A Small Place in Italy (13 page)

‘And what do we do then, Attilio?’ I asked him.

‘Poi dobbiamo riempirlo di terra’
he said, chuckling away. ‘Then we fill it in.’ And this was what we did, having thrown in some manure and rotting vegetation, solemnly filled them in, something we had never had to do after digging trenches in Kent. All this to give the roots of the vines a chance to establish themselves in this heavy-as-lead soil.

Altogether we planted five different sorts of vines, both red and white, which everyone said was a help against disease. We made the holes about three feet apart, in which we planted rooted vines which we got from a nursery down in the plain near Sarzana.

Just before planting them Attilio put in a little sand as a further encouragement. Altogether there weren’t all that many but, by some miracle, only two failed to take.

At half-past six the following morning, the day after Attilio and I finally completed our excavations and the subsequent infilling
of the trenches at I Castagni, Wanda and I presented ourselves at the kitchen door of the Dadà establishment, dressed in our most rustic and ruined clothing – a
vendemmia
is hard on clothes, as we had discovered when doing our own. Each of us was armed with a pair of ordinary domestic scissors and a knife, which was all we could muster at the time – we had no secateurs. Apart from Rina and Signora Maria, there was no one else in sight, although various banging sounds and the deep rumbling of male voices from the direction of the cellar suggested that something of an important nature was going on there.

Rina had just finished the milking and she gave us some coffee, with
grappa
, which at this time in the morning was like a shot in the arm.

Up here the sun had not yet reached the plateau on which the house stood and was still hidden from view behind the big buttresses in the Apuan Alps, and everything was still in cold shadow and our breath smoked. Tranquillo’s tractor was already waiting outside in the yard, hitched to the big trailer which had a power drive to its axle from the tractor. This was the one he used when hauling timber out of the woods.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the yard began to fill with people, some of whom we had never seen before, Signor Modesto and Tranquillo, who had been banging bungs into barrels in the cellar; Tranquillo’s brother, pale, quiet Valentino, who didn’t look like a countryman at all, who would be in charge of the grape crusher; Rina’s sister, the one who was married to the local postman; the sister who lived next to the Dadà, and her husband; and their father, elderly, erect, with a fine, grey moustache, whose first name we never learned in all the years we knew him. And others too, whom neither of us can now remember. No one spoke very much. It was too early for conversation.

Now we began to load the trailer with everything that would
be needed during the day: the
bigonci
, a lot of light wooden boxes picked up in the fruit market at Sarzana, useful for carrying the grapes to the sorting tables; and a lot of shallow wicker baskets with iron hooks on them, several triangular ladders and a couple of folding tables.

Now the sun came shooting up from behind the high peaks above Carrara, flooding the plateau on which Casa Dadà stood with a brilliant golden light, so that it seemed that everything around us was swimming in melted butter.

And now Tranquillo, as if to announce the coming of the sun, which needed no announcement, started up his tractor which roared into life with a great exploding sound. And those of us who were destined to take part in the picking of the grapes followed him on foot as he drove down to the main road. There he made a sharp left turn on to it and then a right turn off it down a rough, steep track past Signor Giuseppe’s new house into what was Dadà territory, with the three men in the trailer who were going to be in charge of the
bigonci
holding on for dear life.

It was a beautiful prospect that opened up before us as we went down the hill. There was not a breath of wind and the smoke from the cooking fires rose in tall slim columns straight into the air from the farmsteads that dotted the hillside, some of them with a solitary cypress growing close to them. Immediately below us, in the direction in which we were bound, the hill fell away in a funnel-shaped valley, the lower end of which was still in deep shadow, dark and mysterious. Above it on a ridge, overlooking the Plain and the city of Sarzana, was the great, grim, geometrical Fortezza di Sarzanello built by Castruccio Castracani, in 1322, three years before he became master of Pisa and Tuscany and the scourge of the Florentines. Somewhere down there, reached by a series of tracks which were either ancient rights of way or else were used by mutual agreement between the various owners of
the land, were other Dadà properties, not only the property of Signor Modesto but of people who belonged to other distant ramifications of the family.

There was only one road in the entire valley, a narrow, winding lane that wound its way round the head of it and gradually descended, eventually ending up in Sarzana. This was the route Attilio always followed when he went down to it from I Castagni.

Now, having crossed this road we entered a dream-like landscape, travelling down long, green tunnels of vines with steep banks wet with dew to one side and roofed in by
pergole
in which the trellises that supported the vines seemed to be groaning under the weight of the bunches of grapes; a landscape in which every seemingly endless vista led to another, as in a dream. And we passed through vineyards which were only a few years old, in contrast to those in the
pergole
, some of which had been planted half a century or more ago. These new
vigneti
were all planted in accordance with modern practice in long, wide spaced, parallel rows, supported by horizontal wires and canes one above the other, held up at each end of a row by baulks of timber which were anchored in the ground to boulders. They allowed much more sunlight to warm the grapes than the
pergole
.

The first of Signor Modesto’s fields that we came to, the ones furthest from the house, a long way down the hill, where the shadows were just dispersing, consisted of half a dozen steep banks one above the other, each one about eight feet high and overhung with vines, those on the downhill side supported on wooden poles.

Here a number of
bigonci
were unloaded, the tables and ladders were set up and we were each given a basket with an iron hook on it, although some people had brought their own. By this time there were about twenty people in the field, some of whom would be cutting the grapes, others carrying them to the sorting tables, and there were the heroes whose job it was, among other tasks,
to lift the
bigonci
when they were full and hoist them on to the trailer.

