Every Day in Tuscany, page 18
The contiguous trail ends in Perugia.
BUT, please, pursue Luca further:
Devote a half day to the great Abbadia Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Asciano, and less than twenty miles south of Siena. The Signorelli and Sodoma frescoes, painted on cloister walls surrounding a courtyard of lemon trees, highlight the life and miracles of San Benedetto, St. Benedict. Several scenes involve falling rafters and stones and monks miraculously saved from death by the good Benedetto. (Very appealing subject matter for this serial restorer. He should be the patron of builders.) One involves a bucket brigade putting out a fire. The most touching fresco, How Saint Benedict Reproved the Monks for Eating Outside the Monastery, appeals to me not for it’s didactic purpose but for the homey interior scene of a meal being served by two graceful women—surely a minestrone, a savory leg of lamb, field greens, and plums. Benedetto must have been, well, a saint—sweet, helpful, steady—because his miracles were not show-stoppers. His were everyday, even mundane, not flashy instant cures or water-into-wine dramas.
The other half of the day, if you wend your way to Pienza you will be startled by this harmonious Renaissance town that smells of pecorino. Shops with open doors lure me toward their cheeses in jackets of hazelnut leaves or ashes. From various outlook spots, you can see grazing all the huddles of sheep that gave the town fame for cheese. I never leave without a hunk of semi-aged pecorino.
The Madonna lost her crown during a restoration of Madonna della Misericordia with Saints Sebastian and Bernadine. This painting in San Francesco is worth seeing for the calm Sebastian, standing beside the Virgin, his arrow wounds punctuating his pale body. Mary throws up her hands in a that’s enough gesture.
Luca loved fabric. Sometimes I flip through Henry and Kanter’s Luca Signorelli just focusing on the lavish patterns and colors worn by his figures. Catch the wild fabric on her dress in Pienza.
In the wine town of Montepulciano, seek out, along with a bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Chiesa di Santa Lucia and the simple and regal Virgin and Child.
Don’t stop now, because his most astounding work, his sopratutto, above all, masterpiece is outside Tuscany, in dramatic Orvieto, a magnificent town suspended over the countryside on a tufa precipice.
Go to the Duomo and gaze.
Then go to your hotel and read a good book on the cycle.
Then go back and gaze again. Behold the Antichrist! My friend Rena wrote to me, years after seeing the cycle: “The Antichrist floored me. There is a big signboard on the highway near Auburn warning us of The Beast, but I got such an initiation in the nine hours with Signorelli in the chapel that The Beast illustrated by Pentecostals is as nothing.”
Maybe, like me, you’ll fall in love right there in the Brizio Chapel. Maybe you’ll weep a little as the grandeur of Luca’s imagination reminds you of how art can stir you toward transformation in your own life.
How to paint the unimaginable? Judgment Day. He cuts loose. There’s a wacky, cartoonish element to this estimable cycle. Devils and green bodies, and hellish torture of the damned. Luca’s usually restrained, suffering, receptive women are no longer the chronic enablers. They apparently sinned as much as any male, although those who’ve attained the heavenly grace look beatific again.
As in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the heavenly part is less powerful than the riotous orgy of writhing misery. But both aspects are inexhaustible. Ed found the “resurrection of the dead” section so compelling that he used a detail on the cover of one of his books of poems.
This is the moment, to my thinking, that hinges all of Christianity: You do not die at death. You will be restored to your most perfect body for eternal life. This places you—you—against a vast backdrop. Without the promise, you’re out in the open, on your own; you might as well just invent your own humanist values, live the best life you can, and Buona notte tutti, good night, everyone.
Luca’s buried skeletons push up through the earth, as though raised by the biotic pull of light. They resume their bodies. Some are completely out and looking good, some are in the process of transformation. We are accustomed to the macrocosmic resurrection of Christ, which hands down the promise to us, but not to the microcosmic sight of resurrected humans.
I’ve seen Luca’s cycle a dozen times and always find new parts to love. John Addington Symonds must have been in Orvieto when he wrote, “To him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and pedantry of having made the human body a language for the utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.”
