Every Day in Tuscany, page 15
We’re all back again the next morning. The women shop to stock the kitchen, the men arrange tennis matches and wine delivery, the children explore. Our table in the piazza fills and shifts—Placido, Chiara, Simone, Claudio, Melva and Jim, Sheryl and Rob, Marco, Cecelia with her new baby, and her English husband, Lee, who is obviously smitten with little Tommaso. Some leave and come back. Ed goes off to the bookstore in search of a dialect dictionary. Fulvio pauses only a second; he’s always in a hurry. I am not in a hurry this morning. Alberto and I stay because there’s much to say. Davide waves from the door of his hair salon. He’s ready for Ed’s appointment. When we asked him how he achieves Ed’s finger-in-the-electrical-socket haircut, Davide said, “First I make a thousand errors, then I connect the errors.” Ed thought it sounded like a life philosophy. Massimo brings out another tray of water and coffee. We plan a trip to Orvieto to look at Signorelli’s frescoes and have lunch at a place he and Susan read about. Marco announces a dinner on the porch of the Teatro after a late-afternoon wine tasting at his enoteca.
ABOUT FIFTY GATHER for the buffet. We sit with Dorothy and Carlos and catch up on news. “Sharon Stone, welcome back,” several call to Dorothy. There’s a resemblance, but Dorothy is really prettier. Marco proposes a toast to the Alfonsos’ return, then we have another toast to Marco’s birthday. His mother, Eta, is an estimable person. Her lavish buffet draws us all back to the table. She presides, insisting that no one is eating. I’ve seen pictures of her as a young beauty in white holding an armful of flowers in some long-ago parade. Now she’s a matriarch, pale and tall for an Italian woman, with three grandchildren. With Marco and his brother Paolo, she and husband, gentle Giuliano, run the efficient market on the piazza, as well as the enoteca. They work. Their store is smaller than the chips-and-dips aisle at an American supermarket and yet everything you need is right at hand. Somehow Eta has time to pause for a chat, to offer a recipe, and to tell me to buy one brand over another. You can see her striding through the parterre park early in the morning and heading home at one, no doubt about to prepare a hefty pranzo.
We tease Marco that he should become mayor but he prefers ever increasing his knowledge about Italian wines. Paolo prefers soccer. Enza, Marco’s smart wife, works with the University of Georgia art program, while Paolo’s wife owns a baby clothing shop—so the entire family mingles and chats in the piazza all day. Nothing passes their notice and all of them have a bright ciao, a hug, or a joke for everyone passing through. Even Marco and Enza’s boy is falling into stride. At nine, he’s having fun restocking shelves and running errands.
Marco makes many rounds with his wines. Each one has its own story. Just over the town hall, I catch a glimpse of a high full moon, coming out just in time to light the piazza like a lamp in one’s own living room.
I think one reason Cortona fell hard for the Alfonso clan is that they remind everyone of something Italians miss—the big, close family. With the lowest birth rate in Europe, Italians have lost an integral part of their culture in one generation. The norm is one child, or none. Couples often wait to marry until their mid-thirties. Unmarried grown children usually stay at home. It’s still common for the elderly to live with their middle-aged children, but no longer are there several small ones running around to care for.
The Alfonsos radiate family. They also have many friends who visit and they obviously love their friends, another quality Italians cherish.
The “herd,” as Alberto calls his group, will be invited to share many dinners during their time here. A stereotype persists about how expats live in Tuscany. It goes like this: Every day the rich property owner goes out to lunch, drinks several glasses of wine, and retires to the villa until time to go out to dinner. Locals are seen as curious fauna placed strategically for said foreigner’s amusement. Expat speaks no Italian and relies on speaking English loud enough that surely the locals will understand. Expat will be tolerated because of spending power, but will not be invited to private homes.
