In Maremma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Copyright Page

  Opposite: Looking North from Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

  Traversando la Maremma Toscana

  Dolce paese, onde portai conforme

  l’abito fiero e lo sdegnoso canto

  e il petto ov’odio e amor mai non s’addorme,

  pur ti riveggo, e il cuor mi balza intanto.

  Ben riconosco in te le usate forme

  con gli occhi incerti fra ‘l sorriso e il pianto,

  e in quelle seguo de’ miei sogni l’orme

  erranti dietro il giovenile incanto.

  Oh, quel che amai, quel che sognai, fu invano,

  e sempre corsi, e mai non giunsi il fine:

  e dimani cadrò. Ma di lontano

  pace dicono al cuor le tue colline

  con le nebbie sfumanti e il verde piano

  ridente ne le piogge mattutine.

  Giosuè Carducci

  Rime Nuove, XVI

  Crossing the Tuscan Maremma

  Sweet land, from whence I derive

  My habit of pride and my scornful song

  And this bosom where hate and love are never appeased,

  When I return to you, my heart leaps after so long.

  I rediscover your familiar forms,

  And through uncertain eyes, through smiles and tears,

  Follow the errant tracks of dreams

  That lead to my youthful enchantment with you.

  Oh, what I loved, what I dreamed was in vain,

  After so much wandering, I never reached the end,

  And tomorrow I’ll die. But from afar

  Your hills fill my heart with hope,

  Steaming with mist and the green plains

  Lovely in the morning rains.

  Giosuè Carducci

  Rime Nuove, XVI

  (Trans. Elena Giustarini)

  1

  WE FIRST SAW Podere Fiume, or “River Farm,” on a cold and rainy afternoon in January 1997. (Some people called the place Podere Bolseto because of the località in which it lay.) The plain two-story house had been built in the 1950s as part of the Ente Maremma program to stimulate the economy of Southern Tuscany. No one had lived in it for more than twenty years. The downstairs consisted entirely of animal stalls, in the largest of which (the one that would become our living room) there were concrete feeding troughs it would take three weeks to demolish. A crumbling outdoor staircase led to the apartment upstairs—four rooms tiled in terrazzo. In the big kitchen there was a Zoppas wood-burning stove barely tall enough for a child to cook at, a 1950s cabinet-and-counter unit in yellow and blue Formica—this latter empty save for a drinking glass from a long-past promotion for Acqua Panna bottled water—and a carved stone sink.

  Three doors opened off this kitchen. One led into a green bedroom with a print of a nondescript Madonna hanging on the north wall, one into a pink bedroom that reminded a friend of ours of Pompeii, and the third into a biscuit-colored bedroom that contained a coarse straw bed and a stuffed wading bird. There was also a minute bathroom. No closets. Doves had built nests between the windows and the boiled-spinach-green shutters.

  The Old Kitchen, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

  The house sat on the crest of a softly proportioned hill, on about two acres of land, one acre of which was given over to forty olive trees and as many fruit trees: apricot, pear, nectarine, white peach, and three varieties of plum. At the base of the poggio a tree-lined rivulet—dry during the summer months—curved alluringly. (It was because of this rivulet that the house had been named Podere Fiume.)

  From upstairs one could see where a famous battle had been fought many centuries ago. One could also see the Monte Argentario peninsula, as well as the “skylines” of the villages of Saturnia and Montemerano, and the town of Manciano. Around us there was pasture land for sheep, farmland which produced hay, wheat, and sunflowers, and a couple of small vineyards. The trees were mostly oaks, pines, and chestnuts. (One of the most beautiful, even moving sights was that of a lone, gnarled, ancient oak in the middle of an expanse of pasture.) The sheep created the illusion of boulders cropping out from the grass. There were few of the cypresses which are the presiding genius of the land around Florence, for the Maremmani associate them with cemeteries.

  We had not gone to Italy in 1993 with the idea of restoring any kind of property. In fact, when we went there—to Florence (having lucked out in finding an apartment on Via dei Neri)—we intended to stay for only one year. But that year flowed into another. The third year, with the vigorous encouragement of a journalist friend named Lou Inturrisi, we moved to Rome, where his friend Karen Wolman was renting her apartment on Via San Giovanni in Laterano. (Lou told us that Karen was “the potato-sack heiress,” but that we must pretend we did not know this.) We became friends with Karen’s architect, Domenico Minchilli, and his American wife, Elizabeth, a one-woman industry of books and articles about Italy. Soon, however, we grew tired of living in what an art historian friend called the “beautiful, infernal chaos” that was Rome, and when Lou was murdered (we gave evidence to the carabinieri on the very morning of Princess Diana’s funeral), we decided to look for a quiet place—not in Chiantishire, not in the environs of “Beverly Hills” (an area of Umbria so-called because its first American colonist was the artist Beverly Pepper). In Maremma, we hoped, we would be able to hear our own voices in the safe silence. As the crow flies, Semproniano, our comune, was pretty much midway between Rome and Florence. The closest train stations were in Grosseto and Orvieto. When there was no moon, the night sky was so dark and yet so clear that it seemed as if one could see every star.

