Every Day in Tuscany (21 page)

Out the back gate of the cemetery, I find discarded tombstones and iron crosses. Did their families die out, leaving no one to pay their rent? I could take them to my house, prop them up among the olive trees. Would anyone mind?

The most affecting part of the cemetery is a wall lined with the oldest stones. These send back messages. One commemorates two small
sorelle
, sisters, taken by
la cruda difterite
, the harsh diphtheria, in 1874. Another marks other sisters, victims of
malevoli insinuazioni
. What? Malevolent insinuations? Am I beginning a heat stroke, here at noon in the July sun? What could that mean? Another mourns
“La cruda difterite tolse la vita a me.”
The same diphtheria “took my life.” The sun beats a slow rhythm on my head. This is a long audit of the past. Since the mid-twentieth century, with the sperm count spiraling down, ten, twenty percent, approaching forty percent, the future should be my worry. If I want to worry, the low Italian
birth
rate should be my focus. We’re on a course so that long before five thousand million years, when the sun evolves into a red giant, ready to collapse, no one will be around to care. This place will have joined the jillions of specks in the universe along with Alain’s lemon soufflé, his crisp blue shirts, Francesco’s memory of the long walk back from Russia with no shoes, the flour on the baker’s hands, the stunned faces of Bruno’s young daughters, the cold wake in the octagonal church, the veil over Ernesto, the amused twinkle in Primo’s blue, blue eyes, the priest who cried.

But Zelinda Dragoni’s 127-year-old passion, for now, endures. She must have had time to compose her epitaph in 1881. She addresses Luigi, “My first and only love on earth. I will always speak with God of the great affection and of the compassionate care, that you vested in me and to Him I will recommend our Ida.
Addio, Addio
.” Ida must have been a daughter, who seems here to be something of an afterthought. Another stone (1852) implores the reader: “Scatter tears and flowers on this field of death.” Okay, no problem.

My phone rings, shattering this communion. “Where are you?” Ed asks. “Do you want me to reheat the chicken for lunch? It’s after one.” I glance up at the town above, where I see a woman as I was earlier, leaning on the duomo wall, looking down at the small city of the dead. Briefly I wonder what she is thinking.

And so I leave my bundle of lavender propped against a lichen-etched stone cross with no name.

Addio, Addio
.

Amici—Friends

“W
HEN IS THE
C
UBAN INVASION?”
M
ASSIMO ASKS
.

“Have you heard from them?” Lorenzo calls from his doorway.

“What’s the news of the
Cubani
?” Edo gets out his phone. “Let’s call them.”

“
Ciao
—you know Luca was looking for Alberto?” someone I don’t even know asks me.

As the nearest neighbors and good friends of the Alfonso clan, we’re constant conduits of information about their papal-level entrances and exits from town. Their annual arrival signals
vacation
as clearly as if the word appeared over the town in skywriting. They bring their Cuban laid-back charm and contagious
gusto di vivere
. Everyone has fallen in love with this family, seventeen strong, who bought Casa Caravita, an ancient house just above Bramasole. They can’t all stay in the house, so a couple of apartments are rented for various configurations of the three brothers, their wives and total of eight children, plus mama Rose, Uncle Enrique, and sometimes an aunt from Spain. Though the father died several years ago, I often sense he’s come along for the prolonged party and just happens to be invisible.

I will not forget the summer night I met Alberto at the Cardinalis’ pergola table. Placido had sold him a piece of land adjacent to his house and invited us over to meet
“questo Cubano molto simpatico.”
We had heard in the piazza that a mysterious Cuban-American had bought the house above us. Because trees hide it, I’d never even seen this oldest farm on the hillside. The chief of the
polizia
used to live there. We heard him every day summoning his dog.
Vieni qui
, he called, come here. We always referred to the hidden house as Casa Vieni Qui. Alberto’s restoration had been accomplished in record time. Miracle. I was curious.

We were a little late, and Placido invariably calls out
“A tavola,”
to the table, on the stroke of eight. We squeezed in, shoulder to shoulder, as Fiorella was bringing out the platter of prosciutto and melon. I had the luck to sit across from Alberto. He was there with two colleagues from his architectural firm, Elizabeth and Secondo, both of whom had bought apartments in Cortona and were in stages of restoration. From down the table there were lamentations over what was or was not hooked up and excitement at progress. Ah, hot water. Windows that open and close. Italians like roof and drainage discussions, too; they’re dealing with their own stone nightmare dream houses.

Normally the subject enthralls me, but I was riveted by Alberto. He has a full-out laugh and looks like someone Caravaggio would have liked to paint: black dense hair like Bacchus, tropical skin, and a look in his eyes—the shining brown of chestnuts—that’s quick, direct, and keeps something hidden. I could see that he was ready to be amused. Later, I’d learn of his empathetic nature, his god-given talent as a painter, his ambitious architectural projects, and his knowledge of Italian architectural history.

“Well, what are you working on?” Alberto asked me. I explained that I was in the middle of a book of travel narratives and Ed and I were on the road a lot. “What do you want to do next?” he persisted.

“I’ve been looking for a house in the South—in North Carolina—and I would love to build a little town there, based on things I like about Tuscan houses.” This popped out, not premeditated.

