A Small Place in Italy (2 page)

After once more becoming imbrangled in the labyrinthine one-way street system of Lerici, we followed Signor Vescovo’s painstakingly written instructions about how to get to I Castagni, and crossed the river Magra by a long, multi-arched, brick bridge. Below it, strung out along its gravel banks, a number of despairing-looking men were fishing without apparent success as they, or their descendants, continued to do for all the years we lived in the area.

Beyond the river we followed the Via Aurelia, one of Italy’s more dangerous roads, to Sarzana, an ancient, walled town on the borders of Tuscany. Here we entered the Plain of Luni, the site of what had been Luna, an important Etruscan city and seaport which Livy described as being ‘the first city of Etruria’ and Strabo as having one of the finest and largest harbours in the world, much of its prosperity being because of the marble trade.

But in the fourth century AD its decline began, brought on by the malaria which eventually rendered it more or less uninhabitable. It was subsequently sacked many times: by the Lombards, by the Normans in the ninth century and by the Arabs, who finally destroyed it and carried its inhabitants into captivity in 1016. Both city and seaport disappeared from history some time in the twelfth century, killed off by the malarial mosquitoes, and became an area
largely populated by ghosts and goats. Now all that remained of it was an amphitheatre that once seated six thousand spectators and a theatre. It was Luna that gave its name to what is now the present region of Lunigiana, although originally it was much larger.

Then, after a couple of miles, we turned off on to a minor road at a place called Ponte Isolone, a hamlet on the Via Aurelia made up of some half a dozen buildings which included a café, a seed merchant, an ironmonger’s and a shoe shop, all of which, except for the shoe shop, which never had anything in our sizes, we subsequently patronized.

Once on this minor road the roar of traffic on the Via Aurelia became a faint murmur and we found ourselves, as if by magic, in rural Italy. It led away, dead straight in a northerly direction, to where the foothills of the Apuan Alps rose steeply from the plain. Rising above them, deep blue in the distance, were their big peaks, the highest of which, Monte Pisanino, is 1945 metres high, with what looked like snow fields on their flanks. These were the
ravaneti
, great screes of glistening white marble, debris from the quarries above Carrara.

We had, in fact, although we didn’t know it at the time, left Liguria at Ponte Isolone and were now in Tuscany, in the province of Massa Carrara, a narrow strip of it not much more than a mile wide, salient with the road running up the middle of it and with Liguria on either hand. High on the hillside there was a long-abandoned customs house, on what had been a frontier.

Here, on what was good, alluvial farmland, olives and vines and maize and wheat flourished, and in the lower parts of the foothills lived what had been
mezzadri
, crop sharers, dependants of the ancient Malaspina family, who at one time had enormous possessions. The family owned the towns of Carrara and Massa Carrara until the middle of the eighteenth century and had a palace and a castle in the latter, and another castle in Fosdinovo
up on the hill in the direction we were now going, which was acquired in 1340 by Spinetta Malaspina. Other rich landowners also had
mezzadri
, who originally gave half their produce to the landowner in exchange for the use of the land and their dwellings, but by the 1960s they received 58 per cent of the proceeds. Those employed by the Malaspina used to live in humble and, by the standards of the time in which they were built, decent, now picturesque farm buildings, many of them built as late as the 1900s by the Conte Malaspina, as a marble plaque displayed in a prominent position on the outer walls of each of them testified.

The majority of these, and the other farm buildings, were rendered in the standard colour for Italian farmhouses almost everywhere except the mountains, known as
sangue di bue
(oxblood), which grows paler and paler as the years pass until it ends up a very pale pink.

Many of these
mezzadri
had begun to work on the land when they left school at the age of eleven after five years of
scuola elementare
, an educational system that endured until the last war. At the time when we bought I Castagni in 1967, the
mezzadria
system was still functioning in some parts of Italy and there were still numbers of
contadini
who were more or less, if not totally, illiterate, and could only make a cross on paper instead of writing their names. Today, most of the occupants of the farmhouses are salaried agricultural workers.

Now we were passing a vast and beautiful villa, also rendered in
sangue di bue
, built by the Malaspina in the eighteenth century at Caniparola, a comparative rarity in what had always been, since the coming of the malaria, and until the development of the Riviera della Versilia in the second half of the nineteenth century, a poverty-stricken part of Tuscany.

It was not only the malaria that the inhabitants had to contend with. Besides having to put up with the already mentioned
Saracenic pirates who whisked their womenfolk away, they had to endure being trampled underfoot by an almost endless procession of foreign armies, which used what was a much-trodden route over the Apennines from the valley of the Po and then down the valley of the Magra, on their way south to despoil Rome and other attractive places
en route
.

What the natives in these northern parts of Tuscany needed to survive such irruptions were not villas but castles, the more Gormenghastian the better, preferably situated on inaccessible crags, and such fortresses were built in considerable numbers. Because of this comparatively few purely domestic villas were built where we now found ourselves. Here, at Caniparola, the hamlet near which the Malaspina villa stood, the road ran past a little chapel, embellished with marble obelisks, in which the family used to attend mass when they were in residence, and passed under an imposing brick archway, part of what had been a huge stable block. The lower parts of the building were plastered with posters announcing incredibly boring decrees, printed in full, or what was going on with the local pop groups. It was a great year for pop, 1967, the year of Sergeant Pepper.

Having passed under the archway, unless the road had made two violent turns, first to the left, then to the right, we would have run straight into the façade of what was to prove to be a rather good, very rustic inn, the Trattoria all’Arco.

Because of this man-made hazard the driver of almost every vehicle ascending or descending the hill, when confronted with it, felt constrained to sound his horn, what for a late twentieth-century Italian was the equivalent of crossing himself, at the same time going into a screaming gear change.