  Heiliger Hain (Holy Grove) (Etching by Max Suppantschitsch, 1865—1953)

  Perhaps because man and beast had lived peacefully together under its roof, Podere Fiume had a good soul as well as good bones. Indeed, as we walked through it that first afternoon, the idea that we would bring the house back to life suddenly seemed natural, even inevitable. Podere Fiume spoke to us from its spirit, not its splendor—there were no frescos beneath the plaster, no Etruscan necropoli in the oliveto (olive grove).

  Necropoli Etrusca del Puntone (Seventh Century B.C.), Saturnia (Photo by MM)

  As it happened, the owner, a local farmer and bon vivant with the extraordinary name of Loando, had had a stroke a few days earlier and was in the hospital in Pitigliano. We made an offer which, by the end of the day, he had accepted from his bed. To our mild surprise, we jumped the bureaucratic hurdles successfully and more or less gracefully, and on the first day of spring, Podere Fiume legally became ours. We celebrated the occasion, as is the custom, by having lunch with its former owner, our respective notaries, the real estate agent, and Domenico at the restaurant of a small hotel in Poggio Capanne, the proprietors of which some Roman friends affectionately called I Puffi—the Smurfs.

  We had come to this part of Italy together for the first time in the autumn of 1993. We needed to get out of Florence for a few days, and we wanted to “take” the fam
ous thermal waters at Saturnia. These sulfuric springs, which gush out of the earth at 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 degrees Fahrenheit), were famous even in Roman times for their curative properties. On windy days the smell of sulfur carries all the way up to the village of Saturnia, said to be the oldest in all of Italy. It was to these springs that injured Roman soldiers were sent to be healed after battle. In the twentieth century, a hotel channeled the waters into a modest series of pools and artificial waterfalls, which in turn flowed down through an old and crumbling stone water mill to form the natural falls known as the Cascate del Gorello.

  Roughly speaking, the Maremma corresponds to the province of Grosseto, which occupies the southwest corner of Tuscany. “Maremma” means “marsh;” and for centuries this was exactly what the area was. A few rich, noble families had divided the land among them. The people, poor and accustomed to hardship, were small in stature. Women traveled on donkey back. In fact, our neighbor Ilvo’s younger sister, at the age of nine, had been dragged to her death by a donkey whose lead she had tied around her waist. Alas, such tragic accidents were common. This was, in effect, the Wild West of Italy, home to the butteri (cowboys) who tended herds of horned Maremmana cattle. (Seeing a horse tied in front of a bank or a bar was still not so unusual in our time.) There were also brigands. The painter Caravaggio was murdered in Maremma, at Porto Ercole. Even during the age of the Grand Tour, the twin threats of brigands and malaria dissuaded all but the most adventurous traveler from stopping here. Nor was the Maremma spared anything of Fascism or the Second World War. Bombs destroyed much of Grosseto, the principal city. Tera-cle, the real estate agent under whose aegis we bought Podere Fiume (Greek, or at least Magna Graecia, names are common here), recalls witnessing, at thirteen, the shooting of an entire family by the Camicie Nere (Black Shirts) because they had given refuge for a few weeks to an English soldier. The father of our friend Brunella was beaten when he refused to sing the Fascist hymn (“Giovinezza”) at school.

  Balilla in Marcia (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure, edited by Massimo Gennari)

  Things started to change in the 1950s, after the threat of malaria was eradicated, and habitable and arable land was claimed from the newly drained marshes. In addition, the government bought up most of the land from its owners and distributed it among the tenant farmers whose families had been working it for generations. This program not only provided funding for hospitals and schools, but also put up houses for the farmers, more or less identical and cobbled together from stone, brick, and blocks of porous and ever-so-slightly radioactive volcanic rock also used by the Etruscans.

  Now the Maremma is relatively prosperous: many an abandoned podere has been converted into an agriturismo (country bed-and-breakfast); vineyards produce sangiovese grapes for Morellino di Scansano. Much of the area has been given over to an enormous national park. Wild boars, roebuck, and chamois abound in the forests; Maremmana sheepdogs—tenaciously loyal, with thick, ivory-colored coats—guard huge flocks on many of the farms. In contrast to Umbria, there is almost no industry; the people still make their living from agriculture. In the summer, when the afternoon temperature regularly reaches a hundred degrees, the older farmers tractor by moonlight. Even after midnight we could hear the cool hum of their machines moving slowly over the fields.

  Living there was rather like living between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries: modern inventions made aspects of life easy, but remnants of ancient ways endured. There were village festivals celebrating the gathering of the hay, and religious processions commemorating salvation from the Black Death in the 1400s. Ancient trades that the Industrial Revolution did much to destroy were practiced still. Gods and goddesses that predated Christ were worshipped (though often obliquely). There, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, one burned branches of laurel to invoke the protection of benign deities in the coming year. There, when one moved into a house, one waved branches of myrtle in each room to chase out evil spirits.

