Amore and Amaretti

by Victoria Cosford

  One afternoon Ignazio surprises me by inviting me to accompany him on one of his trips to Montalcino, famous for its Brunello wine. His car winds up through vineyards until we reach the top of the hill. From the fortress the valleys below are bathed in pale gold. We sit outside at a little table and drink wine the colour of translucent cherries, our conversation innocuous and comfortable, then climb more stepped and narrow streets for more views and, in another bar, more Brunello tastings from enormous glasses.

  Another day I choose Il Ferrone in order to visit the terracotta factories I have often heard mentioned; on yet another, Piero, my old boss from I’ Che C’è C’è, arrives to take me out. My arms encircle his waist for one of our motorcycle jaunts up to Montefioralle, a fortified village within medieval walls so lovely I fantasise, briefly, about living there. Cobbled streets and low doorways and tiny windows belong to another century; it is only the presence of several posters up on a wall that suggests the present. From a small plain menu we order crispy fettunta (grilled bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil), spaghetti with spicy wild boar sauce and moist grilled chicken with zucchini. Even in these timeless little hamlets there will always be at least one chic boutique selling exquisite garments neatly folded on shelves: smart linen trousers, delicate woollen knits, silky sensuous blouses I dare not disturb with my clumsy, grubby fingers.

  I am asked to write an article about panettone for a prominent Australian food magazine’s Christmas issue. On several Tuesdays I spend time at my favourite Florentine bookshop, the Libreria Edison in the Piazza della Repubblica, where I position myself in front of the cookery section and learn about this traditional Christmas fruitcake. The article must be written by the end of July and enclose a workable recipe.

  This bothers me somewhat, because I have never known anyone who has actually made this cake, a cake famous for being labour-intensive and complicated. Once the piece has been written, Gianfranco and I set about the task of creation. We quickly discover how no one in his right mind would ever consider making panettone so unseasonably in the middle of summer, what with the twenty minutes of kneading the dough required. We share these twenty minutes with perspiration coursing down our faces as we grimly work through a heatwave. The whole process takes between nine and twelve hours, although most of this is yeast- and dough-rising time. Just before midnight I remove the panettone from the oven to find it is a spectacular failure. It has barely risen to the top of the special, high-sided tin I have purchased for it; moreover, it is slightly burnt! My disappointment is fractionally less intense than my sense of panic.

  We try again the next day using a slightly different recipe from a magazine. This time I am so determined to succeed that I do not heed the discomfort. The vision of that puffy golden dome and the perfume of the vanilla sweetening the air come as a great victory at the end of the night. I send the article off several days later, accompanied by some proud photos, but somehow cannot bring myself to even taste the thing, which has ceased to be food.

  Instead of museums and art galleries on my day off, I hang around shops. The six days spent boxed up at Spedaluzzo with neither need nor time to spend my hard-earned lire result in a desire almost physical to do so each Tuesday when I descend upon Florence. My list of items such as cotton balls and talcum powder is briskly attended to in stores like UPIM and Standa, after which I am free to roam, dipping into small side streets and across bridges, alternating between dusty forgotten pockets and expensive fashionable ones.

  My camera accompanies me, slung over my shoulder alongside my handbag strap. I take photographs of bakeries and cheese shops, German tourists eating gelato, a circlet of old men standing chatting outside a bar, a sudden glimpse through complicated wrought-iron gates of inner courtyards. Pictures snap of bloodless mannequins in designer-shop windows, and a gypsy woman sitting cross-legged in front of a Brunelleschi door, her head bowed over a white lamb in the afternoon shade of the Duomo. In the Boboli Gardens, the camera captures a timeless moment, when before me like a painting I am offered the tableau of a boy in a bath to escape the heat. A long, lean youth has climbed into an Etruscan bath on a mound of pebbles in a corner of coolness, his head thrown back against the green-grey stone.

