by Angela Petch
‘How lucky we are,’ Anna said, snuggling in to Francesco’s arms. She reached for a shell, fingering its smoothness, admiring the way it curled into a secret interior, before slipping it into her pocket as a souvenir of the day.
Chapter 30
Francesco - 2010
On a mild and sunny Sunday in early October, Francesco left La Stalla after lunch to clean the footpath that led from Montebotolino to the remains of fortifications along the Gothic Line.
He needed the workout after an indulgent lunch and relished the chance of a couple of hours’ solitude. The view of Alpe della Luna across the river valley was like a watercolour in the autumn haze. He hacked at brambles blocking the path, wondering who might have been the last walker to come this way. Maybe it was himself, the last time he had pruned and clipped, for there were never many walkers in these parts. This area was a tourist route waiting to be exploited and as he worked he thought through some guided walks he could present to the tourist office.
Fluffy white seed heads and tendrils of Old Man’s Beard were beginning to strangle saplings and juniper bushes and he cleared away as much as he could. It was satisfying to see the difference his labour was making. At the top of the peak of Montebotolino he stopped to pick an apple from a tree that sprouted a couple of metres from the bank of an old gun emplacement. As he bit into it he mused on how it might have come to grow in such a remote spot. Had it perhaps been a tree grown from the core of an apple, eaten by a young German waiting by his machine gun in 1944 – a blond-haired, blue-eyed, homesick lad maybe? He’d eaten the apple and flung the core from his trench where leaf-mulch, rain and sun had done the rest.
When he had finished clearing the undergrowth, Francesco made his way down the steep path and along the dirt road to where he’d parked his car on the edge of the deserted village.
Storm clouds were looming to the east but he reckoned he had half an hour before rain fell. He would treat himself to a few extra minutes in Montebotolino before returning to the happy chaos of his family. Some folk found it a ghostly place. It was dubbed ‘the village up in Paradise’ by a local author and he tended to agree. However he was torn between wanting it to remain secret and coming to life once again. He liked the idea of the village being restored to how it once must have been when his great-grandparents had been alive. Montebotolino had been famous for its carpenters and he imagined the sounds of hammers and sawing echoing from the stone houses. Now all he could hear were the last summer cicadas and the leaves rustling in oak trees as he made his way along the grassy paths. And it was peaceful.
He wandered away from the little piazza with its metal cross erected in 1925 still standing proudly in the centre, and along a steep ridge leading to the church of San Tommaso with its campanile. It had once served as a defensive tower but now housed church bells. The neighbouring house was owned by the Curia and it was crumbling away. The roof had tumbled inwards and what was left of the walls was now propped up with metal beams.
On an ancient, twisted apple tree, a laden harvest of red fruit stood out against the old stones of the bread oven beside a house that Anna’s father had rented. Like several others this had a bar and padlock guarding its door, for thieves were frequently tempted to this isolated spot, foraging for anything old they could lay their hands on. Even rusty rings secured to outside walls, once used to tether animals, were considered saleable. Not even the Curia’s house was considered sacred, Francesco thought, as he picked up a discarded pack of cigarettes. He couldn’t understand tourists who came to the countryside seeking beauty and tranquility, yet who selfishly left litter before returning to the city.
His grandmother Marisa’s house was for sale, along with another couple of houses in the village. The new property tax on second homes was flooding the market with dwellings selling for ridiculously low prices. Francesco would have loved to pass down Marisa’s house to Alba as a special eighteenth birthday present, to keep it in the family. But the place was falling apart. It would be a money pit and he and Anna needed any extra income for their children’s education. He undid the padlock on the front door and pushed it open. The house was riddled with damp and woodworm and the floor of the upper storey had rotted away. Somebody wealthy needed to fall in love with his grandmother’s wreck of a building and restore it to its former state.
But was Marisa his real grandmother? Or was she Luisella Starnucci, neé Sciotti? He didn’t know anything about Luisella but Nonna Marisa had been a legend. Everybody had something to recount to him about her. Like how gifted she had been at curing people’s ailments with her herbs and potions and how very kind she was. How she would give away her beautiful embroidered pieces if anybody admired them. So much so, that there had been nothing to pass onto Anna who loved anything vintage and hand made.
And did it matter anyway? He’d heard say that knowledge of the past was important for freeing the future, but how could it be possible to know everything about the past? How many stories had been forgotten over the years? How many secrets or skeletons in the cupboard were lost in time because people were ashamed or felt their past was unimportant.
One look at the metal grey sky told him that heavy rain would soon be falling and he hurried away. As he turned left out of the garden area in front of Marisa’s old house, he caught a movement at the top window. A shadow, or a trick of light? Or merely a piece of loose plastic taped across the broken pane?
For a moment he leant against his car, watching storm clouds gather over the valley. The plateau of Sasso Simone loomed through grey mist, marking the boundary between Tuscany and Le Marche, looking for all the world like an enormous helicopter landing pad. All that now remained of Cosimo dei Medici’s fifteenth century fortress city up there were a few stones marking boundaries and parts of a road. What traces would remain of his own family home, Francesco wondered. Would Il Mulino and La Stalla crumble away like the fortress? And what of his family, made up of Italian and English cultures, that might never have been created if Anna hadn’t arrived in Tuscany ten years earlier. What would remain of their stories once they were gone? He’d helped her discover who her real father was - not Norman the British POW - but Danilo, from this very village of Montebotolino. And now the same doubt over identity had crept into the history on his side of the family and Luisella might or might not have been his real grandmother. But there was no point in dwelling on might and maybe or chasing after the missing pieces of ourselves. People could argue for evermore between nurture or nature but we are what we make of ourselves, he concluded, and we can only do our best.
