Under the Tuscan Sun (25 page)

WE INTENDED TO COOK BUT WE HAVE LINGERED. WE DEPOSIT
all the food in
the car and walk back to Dardano, a favorite
trattoria,
for dinner. The son who has waited tables since we came here
suddenly looks like a teenager. The whole family sits around a
table in the kitchen. Only two other customers are here, local
men bent over their bowls of
penne,
each eating as though
he were alone. We order pasta with black truffles, a carafe of wine.
Afterward we walk around in the quiet, quiet streets. A few boys play
soccer in the empty piazza. Their shouts ring in the cold air.
The outdoor tables are stored, the bar doors closed tight with
everyone inside breathing smoke. No cars. A lone dog on a walk.
Totally emptied of foreigners, except us, the town reveals its
silences, the long nights when men play cards way past the nine
o'clock bells, the deserted streets that look returned to their
medieval origins. At the
duomo
wall, we look out over
the lights of the valley. A few other people lean on the wall,
too. When we're really freezing we walk back up the street and open
the bar door to a burst of noise. The cocoa, steamed on the espresso
machine, is thick as pudding. One day back and I'm falling in love
with winter.

AT FIRST LIGHT, WE ARE OUT ON THE TERRACES, EVEN THOUGH
heavy dew
is on the olives. We intend to finish today, not leaving them time
to mildew. Below us the valley surges with fog as thick as
mascarpone. We are above it in clear, frosty air, utterly fresh
and sharp to inhale, as if we're looking down from a plane: a
disembodied feeling—this hillside is floating. Even the red
roof of our neighbor Placido's house has disappeared. The lake gives
this landscape some of its mystery. Large mists rise off the water
and spread over the valley. Fog billows and rises. As we pick olives,
wisps of clouds pass us. Soon the sun asserts itself and begins to
burn off the fog, showing us first the white horse in Placido's
pen, then his roof and the olive terraces below him. The lake
stays hidden in a pearly swirl of clouds. We come to trees with
nothing on them, then a laden tree. I take the lower branches. Ed
leans the ladder into the center and reaches up. To our joy,
Francesco Falco, our caretaker of the olives, joins us. He's the
quintessential olive picker in his rough wool pants and tweed cap,
basket strapped to his waist. He sets to work like the pro he is,
picking more than we're able to. He's not as careful, just lets
twigs and leaves fall in, whereas we've fastidiously removed any
stray leaf after reading they add tannin to the taste of oil. Now
and then he pulls out his machete from the back of his pants (how
does he not get poked in the bottom?) and hacks off a sucker
sprouting up. We must get the olives in, he tells us, a big freeze
may be coming. We pause for a coffee but he keeps picking. All
fall he has cut back the dead wood so that new growth is
encouraged. By spring he will have hacked off everything except
the most promising limbs and cleared around each tree. We ask about
bush olives, more experimental techniques of pruning we've read
about but he will hear nothing of those. The way to take care of
olives is second nature, unquestionable. At seventy-five, he has the
stamina of someone half his age. The same stamina, I suppose, that
gave him the strength to walk home to Italy from Russia at the end
of World War II. We identify him so totally with the land around
Cortona that it's hard to imagine him as the young soldier stranded
thousands of miles from home when the ugly war ended. He jokes
constantly but today he has left his teeth at home and we have a
hard time understanding him. Soon he heads for the lower terraces, an
area still overgrown, because he has seen from the road that some
of the olives there are bearing fruit.

With the olives from below, we do have a
quintale.
After siesta, which we've worked through, we hear Francesco and
Beppe coming up the road on a tractor pulling a cart of olives.
They've taken the sacks of their friend Gino and are on their way
to the mill. They load Gino's olives into Beppe's Ape and help us
load ours on, too. We follow them. It's almost dark and the
temperature is dropping. Many California winters have dimmed my
memory of real cold. It's a presence of its own. My toes are numb
and the Twingo heater is sending out a forlorn stream of tepid air.
“It's only about twenty-five degrees,” Ed says. He seems to
radiate warmth. His Minnesota background reawakens anytime I
complain that I'm cold.

“Feels like Bruno's freezer to me.”