  I see the coat of my dreams in a slick minimalist shop off Via de’ Tornabuoni. It is black ankle-length pure wool, soft as moss, lined with satin and double-breasted. With its slightly padded shoulders and nipped-in waist, it instantly transforms me into a small blonde Anna Karenina. It costs a month’s salary and I force myself to consider the impulse over a beer at Paskowski’s. This, the beer, is always part of the ritual and, in spite of the haughty waiters in white jackets who bring tiny dishes of salted biscuits to accompany my drink, the black-toothed woman in charge of the toilets always greets me warmly. I extract postcards of Tuscan countryside from a brown paper bag and spend the next forty minutes engrossed in writing on the backs of them. Then I quickly march off to the coat shop, suddenly terrified that my coat is already gone, and when I discover it still there I immediately reserve it. Naturally.

  Alvaro comes to save us, a short black Florentine with darting, dancing black eyes with a gently sloping paunch that hides the waistband of his apron. He loads and unloads the dishwasher with energy, washes sinkfuls of lettuces, mushrooms and leeks, springs sycophantically into the role of Gianfranco’s sidekick and becomes my new friend. He is full of jokes, winks and songs; the corners of his mouth are used to store cigarettes and the restless beginnings of funny stories. I love him more when I discover his annual custom of participating in Calcio in Costume: a traditional Florentine procession of soccer teams dressed in medieval costume. He drinks too much, calls me ‘Vickovski’, and occupies the little alcove Vera used to inhabit. He becomes a buffer for Gianfranco’s moods and tantrums and Ignazio’s surly silences. I smell his cigarette smoke in the darkness from the room I have made cluttered and snug, through whose window late into the night I continue to hear sounds of groups leaving the restaurant, car doors slamming and choruses of ‘buona notte’.

  On my days off in Florence, I sometimes cut my way through the crowds congesting the Ponte Vecchio to visit Lidia in her leather shop. Lidia is blonde, a translucent-skinned Sussex girl who has been living in Florence for the past twenty years – she is almost Italian. The partner of Fabio, our jack of all trades, she was first introduced to me long ago when I was Gianfranco’s girlfriend, but it is really only now that we have cultivated a friendship of sorts. She manages the elegant, expensive boutique for a Florentine who is largely absent, and if I arrive too early for her to take her break I observe her with customers. With Italians she slips easily into relaxed idiomatic Tuscan; with the tourists she is polite and English. Then she is locking the door and clipping in her smart, heeled boots over the bridge with me, heading to a favourite bar for lunch.

  We sit in the cool interior and talk. I usually begin, because I must spill out the past six days of Spedaluzzo to a sympathetic Anglo-Saxon female who speaks the same language – who, moreover, is familiar with the cast of characters whose latest exasperating, upsetting or bewildering behaviour I am now describing. There is such a comfort for me in her calm, resigned presence, in the way she lightly rests the spout of the ceramic teapot against her curled fingers as she pours, in her prolonged understanding nods and murmurs of ‘I know, I know’. I tell her about the latest batch of eleven-and-a-half-hour working days, and about the tantrum that Gianfranco threw after I accidentally knocked over two containers of sauce in the refrigerator – admittedly on to his newly cleaned floor – and the way he started seizing things from the fridge and demanding to know why I needed four lots of cream and two separate packages of pancetta, before hurling them to the ground. How I then flounced out of the kitchen and up to the sanctuary of my bedroom.

  I describe how my jeans are acquiring that strained level of discomfort because of all the bread and cheese and wine I so chronically consume. I relate the cruel com
ments Gianfranco made about my latest haircut, and how distressingly distant Ignazio is. How cloistered and claustrophobic it becomes, quickly, between all of us working and living there together. How when Gianfranco challenged me as to why I don’t dream up new pasta sauces to have as weekly specials I explained that the few times I did he would laugh and tell me, ‘We Italians don’t eat that sort of thing,’ but then later would ask me to think up an interesting way to bake the round zucchini he had just brought back from the markets. So, just the usual mixture of coldness and kindness.

