by Angela Petch
Now and Then in Tuscany
ANGELA PETCH
Copyright © 2018 Angela Petch
The author asserts her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar conditions being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN:
For my children: Jonathan, Emily and Rosanna.
“Com’è triste fare una passeggiata in campagna!
La maggior parte è abbandonata.
Non si sente più il chiasso dei contadini, il canto dei pastori, il belare delle pecore, il muggito delle vacche, il tintinnio dei campani ché ogni gregge aveva il suo sonaglio...”
“How sad it is to walk in the countryside now!
Most of it has been abandoned.
You no longer hear the sounds of country folk, the singing of shepherds, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the tinkling of bells particular to each flock…”
[From “Sù, Bellarosa…sù, Pastorella!”
Published by “Dina Dini”, documentation centre of peasant life, Pieve Santo Stefano (AR).]
Acknowledgments
On a misty Sunday in late September 2012, I joined my local friends from Badia Tedalda on an outing down to the Tuscan coast. ‘Si va in Maremma per la festa del ritorno,’ they told me and I was intrigued about this nostalgic pilgrimage. I learned on the long journey how their relatives (and indeed a few of the elderly passengers themselves) used to make this trek on foot at the start of the long mountain winters because they had no choice. Out spilled the stories of hardship, of families separated for five whole months. I heard about bandits, cowboys and malaria infested swamps. My imagination prickled. In the museum of Alberese I discovered old recipes, grainy photos of peasants, antiquated machinery, tools, clothes and accounts of life away from home. And so I began to research further and to write “Now and Then in Tuscany”, a sequel to my first novel “Tuscan Roots”.
My thanks go to Fulvio Pieghai for persuading me to join in that day and subsequently providing me with encouragement and documents. The Villa Garavelle Folk museum at Città di Castello was a revelation. Maria Assunta Bellucci shared her photographs, Andrea Meschini helped with maps, Pierluigi Ricci let me use his paintings for the cover and Ben Harvey patiently put it together with his talented eye. Thanks also to my Beta readers from Sea Scribes and Arun East U3A, to Maureen Blundell (aka Roz Colyer) for her editing skills and to Alison MacLeod for her timely lecture at Worthing WOW Festival 2016, on “Editing your Novel”.
But most of all grazie infinite to Maurice, who lets me scribble away in Italy while he hacks at weeds and grows delicious vegetables.
Main characters
NOW
Francesco Starnucci
Anna Starnucci (neé Swilland)
(Parents of: Alba, Davide, Rosanna and Emilia)
Teresa Starnucci – Francesco’s sister
Giselda Chiozzi – an elderly descendant of important local landowners
THEN
Vincenza and Olinto Starnucci
(Parents of Giuseppe Starnucci, Francesco Starnucci (d. 1915), Angelo, Maria Rosa and Nadia)
Marisa (neé Bravini) – a herbalist
Dario Starnucci – Giuseppe’s son
Luisella Sciotti – a waitress
***
Author’s note: In the map, the Via dei Biozzi is the actual route of the transumanza. I have changed the family name to Chiozzi.
Many of the illustrations in my book are copies of old, original photographs and as such, the quality is grainy and indistinct. I have chosen to include them as testament to a past way of life.
PROLOGUE - 1957
Old Giuseppe had been in the bar playing cards, making a couple of glasses of wine last three hours. His friend Franco had been grumbling on about his grandson’s cushy life, how the spoilt, mollycoddled rascal wouldn’t have lasted even one afternoon of what they’d had to endure as youngsters.
‘Suffering begins the journey to wisdom,’ he’d pronounced, slapping his losing cards on the table. This remark had set Giuseppe’s own memories stirring again, like leaves scuttling down dusty cobbled paths.
After the noisy game of briscola was over he set off home. In the corner of the piazza, a battered Fiat Topolino was parked alongside a sleek Lancia where, once upon a time, mules and horses had been tethered.
As he made his way down the alley steps to his house, he pondered how different his life would have been if he’d been wise when still green behind the ears. Mistakes in his youth had led him to sleep with the wrong woman in the wrong bed; to live a life he wouldn’t have chosen; to travel a long way to eventually find peace. He thought of all the hardships he had endured. Perhaps Franco had a point about the journey to wisdom.
The key was hanging from the latch by its length of string. So engrossed was he in his thoughts that letting himself into the cool shade beyond the sun-blistered door he called out, ‘Luisella, I’m back. Put on the pasta.’
But Luisella had been gone for years. His mind was playing tricks again and he wasn’t hungry. These days he was never hungry.
The wine had been strong and the August heat had drained him of energy. Leaning his stick against the cherry-wood table and heaving himself onto the bed, he stretched out and within minutes he was asleep, dreaming of his past.
The setting sun spilled orange, pink and red onto a glass-calm sea. Giuseppe swam towards the island: a dark, triangular silhouette looming in front of him. With each stroke he could only tread water, his arms and legs leaden as if in treacle. He had to get there before the sun disappeared and the world turned black. She was waiting.