OUR SACKS ARE WEIGHED, THEN THE OLIVES ARE POURED INTO
a bin, washed,
then crushed by three stone wheels. Once mashed, they're routed to a
machine that spreads them on a round hemp mat, stacks on another
mat, spreads more until there is a five-foot stack of hemp circles
with the crushed olives sandwiched between each. A weight presses
out the oil, which oozes down the sides of the hemp into a tank.
The oil then goes through a centrifuge to get all the water out. Our
oil, poured into a demijohn, is green and cloudy. The yield, the
mill owner tells us, was quite high. Our trees have given us
18.6 kilograms of oil from our
quintale—
about
a liter for each fully bearing tree. No wonder oil is expensive.
“What about the acid?” I ask. I've read that oil must have less
than one percent of oleic acid to qualify as extra virgin.

“One percent!” He grinds his cigarette under his heel.
“Signori! Più basso, basso,”
he growls,
lower, lower, insulted that his mill would tolerate inferior oil.
“These hills are the best in Italy.”

At home we pour a little into a bowl and dip in pieces of
bread, as people all over Tuscany must be doing. Our oil! I've never
tasted better. There's a hint of a watercress taste, faintly peppery
but fresh as the stream watercress is pulled from. With this oil,
I'll make every
bruschetta
known and some as yet unknown.
Perhaps I'll even learn to eat my oranges with oil and salt as I've
seen the priest do.

The sediment will settle in the big container over time but
we like the murky, fruity oil, too. We fill several pretty bottles
I've saved for this moment, then store the rest in the semidarkness
of the cantina. Along the marble counter, we line up five bottles
with those caps bartenders use to pour drinks. I've found those
perfect for pouring slowly or dribbling oil. The little lid flaps
down after you pour so the oil stays
clean. We'll cook everything this holiday season in our oil. Our
friends will have to visit and take bottles home with them; we have
more than we can use and no one to give it to, since everyone here
has their own, or at least a cousin who supplies them. When our
trees yield more, we may sell the extra oil to the local consortium.
I've bought the terrific
comune
oil in a gallon jug for
about twenty dollars. I once lugged one home and it was worth the
long flight with the cold jug balanced between my feet.

Our herbs still thrive, despite the cold. I cut a handful of
sage and rosemary sprigs, quarter onions and potatoes, and arrange
them around a pork roast and pop it in the oven, after a liberal
sprinkling of our first season's oil baptizes the pan.

The next afternoon, we find an olive oil tasting in progress,
the town's first
festa
for
olio extravergine del
colle Cortonese,
the extra virgin oil of the Cortona hills.
I remember my tablespoon at the
mulino,
but this time
there's bread from the local bakery. Nine growers' oils are lined
up along a table in the piazza, with pots of olive trees around for
ambiance. “I couldn't have imagined this, could you?” Ed asks me as
we try the fourth or fifth oil. I couldn't. The oils, like ours, are
profoundly fresh with a vigorous element to the taste that makes me
want to smack my lips. The shades of difference among the oils
are subtle. I think I taste that hot wind of summer in one, the
first rain of autumn in another, then the history of a Roman road,
sunlight on leaves. They taste green and full of life.

F
loating
W
orld:
A Winter Season

THERE IS SOMETHING AS INEVITABLE AS LABOR
that takes over around Christmas. I feel impelled to the kitchen. I feel
deep hungers for star-shaped cookies and tangerine ices and caramel
cakes, things I never think of during the rest of the year. Even
when I have vowed to keep it simple, I have found myself making
the deadly Martha Washington Jetties my mother made every year on
the cold back porch. You have to make them in the cold because the
sinful cream, sugar, and pecan fondant balls are dipped by toothpick
into chocolate and held up to set before being placed on the chilled
wax-papered tray. The chocolate dip, of course, constantly turns
hard and must be taken into the kitchen and heated. My mother made
Jetties endlessly because her friends expected them. We professed
to find them too rich but ate them until our teeth ached. I still
have the cut-glass candy jar they spent their brief
tenures in.

The other absolute was roasted pecans. Nuts roasted in butter
and salt; the arteries tense even to read this—we ate them
by the pound. I cannot get through a Christmas without them,
although now I usually give most to friends and save only a small
tin for the house. For guests, of course.

This year, no Jetties. But our almond crop must be used so
roasted almonds seem inevitable. This weather demands the red soup
pot. In preparation for Ashley and Jess's arrival, I'm making the
big pot of
ribollita,
a soup for ending a day of fieldwork,
or, as I think of it, for arriving from New York. Reboiled is the
unappetizing translation and, naturally, it is, like so many
peasant dishes, a soup of necessity: beans, vegetables, and hunks
of bread.