If the vehicle happened to be a bus, one of the service which operated between Sarzana and Fosdinovo, then the sound of the horn at close quarters was unbelievable. It was therefore not
surprising that the Arco was a rather noisy place at which to eat in the open air.

Beyond it the road began to climb the hillside – at that time Caniparola was a very small place with no modern buildings at all, apart from one or two post-First World War ones – winding its way upwards in a series of hairpin bends, through fields planted with vines and olives, passing old farmhouses all painted in various shades of
sangue di bue.

As we climbed we began to have fleeting views of other places, such as Castelnuovo di Magra, a hill town across the valley to the right which had a castle rising above it. Confronted with what seemed an endless succession of these bends, all of them more or less identical, with what looked like identical vineyards and olive groves sandwiched between them, we began to wonder if we had passed the track which led to the house we had come to see; but on this matter Signor Vescovo’s instructions had been explicit, and we would have had to be barmy to make a hash of them.

‘After a farmhouse on the left of the road with a vineyard in front of it in which the vines are supported on stone columns, the only such ones in the zone, you come to the seventeenth bend.

‘Beyond this,’ he continued, ‘you pass on your right a food shop, a butcher’s shop and a communist cell with a hammer and sickle over it.’ (This was a branch of the Italian Communist Party which, by that time, had passed the peak of the popularity it had enjoyed in the 1950s and early 1960s, epitomized in Guareschi’s
Piccolo Mondo di Don Camillo
.) But in spite of it now being closed, probably for ever, we always called it ‘The Cell’ because it sounded more exciting than a branch.

‘Then, after the eighteenth bend, you will see, a hundred metres or so up the hill, a tall solitary cypress, from which a rough track leads off to the left.

‘This track,’ he wrote, ‘leads down to a small house. In it lives a widow, a Signora Angiolina. She has the keys of the property and she is expecting you at three o’clock.’

All the years we subsequently lived here we had trouble with what Signor Vescovo described as the eighteenth bend from Caniparola. Wanda made it the twenty-second, I made it the twenty-first and none of the friends who came to stay with us was able to agree how many there were either. It was a waste of time appealing to the local inhabitants, they had never even attempted to count them.

Signora Angiolina was hovering in her vegetable patch outside her house, awaiting our arrival. As she told us, she had just finished feeding her rabbits which lived in a large wooden hutch at the back of the house.

The house looked bigger than it really was as she had rented a large room on the ground floor to a communist social club which was, at the moment, like the cell at the seventeenth bend, more or less moribund, but not completely so, and subsequently it started up with evenings of very un-communist pop which would have made Lenin turn in his grave.

Signora Angiolina’s husband had died a couple of years previously and because of this she was in deep mourning, which meant that she was dressed in black from head to foot: black headscarf, black cardigan, black skirt, reaching below the knee, black woollen stockings – normally she wouldn’t have worn any at all before the cold weather set in – and black felt slippers.

The only item that wasn’t black was her apron which was dark navy with small white spots on it, which helped to cheer her outfit up a bit.

Later she told Wanda that she was fed up with being in mourning – the navy apron was probably a first sign of rebellion
against it – and she was looking forward to leaving it off and quite soon she did so, which raised her spirits no end.

Signora Angiolina was in her sixties when we first met her, and was very slim. She had nice, bright-blue eyes and she cried easily. She had greyish-brown hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in a bun, now hidden by her headscarf. And she had a really lovely smile.

It was a tragic face but a beautiful one, a beauty, one felt, that would endure and in fact it did, until the day she died. Even seeing her briefly for the first time it was obvious that at some time in her life something awful had befallen her but we had to wait until we were on more intimate terms with her in order to discover what it was.

Like most
contadini
she was wary of people such as ourselves who came from cities and were foreigners but, in spite of this, she did bestow on us this lovely smile.

However, when Wanda asked her if she would take us to see the house and unlock the doors for us so that we could see the inside, which was the purpose of our visit, she suddenly looked serious, shrugged her shoulders in a way that was almost imperceptible, and said,
‘ Ma!’

This seemed like bad news. In my experience almost all the Italian
contadini
I had ever met who used this expression had done so in a negative sense, one that usually boded ill.

When, for instance, while on the run in Italy during the war, I had asked the
contadini
for whom I was working in exchange for food and a roof over my head, if I had any chance of remaining free when the snow fell in the Apennines, something I had been thinking about for some time, there was no doubt as to what they meant when they said,
‘Ma!’
They meant ‘No!’ And they were right. But Signora Angiolina’s
‘Ma!’
was of a different sort. One she used in the sense of
‘Chissa?’
(‘Who knows?’)

But this was not her only interpretation of
‘Ma!’
If you asked Signora Angiolina,
‘Che sarà successo?’
(‘What can have happened?’), a question that we would be asking all and sundry in this part of rural Italy for the next twenty years or more, one which could cover any sort of calamity – a blow-back in a septic tank, the sudden disappearance of the roof, or the cessation of the water supply – her first reaction would be to say
‘Ma!’,
implying that she didn’t know.

What she meant by
‘Ma!’
in this particular instance, as Wanda subsequently explained to me, being more practised in the understanding of such things, was that she was not the actual owner of the keys, and was therefore expressing trepidation at the thought of having to be responsible for opening doors to rooms to which she may not have had access previously, unless someone had died in one of them, in which case she might have entered it for the wake.

Worst of all, for her, was the idea of opening them up for a couple of unknown persons who might quite easily turn out to be robbers. But in spite of all this, the implication was that she would do it. It was all rather confusing.