Amore and Amaretti (17 page)

Piero, my old boss from I' Che C'è C'è, putters up the hill on his motorbike and parks it on the gravel next to the garbage skips. I would never have imagined Piero as a biker – he is such a refined man – and yet his fingers are self-assured as he tightens the strap of the second helmet under my chin and kicks the machine into life. He comes to my rescue, on occasional weekday afternoons, and bears me off to villages and hill towns to look at castles and taste wines and attend markets and little local festivals, or
sagre
, which take place throughout the year in celebration of mushrooms or wild boar or a type of flower. Dear Piero is unchanged after all these years, though no longer running a restaurant, but throwing his energies instead into taking groups of tourists to vineyards and educating them about wines.

I lean with Piero around bends and curves as we twist our way up to hill towns enclosed by walls; Piero's stomach is all hard muscle. At Il Palagio vineyard in Castellina in Chianti we are enchanted by the little castle that perches in its grounds. Clicking our way across the intricately tiled inner courtyard, we find the pretty chapel with its mosaic walls, its slender soulful Madonna and its violent canvases depicting slaughter.

We bump along unsealed tracks until we reach a low, flat building in the middle of a homely farmyard. Inside the building, Danish girls with fiercely ruddy cheeks and white shower caps scrub down endless expanses of stainless steel at the end of the ricotta-making shift. Domes of snowy cheeses imperceptibly quiver in neat lines. At the lily
sagra
(festival), we stand before an antique olive press, eating sticky fried pastries, while Piero explains to me all the stages of olive oil production. He shouts back to me, riding pillion, an amusing story about a mushroom hunt with friends in nearby woods, where unplanned psychedelic experiences occurred, and I laugh into the laundry fragrance of his shirt.

These outings return me to a sense of where I am and who I am, expanding my world with possibilities. I invariably come back resolving to pack more into my days here, but, unless Piero visits, resettle into the habitual groove.

July and August are fantastically hot, the outside temperature in the high thirties and the kitchen worse. Fortunately, during the day we are not busy, but in the evenings we run. Whereas I am used to making batches of tiramisu on a twice-weekly basis, I now find myself needing to do so every day. A small fan whirrs asthmatically beside me all night long in the little room I have come to think of, for all its eccentricities, as a haven.

One Saturday night around the middle of August, Cinzia stands in the corridor screaming that she needs to go to hospital for tranquillisers. Gianfranco, in a voice like ice, orders her to go upstairs to bed. I sit beside her as she sobs and heaves, and I say soothing, meaningless things until she becomes calm.

After Cinzia's breakdown, Gianfranco decides we all need a break, to tie in with the annual national midsummer holiday, Ferragosto. Incredibly, the cocktail of heat and intense working conditions has made Gianfranco contrarily good-humoured and cheerful – presumably, the success of the restaurant is contributing as well – and he and I fire along together beautifully. Even Ignazio (whose girlfriend, I realise, I dislike precisely because she possesses three features I lack – namely, youth, beauty and slenderness) behaves with less ambivalence, and more friendliness, towards me.

One night at five to midnight, I find myself sitting in bed surveying my room – plunged into shadow and lit by one tiny bedside lamp – with pleasure. Today I made forty-two crêpes and two cheesecakes, one flourless chocolate cake and a double carrot cake, a batch of
biscotti di Prato
, savoury
biscottini
,
salsa di guanciale
and
salsa ghiotta
.

Through pinched, tired eyes I look at the luxuriant plant in the tiny alcove below the window, my desk cluttered with books, letters, photos, pens, envelopes and diaries. There's my handbag and a flask of Chianti propping up mail. This is one of the rare times I feel a quiet happiness because, despite having failed my last few attempts at dieting, I am beginning to think I will drop the notion of being a tiny size 8 and relax into just being me. Now that would be progress.

In August, everyone heads to either the seaside or the mountains. Florence is almost deserted, with most businesses closed behind the ubiquitous green shutters.

Gianfranco and Cinzia leave for their days off. They have decided to close the restaurant for five days to go to the Isle of Giglio, where Cinzia's parents own a house. Ignazio heads off to Yugoslavia with a group of mates and I elect to stay behind at Spedaluzzo in luxurious solitude.

I read and walk in the afternoons instead of early mornings. I write lots of letters, and at night watch dreadful variety programmes on television as I spoon
gelato
into my mouth.