Winter food makes me understand Tuscan cooking at a deeper
level. French cooking, my first love, seems light years away: the
evolution of a bourgeois tradition as opposed to the evolution of a
peasant tradition. A local cookbook talks about
la cucina
povera,
the poor kitchen, as the source of the now-abundant
Tuscan cuisine.
Tortelloni in brodo,
a Christmas tradition
here, seems like a sophisticated concept. Three half moons of stuffed
pasta steaming in a bowl of clear broth—but, really, what
is more frugal than to combine a few leftover
tortelloni
with extra broth? More than pasta, bread is the basic ingredient
of the repertoire. Bread soups, bread salads, which seem rich and
imaginative in California restaurants, were simply someone's good
use of leftovers, possibly when there was little in the house except
a little stock or oil to work with. The clearest example of the
poor kitchen must be
acquacotta,
cooked
water—probably a cousin of stone soup. This varies all over
Tuscany but always involves invention around a base of water and
bread. Fortunately, wild edibles always abound along the roadsides.
A handful of mint, mushrooms, a little sweet burnet, or various greens
might flavor cooked water. If an egg was handy, it was broken into the
soup at the last moment. That Tuscan cooking has remained so simple
is a long tribute to the abilities of those peasant women who cooked
so well that no one, even now, wants to veer into new
directions.

ASHLEY AND JESS ARRIVE WITHIN AN HOUR OF EACH OTHER, A
miracle of
scheduling since she is coming to Chiusi from the Rome train and he is
coming into Camucia from Pisa and Florence after landing from
London. We pick her up, then speed the forty minutes back and arrive
just as he steps off the train.

The people one's children bring home are problematic. One
came to visit when we were renting a house in the Mugello, north of
Florence. He was deeply into Thomas Wolfe and sat in the backseat
engrossed in
Look Homeward Angel.
We madly drove all over
Tuscany to show them (both artists) the Piero della Francescas but
he only turned pages and sighed now and then. Once he looked up and
saw the round gold bales of hay in the lovely fields and said,
“Cool, those look like Richard Serra sculptures.” We never were
sure anything else penetrated. A young woman Ashley brought over
suffered from dire toothache except when shopping was mentioned.
She miraculously recovered long enough to buy everything in
sight—she had an excellent eye for design—then relapsed
in her room, requiring meals on trays. Nothing was wrong with her
appetite. When she returned to New York, she had to have extensive
root canal work on three teeth, so her forays into the shops
were
remarkable mental triumphs over pain. Another never
paid me for his round-trip New York-Rome ticket, which was charged
to my AmEx because Ashley picked up their tickets. Naturally, we
have been wondering about the person who will be spending a couple
of weeks.

If I'd had a boy, I'd have wanted him to be like Jess. We both
fall right away for Jess's humor, intellectual curiosity, and warmth.
He arrives with a wicker hamper of smoked salmon, Stilton, oat
biscuits, honeys, and jams. He spent his last two days in London
buying beautifully wrapped gifts for everyone. Best of all, we don't
seem like capital P parents to him but potential friends. Relieved
that this will be effortless, I'm bouyed, too, by that expansion I
feel when someone new is admitted into my life. My Iranian friend
maintains that attractions among people are based on smell, which
seems logical enough to me. Most of those most important to me I've
liked instantaneously and have known I wanted a permanent friendship.
(The times the connection has not lasted still sting.) Jess knows
all the words to every rock song. Ashley is laughing. We're already
singing in the car. What luck.

It's midday and too warm for
ribollita.
We stop
in town and have sandwiches at a bar and Jess tells us about the
wedding he was just in at Westminster Abbey. Ashley has had the
longer trip and wants to fade. Ed and I take a walk, then, because
the day is warm and the force of habit strong, we start to work in
the garden. I pull weeds away from herbs and lift geraniums out of
pots, shake off dirt from the roots and wrap them in newspaper to
store over the winter. Ed mows the long grass and rakes. Everything
is drenched, sweet, lush; even the weeds are beautiful. I decorate
the shrine with boughs of spruce and its nuts, olive branches and
a gold star over Mary's head. Ed tries to burn a pile of leaves
we never were able to burn last summer because of the dryness.
They're so wet now that they just smoke. When Ashley and Jess
reappear, we drive to the nursery and buy a living tree and a big pot
to plant it in. Small as it is, it dominates the living room. Since
we have nothing for decoration except a string of white lights,
we decide to go to Florence tomorrow and buy a few ornaments. I've
brought over some candles shaped like stars and some distinctly
non-Tuscan
farolitos,
a Santa Fe custom I've kept since
spending a Christmas there once and loving the candles in paper bags
outlining the adobe houses. These are glazed bags with cut-out stars.
We line the front stone wall with a dozen of them and they look
magical with their glowing stars. We fill the fireplace overhang
with pinecones and branches of cypress Ed cut this afternoon. How
easy everything seems and what a pleasure to recover the fun of
Christmas. The bowls of
ribollita
and a fire act as
knock-out drops. In the big armchairs, we're wrapped in mohair
blankets, listening to Elvis singing blue, blue, blue Christmas on
the CD.