  Lidia listens with unswerving patience, making soothing noises as she forks cake into her lipsticked mouth. Because I have worked myself up, I tell her how easy it is to lose sight of the fact that couth, civilised, intelligent life pulsates beyond the small portal of La Cantinetta. Then I stop talking, sit back and allow her to take over. Even though she has not been able to resolve any of my frustrations and worries, the mere act of pouring them all out has rendered them manageable, even a little humorous.

  Meanwhile, Lidia gratefully accepts the opportunity to unburden herself. I hear the next instalment in the tale of the house renovations, which seem to have been going on interminably. It is a nightmare. She is worn down by the chaos in which they live; Fabio is so fantastically busy helping other people with their projects that he has little time to spare for their own. And then, of course, she must cook and clean and do all the servile things expected of Italian women, in spite of the long hours she works in the shop. I know she loves Fabio, but sometimes it is hard to glimpse affection through the litany of complaints against him. Sometimes we find ourselves lapsing back into Italian when it seems that the matching English expression does not sufficiently convey the sense or the sentiment. Then we catch ourselves, and laugh. Afterwards, outside the bar, we wrap our arms around each other before separating, and I know that for her, as for me, the feeling of being fortified will remain for a long time. It will get us through.

  Chi mangia e non invita, possa strozzarsi con ogni mollica

  He who eats alone and invites no one may choke with every crumb

  Even knowing that my time here is both finite (home before it becomes seriously cold, home for Christmas) and instructional does not prevent regular assaults of loneliness. ‘You exclude yourself,’ Gianfranco tells me, referring to my tendency in a late-night post-work group to head off to bed well before anyone else, to mostly dine alone, to submerge into the pages of a novel while all around me a jovial, noisy conversation takes place. The fact is that, older this time round, I find myself less amiably tolerant of traits I once found so charming. As I am no longer anyone’s girlfriend, I am able to be my resolute Australian self, refusing (at least in spirit) to bow to the essentially chauvinistic character around me. I am outraged when I learn how Gianfranco expects Cinzia and me to clean the awful bathroom, despite the fact that we all work the same long hours; I am appalled rather than amused when I witness evidence of marital infidelity on the part of husbands, even though I know most wives take it for granted.

  I find myself irritated by the facility for spontaneity and the relative, dubious, subjective concept of ‘time’. I always used to love the looseness with which rules are applied, an almost inability to take anything truly seriously, and yet now am often frustrated by it. The passion poured into the most trivial of emotions, experience or anecdote at times exhausts me, and I find myself longing for the laconic texture of Australian life. Six days of the week boxed inside that big old hilltop building – with its fading Spedaluzzo sign on the side wall, the heavy green gates chained shut and padlocked each night – make for an odd existence. Invariably, each Tuesday night, when I have caught the blue bus back from Florence, I sit for a couple of hours over a letter to sisters or friends in which the usual self-absorbed scrutiny of my inner life goes on.

  In fact, I see how my reaction is a function not only of my upbringing and culture, but perhaps more significantly of my own insecurities. Unpredictability always throws me out; unpunctuality and behaviour outside of expectation leave me thin-lipped with disapproval. And yet, all those years ago, younger and more malleable, I was charmed by the ease with which one’s path could be diverted, and it seemed that if I stayed long enough in Italy I too might become spontaneous.

  I used to love the way, en route to an appointment, Gianfranco and I would bump into someone we knew, and immediately be bundled off to the nearest bar for a coffee. Everyone operated like this, so it was perfectly acceptable to be late. It is a talent for living, and living fully for the moment, involving oneself completely in the landscape of life. In the face of it, I see how pinched and deliberate my own life is – and yet I am incapable of changing.