When I visit, the first image I always look at is the self-portrait of the artist, standing with Fra Angelico beside his own creation. He gazes at you. He’s a sturdy man. The Signorelli ancestors must have been from northern Italy. He’s light. His long blond hair falls in rivulets. A cloth hat sits at an angle, pulled down almost over his eyebrow. So, he consciously tilted his hat. And the well-made coat with stand-up collar and ruched sleeves—he’s no fashion slouch. Is he blue-eyed? His right eye looks blue, the left brown. I would like to have a ladder to see up close. He shows himself unretouched—circles under his eyes and the slight beginning of a double chin. A man in his prime. He has completed his masterpiece.
You can come only so close to those you love and never knew, never could have known. I have loved Atatürk, Yeats, Keats, Jeb Stuart, and have felt their presence and distance simultaneously. I’ve longed for friendship with Colette, Freya Stark, Eudora Welty. Their work draws the lover of words close. Time intervenes with its harsh imperatives. Did Luca walk at night on the Roman road to see the stars? Did his blond hair darken? Did he carry the bambino Antonio on his shoulders or keep a falcon or snap a sprig of rosemary for his buttonhole? Was his voice smooth and deep, like a slow pour of newly pressed olive oil? Did he love the bitter taste of wild cherries in June? In November did he pick a frozen grape, bite into icy slivers and fulsome juice? So much we can know from his paintings, but the person remains enigmatic, out of reach. He cleaved the air of the piazza as he crossed and the air closed behind him.
Farther afield, in Volterra the Annunciation reigns. In this Etruscan city, one of the most evocative in Tuscany, Luca also left Saint Jerome and a Virgin and Child with Saints, now in the Pinacoteca Civica.
Urbino, Loreto, and Arcevia form their own minitrail.
AND IF YOU search beyond these suggested sites, you appreciate how ambitious Luca was, how much he accomplished in his long life. I relish the drive and will behind his work. Some of his most moving paintings live in Florence at the Uffizi, I Tatti, Pitti Palace, Galleria Corsini, Galleria Torrigiani, and Museo Horne.
Rome, too, yes, find him. Luca, born in a rural small town, lives all over the world.
Like someone with an ambition to visit all fifty states, I have my list of Luca paintings to visit. There’s the half of an Annunciation to see at the Walters in Baltimore, a Virgin in Krakow. Onward to Dublin, Bergamo, Toledo, Ohio, Washington, but only a dream visit to Luca’s secular Pan, by all accounts a major work, sadly burned at the end of World War II in Berlin. They’re all listed in my Luca notebook, drawing me to travel.
Città di Castello
WHILE ON THE CORTONA-PERUGIA SIGNORELLI Trail, Città di Castello is a prime choice for an overnight stop. I like to take the back roads around Città. From my house in Cortona, we swerve around hills and hollows, along serene fields with crops so green and lush that you want to get out and graze. You traverse the rural, unpopulated, unvisited countryside you dream of finding in Italy. Each carsick curve reveals a verdant vista, a castle floating in the clouds, a ruined tower like an old ink sketch of itself, or a working farm.
En route, I watch for the roadside huts with signs announcing “Porcini” and “Tartufi” especially around Palazzo del Pero, command central for these elusive morsels. Often the local hunter-gatherers set up impromptu tables in town and display their baskets of porcini, small mounds of fresh black truffles, and rarely the scarcer white truffles, which must come from Piemonte.
The angels in Luca’s paintings dine only on this delicacy. At pranzo, they put down their lutes and shave the slivers over tagliatelle. As we pass, I can see in Ed’s glance visions of chicken with black truffle slices and herbs stuffed under the skin, a creamy risotto absorbing shavings of white truffles, and meaty porcini grilled with a big Fiorentina steak.
Only an hour away, Città di Castello is a top choice of all the fine Umbrian towns. If I were looking for a place to live in Italy now, this would be high on my list. Occasionally, in an Italian town, I intuitively feel this may be more home than home. I like its homey dignity, the number of bookstores, and especially the piazza’s impressive bell tower with twin clocks, one for the minutes, one for the hours. Sitting outside a café, looking up at those timekeepers, looking around at the choreography of entrances and exits to the piazza, I count as some fine hours. Once I saw two men collide on motorini, pick themselves us, straighten their clothes, and embrace. Another day, I saw a man with a prolific mustache reading the paper in dappled shade. From where I was he appeared to be holding a silver fish in his mouth.
