Every Day in Tuscany (15 page)

T
HE CHOREOGRAPHY OF
the kitchen—I peel, you scrape, wine spills, bag splits, beans simmer, sink slurps, petals fall, flour drifts, crust splits, aromas spread, lights flicker, chocolate melts, glass shatters, sauce thickens, finger bleeds, cheese ripens, crumbs fall, sweat drips, spoon bangs, meat glistens, oil spatters, wine breathes, garlic smashes, lettuces float, silver shines, apron snags, you sneeze, I sing
oh, my love, my darling
, and dough rises in soft moons the size of my cupped hand as planet earth tilts us toward dinner.

D
OMENICA, WHOSE NAME
, Sunday, I love, lives in a mountain house called Il Poggio del Sole, Hill of Sun, with her husband, two grown sons, and her mother-in-law, Annetta, who is a bright-faced woman the size of an eight-year-old girl. She sits by the woodstove in the kitchen in her apron, with a scarf around her head, as she has for all her eighty-six years. She says little but her eyes are so friendly that I always feel that I’ve had a conversation with her. She watches Domenica roll out the pasta and begin cutting it into strips. She rises to stir the pot on the stove and yanks open the oven to check on the hare she’s axed and skinned this morning. I’ve never seen her in town and suspect that long years when getting into town was difficult disincline her now that it’s easy.
La vecchia stampa
—a person of the old stamp. They’re disappearing fast from Cortona now, those self-sufficient old-timers who used to sit inside the huge fireplaces trading stories and passing around the
vin santo
. When I see women near town with bundles of sticks on their backs or with their armfuls of greens for their rabbits, I say to myself,
We won’t see her kind for long
. Simultaneously, my own life is running quickly through the same hourglass. The changes coming fast now to Italy are sometimes painful. Out in the mountains, though, time is not so relentlessly transformative.

Since restoring Fonte delle Foglie, I’ve had the good luck to meet many fiercely independent mountain people of
la vecchia stampa
. I sense more than know that Signorelli lived nearby. His original name was Luca d’Egidio di Ventura, suggesting that his family was of the mountain Sant’Egidio. In his self-portrait, his face looks determined. He looks like a man who knows exactly who he is, a kind of face I’ve seen on many mountain dwellers. Their isolation promotes independence. Curiously, I’ve found an intense friendliness and a warmth people give forth generously when not bombarded daily with dozens of social encounters. They’ve revealed a wilder side of Tuscany to me.

The first neighbor I met was Angelo, who stepped from behind the house when it was still a ruin and fixed me with a silent stare, which I took for a greeting. His tail-thumping mongrel stood almost eye to eye with Angelo. They were out gathering
vinco
, a type of willow. A sprite of a person, Angelo carried a carved stick and wore thick brown wool clothes that must have fit when he was more robust. The pants, secured by a rough belt, gathered in folds around his middle. From a strap slung over his shoulder dangled a bottle covered in woven
vinca
. “We’re buying this place; I know we’re crazy.” I held out my hand, which he regarded as though it were a dead bird before he stuck out his own small hard hand and cracked my metacarpals. He took a swig of whatever was in his distinctive flask. He cocked his head, and lifted his face of a thousand wrinkles to the sun. I realized he was nearly deaf. He seemed otherworldly to me and probably I seemed to have landed on his wild mountainside from another galaxy.

I soon met his wife, Irene, she of the single yellow tooth and big smile, and visited their house, which looked barely changed for hundreds of years, except for the blaring television that dominated the dark cavernous kitchen. Angelo beckoned for me to follow him into an even darker room where, among hanging salamis, rows of cheeses, and the prosciutto secured on a carving stand, I saw the cunning, artistic willow baskets he wove all winter by the fire. I put his egg and vegetable baskets on top of the cabinets in my kitchen where we can admire them every day.

Angelo roams the woods all year, and they also invite us to roam. I love stepping over our low electric fence and onto the rutted road leading absolutely nowhere after passing a rustic cottage, a ruin of three attached collapsed houses, and an architecturally pure small stone chestnut-drying barn.

I’m out in the territory of wild cherries, apples, heather fields, and wildflowers. Succulent strawberries the size of a pea especially prefer the edges of the road. Occasionally I startle a mother boar herding her young along the mud holes and torrents. When I meet one of the beady-eyed, nut-seeking maniacs, I adopt the old southern advice about snakes. Don’t bother them; they won’t bother you. No eye contact. Exit in the opposite direction. I back up and she runs. This works so far.