These
pergole
, although extremely picturesque, were difficult to work in because in them the grapes had a remarkable capacity for concealing themselves among the leaves high overhead. The best way to harvest them was to sit on top of the bank with one’s legs dangling down over it, getting nice and wet from the dew in the process, and grope for the bunches among the leaves. Then, when you had cut as many as possible, the next step was to erect one of the three-legged ladders under the
pergole
and gather the bunches from below; but sometimes the ground was so uneven that the ladder keeled over and on one occasion left me dangling in mid-air from one of the supporting wires, rather like a male gorilla swinging about in the treetops.

Among the worst things you could do was to upset your basket when it was full of grapes and hooked on to one of the supporting wires of a pergola, scattering them over a wide area in the grass below, from which they had to be retrieved, each and every one of them. To lose grapes that you had harvested in this way was unacceptable, although no one ever said so. You could tell it was unacceptable by the care with which anyone who happened to drop even two or three continued to look for them until they succeeded in finding them. You could eat as many grapes as you liked, though most people got bored with eating them; but losing them was another matter. The last thing you did when working on a section of any particular pergola was to slack off the pole which supported its outer edge which enabled you to reach the bunches that would have otherwise been out of reach.

From time to time some ancient trusty, whose active life swinging about under the
pergole
had more or less come to an end, would appear, take your basket, give you an empty one and pour the contents of your own into one of the boxes from the
fruit market. If you had a basket you were particularly fond of and wanted to go on using it, you put the grapes in the box yourself and, if it was full, carried it to the sorting tables.

The best instruments for cutting the grapes were secateurs; scissors didn’t exert enough pressure and were hopeless if, as I am, you are left-handed; knives were good but it was quite easy to cut off one of your own fingers on your other hand instead of a bunch of grapes, or even someone else’s finger if they were working on the other side of the vine, although I never heard of such a thing happening. By the end of the first day both Wanda and I had succeeded in cutting our own fingers and after this we used secateurs. Some hardy characters broke off the bunches with their bare hands without losing any grapes, always a source of wonderment to me.

At the tables hawk-eyed ladies subjected our offerings to further scrutiny and cleansing. Here too, the number of stalks was further reduced by pruning. Sometimes if a bunch obviously had nothing wrong with it they filleted it by taking it in one hand and then stripping the grapes from it with the other, straight into a
bigoncio
. If any bunches were affected by mildew, they were got rid of at this time.

Some bunches, especially good ones, were earmarked for eating later in the year and, when possible, these had their stems cut into a T-shape so that they could be hung on nails on a wall of the cellar until they were needed.

Other bunches we were told to leave on the vines so that they could continue to ripen until the onset of the
Estate di San Martino
, St Martin’s Summer, otherwise Martinmas, 11 November. You had to be very careful not to cut any of these grapes by mistake which was horribly easy to do. I did it once, buried the evidence, and went to work in another part of the
vigneto
as far from the scene of the crime as possible. The loss was noted but I was not suspected, at least I didn’t think so.

These were fine grapes from old
pergole
, like those at I Castagni, anything from thirty to forty years old, or even more. Black and white grapes with a beautiful velvety bloom on them and oozing juice. Looking at them, it was difficult to believe that these skins, so good to look at, housed millions of microscopic moulds, bacteria and yeasts which between them performed the fermentation process for the making of wine.

When there were more filled
bigonci
than empty ones, or at some moment which Tranquillo or his father deemed to be the
momento giusto
, they were hoisted on to the trailer, which stood a good five feet above the ground, by those chosen for this particular form of torment and then Tranquillo would haul them and the
bigonci
up the hill to the cellar for the crushing operation.

It was important to keep the supply of
bigonci
turning over. One of the worst things that can happen at a
vendemmia
when it is going full blast, apart from a leak developing in the bottom of some enormous barrel, or a hailstorm developing, is for whoever is in charge of the proceedings to discover that all the
bigonci
are full. When this happens and the baskets are also full and the boxes are full and the sorting tables are groaning under the weight of grapes that can no longer be sorted because there are no
bigonci
, the system grinds to a halt. But in a well-run
vendemmia
such a mishap is unlikely to occur unless the tractor or the grape crusher, or both of them at the same time, give up the ghost. The trouble with grapes in a
vendemmia
is that in some way they bear a resemblance to sewage, which still goes on arriving at the sewage outfall even if orders are given that no more can be accepted for the time being because the place is awash with it.

By about ten o’clock, after having worked for about three hours among the
pergole
in this lowest field and having stripped them of grapes, everyone was beginning to feel like a rest, and a drink. ‘Another three hours like this,’ Wanda said, ‘and I’m going to feel
a bit done-in.’ It was therefore a very welcome surprise for us when Rina and her two sisters appeared on the scene, each with a hamper perched on her head with a piece of rolled-up cloth underneath it to take the weight; all three of them very erect – you can scarcely be anything else with a heavy weight balanced on your noddle. In fact they looked like the sort of women who walk interminably round Etruscan pots. The baskets contained a
merenda
for some twenty persons, for that was what we amounted to, something everyone except ourselves had been anticipating, but for us a welcome surprise, and they now proceeded to set it out on a large white tablecloth which they spread on the grass.

The place chosen was shaded from the heat of the sun by a plantation of canes and by trees and lush vegetation. And there was a spring which, if you removed a wooden plug from it, discharged a jet of water into a sort of miniature aqueduct made with the trunks of small trees which had been split in half and hollowed out and joined to the next one, which conveyed the water to some other part of the property.

Here and there long shafts of sunlight penetrated the dark shadows cast by the vegetation overhead, and when an occasional ripple of wind passed through this glade everything was dappled with light and shade. It was a magical place and one to which we always looked forward to returning.