  2

  AFTER WE SETTLED on settling in Maremma and A before we found Podere Fiume, we looked at about twenty houses that were for sale. Each of them seemed to have an insuperable flaw Finally we did see a house that we quite liked. It was one of a row of attached houses built in the thirties, in a tiny borgo just north of Montemerano. (One of these houses belonged to the Toscanini family.) The owner was a Roman real estate agent whose wife, an architect, had restored the small yet high-ceilinged rooms with care, building a reading loft in the bedroom, carving a room for dealing with what Mussolini called “gli elementi della natura” from a thick wall, adding a terrace on the roof. In the living room a new fireplace had been installed—on the model of the one that originally was there, but smaller. In front of the house there was a big garden with a grass lawn (rare in this part of the world), stone paths, roses, and an ancient oak tree.

  In reality, this house fit our fantasies better than it did ourneeds. For example, it had only two bedrooms, which meant that one of us would have to do without a study and work in the living room or at the dining table: not a big deal, but something to consider. The living room was far too small ever to hold a piano. There were no closets. And yet, and yet . . . the view from the terrace was so splendid, did it really matter if there weren’t enough closets? After all, one didn’t buy a house in Italy for the sake of storage space. Both our families had excesses of storage space, and what had they done with it? Stowed away boxes filled with creased sheets of Christmas wrap-pingpaper, fondue sets, Tupperware bowls missing their lids, ancient blenders, and televisions that actually had dials. What need had we of closets?

  And so we paid a visit to the real estate agent who had taken us to see the house—his name was Marco Rossi, which in Italy is like being named John Smith—during which we expressed some timid interest, then inquired as to how we might proceed. He smiled, then took out a thickly stuffed file from his desk. Because he liked to be completely up front with his clients, he said, he wanted to make sure that we were aware from the beginning of certain piccoli problemi with the house—nothing serious, no; still, worth knowing about.

  He opened the file.

  The first “little problem” had to do with the garden. Although it was for sale along with the house, and had the same owners as the house, the patch of land that led from the front door to the gate belonged to someone else. How was this possible? The piece of land in question was about the size of a large sofa. Marco Rossi explained that the land around the house had originally belonged to a widow who had died intestate. As she had eighteen legitimate heirs, the land had been divided into eighteen parcels. Seventeen of the owners had agreed to sell when the real estate agent and his wife had bought the garden, but one had held out. One always holds out . . . Not that it mattered in this case. The owner of the sofa-sized patch was very nice, actually a friend of his, Marco Rossi said, and he had no objections to the owners of the garden trespassing on his land in order to reach it.

  Marco Rossi turned another page in his file. “Little problem” two, he said, concerned the cantina (basement). It did not belong to the owners of the house, but to an old woman who lived down the street, and though she would be willing to sell it, she wanted thirty-five million lire (at that time about twenty thousand dollars). The old woman told Marco Rossi to reassure us that if we chose not to buy the cantina, she was certain that someone else would—perhaps even someone in the borgo who would like to convert it into a playroom for their children. Old Italian women often are subtle practitioners of the art of blackmail.

  Anything else?

  Just one more “little problem”: if we bought the house, we would have to buy it as two separate apartments, the upstairs and the downstairs. This was merely a technicality. As there were two ofus, it even could be perceived as an advantage: we could each buy one apartment.

  We went back to Rome with photocopies of the documents relating to the three “little problems.” The next day we called Ada, a real estate agent we had met the summer befo
re in San Francisco, where she was vacationing with her girlfriend, Maura. At a restaurant, they had appealed to us for help in translating the menu and then for advice on where they could go to get married. (This was in the days before same-sex marriage was legalized—and then just as quickly illegalized—in California.) Ada invited us to her apartment, where we gave her the photocopies. It took her about ten minutes to get through them. The reason the house was being sold as two apartments, she said, was because the major “renovation”—nothing less than the construction of the staircase linking the two floors—had been done without a permit. The electricity, the plumbing, and the roof terrace had also gone in without permits. In short, the whole house was illegal. If we bought it, and the illegal works were discovered, we could be compelled either to undo them or to pay an exorbitant fee in exchange for a condonno (certificate of approval).

  “You could buy that house,” Ada said, “but I wouldn’t. I like to sleep at night.”

  So we didn’t.

  When we told Domenico about this adventure, he said, “Oh, that’s pretty common. In one house I did, I put in a swimming pool without a permit. When the inspector came, we covered the deck with sheets of sod and said that it was a holding tank for water.”

  3

  Paestum hurts; it is the only place I know that would move one to tears. A desolate fever-haunted plain with wild shaggy bullocks roaming about in the brush; then lovely mountains; on the other side the sea asleep naked; and near the shore the temple of Neptune, the oldest thing in the world—impressionally at least; older than Greece and Assyria, as old as the oldest Egypt; so solemn and serene and sweet that one burns with shame; what have I done with my life? It hurts and consoles one at once. HARRY BREWSTER SR., from a letter to Ethel Smyth (1893)