Besides the important Pinacoteca, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and several churches are on my rounds when I visit. Sometimes it’s not the great paintings that grab you. In the Pinacoteca I like to visit Madonna col Bambino Dormiente, Madonna and Sleeping Baby, by Vincenzo Chialli. It has the simplicity of an ex voto. The Madonna kneels beside the cot of her son, who appears to be around four years old. He’s sleeping perfectly. She’s obviously up to check on him. We glimpse in the background room her simple bed.
I have never seen this subject painted before, this archetypal scene of the mother who keeps watch and worries and loves. I say to my grandson as I turn off the lamp, “I’ll be checking on you.” Sometimes he wants to know when. Or he says sleepily, “I’ll be checking on you, Franny.” On any quest, sometimes the asides have the real news for you.
Getting to know this town is like starting a thousand-piece puzzle; it’s best to find the flat edges and construct the outline. So much complex history simply overwhelms the desire for good background for visiting a town. Papal ownerships, Guelphs, Ghibellines, even Urbino’s Duke Federico III da Montefeltro all jerked this fine little city around for centuries. Città di Castello’s fragmented past has more pieces than any jigsaw, but the corner pieces, easily placed, are Roman. Originally Tifernum or Tiberinum, the name refers to the Tiber. Colle Plinio, in the vicinity but not definitively located, was the site of Tuscis, where Pliny the Younger built a villa and wrote enchantingly about the garden with his name spelled out in topiary and delicate morsels for guests floated on trays in fountains.
A luminous point in the past occurred when Dr. Maria Montessori gave her first training lectures in 1909. A hundred teachers and a few students participated. She was a guest at Villa Montesca, now a study/conference center and park just outside town. The owners, Baron Leopoldo Franchetti and his American wife, Alice Hallgarten, were enlightened people light-years ahead of their time. Alice not only held a free school in their villa, she established a textile-weaving workshop for local women. The villa’s workers lived in exemplary conditions. Their interest in educating local children led to their invitation to Maria Montessori. She spent the summer with them, discussing her methods and writing the book, known to us as The Montessori Method, which sent her name out to the world.
Now the town’s reputation centers on antiques and a hand-woven textile center (thank you, Alice), as well as being a mecca for reproductions. As we have, many hotel and agriturismo owners come to acquire traditional furnishings for their guestrooms.1 I’ve brought my sketches to one shop and two weeks later picked up twelve dining room chairs, built and painted exactly as I’d envisioned. I love living with furniture that I’ve had a chance to design myself. Italy gives many such opportunities to work with artisans. For me this is one of the primo advantages of living here.
Città di Castello also is known as the birthplace of the beauty Monica Bellucci and of the artist Alberto Burri, who left his work to the town in two museums, Palazzo Albizzini and Ex-Seccatoi del Tabacco, a former tobacco-drying warehouse. A physician in the Italian army in World War II, Burri began his painting using burlap sacks while he was a prisoner of war in Hereford, Texas. If you’ve never heard of him, you’ll ask why when you visit. He was a forerunner of many of the directions of postwar art.
And then there’s Il Postale, a worth-a-journey restaurant in a refitted postal bus garage. Marco and Barbara Bistarelli are young and adventurous. Marco’s duck breast with artichokes manages to be both earthy and ethereal. Eating under their care always shows me something new. Who would think to serve cabbage with lobster and a drizzle of hazelnut oil? What would Maria Montessori have ordered? Maybe the musetto di maiale con salsa amatriciana, sedano e pecorino would have tempted her: a little pig snout with celery and sheep’s cheese and a traditional sauce of tomatoes, garlic, a few red pepper flakes, and pancetta. Amatriciana comes from Amatrice in Lazio, where the recipe originally called for guanciale, cheek meat, instead of pancetta. Maria, being an innovator herself, probably would have called out “Class dismissed!” at the thought of Il Postale’s pear William soufflé with chocolate sauce or the lemon mousse with cubes of mango gel and a fresh celery salsa.
