A Small Place in Italy (16 page)

Most lowering to the spirits were the years when there were so few grapes of good quality that people had to go further south in Tuscany, or to the market at Sarzana, to buy them.

It was never an enjoyable task buying grapes, partly because it almost always seemed to be raining when we engaged in it which was not surprising as it was rain and lack of sun that had caused the shortage in the first place. The grapes were in huge stacks of boxes all round the periphery of the market. The first time we went there to buy we enlisted the help of Signor Giuseppe whose very presence had the effect, to some extent, of keeping the prices down; but in fact they were more or less the same for everyone unless a very big deal was being done. At first it was not easy for Wanda and myself, sampling grapes from one of the boxes to know what they were – Sangiovese, Canaiolo, Trebbiano and so on, among reds; Vernaccia, Trebbiano and so on, among whites. Tasting these grapes, plucking up courage eventually to ask what sorts they were, for all we knew they could have come from Sicily or Molise.

At that time the market at Sarzana was near the railway station and was surrounded by shops selling seeds and agricultural instruments, and by little
caffès
. In spite of being in the town it had a genuinely rural air and every market day numbers of female
contadini
, including Signora Angiolina and Signora Fernanda and Signora Maria and Signora Cani, used to take up temporary residence inside the main hall where, sitting on upturned boxes, they offered for sale various sorts of home produce – cheese, eggs, fruit and vegetables.

Many years later the market was moved to an unattractive location on the outskirts of the town and it never again had the same feeling about it.

Another great
vendemmia
was that of our local postman (no relation to the other postman), who was married to one of Rina’s sisters. The postman, a very jolly man, was one of the first people we got to know after we were finally installed at I Castagni. He used to bring us our mail, roaring down the bend to the house on a Vespa, later in a little Fiat. He often used to stop for a glass of wine which he drank while giving us all the latest information on what was going on.

When the last
vendemmia
had taken place, and the last dinner had been eaten, and the last wine drunk, we would all reel away under the stars, or through the rain to our various habitations, sometimes, if we had indulged too freely (a male defect in these parts at such times), falling into ditches which some thoughtless fellows seemed to have dug since we passed that way in the morning; and the next year would be the same with either more or less sun and better or worse grapes and wine, and so on
ad infinitum
– at the two Dadà
vendemmie
, the Canis’, the Bs’ (that is if they remembered to invite us), and at that of our postman. And sometimes there were others. This doing the
vendemmie
became an important part of our lives for more than twenty years to come.

One year, after the various
vendemmie
had been brought to a successful conclusion, the weather broke and for the following three days the
scirocco
roared in from Africa by way of the Ligurian Sea and the rain fell in torrents, turning what had been almost iron-hard earth into a Passchendaele of mud. Then it stopped and the sun came out again but with less vigour than it had displayed previously. Now there was a distinctly autumnal feeling in the air. If I had been in England, I would have thought about eating crumpets and wearing a tweed coat.

Such conditions, rain after extreme heat, and then sun again, were right for what could be a spectacular growth of
funghi
within the next day or two.

These, if they did decide to appear, would probably be of the genus
boletus
, of which there are numerous sorts. The best are
boletus edulis
which have brown, shiny caps, known in Italy as
porcini
, in France as
cèpes
, in Germany as
Steinpilz
and in Britain, where until recently few people have ever heard of them let alone eaten them, as ceps or penny buns. Of the
boleti
only a couple of rare, highly coloured variants,
boletus satanas
and
boletus purpureus
, are poisonous but not usually fatally so. Two other highly coloured versions,
boletus luridus
and
boletus erythropus
,
are delicious. Some species are best thrown away as they have an unpleasant taste.

The larger sorts have caps up to twenty centimetres in diameter, sometimes more, and they are all shades of brown, from pale straw colour to chestnut, although one sort is a rather dingy white. They all have one characteristic in common – their undersides are like very fine sponges with hundreds of tiny pores, that is except the youngest ones which have small, hard, round caps so tightly crimped to their stems that their spongy undersides are invisible. The stems of the
porcini
are thick and squat and bulbous, like the trunks of very old oak trees that have been pollarded. Some sorts have a delicious fungoid smell, others have a nasty smell, others have scarcely any at all.

Neither of us was a stranger to
boleti.
Back in the 1950s we had hunted them (for that is what it feels like, the search for them, a hunt) in the Carso near Trieste, in northern Scotland, on Wimbledon Common, only about eight miles from Hyde Park Corner, and at Wisley in Surrey, exercising all the skill and cunning at our command.

