Every Day in Tuscany (19 page)

This is Italy—such an out-of-the-way, inconspicuous holein-the-wall—and the meal leaves us wide-eyed. The waitress just brings out what they’re serving, a penne with tomato sauce and basil, veal roast and potatoes, sautéed spinach, terrific bread, and panna cotta. Simple, very simple, and perfect.

We feast, then drive on, making it back to Bramasole in time to shop for the weekend. Cortona is abuzz with tourists—fewer this year and the merchants are dismayed—but still the piazza throbs with talk and laughter. Ah, Marco’s has a wine tasting in progress. We join friends and strangers there and meet the makers of the local and impressive Gemelli wines.

Evening falls softly and the intense sky fades to thin turquoise streaked with gauzy clouds. Everyone looks wonderful glazed with this radiant light.

“This is the happening place,” Jim says, handing us glasses of dark red wine.

“Yeah, rockin’.” Ed clanks glasses with us.

Yes, Luca, so nice to be back. Are you joining us in the piazza?

No wonder swarms of travelers converge on Italia, expecting to be dazzled. Washed and unwashed masses hoping for, yes, plain fun, hoping for enlightenment, for relaxation, transformation. Perhaps that bolt of life force that shoved the Middle Ages into the Renaissance also sparked the idea that Italy is
the
place. Humanism’s blaze of glory still draws us. Witness this piazza on a summer evening. Perhaps the big old Mediterranean sun, throwing its golden arrows across the piazza, continues to pull us, too.

“Did I ever tell you,” I say to Valentina, “that once I got on an empty bus. Then a woman got on and of all the empty seats, she chose to sit beside me.”

She looks at me blankly.
“Perché no, cara?”
Why not, darling?

S
ENIGALLIA IN THE
M
ARCHE

We’ve been wanting to explore the Adriatic coast, so when Riccardo and Silvia, just returned from Senigallia, recommended a hotel, we looked it up on the Internet and found the description on the website irresistible:

To the natural offer of a still fierce landscape of the own authenticity, the Marine Terrazza Marconi Hotel and SPA spouse the own ability to receive and to satisfy the requirements of the present. Is the meeting of the precious and atavistic equilibrium between desires, habits and resources, it rocks of a harmonious daily ritual to measure of every host. It is also a fascinating dialogue between architecture and landscape, an invite towards one pause of well-being in a generous and cordial context; it is the source of found again union between space and the time.

I book a room immediately. We see right away that Senigallia not only lies on the opposite coast from Portofino, but the town is opposite as well. Portofino is one of the most exclusive spots on the entire Mediterranean; Senigallia, instead, is a relaxed beach resort, ancient in origin, and welcomes everyone to its broad strand, known as Velvet Beach: African men selling scarves; sun-seekers actually lying on towels and folding chairs as well as lining up at the concessions of umbrellas and chairs; children building sand castles; and boys playing volley ball. Senigallia is one of the EU Blue Banner beaches; the golden sand has been drawing sun-seekers since the Romans.
¹

Getting a bit lost gives us a look at the gritty, colorful port area. The Misa River runs through town and such advantageous access must have been what originally attracted settlers in the fourth century
B.C
. This was the first Roman colony on the Adriatic.

We meet several blocked streets teeming with people. During the Middle Ages Senigallia held a gigantic market fair. The tradition continues, with stands set up to sell clothing, household items, and beach toys instead of oxen and farm supplies, although the fish, herb, and vegetable market in Foro Annonario probably doesn’t veer much from its earlier model.

We’ve come to Senigallia for walking on the beach and because of two culinary meccas—Uliassi, a short walk from the hotel, and, a little out of town, La Madonnina del Pescatore. I couldn’t say which I prefer. They’re diverse but similar. For both innovative chefs, local ingredients star. “Write what you don’t know about what you know,” a colleague of mine used to tell her fiction students. That’s the mode in Senigallia. The chefs seek what’s new in what’s familiar, especially seafood. A few days of sampling both kitchens, walking the beach at dawn, taking a massage, reading a book on the terrace—here’s a recipe for an instant sensation of liberation.

The hotel keeps bicycles parked out front, with wicker baskets and no gears. Pedaling up and down the promenade, stopping for lunch at a simple fish restaurant on the beach (where moisture always clogs the salt shaker) would feel like an old-Florida beach experience if it were not so quintessentially Italian.