He scanned the mountains covered with untamed woodland, a few patches of flower-dotted meadow breaking up the blanket of green. The river Marecchia flowed like a silver artery in the valley down below, fresh and clear. And a saying of Anna’s sprung into his mind. She’d told him it was from one of her favourite poems, as she’d recited it to him in their early days, one sticky afternoon when they’d picnicked by the river. Parts of it he’d never forgotten. Life was like “a bubble on the stream…an hour-glass on the run, a mist retreating from the morning sun.”
‘Which is why we have to make the most of it’, she’d said, and so they’d made love there and then on the bank under a willow and laughed afterwards as they removed grass from each other’s sweaty skin, Anna complaining ants had bitten her on her backside.
Chuckling self-consciously at his unusually philosophical thoughts, Francesco climbed back into his old car and drove down the mountain to his family, in time for afternoon tea.
Afternoon tea. English-style. In Tuscany.
Epilogue
Marisa - 1965
It was during the winter of 1957 that my Giuseppe developed a nasty chest cough.
At night I knew he was trying not to wake me. He’d pull the quilt up over his head to muffle the sound, but the metal bed ends would shake and clatter against the wall with each racking cough and I couldn’t asleep anyway.
I tried several treatments on him: inhalants fr
om rosemary and sage and juniper berries washed, boiled and filtered to brew liquids that I gave him twice a day. At first they soothed his cough. But one morning his pillow was speckled with blood.
I knew then there was nothing more I could do for him, except ease his symptoms.
Dario had a good job. At that time he worked down in Pieve Santo Stefano for the Forestry Corps and he insisted on paying for his father to visit a specialist in Arezzo. The X-rays showed shadows on both lungs.
We didn’t tell him about the prognosis. Maybe it was selfish but I thought if I told him, he would go too quickly. I wanted him with me for as long as I could have him.
On a balmy afternoon, at the dying end of summer 1958, he asked me to come and help him in his orto. That was strange in itelf, because as a rule he loved to escape to his vegetable patch and work alone.
‘I’m going to dig around my thoughts,’ he would tell me and off he would go. He’d spend hours hoeing weeds, pruning his vines, digging chicken manure into the poor soil. He’d built a bench by the hedge from old oak floorboards, and he’d planted a fig tree beside it for fruit and shade. Oh yes – and an apple tree with Dario when he was very little. They’d sown a pip from a special type of apple – I forget the name now, but Giuseppe bought it from the fair down at Ranco. ‘I might not live to sit in the shade of this,’ he said, ‘but maybe Dario’s children will.’
And he was right – years later little Francesco loved to play beneath its branches, whilst baby Teresa slept in her basket, bless them both.
There was a wild plum tree too, which he’d transplanted to the Montebotolino side of the orto fence. It’s not there now. It survived him by only two years. An early frost killed it.
‘Come and help me gather plums,’ he said. ‘Then you can make jam and we’ll be set up for winter.’
We arranged an old sheet under the branches which were so laden they almost touched the grass. Thud, thud, thud went the plums as he shook the tree. Some of the fruit rolled away and I turned to collect them for my basket. I heard one more thud and when I turned, I saw he was on the ground.
If I hadn’t been there that afternoon he would have lain outside for two hours or more. Most likely he would have died frightened and cold, and alone.
As it was, he never set foot in his orto again. He was paralysed down his left side and he couldn’t speak. I had to feed him, bathe him and dress him.
I’m glad I had him for those three precious remaining weeks. Like a mother tends to her baby, I did everything for him that a man should be able to do for himself. But he wasn’t a baby – he was my husband. And even though he could no longer speak, he would gaze at me with those beautiful eyes of his. His eyes spoke for him. I saw tenderness there.
And I knew he loved me.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mi rivedo ragazzo – Florido Fanfani
Di Guerra si muore – Maria Grazia Linares
Testimonianze di ruralità montana – Maria Teresa Tocci & Alberto Santucci
I Percorsi della transumanza in Toscana – Paolo Marcaccini & Lidia Calzolai
Per non dimenticarli – Egidio Mascioli
Il Paese sul Paradiso – Marta Bonaccini
“Il bisogno aguzzo” – Associazione centro documentazione storica civilta contadina “Dino Dini”.
and
“Su, Bellarosa...su, Pastorella!” – (La fatica e la speranza dei contadini) - Centro di documentazione storica della civiltà contadina “Dina Dini”, Pieve Santo Stefano (AR).
The children’s project at the Scuola di Badia Tedalda. (AR).
Religiosità e mondo rurale in Toscana by Matteo Baragli, Comune di Caprese Michelangelo (Museo della città del territorio) Edizioni Kappa
Il tramonto del sistema mezzadrile in Casentino – by Giovanna Daneusig
Maremma com’era by Renzo Vatti and Morbello Vergari
What is life? – by John Clare 1793 – 1864.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Petch lives half the year in Tuscany and the other six months in Sussex. An incurable people-watcher, she believes there are still many untold stories waiting to be shared. So she is quite unashamed about striking up conversation with strangers whenever she travels. A prize-winning author, “Now and Then in Tuscany” is her second novel, a sequel to “Tuscan Roots”, available on Kindle and in paperback on Amazon. Search with: Mybook.to/TuscanRoots.
Thank you for reading my book. I’d love it if you could spare a moment to leave a brief review on www.amazon.co.uk or Goodreads. It is so helpful to authors.
You can also find me on Twitter@Angela_Petch
www.facebook.com/AngelaJaneClarePetch
Learn more about holiday accommodation that inspired the book’s locations.
www.ilmulinorofelle.com
I look forward to hearing from you.
Researching the route of the transumanza: the Via Maremmana.