AMONG THE CHARMS of the upper Tiber valley is Archeologia Arborea. The late Livio dalla Ragione collected rare varieties of fruit trees from abandoned farms, monastery and convent cloisters, and orchards. With his daughter, Isabella, who carries on the work, he started an arboretum in San Lorenzo di Lerchi, just outside town. The trees survive not only as themselves but as a remembrance of an earlier way of life. The Clogmaker’s Fig reminds us that the fig wood used to be preferred for making farmer’s clogs. When the farmers left the land, the tree almost disappeared. Peasant’s Steak Pear speaks for itself.
You can walk the orchard in the warm months, make friends with the Little Convent Apple, Goose Cherry, Giant Fig of the Zoccolanti Friars, Icicle Pear, Small Bloody Peach, Drunken Apple, Ox Muzzle Apple, Pink Stone Apple, Little Fox Pear, and many more. The names seem to contain old tastes: Pink Strawberry Apple, Chestnut Apple, Butter Pear, Lemon Apple, and Cinnamon Pear.
If you adopt a tree, you are entitled to its harvest. The proviso, however, requires you to leave three fruits—one for the sun, one for the earth, and one for the tree itself. This sounds like something St. Francis of Assisi could have written. Che vita, what a life, to dwell among these fruit trees.
Perhaps someone brought Luca a basket of dark green figs as he painted the striped leggings on the men in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.
PETTO D’ANATRA GLASSATO AL CARAMELLO
SPEZIATO E CARCIOFI
Duck Breast with Caramelized Spices and Artichokes
Marco Bistarelli, the chef and co-owner, with his wife, Barbara, of Il Postale, shared their recipe with us. Marco recommends the Anatra Muta for this recipe, what we call the Muscovy Duck, and specifies a female duck.
Serves 4
Salt and pepper
2 duck breasts, about 8 ounces each, skin left on
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
8 tablespoons butter
3 sprigs of thyme
4 garlic cloves, peeled Peel and juice of 1 lemon, separated
4 whole fresh artichokes
Handful of fresh parsley, chopped
Dash of white wine (about ¼ cup)
1 cup sugar
20 juniper berries, ground
20 seeds of coriander, ground
20 grains of pink peppercorn, ground
10 whole cumin seeds, ground
Sprinkling of curry
2 fresh chilies, seeded and diced
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper the duck breasts on both sides. Put the oil, butter, thyme, and garlic in a cast-iron pan, sauté 1 minute, then add the lemon peel and duck, skin side down, and cook until the meat reaches a temperature of 125 to 130 degrees F (measured with a cooking thermometer). Remove and keep warm. Reserve the remaining garlic and butter mixture.
Meanwhile, remove all the leaves from the artichokes, spoon out the thistle, and quarter the hearts. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the lemon juice and artichoke pieces; cook until the artichoke hearts are tender. Submerge the artichokes in a bowl of ice water to stop them from cooking.
To the sauté pan with the garlic-butter mixture added, mix the chopped parsley and white wine, and add the artichokes.
Prepare the spicy sauce by slowly cooking the sugar with the juniper berries, coriander, pink peppercorns, cumin, curry, chilies, and balsamic vinegar until they caramelize slightly.
Reheat the duck in a second sauté pan, adding the spiced caramelized sauce, and let it rest. Cut the duck into slices and place it on a serving dish, spooning over them the artichokes and the sauce.
RISOTTO CON TARTUFI BIANCHI
Risotto with White Truffles
When our friend Fulvio and his wife, Aurora, came to see us in the United States, they brought a gemstone-like white truffle, known as the Alba truffle, the kind found in the Piedmont region of Italy, which we immediately included in our dinner that night. He even brought a truffle slicer. Fulvio had made his Barolo risotto for us before (included in Bringing Tuscany Home), so we’ve adapted his recipe for a truffle risotto.
There are truffles and there are truffles—so beware. We’ve had summer truffles that are woody and tasteless, and some in jars are a mere wisp of the real thing.