At night we hear the
cinghiale
snorting in the dark. Their attachment to the acorns that fall near the house prompted the electric fence. They’d rooted up the irrigation system and the stone patio in their zeal for the crunchy nuts. Ed was looking out every morning to see if we’d find one in the pool floating feet up. British friends, who returned after a long absence, immediately noticed a putrid smell in their tap water. A two-hundred-pound boar had somehow shifted the stone off the well and fallen in.

Since our fence began delivering a zing to their hairy snouts, they have stayed out, ripping up the hillside above us and delivering frequent avalanches onto the road. We’re fond of them—so brutal and wild—and when they run we laugh at their cartoonish, rocking-horse gallop, those absurd tusks, and tapering legs attached to pointy hooves.

The mountain people regard them differently. Their corporeal form simply embodies the first phase of
cinghiale in umido
, a long-marinated (to get the raunchy taste out) stew that falls apart on the fork and reminds you of a smoldering fire on the morning of the first
brina
, frost. During hunting season, our friend Giorgio always has brought us bags of bloody boar. Now Domenica’s other son, Mirko, sometimes drops off a hunk. I hate the way they’re hunted. A squadron of men, who look dressed for combat in the latest American war, spread out across a wide flank of hill and flush them out. Given that they are hunted, the best fate for the meat is pasta sauce. Every trattoria in Cortona serves long-simmered
pappardelle al cinghiale
, wide pasta with rich boar sauce.

T
O WALK, GOING
nowhere. The sensation deeply relaxes me and leads me to walk for miles through the woods on old logging paths and Roman roads. Following the ancient stones through the pine and chestnut forest, picking the sweetest blackberries, finding patches of pink cyclamen, yellow and purple crocuses, and seeing the neat falcons called
pellegrini
, little pilgrims, peering down from a branch—
che gioia
, what joy. I sing. Loudly. Loudly because when I took voice lessons at fifteen, the teacher, reaching for a compliment, said I had a “soft, sweet voice.” San Francesco’s followers sang as they wandered the mountains, but not my “Nessun Dorma” or “American Pie.” I wish Robert Frost had never written that always-anthologized poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood, because at every separation of path I recall that he took “the one less traveled by,” a choice that influenced his whole life. Here
all
of the branching Roman trails are less traveled by, and the snags in my sweaters and scratches on my arms prove that.

To be where there’s
no one
. Solitude, the real luxury item. Clearings show me views of Lake Trasimeno that look like backdrop painted scenery, the distant Val di Chiana, forever the fruit basket of Tuscany, with apartments and shops now creeping out from its edges, and always Cortona below, which I see like an eagle from one vantage, and then in a fanned-out position, a fine little city spread like a bolt of green-gold embroidered silk over the hill.

The Etruscan spring still runs, even in drought. The spring house that once protected the bubbling source lies in heaps, with water finding its way among the stones. Ed wants to rebuild it—but what did it look like originally? Or maybe not originally, but even recently, say 1600. Wild as our mountainside seems to us, many traces indicate that it was not always so. Our house and the two nearby are called
“Cassacie,”
the bad houses, on the old maps, although one has spider-leg script labeling ours Fonte della Foglia, Font of the Leaf. We changed it to Fonte delle Foglie. Plural leaves made more sense. A section of a Roman bridge and medieval monastery ruins remind me of other travelers, other lives. During our reconstruction, we found two sections of Roman aqueduct. Coming upon these things makes me question what
else
is just under the surface of where I roam.

Emphatically, what is
not
underfoot or in the air is the Tuscany of the Renaissance. Here we feel the more primitive biotic pull of Tuscany before it was Tuscany. At this time in my life, I’m loving the raucous waterfalls, stone pushing up from deep tertiary levels, grandfather chestnuts, some with hollow trunks you could camp in, freshets that open after downpours, big prelapsarian silences I don’t even want to interrupt with a single word. This is where I came for comfort when we experienced at Bramasole our own private terrorist incident. This is where I come now for the pure joy of loving a place so purely itself.

Who would not be happy, this far in the country? Happiness, what an elusive elf, how to hold happiness, how to find it, how to live inside a great happiness of your own making?
The Sustainability of Happiness
—some philosopher should write a treatise. Maybe it would be very long, or perhaps it would be only a few sentences.

D
OMENICA DOES NOT
toss a pinch of flour onto the oven floor and count the seconds until it browns, as I’d been told to do. She sticks her face close to the open door and the reflective coals burnish her tanned skin to copper.
“Pronto,”
she shouts, and we begin rolling the pizza. Our American guests toast Domenica and gather around to watch. The Italians stand back, bemused, having seen this process since birth.