Under the Tuscan Sun (19 page)

The piazza's focus is the tall Palazzo Casali, now the
Etruscan Academy Museum. The most famous piece inside is a
fourth-century
B.C.
bronze candelabrum of intricate
design. It's remarkably wild. A center bowl fed oil to sixteen
lamps around the rim. Between them, in bold relief, are animals,
horned Dionysus, dolphins, naked crouching men
in erectus,
winged sirens. One Etruscan word,
tinscvil,
appears
between two of the lamps. According to
The Search for the
Etruscans
by James Wellard,
Tin
was the Etruscan
Zeus and the inscription translates “Hail to Tin.” The candelabrum
was found in a ditch near Cortona in 1840. In the museum, it is hung
with a mirror above so you can get a good look. I once heard an
English woman say, “Well, it is interesting, I suppose, but I
wouldn't buy it at a jumble sale.” In glass cases, you see
chalices, vases, bottles, a wonderful bronze pig, a two-headed
man, many lead soldier-sized bronze figures from the sixth and
seventh centuries
B.C.,
including some in
tipo
schematico,
an elongated style that reminds the contemporary
viewer of Giacometti. Besides the Etruscan collection, this small
museum has a surprising display of Egyptian mummies and artifacts.
So many museums have excellent Egyptian exhibits; I wonder sometimes
if anything from ancient Egypt ever was lost. I always visit
several paintings I like. One, a portrait of the thoughtful Polimnia
wearing a blue dress and a laurel crown, was long thought to be
Roman, from the first century
A.D.
She's the muse of
sacred poetry and looks quite pensive with the responsibility.
Now she's believed to be an excellent seventeenth-century copy. The
museum has not changed the more impressive date.

Appealing family crests emblazoned with carved swans, pears,
and fanciful animals cover the side of the Palazzo Casali. The short
street below leads to the Duomo and the Museo Diocesano, formerly
the Chiesa del Gesù, which I sometimes pop into.
Upstairs,
the treasure is the Fra Angelico
Annunciation,
with a
fabulous neon orange-haired angel. The Latin that comes out of the
angel's mouth heads toward the Virgin; her reply comes back to him
upside down. This is one of Fra Angelico's great paintings. He
worked in Cortona for ten years and this triptych and a faded,
painted lunette over the door of San Domenico are all that remain
from his years here.

Just to the right of Palazzo Casali is Teatro Signorelli, the
new building in town, 1854, but built in a quasi-Renaissance style
with arched portico, perfect to shade the vegetable sellers from
sun or rain. Inside is an opera house straight out of a
Márquez novel: oval, tiered, little boxes and seats
upholstered in red, with a small stage on which I once witnessed
a ballet troupe from Russia thump around for two hours. It serves
now as the movie theater in winter. Midway through the movie, the
reel winds down. Intermission. Everyone gets up for coffee and
fifteen minutes of talk. It's hard, when you really love to
talk, to shut up for an entire two hours. In summer, the movies are
shown
sotto le stelle,
under the stars, in the town park.
Orange plastic chairs are set up in a stone amphitheater, kind of
like the drive-in with no cars.

Off both of these piazzas, streets radiate. This way to the
medieval houses, that to the thirteenth-century fountain, there
to the tiny piazzas, up to the venerable convents and small churches.
I walk along all of these streets. I never have not seen something
new. Today, a
vicolo
named Polveroso, dusty, though why
it should be more or less dusty than others was impossible to
see.

