babies are in short supply. A four-year-old flirt in a red dress is making the most of her position. She's practically ambushed by admirers. Toasts begin but the two boys, along with several friends, have absconded from the table. One gift to them was a computer with games so they've run inside to strafe the enemy. New carafes of wine replace the empties immediately. I am through. This is a stupendous groaning board. But Ed keeps eating. A little more lamb? I see him look up and smile, “Sì.” And patate? Again, “Sì.”
Suddenly three men appear, carrying something heavy. People rush forward shouting and snapping pictures. Too large for their ovens, a gigantic thigh of a Val di Chiana cow has been roasted in a hotel oven in town and has just arrived on a tray that could hold a human. Soon platters of beef and more crisp potatoes circulate. I give in and have some. Oh no, it's too good. I can't have more, maybe a taste. Ed is eating like a lord. Two Italian women have asked him if he's in films so he feels particularly expansive. Salad arrives. Then fruit tart, tiramisù, and the reemergence of the two boys, galloping out like ponies. They shyly cut a three-tiered cake and offer the first pieces to their parents. The cake has rich layers of lemon filling. Out comes the grappa and vin santo. I'm astonished. Ed has some of both. He finds himself arm-in-arm with several men, singing a song he's never heard. An accordion starts and the dancing begins. I have never eaten this mu
ch at once in my life. Ed has eaten a prodigious amount.
At five, we are the first to leave. Our friends Susan and Cole, who married at our house during the restoration, are arriving in time for dinner. We find out later that most guests stayed until eleven, with the beef making several more appearances.
Our friends have arrived early and are sitting on the terrace. Happy as we are to see them, we barely can walk or speak. Ed describes the meal, ending with, “I just hope we're around when those boys get married. Imagine what that will be like.” We collapse for two hours then emerge in the sweet time of day to take them around our garden, gathering lettuces, zucchini, onions, and herbs for a simple salad and frittata. For them. We don't want to eat or drink for three days. We sip tepid water while they enjoy a great Brunello.
In the morning, we awaken to the grinding noise of a truck coming up the drive. Anselmo is directing as it swings backwards up our lane. We get downstairs in time to watch two men unloading the torchio, the great wine-press Anselmo showed us in his barn. “Un omaggio,” he says briskly. The gift is left in the middle of the front yard. We thank him profusely, wondering where this huge piece of equipment is going to live. He launches into instructions on the mechanism and then moves into the details of vin santo. That we are not here in fall, that we do not yet have many grapes does not seem to matter. When we first saw the house, one room was strung with wires overhead and Anselmo at the time had noted, “For drying the grapes for vin santo.” Susan and Cole, both ardent gardeners, join us and assure us they'd love to come help harvest grapes. Anselmo found this place for us. All along he has helped us with restoration. Now that he is retired, he has transformed two of our terraces into a vegetable paradise. He has taken us on jaunts in his car, introducing us to country people with their own ways. He has watched Ed learn about vines from Beppe and Francesco. I feel a quick shiver in accepting this gift. Now he is passing on the torchio, like passing the torch.
Dark never turns black-dark. The stars exert their most powerful kilowatts. Also the moon, glassy in old windows, wavering and rising from bottom pane to middle to top is a pleasure for the insomniac to watch. The one nightingale, who must live in the ilex above the house, pierces the quiet with insistent notes. Dawn is the sweetest time on earth. In the last moments of dark, the bird chorale begins. One of us wakes the other. Listen, they're starting to sing now. So many, a rising cloud of birdsong, a lift, an ushering-in. Then the sky—no rosy finger of dawn but a suffusion of rose out of indigo, the quietest light on the hills and the rushing songs of the birds still rising over the absolute world unto itself. Moles, voles, porcupines, snakes, foxes, boar, all the creatures burrowed for the night return to day with this music, as we do. The deep freshness of the earth returns to those who sing, to the fusion of colors. As the sun brightens, colors sharpen and separate from each other. But where is the cuckoo at this hour?
Our friends wake to the sound of the bird who sings, “Wheat, wheat.” Ed listens every day for the bird he says sings, “When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette. . . .” from West Side Story. We take them on a wildflower walk around the land. All spring, I've photographed each flower as I found it. Most amazing have been the wild white and purple orchids. My book with the medieval wildflower cover, bought in Asolo, now bulges with poppies against stone walls, ragged robin, purple lupin, cotton lavender, wild carnations, lilies, dog roses, still unidentified spiky blue flowers. The many yellows are hardest to identify with the wildflower book in hand. There simply are too many that look similar.
Susan and I cut off rose leaves with black spots and some with the dreaded rust. These go in a bag to be destroyed. She shows me how to take cuttings from my favorite pink roses in front of the house, which survived thirty years of neglect and still bloom with a clean, violet fragrance especially strong early in the mornings. We spend hours in the garden and on the terraces picking wildflowers, then down to the orto to fill a basket with lettuces for lunch.
At home in California we are so busy we have 8 A.M. phone conversations two or three times a week, shorthand exchanges of vital information about our daughters, both of whom are in graduate school, about her bookstore business, and what we're managing to read. A few days to walk, go to a museum, cook dinner, and sit out under the benign lights of fireflies and the Milky Way, reconnects our friendship. “Why don't we have more time at home?” we ask each other, but we don't have an answer.