The sea’s mood changed. Waves heaved and crashed into deep valleys, like ravines he’d crossed on journeys from his mountains. Salt spray stung his eyes and each wave swept up a new image. The frothy foam was a flock of sheep, a dozen riderless horses tossed manes in thundering surf and the sun’s dying rays were embers from a camp fire. He recognised faces of old shepherds as they stretched hands towards the glow. He thought he heard a bell clanging from a gelder’s collar but it might only have been the clink of shells and pebbles tumbling to the shore. Giuseppe was dragged back to the sea’s edge where skeleton trees and driftwood were piled like funeral pyres on the sand. In lace-edged shallows, the dwindling tide lapped at his bruised body like the tongue of a cat or the touch of a woman, stroking and caressing him, teasing him.
He grunted, turned over and drifted into deeper sleep.
NOW
Chapter 1
2010 – Francesco, Anna and family
Francesco peered at his son over the top of his newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. Davide was flat on his back on the stone floor of their converted stable, La Stalla, bouncing a tennis ball off the beams of the large sitting room.
‘Davi, I’m only going to ask you once more to stop that, or there’ll be trouble. You’re going to break something.’
With an exaggerated sigh, the boy scrambled to his feet and moved over to the window.
Rain poured down the steep banks separating the garden from the meadows. The roar of the swelling river crashing over the weir near the road bridge was loud in the sitting room, despite double glazing and thick, stone walls. Curtains of rain almost obliterated the view of the mill, Il Mulino, which the family rented out to holidaymakers. Davide wondered
what the guests were doing to occupy themselves inside. This morning two girls had been sunbathing on the grass at the river’s edge. No chance of that now. Only half an hour earlier he and his father had been engrossed in putting finishing touches to a long awaited den up in the walnut tree. In summer its wide branches shaded the mill race which ended up in the former mill pond, now an ornamental garden area. He would have preferred a den built in one of the oaks nearer La Stalla. He sighed again as he thought of how he’d now have to share the tree house with children staying at the mill.
‘It’s soooo boring being stuck indoors,’ he moaned.
‘Careful…you know what happens when I hear that word. I’ll find you an interesting job,’ Francesco said, folding his paper and walking over to his son. ‘Boredom is banned in this household. I thought you had some homework to finish anyway. If it’s not done when Mamma comes back with the girls, you’ll be getting grief from her too.’
‘Don’t know where to start.’ Davide blew onto the window pane, doodling a picture of a pin man with an unhappy mouth. ‘Haven’t got any grandparents to help me with my homework like others in my class,’ he muttered.
‘What about some help from your old Dad?’
Davide squinted up at his father through his glasses. ‘You’re not old, Babbo. At least not very. Your hair’s a bit grey and you’ve got wrinkles round your eyes. But you’re not old.’
Francesco chuckled. ‘They’re laughter lines but thank you for the compliment.’
He swept up the little boy and dangled him upside down, wondering for how much longer he would be allowed to play like this. His ten-year-old son had shot up recently and Anna had taken him down to Sansepolcro on a shopping expedition to buy new clothes. She’d commented afterwards how much easier it was to shop for boys, although their three daughters were not nearly as streetwise and fashion conscious as some of the children who came to stay at Il Mulino during summer.
He set Davide down. ‘Very trendy,’ he said, ruffling up his son’s already unruly hair, sticking up as if gelled into a style. ‘What is this awful homework, then?’
‘Research about relatives who moved away from here. What they did, why, where they went - all that kind of boring stuff.’
‘That word again!’ Francesco waggled his finger. ‘Bored people are boring…’
‘But it’s soooo unfair. Everybody else has grandparents still alive and they’ve been able to record what they did and it’s easy-peasy for them. I don’t know where to start and Signorina Grazia warned us we’ve got to get good marks and those who don’t can’t go away for the sports trip in June and I know I’ll be one of them…’
He broke off before tears fell. He hated crying, tending to button up his feelings, unlike his twin sisters who chatted away like nightingales. In many ways, Francesco thought, Davide was like his mother. Brought up in England, Anna was not as gregarious or extrovert as many Italians, although she had Italian ancestry. Francesco had helped her in many ways – not least in translating her Italian mother’s war diaries and, in so doing, they had discovered her father was not the Englishman she had known but, in fact Danilo, a local Italian who had died seven years ago. Over the ten years of their marriage he had found ways to winkle Anna out of her introspection.
‘Right!’ Francesco said, clapping his hands together. ‘Bring me the biggest piece of paper you can lay your hands on and we’ll see if we can put together a family tree.’
Half an hour later, when his younger twin sisters returned from Music Club with Mamma, father and son were kneeling on the floor by the stove and already had a few names written in thick black felt-tip pen on their tree.
‘What are you two doing?’ Emilia, the slightly taller twin, dark hair plaited to her waist, was the more outgoing. Rosanna, also brunette, but with a pudding basin crop, picked up Emilia’s music bag which had been dumped by the door and tidied it away into the basket labelled with her name. Anna had devised this system of individual baskets for her children in an effort to keep the farmhouse-style kitchen tidy. Her brood, ranging from eight-year-old twins to eighteen-year-old Alba (Francesco’s daughter from his first marriage), took some organising. Anything to avoid extra stress on chaotic school mornings was a bonus.