Mangia che ti passa

Eat and you will feel better

For most of that intensely hot summer, both the hot water system and the toilet in our bathroom are out of order. Essential functions and services breaking down is a facet of everyday life taken for granted in this battered ancient country, as presumably it is in all other countries not ‘new' like Australia – the general response is philosophical.

Since my first time in Italy, I have experienced on innumerable occasions the disappearance of water for no apparent reason. The time it occurred on an extremely busy night at the first restaurant is the most memorable. Crates of mineral water had to be emptied into the enormous pasta pot; into the sink, for washing up; over our hands, for regular hand-washing. The chaos was extraordinary, and yet outside the kitchen the customers calmly enjoyed their meals without the slightest suspicion. In the Via Ghibellina flat shared with Ignazio, the shower water once stopped just as I was about to rinse off the foamy white conditioner from my hair. Fortunately, we had a barber shop directly below us into which I could drip so I could finish the job. On the Isle of Elba, it happened so frequently that I became adept at showering with the aid of bottles of mineral water – lathering up, rinsing off – and, on the nights I needed to wash my hair, would require a store of eight bottles do so effectively.

After two months, Fabio, our jack of all trades – a massive man whose large, loose jeans hang low around his hips, whose Florentine accent is almost incomprehensibly thick, whose soul is infinitely gentle – arrives to bring salvation. Until then, the cold baths I have been sinking into every afternoon in the heat are all I desire, and flinging a bucket of water down the toilet to flush away the contents seems as efficient a method as any. Once Fabio has left, all he has fixed we experience as absolute luxuries; this sense of luxury and privilege and ease of life remains with us for a long time afterwards.

There is an unexpected phone call from Emba – beloved mother-figure from I' Che C'è C'è – who has invited Piero and me to her place on a day off but not until late afternoon, allowing me to first visit the Valentino exhibition at the Accademia. I am up even earlier than usual to catch the bus into Florence, which deposits me behind the Santa Maria Novella station a little before nine o'clock. I spend an entrancing two hours in the lofty gallery, where David has been surrounded by shop dummies attired in red evening gowns falling to the floor in drapes and folds, pleats and swirls; most of them have been loaned, for the purposes of the exhibition, by movie stars like Sharon Stone and Glenn Close, according to tiny plaques beside each one. The drama of contrast, making that sublime statue whose imitations and reproductions are ubiquitous throughout the city the naked centrepiece for a room of red-gowned headless women, is both audacious and ingenious. Or perhaps just quintessentially Italian… I am still filled with the wonder of it when the bus tips me out at Spedaluzzo, so that shortly afterwards, when Piero arrives, it is all I can breathlessly talk about.

Piero is excited for other reasons: he has a brand-new BMW, larger than the previous motorcycle, and is eager to roar back toward Florence, to where Emba and her family live.

It is to be the first time I have seen her in years and years, but she is exactly as I remember her: round and soft and sweet and warm, if a little greyer. Ever since I' Che C'è C'è days, she and Piero have called me
‘coniglietta'
, or ‘little rabbit' – and thus I am called all that very long afternoon-into-evening. The apartment she shares with her gentle silent husband, two bossy grown-up daughters and Maurizio – who, thinner than before, makes a brief appearance – has as its hub a small kitchen around whose table we settle, all talking over the top of each other. Even though Emba no longer works in restaurants, food and cooking remain her great joys, and so, over glasses of the superior expensive spumante Piero has supplied, these largely constitute our conversation. And then the table is being set and the dishes brought out. There is
buristo
, the Sienese equivalent of
boudin
, or blood sausage, which Emba has sliced thinly, dipped in flour and fried in a little oil. We eat it with bread, like
pâté
.
Pecorino
al tartufo
is fresh pecorino seamed with black truffles and is both earthy and creamy. The local green olives inspire Piero – who has become an expert in olives and grapes while taking group tours through vineyards – to tell us that green olives make the best extra virgin olive oil because of their asperity and their greenness, although obviously their yield is always much lower than that of the fully ripe, juicy black ones. There is a platter of rape, deep green leaves like spinach, which Emba has simmered in olive oil, garlic and a little
brodo
(chicken stock).

I love most the pasta dish, with Emba's own
salsa erbe
, or herb sauce, which she has folded through fresh tagliatelle. In between mouthfuls, I copy down the recipe on the torn-off sheet of a pharmaceutical company notepad.