AT THE OUTDOOR MARKET IN FLORENCE, WE FIND
papier-mÂché balls and bells with decoupage
angels. A wagon off to the side serves bowls of
trippa,
tripe, a special love of the Florentines. Business looks brisk.
If I thought yesterday that I was falling in love with winter, today
it's certain. Florence is redeemed and magnificent on a cold December
morning. As in all the towns, the decorations are sweet—lights
strung across the narrow streets at short intervals, necklaces of
light with dangling pendants. Obviously the women of this city have
not heard of cruelty to wildlife; I never have seen so many long,
lavish
fur coats. We look in vain for fake fur. The men are dressed in fine
wool overcoats and elegant scarves. Gilli, one of my favorite bars,
is crowded with noisy voices and clinks of cups and constant rushes
of steam from the espresso machine. In the middle of the street,
Ed pauses and holds up his hands. “Listen!”

“What is it?” We all stop.

“Nothing! How could we not have noticed? No motorcycles.
It must be too cold for them.”

Ashley wants boots for Christmas. Obviously, this is the place.
She finds black boots and brown suede ones. I see a black bag I really
admire, don't need, and manage to resist. Just before everything
closes, we dash over to San Marco, the serene monastery with Fra
Angelico frescoes in the cells. Jess never has seen it and the
twelve angel musicians seem good to look at during this season.
Siesta catches up with us, so we settle into a long lunch at
Antolino's, a righteous
trattoria
with a potbellied stove
in the middle of the room. The menu lists pastas with hare and
boar
ragù,
duck, polentas and risottos. The
waiters rush by with platters of big roasts.

There's plenty of time for a long walk before the town
reopens. Florence! The tourists are gone, or if they're here, the
fine misty rain must keep them inside. We pass the apartment we
rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads
of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park.
Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted
for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed
heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when
waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what
they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way.
Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn
T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists
dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is
that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children
terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering
lasagne verdi
and Coke, then complaining because the
spinach pasta was
green.
My own reflection in the window,
carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering.
Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested
fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave
when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has
added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in
the air.

In early morning, though, we'd walk to Marino's for warm
brioche, take them to the middle of the bridge and watch the silvery
celadon light on the Arno. Most afternoons we sat in a café
at Piazza Santo Spirito, where a sense of neighborhood still exists
even in summer. The sun angling through the trees hit that grand
undecorated sculptural facade of Brunelleschi's, with the boys
playing ball beneath it. Somehow it must make a difference to grow
up bouncing your ball against the wall of Santo Spirito. Perhaps
many who come to Florence in summer are able to find moments and
places like this, times when the city gives itself over by returning
to itself.

Today, the stony streets take a shine from the mist. We walk
right in the Brancacci chapel. No line; in fact, only a half dozen
young priests in long black gowns, following an older priest as he
points and lectures about the Masaccio frescoes. I haven't seen
Adam and Eve leaving Eden since the vines over their genitals,
painted during some fit of papal modesty, were removed and the
frescoes cleaned and restored. Shocking to see them lifted out of
the film of centuries of candle smoke: all these distinct faces
and the chalky rose and saffron robes. Every face, isolated and
examined, reveals character. “I wanted to see what made each one
that one,” Gertrude Stein said about her desire to write about many
lives. Masaccio had a powerful sense of character and narrative and
a sharp eye for placing the human in space. A neophyte kneels in a
stream to be baptized. Through the transparent water we see
his knees and feet. San Pietro flings the basin, showering his head
and back with water. All the symbolism of earlier art is abandoned
for the cold splash on the boy. Another pleasure is Masaccio's (and
Masolino's and Lippi's, whose hands are apparent) attention to
architecture, light, and shadow. Here's Florence as he saw, or
idealized it, with the sun falling logically—not the sourceless
light of his predecessors—on this cast of characters who
surely walked the streets of this city.