Ed and I recently had decided to leave California and move back to my southern roots. He went to grad school in Virginia and always had an attraction to the South. We had not then found a house with an intact soul. We had been talking a lot as we filed in and out of houses about what we, right now, value in four sheltering walls. I mentioned a term paper I wrote in college on “The Ideal Place of Learning.”
Come down out of the clouds
, my professor had written across the top in a crabbed scrawl. B plus. We were looking for a little farm and hoping for a creek, but had found only perfect new houses or cramped cottages.

Alberto laughed. “Really! A
town
? That sounds so
interesting
.” “Interesting,” I found, is one of his words, pronounced with a drawn-out first syllable and used either sincerely or ironically or to mean
not
interesting. This time he obviously was intrigued by the wild idea.

We fell into conversation about the mutually favorite subject, architecture. We talked stone, we talked water, we talked land. The dinner swarmed around us but we had found shared obsessions and it’s hard to stop that, even for Fiorella’s apricot
crostata
. I learned a little about his practice, the airport, museums, and houses he’d designed, then the
sotto voce
admission: “What I really want to do is paint; I bought my house here so that it would bring me closer to painting.”

And I confessed, “I wanted to be an architect. Back then, I just did not have the vision.”

We’ve been talking ever since: emailing, meeting at his office in Tampa, meeting in Rome, sending books, calling from airports, meeting in North Carolina, and best of all, meeting in the piazza or my herb garden or on a trail at Fonte.

Our families just give us space. After all, who wants to listen for hours to talk about the layout of a William Werther farmhouse built in Santa Cruz in 1926? Or to discuss how a church near the Florence airport looks like Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp? Who will tramp through Rome in the rain to verify whether Bramante’s Tempietto actually measures the same as the oculus in the Pantheon?
¹

I have had the gift of several such friendships in my life, just enough to know how rare they are. When you meet a true friend, I find, you recognize each other immediately. “Do you remember the first time we met?” I asked him recently.

He answered, “First in the bottega in Firenze the summer of 1492, just after Il Magnifico’s death, where we learned to crush pigments.”

Yes, exactly then.

A
COUPLE OF
days after that dinner, Alberto called. “Are you serious about your Utopian town? Because I’d like to work on something like that.”

W
E CALL OUR
town Montelauro, mountain of laurels. We see it near a river. We run all over Tuscany photographing houses and details and entrances to towns and piazzas and bridges and pergolas and arches. We each buy a better camera. We love the golden mean. We measure felicitous buildings, getting to the square root of ideal human scale. Ed loves the idea. He wants Italian chefs coming in to Montelauro on a rotating basis. Alberto’s brother Carlos, an architect with business sense, becomes enthusiastic, as does brother Tony, who starts scouting land on Internet sites. Alberto buys black sketchbooks for each of us and we make notes of street names, lenders, and trees to plant. I feel that I’m again inside a clubhouse made of packing crates. Password: Montelauro.

A
S IT HAPPENS
this morning, when I’m asked all the questions about the Cubani, I do have an answer. “They’re arriving on Tuesday. All of them.”

O
N
T
UESDAY MORNING
I cut a big armful of blue hydrangeas and Ed prepares a basket of olive oil, jars of our tomatoes—enough for their month-long visit—and fruit, bread, and cheese. Even though their house is close enough that we can shout to each other—sound carries on a hillside—the climb is steep. We load the Fiat and drive around Torreone, then along their goat-track road. I see wild white lilies on the hillside and the gingerspeckled orange ones below the Etruscan wall that borders their land. What an extravagant wildflower—spontaneous lilies. I take it as omen. In the Renaissance someone would have built a chapel there. A housekeeper is airing sheets on the line.

Just as we’re unloading, the first wave of Alfonsos arrive: Tony, the middle brother; his wife, Joy; their three children; Uncle Enrique (called Nico); and Mama Rose. First item out of the van: Tony’s guitar. We flash on great evenings to come. They’re wild to see the rose pergola, the new pool, and the lavender planted last year, now waving wands of scent.

Later, we hear Carlos and Dorothy arrive with their three, then we get a call from Alberto—late plane—driving madly with Susan and their two children from Rome.

We expect they’re tired and will throw together a pasta and turn in, but around ten, as we exit from the pizzeria, there’s commotion in the piazza and we know the Alfonso clan has taken up residence again. Luca, their architect, Massimo, Edo, and Maria have found them, and the Cynar and Averno and grappa are pouring. The children are coming and going from the gelateria and kicking a soccer ball. There is always laughter in the piazza, but with them around, the stones reverberate.

We’re all back again the next morning. The women shop to stock the kitchen, the men arrange tennis matches and wine delivery, the children explore. Our table in the piazza fills and shifts—Placido, Chiara, Simone, Claudio, Melva and Jim, Sheryl and Rob, Marco, Cecelia with her new baby, and her English husband, Lee, who is obviously smitten with little Tommaso. Some leave and come back. Ed goes off to the bookstore in search of a dialect dictionary. Fulvio pauses only a second; he’s always in a hurry. I am not in a hurry this morning. Alberto and I stay because there’s much to say. Davide waves from the door of his hair salon. He’s ready for Ed’s appointment. When we asked him how he achieves Ed’s finger-in-the-electrical-socket haircut, Davide said, “First I make a thousand errors, then I connect the errors.” Ed thought it sounded like a life philosophy. Massimo brings out another tray of water and coffee. We plan a trip to Orvieto to look at Signorelli’s frescoes and have lunch at a place he and Susan read about. Marco announces a dinner on the porch of the Teatro after a late-afternoon wine tasting at his
enoteca
.