Maybe this curious specimen exists somewhere, but I do not see him or her around these parts. I’d guess that foreigners own fifty houses. Many who’ve bought here have stretched to do so. Or they’ve moved savings out of traditional investments and put it into a place they can enjoy. Smart move. Some few are really rich but not in any ostentatious way. The Americans I know are genuinely involved in the community, have many friends, and work on their own land and projects. They do everything from contributing to charities to singing in choirs. They travel with a sharp sense of cultural interest and an adventurous spirit. The houses they’ve restored were, generally, not snatched out of the hands of Italian buyers but were, like ours, abandoned or falling into ruin. The foreigners have—whether they thought about it that way or not—rescued important parts of the patrimony.
The local people like the energy of the Georgia students and the expat residents. An English woman told me that a merchant called her a “filthy foreign bitch” when she put in a small window—with permission—facing his house. I had my xenophobic incident, too. But this behavior remains rare. There are nuts anywhere! More typical is Placido, who invites total strangers he meets in town to come to dinner, or Lapo, who lives down the road. He often stops by and drops off a round of fresh pecorino. Sometimes we go to his place and help make the cheese. When he invites us this time, I say that we have guests, my nephew and his family, and that the Cubans are coming over, too.
“Bring them all, tutti, nessun problema.” He throws open his arms, which is part of his invitation. And so we arrive, our own little tour group. Lapo is a shepherd but also a canny businessman. He and his wife, Paola, with their daughters, Laura and Ilaria, turned two stone farm buildings into guesthouses. They built a pool and, lo, they had an agriturismo. They are happy to meet their guests, and those who stay there couldn’t have landed in a more hospitable setting. Lapo and Paola grill almost every night and the outdoor tables seldom have empty seats.
Now he starts cooking the fresh sheep milk and then adds the rennet. After a few minutes for cooling, he rolls up his sleeves and starts to raise and dip the curds that are quickly bonding. When the mixture forms an oozy, primitive clump, he sets us to work pressing milky glops into molds, easing out the water, compacting the mass.
This feels like the work of the world, something so fundamental that it seems we already should know the whole process. The children are engrossed. We each make our own satisfying, truly artisan cheese. Paola sets out platters of their cheeses at various stages of aging, their own salamis, and wine. Lapo puts an LP on the turntable. The youngest child has never seen such a relic before, which makes me recall the wind-up Victrola in the back hall of my grandmother’s house.
“This is the music of my father from before the war.” Lapo turns up the volume and pulls me to the middle of the cheese-shed floor. The music takes us back a lifetime or more, half polka, half torch song. He twirls me around—oh, he’s good; these Tuscans always know how to dance. He’s my height, five foot four, but in the confidence of his muscular body, he feels tall and lithe.
He gives everyone hunks of pecorino to take home and a week later drops off the rounds we’ve made, along with some of his own ricotta, honey, and olive oil. The Alfonsos take an album of photos and my nephew’s children send text messages to friends in Atlanta, a world away from the dusty donkey they rode in the afternoon.
WILL THIS MONTELAURO, place of beauty and harmony, ever rise off the North Carolina dirt? Will we ever give classes in stone-wall building or import cotto for floors? As many before me have said, the journey, not the arrival, matters. The project becomes an aide-mémoire, and keeps us aware of why Tuscany is the way it is. How it works. We talk to Italian architects. Alberto draws floor plans on napkins in the café. We build a scale model of our village. What fun to use equipment architects take for granted. You can press a few keys and “see” the building from various elevations and perspectives. Alberto paints watercolors of our ideal buildings and I plan landscaping and write descriptions of fields of goldenrod, wild plum, and lupine. I can see a riverine walk through lush grasses spiked with blue chicory. We talk about a medieval garden of simples. With words and paints we create an ideal town. I can almost walk the streets, see inside a window a stone hearth with a little fire of twigs, the benison of Carolina afternoon light striking a pewter bowl of pomegranates on the table.
In Book Ten of his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote of memory as a “great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds.” Montelauro is our memory palace.
Playdates for grown-ups—the pleasures are immense. Plus, even better, we laugh in the same places.