If you're in great shape, you'll still huff a little on a
walk to the upper part of town. Even in the mad-dog sun right after
lunch, it's worth it. I pass the medieval hospital, with its long
portico, saying a little prayer that I never have to have my
appendix out in there. At mealtimes, women dash in carrying
covered dishes and trays. If you're hospitalized, it's simply
expected that your family will bring meals. Next is the
interminably closed church of San Francesco, austerely designed
by Brother Elias, pal of Saint Francis. At the side the ghost of
a former cloister arcs along the wall. Up, up, streets utterly clean,
lined with well-kept houses. If there are four feet of ground,
someone has planted tomatoes on a bamboo tepee, a patch of lettuces.
In pots, the neighborhood hands-down favorite, besides geraniums, is
hydrangeas, which grow to bush size and always seem to be pink.
Often, women are sitting outside, along the street on chairs,
shelling beans, mending, talking with the woman next door. Once,
as I approached, I saw a crone of a woman, long black dress, black
scarf, hunched in a little cane chair. It could have been 1700.
When I got closer, I saw she was talking on a cellular phone. At
Via Berrettini, 33, a plaque proclaims it to be the birthplace of
Pietro Berrettini; I finally figured out that's Pietro da Cortona.
A couple of shady piazzas are surrounded by townhouse-style
old houses, with pretty little gardens in front. If I lived here,
I'd like
that
one, with the marble table under the
arbor of Virginia creeper, the starched white curtain at the
window. A woman with an elaborate swirl of hair shakes out a cloth.
She is laying plates for lunch. Her rich
ragù
smells like an open invitation, and I look longingly at her green
checked tablecloth and the capped bottle of farm wine she plunks
down in the center of the table.

The church of San Cristoforo, almost at the top, is my
favorite in town. It's ancient, ancient, begun around 1192 on Etruscan
foundations. Outside, I peer into a small chapel with a fresco
of the Annunciation. The angel, just landed, has chalky aqua
sleeves and skirts still billowing from flight. The door to the
church is always open. Actually, it's always half open, just ajar,
so that I pause and consider before I go in. Basically a
Romanesque plan, inside the organ balcony of curlicued painted
wood is a touching country interpretation of Baroque. A faded
fresco, singularly flat in perspective, shows Christ crucified.
Under each wound, a suspended angel holds out a cup to catch
his falling blood. They're homey, these neighborhood churches. I
like the jars (six today) of droopy garden flowers on the altar,
the stacks of Catholic magazines under another fresco of the
Annunciation. This Mary has thrown up her hands at the angel's news.
She has a you've-got-to-be-kidding look on her face. The back
of the church is dark. I hear a soft honking snore. In the privacy
of the last pew, a man is having a nap.

Behind San Cristoforo is one of the staggering valley views,
cut into diagonally by a slice of fortress wall, amazingly high.
What has held them up all these centuries? The Medici castle perches
at the top of the hill, and this part of its extensive walls angles
sharply down. I walk up the road to the Montanina gate, the high
entrance to town.
Etruscan, too; isn't this place ancient? I often walk this way into
town. My house is on the other side of the hill and from there the
road into this top layer of Cortona remains level. I like to go
through the upper town without having to climb. One pleasure of
my walk is Santa Maria Nuova. Like Santa Maria del Calcinaio, this
church is situated on a broad terrace below the town. From the
Montanina road, I'm looking down at its fine-boned shape, rhythmic
curves, and graceful dome, a deeply glazed aquamarine and bronze
in the sun. Though Calcinaio is more famous, having been designed by
Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Santa Maria Nuova pleases my eye more.
Its lines counter a sense of weight. The church looks as though it
alighted there and easily could fly, given the proper miracle,
to another position.

Turning back from the gate toward town, I walk to the other
treasure of a church, San Niccolò. It's newer,
mid-fifteenth century. Like San Cristoforo's, the decorations are
amateurish and charming. The serious piece of art is a Signorelli
double-sided painting, a deposition on one side and the Madonna
and baby on the other. Meant to be borne on a standard in a
procession, it now can be reversed by the custodian. On a hot day,
this is a good rest. The eye is entertained; the feet can cool on
the stone floor.
On the way out, almost hidden, I spot a small
Christ by Gino Severini, another Cortona boy. As a signer of
the Futurist manifesto and an adherent to the slogan “Kill the
moonlight,” Severini doesn't readily associate in my mind with
religious art. The Futurists were down on the past, embraced
velocity, machines, industry. Around town, in restaurants and
bars, I've seen posters of Severini's paintings, all color, swirl,
energy. Then, over a table in Bar Sport, I noticed that the modern
Madonna nursing a baby is his. The woman, unlike any Madonna I've
seen, has breasts the size of cantaloupes. Usually a Madonna's
breasts look disassociated from the body; often they're as round
as a tennis ball. The Severini original in the Etruscan museum
just escapes being lugubrious by being tedious. A separate room
devoted to Severini is filled with an interesting hodge-podge of
his work. Nothing major, unfortunately, but a taste of the styles
he ran through: Braque-like collages with the gears, pipes,
speedometers the Futurists loved, a portrait of a woman rather in
the style of Sargent, art school-quality drawings, and the more
well-known Cubist abstractions. A couple of glass cases hold his
publications and a few letters from Braque and Apollinaire. None
of this work shows the verve and ambition he was capable of. Of
course, all the Futurists have suffered from their early enthusiasm
for Fascism; baby went out with the bathwater. They've suffered
more from the tendency we have had, until recently, to look to
France for the news about art. Many astounding paintings from
the Futurists are unknown. For whatever reasons, Severini, in his
later years, returned to his roots for subjects. I think there's
a microbe in Italian painters' bloodstreams that infects them
with the compulsion to paint Jesus and Mary.