An art nouveau pavilion suspended over the water prods the memories of every Italian over forty. They all know the words to the seventies song “Una Rotonda sul Mare”—“A Rotunda on the Sea.” All the friends are dancing at the sea but where are you—that kind of song. For Italian friends, it carries the kind of nostalgia that “California Dreamin’” does for me.

While leaning on the rotunda railing, I’m catapulted back to the beach casino on St. Simons Island, where my family spent vacations when I was a child. My older sisters in their summer sundresses went off with their boyfriends to dance to
Somewhere there’s music, how high the moon
… In memory the casino is round, columned, open to the night sky, smooth terrazzo floor, a jukebox glowing gold, red, and green. Did the casino actually look like a Greek temple? I can see the tanned lifeguards my sisters dated and the secret anticipation I felt that someday I would flounce off on the back of a scooter, my hair a mass of damp curls, my toenails painted hot pink, and my arms encircling the waist of someone semidivine.

If we’d been Italian, would I have gone to the
rotonda sul mare
? The high moon shines the same silver on the water, dancing in an open pavilion at the sea is the same, my sisters nowhere in sight. The local boys of summer are dark, with black eyes, and as a teenager I would have loved to dance with them.

We take several drives down the coast, where we find a splendid stretch of the Adriatic, the natural park of Conero, and the tiny towns of Sirolo, Portonovo, and Numana. Who would not love a home along this coast? We make a plan to visit Portonovo with our grandson next summer. The hotel there is an authentic walled Napoleonic fort from 1810, perched over the sea.

Before we check out, we take a soak in the hamam downstairs. We lounge in the tile chairs and let the warm waters swirl around us. The hotel description is right. It does rock of a harmonious daily ritual.

Circles on My Map—Umbria and Beyond

A
SSISI
, H
OME OF
S
AN
F
RANCESCO

IN UMBRIA, ASSISI HAS A PROFOUND ATTRACTION
no number of tourists can dissipate. Ed and I often return for the immense pleasure of seeing this pale stone town dramatically positioned against its hillside. We come here to venerate San Francesco and Santa Chiara, immortalized in their own churches, to see the Romanesque facade of Duomo di San Rufino, and to gaze at the Tempio di Minerva, whose severe columns stand strongly for the ancient world. We’re only an hour away, so this is a gift we often exchange. “Why don’t we drive over to Assisi,” Ed will say on an idle day.

The main parking lot heaves with buses unloading religious tour groups and art lovers who throng the lower church of Basilica San Francesco for the Giotto frescoes. We all file onto the outdoor escalator that raises us (assumes us?) into town. The great pilgrimage sites always have been crowded with seekers and sellers. Seeing nuns from all over the world in their various habits, watching pilgrims buying wooden San Francesco crosses, hearing bearded young men singing and strumming in the piazza is part of the experience. If you haven’t heard “Kum Bay Ya” since Methodist Youth Fellowship, this is the place.

As we enter the main gate of town, the July sun seems to pour down from a great chalice onto our baking heads. Today the crush of other tourists is daunting. I try to follow my photographer friend Steven’s advice: See as through a lens. Look up, or down, or around at the carved stone and magical street shrines and green courtyards and doors that open into palaces.

An African group in colorful garb sits down in the first piazza and starts up a lugubrious hymn. “Do you think there’s such a thing as a global soul?” Ed asks out of nowhere.

A global soul. I have to think. “Well, I suppose so. Isn’t the mineral content of the human body compositionally the same as the mineral content of the earth—I mean, in the same proportions?” He seems okay with the response, but I don’t know how the Africans singing a Catholic hymn provoked him. Probably just the United Nations component of Assisi.

D
URING A SIESTA
stroll through this ancient town, where well-fed alley cats curl under a lavender plant, I suddenly experience a joyous release from the present tense. I madly wish I could photograph all the fantastic iron door knockers, or paint the coral geraniums tumbling from a balcony. The aroma of roast chicken drifting from a window makes me want to tap on the door and introduce myself to the man in the wife-beater undershirt reading the paper at the window. He’s privileged to glance up at any time of day and look at the rose window of San Rufino, as we do now.

“That rose window looks like a doily that Domenica crochets on her winter nights,” I notice. This is a church Ed particularly likes for its solid bell tower from 1028, the oldest part of the church, and the stone zodiac signs around the main door. The construction lagged so long that you can trace the change from Romanesque toward Gothic as your eye and time move up the facade. The inside has been remodeled and no longer speaks the stark primitive language of the outside, but you can run your finger around the rim of the marble font where both Francesco and Chiara were baptized.