‘We’re building up a family tree,’ Davide answered, tongue on his bottom lip as he concentrated on spelling his paternal grandfather’s name.
‘S- t- a- r- n- u –c- c- i, D- a- r -i -o. When did you say Nonno was born, Babbo?’
‘1923 and his birthday was in May, but we’ll check on dates and names at the Comune where everything is recorded. Maybe Mamma can take you in after school on Monday?’ Francesco looked over to Anna, eyebrows raised in question.
‘Did Nonno go abroad?’ Davide asked, sitting back on his haunches. ‘Gianni’s grandfather went to work in France.’
‘Your grandfather stayed in Italy. And so did your great-grandfather Giuseppe. But he had to go down to the Maremma every year during winter months.’
‘We’ve learnt about the Maremma area at school. Signorina Grazia told us it was very hard work on the coast because of malaria and that we don’t realise how lucky we are that our families don’t have to go there anymore.’
‘So you’ve studied about the transumanza?’
‘Yes, but not that much.’
Rosanna, who had been poring over the names on the family tree, piped up with, ‘It’s when men took sheep and cows down to graze at the sea-side during winter.’
Emilia added, ‘And they stayed away for months and months, because there was no work up here and it was too cold to work because of the snow and everything.’
‘Correct!’ beamed Francesco.
Anna came over to Davide and ruffled his hair. ‘Well, I know very little about it.’ She crouched down beside him to look at the chart on the floor.
Francesco looked up from what he was writing. ‘I suppose people who’ve always lived up here take it for granted. It was a given that from October until May there was mass migration of men to the coast. There was no choice and it went on until the 1950’s. You remember when we first met and you asked me to help you look into your parents’ past in Italy? How difficult it was to get people to talk to us about the war years? They wanted to forget and I suppose it’s the same about the transumanza. Now they’re no longer poor, past hardships are best forgotten in their eyes. But I think it’s brilliant children are studying about their heritage at school.’
‘Was Nonno like that too?’ asked Davide. ‘Didn’t he want to talk to you about it?’
‘He didn’t talk about the past much at all. But I do know your great-grandfather Giuseppe was a cobbler and farrier,’ Francesco continued. ‘Somewhere in the attic there are some old horse shoes he made. He was an expert in forging them for lame animals and won awards in Rome for his work. Maybe you could take some in to show at school?’
‘That would be cool,’ the little boy said. ‘Signorina Grazia’s set up a table in the classroom and there’s already stuff on there like old tools and a pair of boots that Maria’s grandfather wore. They’re clumpy and full of holes.’
‘I’ll see if I can gather more information for you, Davide,’ Francesco said. ‘I’ve some books we can look through together.’
‘And if you want more details about the English side of the family I could help you fill that in too.’ Anna said, picking up a pen to start writing the names of her half-brother and sister, Harry and Jane. But Davide swiped it from her hand.
‘No, no – the English side doesn’t matter, Mamma. This is just about family in Tuscany.’
‘And he doesn’t like having English family anyway, do you, Davide?’ Emilia added in a knowing tone.
‘Don’t you? Why not, sweetheart?’ their mother asked, getting up from the floor to start preparations for supper.
Davide shrugged and continued to write on the sheet.
‘It’s because he gets teased in English lessons,’ Rosanna explained. ‘ They tell him he’s showing
off because he knows all the answers,’ she said, turning a perfect somersault but knocking over the pot of marker pens in the process. ‘And they call him Harry Potter ‘cos of his glasses and because he’s got some inglesi relatives.’
‘Now look what you’ve done, you cretin,’ Davide shouted at his sister, jumping up and running from the sitting room, pounding up the wooden staircase to his bedroom.
His door slammed and there was silence for a few seconds. Anna put down the knife she was using to chop onions and made to follow him but Francesco persuaded her to leave him to stew for a while. ‘Are you worried about him calling his sister a cretin or the fact he’s being picked on at school for having English connections?’ he asked, rolling up the family tree and securing it with an elastic band.
‘Both!’
‘Let’s deal with it later, darling. Leave him be for a while.’
Anna returned to supper preparations, wondering what on earth she had managed to fill her time with before having children. “B.C”, they jokingly described it. She loved all of them to bits. But there were times when she longed to escape from the bedlam of family life. Lately she felt constantly tired. Some mornings she forced herself to put one foot in front of the other to confront the day. And she was putting on weight despite being careful with her diet. She worried there might be something seriously wrong, but it was easier to push nagging thoughts to the back of her mind. She craved one week on her own: one week of blissful quiet without the confusion and togetherness Italians craved. To go to bed late if she wanted without a six a.m. alarm call. Time to read a whole book in one sitting or drink wine in the middle of the day, without the responsibility of being the afternoon chauffeur to one of her children: for swimming lessons, music clubs, gymnastics and now regional tennis coaching, for which Davide had been selected. And a week of sleeping in a bed on her own might be good, she thought - without having to get up to soothe a child’s nightmares or being kept awake by Francesco’s snores or his hand stroking her thigh, when sex was the very last thing on her mind…