  A chi trascura il poco mancherà pane e fuoco

  Be grateful for what you have

  Piero, my old boss from I’ Che C’è C’è, putters up the hill on his motorbike and parks it on the gravel next to the garbage skips. I would never have imagined Piero as a biker – he is such a refined man – and yet his fingers are self-assured as he tightens the strap of the second helmet under my chin and kicks the machine into life. He comes to my rescue, on occasional weekday afternoons, and bears me off to villages and hill towns to look at castles and taste wines and attend markets and little local festivals, or sagre, which take place throughout the year in celebration of mushrooms or wild boar or a type of flower. Dear Piero is unchanged after all these years, though no longer running a restaurant, but throwing his energies instead into taking groups of tourists to vineyards and educating them about wines.

  I lean with Piero around bends and curves as we twist our way up to hill towns enclosed by walls; Piero’s stomach is all hard muscle. At Il Palagio vineyard in Castellina in Chianti we are enchanted by the little castle that perches in its grounds. Clicking our way across the intricately tiled inner courtyard, we find the pretty chapel with its mosaic walls, its slender soulful Madonna and its violent canvases depicting slaughter.

  We bump along unsealed tracks until we reach a low, flat building in the middle of a homely farmyard. Inside the building, Danish girls with fiercely ruddy cheeks and white shower caps scrub down endless expanses of stainless steel at the end of the ricotta-making shift. Domes of snowy cheeses imperceptibly quiver in neat lines. At the lily sagra (festival), we stand before an antique olive press, eating sticky fried pastries, while Piero explains to me all the stages of olive oil production. He shouts back to me, riding pillion, an amusing story about a mushroom hunt with friends in nearby woods, where unplanned psychedelic experiences occurred, and I laugh into the laundry fragrance of his shirt.

  These outings return me to a sense of where I am and who I am, expanding my world with possibilities. I invariably come back resolving to pack more into my days here, but, unless Piero visits, resettle into the habitual groove.

  July and August are fantastically hot, the outside temperature in the high thirties and the kitchen worse. Fortunately, during the day we are not busy, but in the evenings we run. Whereas I am used to making batches of tiramisu on a twice-weekly basis, I now find myself needing to do so every day. A small fan whirrs asthmatically beside me all night long in the little room I have come to think of, for all its eccentricities, as a haven.

  One Saturday night around the middle of August, Cinzia stands in the corridor screaming that she needs to go to hospital for tranquillisers. Gianfranco, in a voice like ice, orders her to go upstairs to bed. I sit beside her as she sobs and heaves, and I say soothing, meaningless things until she becomes calm.

  After Cinzia’s breakdown, Gianfranco decides we all need a break, to tie in with the annual national midsummer holiday, Ferragosto. Incredibly, the cocktail of heat and intense working conditions has made Gianfranco contrarily good-humoured and cheerful – presumably, the success of the restaurant is contributing as well – and he and I fire along together beautifully. Even Ignazio (whose girlfriend, I realise, I dislike precisely because she possesses t
hree features I lack – namely, youth, beauty and slenderness) behaves with less ambivalence, and more friendliness, towards me.

  One night at five to midnight, I find myself sitting in bed surveying my room – plunged into shadow and lit by one tiny bedside lamp – with pleasure. Today I made forty-two crêpes and two cheesecakes, one flourless chocolate cake and a double carrot cake, a batch of biscotti di Prato, savoury biscottini, salsa di guanciale and salsa ghiotta.

  Through pinched, tired eyes I look at the luxuriant plant in the tiny alcove below the window, my desk cluttered with books, letters, photos, pens, envelopes and diaries. There’s my handbag and a flask of Chianti propping up mail. This is one of the rare times I feel a quiet happiness because, despite having failed my last few attempts at dieting, I am beginning to think I will drop the notion of being a tiny size 8 and relax into just being me. Now that would be progress.

  In August, everyone heads to either the seaside or the mountains. Florence is almost deserted, with most businesses closed behind the ubiquitous green shutters.

  Gianfranco and Cinzia leave for their days off. They have decided to close the restaurant for five days to go to the Isle of Giglio, where Cinzia’s parents own a house. Ignazio heads off to Yugoslavia with a group of mates and I elect to stay behind at Spedaluzzo in luxurious solitude.