I
MUST VISIT
the flying buttresses of Santa Chiara’s church of striped pink and white stone, and go inside to say
ciao
to her mortal body lying on view, her face a waxy brown, like beef jerky.

“That’s a poem,” Ed says, pointing toward Chiara’s rose window.

“Do you think the form simply evolved from the older oculus windows of the ancient buildings?”

“Maybe, seems logical. What makes them so pure? I guess it’s the contrast of the hard stone carved into a lacy design.”

“Yes, stone so heavy and the design absolutely airy.”

“I like the name as much as the windows. Rose windows. These are so much simpler than Notre Dame and Chartres.”

“A whole different gesture.”

The upper church of the Basilica has an important rose window, too. Not that these windows are the prime attractions of Assisi. We’ll leave that to Giotto’s frescoes, and to those of Cimabue, Simone Martini, and Lorenzetti. But the perk of return visits is that you get to ferret out nuances of a place, and often those connect to you personally more than the five-star attractions.

Wandering neighborhoods, arm in arm, we glance in open windows. The laughter and shouting inside, dishes rattling, cage with a finch, the crocheted curtains, climbing roses, and pots of hydrangeas all speak clearly about life in Assisi. Ed stops to inspect a pot of basil on a stoop. I just stare, imprinting a faded blue door into my brain.

San Francesco in his rough brown robe lies inside, sleeping off the heat and dreaming of holding out his hand to a wolf.

I
TALY IS ENDLESS
. My favorite short trips are to places that remain uniquely themselves. Small towns especially yield an intimate experience—and you find an immediate sense of the place’s essence. You may also have closer encounters with people, always a bonus in Italy.

Last week, en route to Venice, where we met friends, we hopped off the train for a night in Ferrara in Emilia Romagna. Ferrara deserves a long chapter and I can’t wait to go back. If “Best Places to Live in Italy” lists are compiled, surely Ferrara makes the top echelon. The town is flat and open, with handsome buildings, numerous palaces, bell towers, arcaded walks, and a populace on bicycles. Bicycles everywhere, with clusters of people who’ve stopped to talk while balancing their bikes. From just a whirl in this marvelous city, I absorbed its strength and dignity. What other city has such extensive Renaissance town walls, open splendid piazzas, and tree-lined streets full of birdsong?

The forceful Palazzo dei Diamanti, Diamond Palazzo, takes its name from the faceted stone facade. Inside, we had the Ferrara School of painters to ourselves. The security guards were all reading books. The Este family powerbrokers, who held court here, left their indelible stamp of culture and history. More recently, the Bassani novel and De Sica film,
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
, leaves a scrim of sadness over the place for the Fascist-era fate of Jews, who’d previously, from the seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, been shuffled into a ghetto area. Under the plaque listing names and commemorating lost Jews, café tables host throngs of cheerful people partaking of a late-afternoon
aperitivo
.

We happened into a small restaurant that I like to think represents the town well, Quel Fantastico Giovedi (That Fantastic Thursday), the name taken from the translated title of John Steinbeck’s novel
Sweet Thursday
. Memorable, the
budino
of peas with gorgonzola fondant, the scallops with fennel, spinach ravioli stuffed with quail, then the ambrosial peach sorbet.

Lacking bicycles, we walked for hours in Ferrara.

C
LOSER TO HOME
, we often drive guests over to Bagno Vignoni, where a thermal spring with curative properties runs downhill through a travertine ditch. Often our guests have pulled a muscle hoisting suitcases or twisted an ankle walking on stony streets in high heels. We take them to the waters. Early morning is the time to go and soak your feet, even if they don’t hurt. By noon, many Italians have arrived, ready for the mineral properties of the hot water to infuse their work-sore feet. They hike their skirts and trousers, lower their feet, and heal. In town, a thermal pool takes the place of the usual piazza and you can imagine Lorenzo Il Magnifico floating like a water lily.

O
N
I
SOLA
M
AGGIORE
, an island in Umbria’s Lago Trasimeno, a walk at midnight returns you to a lost time when the village was home to fishermen and the castle-monastery brooding on the end of the island hosted St. Francis for a visit. Cornucopia-shaped nets still dry on the main street. Through a window, you see a woman making lace by lamplight. In a place with no cars, a human proportion asserts itself. You can walk in silence, watching the dimpling light of stars on the water.