IN OUR EARLY years here, we used to avoid other Americans, which was easy because there were not many. We had our tight group of writer friends, but otherwise, we came to be with Italians, we told one another. Gradually we realized that we came to be with people we loved, no matter where they hailed from. Being friends with Americans and English and French residents also increased our numbers of Italian friends because we met friends of friends. Also, I got lonesome for American women friends. Now, especially with three couples, we keep a book exchange going, help each other haul plants from the nursery, and trade info about construction, changing immigrant laws, and news from home. We go on hikes and little trips, entertain each other at long dinners, and, of course, run into each other in the piazza. Lavishing attention on proper stonework and authentic colors, our friends have made spectacular gardens and homes, one small jewel, one farmhouse, and one villa.
Through chance meetings in the piazza and at Marco and Arnaldo’s wine dinners and tastings, we’ve met other expats like us, though generally they are new and we’ve been around so long by now that we feel that metaphorical taproot probing down among the Etruscan middens. My former attitude—we’re here to be only among Europeans—was provincial. Our connection with other settlers complements the primary experience. I am yet to meet someone who is here by lucky choice who does not get it.
There is a group of other Americans, mostly painters and photographers, who don’t live here but out of love for the place return every year. They, too, have their circles of friends and habits of work. One woman, Anna, a great reader, lives for a couple of months a year in one of the convents where the nuns dote on her. Another, Robin, who has a beauty like a thirties film star, comes in for a few weeks, dazzles us with her photographs, and suddenly is gone. I watch for the artists painting watercolor landscapes in the hills around town and sympathetically inhabit their perches overlooking cypress lanes with columns of light and half-melon domes punctuating a vista of olive groves.
Is it too late to take painting classes? Candace, teach me how to daub that lavender light behind your three white jars. No, not white—I see subtle cream streaks and gray undertones (so pure with the lavender). How? By staring long at Morandi’s pure forms? Do these artists feel themselves under your protective cloak, Luca?
Up at the Alfonsos’ house, every day after lunch, Alberto, Carlos, and several of the children retire to private outdoor spots and sketch or paint. Carlos sometimes gets up at dawn and goes out photographing that delicious silvery light on the olives and architectural fragments. Albert Joseph, Alberto and Susan’s son, at age eleven tries out the geometric style of Gino Severini, the Futurist painter who was born in Cortona. Olivia, their fourteen-year-old, brings me a sunflower she has painted. The face almost fills the paper and, yes, it feels crazed with light. I prop it over my desk for inspiration. If I knew where Luca is buried, I would leave it on his stone. See, Luca, your legacy.
WE SET THE table inside because the forecast says rain. Once when I heard the report, the meteorologist apologized at the end and said he was sorry but he’d read last week’s weather. So, we’ll see. No clouds all afternoon when the Alfonsos come up for a swim. Gilda is coming to help us and she will bring several dishes. I know because when she starts up her bread oven, she just won’t quit.
I could dine on the flowers alone—face-sized white hydrangeas in a white pottery bowl. We often have casual dinners but tonight—glasses for each wine, place cards, two secondi (Italians often serve two entrées but I usually serve one), candles in hurricane lamps, and the napkins Melva gave me. They’re the size of head scarves and monogrammed with the initials of someone long gone. We leave a small flashlight beside Placido’s place, as we always do to tease him because he complains that he cannot see what he’s eating in dim candlelight.
Alberto takes the children home, settles them in for the evening, and returns with the other adults. They arrive just as Melva and Jim and Placido and Fiorella are turning in the gate. How joyous to see this phalanx of friends, faces brushed with late sunlight, crossing the grass in their summery colors of pink hibiscus, saffron, aqua, and lemon.
No rain at all. Gilda brings out an aperitivo she’s invented with grapefruit juice and Campari, so pretty in the glass pitcher with floating tiny berries and mint leaves. We serve the crostini and slowly move to the table.