Like the birdsong, like the droves of butterflies and bees, the volunteer flowers in profusion delight me because they come purely as gifts of the land. Just as I'm waxing about the pleasures of rural life to Susan and Cole, an English friend calls and says they've arrived to find two drowned baby boars in their well and they've fished out the rotting, bloated carcasses with a hoe.
At dinner Cole speculates on why we've taken this place so much to heart. “Is it because it's a return to a simpler time? You get to erase the urban blight from your minds for a few months each year?”
Relaxed and enjoying the evening, with lanterns along the wall, lasagna, and the Vino Nobile they have brought, we agree. By dessert, I retract. “That's not really it. It's the end of the ugly century here, too.” I flash on the prostitutes along the Piero della Francesca trail. Trucks on the autostrada polluting like mad. Frustrating strikes, which are so frequent there's a space in the newspaper announcing when public services will not be operating. “The people aren't in a simpler time. Generally, they've just managed the century better than we have in America. Everyday life in Tuscany is good.”
“The everyday interactions with people are drastically different—personal and direct,” Ed says. “We were too geared toward the long range and the long range is a long shot.”
“There's very little violent crime, people have manners, the food is so much better and, we all know the Italians have more fun.” I realize I've said “manners,” and sounded like my mother. “I love the courtesy of encounters in the streets, purchases in stores, even the mailman seems pleased to hand me a letter. When strangers are leaving a restaurant they say goodnight to the people around them.”
We tell them about our recent trips into the countryside and the lives we've glimpsed. Our expat friends talk about how much Cortona has changed. But the changes were rapid—and needed—after the war. Now they have slowed. The life of the town is intact, they've taken the right measures to protect the countryside, the cultural life of this tiny town puts to shame most good-sized American cities. I think of the younger generation—Giusi, Donatella, Vittorio, Edo, Chiara, Marco, Antonio, Amalia, Flavia, Niccolò—bringing along all the good traditions. When our adored Rita retired from her frutta e verdura last year, a young man took over. Unlike many rural towns, this one hasn't lost its young to the cities. I've said enough and don't say any more.
A group from town walking by the house is singing together. They walk and sing. In my normal life I cannot imagine doing that on a Wednesday night. We listen to the unfamiliar song.
“Like that—Italian life is still sweet.”
“And what's also sweet is this peach parfait,” Ed says. “It makes my teeth ache.”
The past few days have added hundreds of images to my mental archives. Finding the taproots of places far in the country counterweighs the noetic life with a powerful reality. Already I return in imagination to Achille's place in the mountains with joy. Right now he may be soaping his wife's back in the cool night air. Could we have a bathtub outside? And Giusi's long, long feast, over in a day, will stick in time for its intense celebratory generosity. Ed probably will dream of the entrance of the beef leg into the tent, adding the blare of a trumpet. The signora sleeping near her framed husband with the shining eyes has spanned the century and still grabs my hand, pulling the new into her world. Anselmo has made his last wine in his barn but has his eye on our grapes. We will make the wine someday. His brother-in-law, on intimate terms with the Romans and Hannibal, has a sense of time that irritates the hell out of h
im; he wants his pears and olives to live right now.
The Root of Paradise
ED HEADS FOR THE UPPER TERRACES EARLY. HE wants to cut out a trunk of ivy which is menacing a wall. If he doesn't, tentacles will twist between stones and in two days or twenty years the whole wall will cascade down onto our roses. He pauses to watch our neighbor Placido's fifteen white doves swoop over the valley. Let out twice a day for a few minutes of freedom, they fly in loose formation round and round, then all at once head back to their cage. A movement to his left startles him. From behind the ilex tree, a woman emerges, holding a cloth sack and a stick. The forager!
She is not at all abashed at being caught. “Buon giorno, signore,” she greets him. “Una bella giornata.” Beautiful day. She waves her stick over the valley.
Ever polite, even to someone who may have helped herself to our daffodils, Ed introduces himself. “You're the Swiss professor,” she says.
“Not Swiss, americano.”
“Ah, sì? I thought you were Swiss,” she says dubiously.
Although the morning is mild, she's wearing two or three layers of sweaters, a scarf knotted at her throat, and rubber boots. She grins, showing gold. “Letizia Gazzini,” she says in a loud voice. “I used to live here but many years ago.” She opens her bag. “I always come back.” She has collected several kinds of greens and a separate plastic bag of snails. She holds up spindly weeds. “You have the wild leeks, naturally.” She rummages deeper and pulls out more. “Prenda, prenda,” take them, take them, she offers.
Ed is totally disarmed. He likes her tanned, creased face and shiny black eyes. He takes the leeks. “Did you own the house?” He's confused. We'd been told that ancient sisters from Perugia held on to the place, leaving it abandoned for thirty years.
“No, no, signore, my husband was the farmer, we lived only in a portion of the house. That part.” She points with her stick. Ed knows all too well; that section was walled off when we bought the house and had to be opened on all three floors. “Many years of hard labor. Now my husband is dead and I'm left.” She pauses. “Insomma,” she concludes, an untranslatable expression, in summary, meaning more closely, what else is there to say.
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