Eventually, we had been forced to abandon Wimbledon Common as we found ourselves hopelessly out-manoeuvred by more cunning, better informed fungus hunters than we were – Czechs and Italians from Soho, and some Russians from their trade enclave in Highgate, who moved in every morning at first light. Skill and cunning are necessary because, in dealing with fungi, particularly
boletus
, you are entering a world in which, having penetrated it, you begin to realize that you are dealing with growths that give every indication of being motivated by some supernatural power. It is said, for example, that if you succeed in finding a
boletus
, and then fail to gather it – it should be cut, not wrenched out by the roots – it will disappear back into the earth from which it was in the act of emerging. If you do pick
them they should be put in a basket, never in a plastic bag. The absence of fresh air ruins them.

A few days after the
maltempo
in Tuscany had ended the news spread like wildfire – it was actually in the local newspaper – that there were
funghi
in the mountains and all the
contadini
with any woods to their names, or high meadows in which other sorts of
funghi
grew, immediately made plans to set off to gather them. This was to anticipate the arrival of
raccoglitori
from the city, many of them professional
funghi
gatherers who would already be on their way to the Apennines and the Apuan Alps to strip them of the
funghi
which since time immemorial had been the property of the owners of the woods and meadows, the legal
raccoglitori.
Tempers were already running high and several
padroni
said they would be taking their shotguns with them in case, as they put it, there was an opportunity for
‘un po’ di caccia’,
though what sort of hunting – birds, beasts, the shooting season had already begun, or illegal
raccoglitori di funghi
– was not clear.

It was now, much to our surprise, that we received an invitation from Signor Giuseppe to join him and Signora Fernanda and Signora Angiolina on a
funghi
hunt in some woods on the north side of the Foce il Cuccù, which belonged to them, leaving immediately.

We had not been surprised that we hadn’t been invited to take part in their
vendemmia
. Their
vigneto
was of comparatively modest dimensions and there was really no need of any outside help. There was Signora Fernanda’s married son and her daughter-in-law, and Signora Fernanda’s daughter who had married a shopkeeper in Sarzana and had two teenage daughters.

The invitation to the
funghi
hunt was, however, another matter. They really had no need of assistance and it was really kind of them to do so when the current price was some astronomical number of lire a kilo, although it would fall dramatically if they
really began to proliferate. We ourselves were not at all sanguine about the chances of finding any
funghi
. Previous experience had taught us that the more optimistic one was, the less chance one had of finding any at all. Besides, I was still smarting under the humiliation of the affair of the wild asparagus, something which Signora Angiolina still used to remind me about, roguishly, from time to time.

Armed each of us with a knife, a stick for prodding about in the undergrowth and what looked like a far too large number of baskets in which to carry away our spoils, if indeed there were any, we set off in the Land Rover for the Foce il Cuccù, Attilio’s mysterious Shangri-la, the secret of which, where beyond it he went to do his famous
giornate
, or for whom, he never ever yielded up. Was it a
padrone
or a
padrona
? He had already declared that Wanda was
‘la mia padrona’.
Was Attilio a man with a
padrona
in every port?

The view that morning from the Foce was magnificent. To the south and west, cities, towns, the nearest of which was Fosdinovo with its enormous castle, villages, rivers, seas, offshore islands, gulfs and plains, a whole world in microcosm was visible as in a painting by Leonardo.

And something we had not yet seen, except fleetingly when we first visited Fosdinovo while trying to buy I Castagni, to the north and east was the
crinale
, the high main ridge of the Apennines, on the far side of which I had spent part of the winter of 1943–4 holed up in caves and cabins in the snow.

Below the Foce, on the side facing the Ligurian Sea, the mountain fell away gently to an alpine meadow in which the grass was still green in spite of the time of year, not bleached as it was almost everywhere else, because this was a place where several springs rose to the surface, springs that eventually fed the Magra. Across this verdant expanse a large flock of sheep was grazing its way
with infinite slowness, followed by what looked like a semi-somnolent shepherd and his rather more wide-awake dog.

In the midst of this meadow stood a fine old farmhouse with a balcony laden with flowers of a sort that exists everywhere in the north Italian Alps but was something of a rarity here. Here, although it was only 500 metres above the sea, it was too exposed for vines to grow. Here, the following spring, this great green meadow would be carpeted with highly scented narcissi, otherwise known as
i fiori del mal di testa
, headache flowers, because if you sleep with them in your bedroom they are liable to bring on the symptoms of a rather nasty hangover, because of the very strong scent.