As I leave San Niccolò, walking down, I pass several
almost windowless convents (they must have large courtyards), one
of which is still cloistered. If I had lace needing of repair, I
could place it on a Catherine wheel, where it is spun in to a nun
to mend. Two of the convents have chapels, strangely modernized.
On down the hill, I encounter Severini again in a mosaic at San
Marco; if I climb this street, I'm on a Crucifixion trail he
designed. A series of stone-enshrined mosaics traces Christ's
progress toward the Crucifixion and then the Deposition. At the end
of that walk (on a hot day I feel I've carried a cross), I'm at
Santa Margherita, a large church and convent. Inside, Margherita
herself is encased in glass. She has shrunk. Her feet are creepy.
Most likely, a praying woman will be kneeling in front of her.
Margherita was one of the fasting saints who had to be coaxed to take
at least a spoon of oil every day. She shouted of her early sins
in the streets. She would be neurotic, anorectic today; back then
they understood her desire to suffer like Christ. Even Dante, it
is believed, came to her in 1289 and discussed his “pusillanimity.”
Margherita is so venerated locally that when mothers call their
children in the park, hers is the name most often heard. A plaque
beside the Bernada gate (now closed) proclaims that through it she
first entered the city in 1272.

The major street off the Piazza della Repubblica leads to
the park. The Rugapiana is lined with cafés and small
shops. The proprietors often are sitting in chairs outside or
grabbing an espresso nearby. From the
rosticceria,
tempting smells of roasting chicken, duck, and rabbit drift into
the street. They do a fast business in lasagne at lunch and all day
in
panzarotti,
which means rolled bread but loses
something in the translation. It's rolled around a variety of
stuffings, such as mushrooms or ham and cheese. Sausage and
mozzarella is one of the best. Past the circular Piazza
Garibaldi—almost every Italian town has one—you come
to the proof, if you have not intuited it before, that this is
one of the most civilized towns on the globe. A shady park
extends for a kilometer along the parterre. Cortonese use it daily.
A park has a timeless quality. Clothing, flowers, the sizes of
trees change; otherwise it easily could be a hundred years ago.
Around the cool splash of the fountain of upside-down nymphs riding
dolphins, young parents watch their children play. The benches
are full of neighbors talking. Often a father balances a tiny child
on a two-wheeler and watches her wobble off with a mixture of fear
and exhilaration on his face. It's a peaceful spot to read the paper.
A dog can get a long evening walk. Off to the right, there's the
valley and the curved end of Lake Trasimeno.

The park ends at the
strada bianca
lined with
cypresses commemorating the World War I dead. After walking along
that dusty road toward home for about a kilometer, I look up and
see, at the end of the Medici walls, the section of Etruscan wall
known as Bramasole. My house takes its name from the wall. Facing
south like the temple at Marzabotto near Bologna, the wall may
have been part of a sun temple. Some local people have told us
the name comes from the short days in winter we have on this side
of the hill. Who knows how old the name, indicating a yearning
for the sun, might be? All summer the sun strikes the Etruscan wall
directly at dawn. It wakes me up, too. Behind the pleasure and fresh
beauty of sunrise, I detect an old and primitive response: The day
has come again, no dark god swallowed it during the night. A sun
temple seems the most logical kind anyone ever would build. Perhaps
the name does go back twenty-six or so centuries to the ancient
purpose of this site. I can see the Etruscans chanting orisons to the
first rays over the Apennines, then slathering themselves with
olive oil and lying out all morning under the big old
Mediterranean sun.