THE MENU
Fiori di zucchini fritti
Fried zucchini flowers
Crostini:
Aglio arrosto con noce
Roasted garlic with walnuts
Tre pomodori (arrosti, secchi, e freschi)
Three tomatoes: roasted, sun-dried, fresh
Gorgonzola e salvia
Gorgonzola and sage
PRIMO
Lasagne con tartufo e besciamella
Truffle and béchamel lasagna
SECONDO
Anatra con miele e arancio
Duck with honey and orange
Faraona arrosto con pancetta
Guinea hen with pancetta
CONTORNI
Patate arrosto al forno
Potatoes roasted in the oven
Bietole con aglio e pignole
Chard with garlic and pine nuts
Insalata del orto
Salad from the garden
DOLCE
Pesche ripiene con mandorle e mascarpone
Peaches stuffed with almonds and mascarpone
Torta di susine
Plum tart
After dessert, Tony takes up his guitar and we all sing “Guantanamera,” “Ivory Tower,” “Blue Moon,” and several Beatles songs, Tony’s specialty. He and Alberto harmonize. I love it when Tony shifts to falsetto. Clearly, they’ve done this before. Uncle Nico tells stories of Rome when he lived there in the seventies. Placido and Carlos talk hunting. We plan an excursion to the Etruscan tombs. Talk, talk, talk. On into the night.
In summer, every day turns into an adventure. Just a morning in the piazza is adventure enough, but the trips and cooking marathons and bocce matches draw all of us into closer and closer circles of friendship.
Riccardo and Silvia celebrate their anniversary with a party at their cooking school. They’ve recently converted an outbuilding at Il Falconiere into a large kitchen with a long table for prep work and, later, dining. Like everything else they’ve accomplished at their sybaritic inn, the teaching kitchen has a welcoming atmosphere and particular character. Riccardo and Silvia embody not only the Italian concept of la bella figura but also the more subtle sprezzatura, the art of making something difficult look easy. Their sense of décor never falls to standard-issue thinking. Silvia could be a flip-this-house maven, if she were not busy realizing her own projects. Whatever she touches turns to Silvia, and that’s a fine thing.
Riccardo meets everyone under the wisteria pergola. “Sempre bella,” he welcomes each woman. Always beautiful. And, “How is it that you are returning more beautiful than before?” To the men, “Grande!” and a hug, which is short for “Grande amico,” great friend, the affectionate way local men greet each other.
We’ve arrived at six, plenty of time to prepare a goose sauce for pasta, lamb en croute, and a scrumptious chocolate dessert. Richard Titi, the chef at Il Falconiere, spends the first hour with us before he has to go down to the main kitchen. We are given aprons, a glass of wine, and a few tips about kneading, whisking, carving the lamb. Silvia keeps everyone on task but the noise level of fifteen cooks starts to rise. As the lamb slides into the oven, some drift to admire the dusky light on Riccardo’s vines and the view of Cortona. Finally, a few other guests arrive and we migrate to the oval table in the garden, ready for several hours of toasts to the day twenty-five years ago when this amazing couple stepped into marriage.
ALBERTO AND HIS family take off for the Dolomites, Carlos goes fishing, Tony and crew pack the van and go sightseeing. I get down to work on ideas for my furniture collection. Ed works with Giorgio, pruning the olive grove. We scatter and come together and scatter. But on the night of the World Cup, we all gather, with every other live soul in town, in Piazza Signorelli, where a large screen has been mounted in front of the bank. Everyone is there except the Cardinalis, who stayed home to watch. Placido maintained that it would be a madhouse in town.
Italy plays France. This is big. Culmination of sixty-four matches. All around the piazza, people are leaning out their windows, shouting at every kick. Somehow Carlos has found plastic chairs inside the museum courtyard and set up our cheering section right out front. Most people are too excited to sit. The crowd breaks into a soccer chant everyone but us seems to know. The Alfonso kids, wearing bright blue team shirts with players’ names on the back, bounce around. They’ve painted Italian flags on their faces. At each good move by Totti, Del Piero, Grosso, or Zambrotta, the child with that name emblazoned on his back takes it personally.