Further along the ridge from the Foce to the north-west, also on the side that faced the Magra and the sea, the mountain fell away more steeply and more densely wooded, and it was in the upper part of these dense woods in which the brambles were more than twenty feet long that Renato and his fellow
cacciatori
had let loose the wild boars that, according to reports, were breeding with enthusiasm and would soon be wreaking havoc unless they were culled.

Beyond the Foce we left the vehicle on a little plateau and entered the woods. The trees were chestnuts mostly, their branches bowed under the weight of the nuts that would soon be ready for collecting, that was if anyone was prepared to collect them.

Some of these trees were very old and the bark was so deeply grooved in what were regular spirals that their trunks looked like giant screws embedded in the earth. Some were dying from a disease that caused them to exude a black liquid; others were dead, without bark, wind-blasted, silvery grey skeletons.

Until recently these chestnuts had provided uncountable generations of
contadini
with some of the principal necessities of life: fuel in the form of firewood and charcoal; timber for building
materials, furniture and vehicles; food in the form of chestnut flour that was used to make the
castagnaccia
, what had been a staple food that most old
contadini
now wanted to forget they had ever eaten, because of the memories it brought back of long years of poverty.

Here, on the north side of the ridge, the woods were now already in shadow for a large part of the day and at first it was difficult to make out anything at all. Now the track was so heavily overgrown with weeds and brambles that there was absolutely no hope of finding any
funghi
; but after following it around the side of the hill for a mile or so it began to be clearer and we could look down into the woods on our left hand where they plummeted down towards the gorge of a stream that eventually fed the Aulella, and on the right look up into them as they soared away overhead up the steep slope to the ridge.

It was now that Signor Giuseppe suddenly halted and began to root about with his stick, eventually unearthing a small boundary stone, what he called a
cippo
, one of a number that delimited his particular piece of property which altogether must have covered something like a square mile of mountainside uphill from the track on which we were standing. I found this feat extremely impressive as eventually he was able to uncover the other three.

‘Andiamo su!’
he said, and we all began to climb the steep north-facing slope, the idea being that we should first get to the uppermost part of his property at the ridge and then descend, rather than gathering
funghi
on the way up and then having to retrace our steps laden, we hoped, with baskets full of them.

In these operations Signora Angiolina, who always looked as if a puff of wind might blow her to smithereens, displayed uncommon agility and it was she who made the first find of the day as soon as we began to descend from the ridge with the words
‘Ecco, ho trovato!’,
in this case two
boleti
which were growing in a bed of brilliant green moss at the foot of a
castagno.
They were
boletus badius
, brown with stems and caps of a similar shade of chestnut brown, a sort that Signora Angiolina called
porcinelli
. Her loud cry caused her to be rebuked by Signor Giuseppe who ordered her to keep quiet on the grounds that goodness only knew how many urban
raccoglitori
were loose in the surrounding woods only waiting to hear that Signora Angiolina had lit on some
porcinelli
, before making their attack on the family fungus bed from an undefended flank; but there was no one, not now or at any time during that long day – there was no
merenda
– just the wind sighing in the trees and an occasional squawk from some unidentifiable bird that had somehow managed to remain alive.

It was the most successful
funghi
hunt that we had ever engaged in during all the years we were in Italy. I will always remember the first big
boletus
, also a
porcinello
, I found that day, alone in solitary splendour, unravaged by worms, its cap the size of a small soup plate. They were everywhere. There were varieties I had never seen before, one with a brick-red cap, which our book on the subject said was delicious, another with a coffee-coloured cap and brilliant yellow underparts and a ring round the upper part of the stem, like a sort of veil.

But presiding over all, like the skeletons at a feast of
raccoglitori di funghi
, were
amanita phalloides
, otherwise
amanita verdognola
, death caps, the caps of which exhibit an alarming range of shades of pale olive, greyish-green, yellow and near-white, the most poisonous
funghi
of all. And there was also
amanita virosa
, the destroying angel, which is dead white. Both varieties were out in force. Whoever eats the smallest morsel of either of these is more or less assured of a horrible death. Some of the cures that were attempted in the past were almost as awful as the symptoms – one involved the victim being forced to eat a paste compounded from
three hashed stomachs and seven raw brains of rabbits, without any discernible improvement.

Descending the mountainside, looking for
funghi
, what surprised me was how different those woods in the Apennines were when I lived in them, and how different these woods in the Apuan Alps would also have been at that time. Now, apart from a few woodcutters with tractors and trailers, and some
raccoglitori
such as ourselves in the
funghi
season, they were deserted. At this time of year back in 1943, entire families would have been out working in them, loading wood for their own use and for sale on to the wooden sledges drawn by cows or bullocks, or loading it on to mules, singing and shouting to one another as they did so.