In Maremma Read online

  DL’s drawing—made after we bought Podere Fiume but before we began working on it—of how he wanted the living room to look. Except for the fireplace, this was what it looked like upon completion.

  As it happens, there is a considerable market for antique fireplaces and fireplace tools in Italy. Even in big cities there are shops that deal exclusively in old attrezzi: wrought iron pokers; Renaissance andirons; enormous cast-iron plaques decorated with heraldic motifs or mythological figures, to be mounted on the back of the fireplace to throw heat forward; medieval hooks from which to hang the pots in which hundreds of years ago cooks prepared stews of meat and onion and borlotti (a variety of cranberry bean).

  Our fireplace came from a man who salvaged them from villas in the Mugello, the mountains between Florence and Bologna. It was made of pietra serena and had the year of its making incised on one of its flanks: 1803. It consisted of six pieces of stone: a mantel, a plinth that held up the mantel, and four side pieces to support the plinth. As a base (the poetic hearth), Sauro hauled in some enormous sassi (stones) that were the same color as the fireplace and that a friend of his had chiseled to make fit together. Once constructed, the fireplace measured a meter and a half by a bit more than a meter.

  The Living Room, Podere Fiume (Photo by Simon McBride)

  At this point it was midsummer—a blazing midsummer at that—and hardly the moment to be building a fire. And so for a few months we filled the fireplace with old and patched copper cooking pots; dried wild artichokes; and even, for a few weeks, the television set; all the while waiting for the cold weather to come. (Country life knows its apogee in winter.) Already we had a complement of attrezzi. Between the house and the uliveto, a cord of wood was stacked. As a housewarming present, our friend Piero had even given us a pronged potato-roasting device designed to be fit into the embers.

  In December, the time for fires came. We put logs into the embrace of the andirons; around their feet went the kindling. We lit a match and stood back. Fire! Smoke! Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? We threw open the windows. Perhaps there was not enough wind outside to make the chimney draw. But the next day—even though there was more wind—the same thing happened.

  Presently (December 16, 1998), Domenico drove up from Rome with Magini to meet with Sauro and assess the situation. After conferring among themselves for quite a while, they built a fire. This time a beautiful blaze leapt, the smoke following orders and going exactly where it was supposed to. Domenico gloated, just a little—and a little too soon, for just then the smoke turned around and billowed into the room.

  The problem, Domenico concluded, was quite simply that the opening was too big for the room. Why had he not considered this possibility before the fireplace was put in? “A fireplace like that, you need a chimney that’s twice as high,” Sauro said—why had he not said this while building it?—and proposed to install an electric fan that looked like a serrated chef’s toque at the top of the chimney. But no, Domenico said, the solution was just to make the opening smaller, perhaps by attaching a large panel of copper or wood to the back side of the mantel. But no, Magini said, the solution was to drape a curtain over the fireplace, far enough away from the fire, of course, so that it wouldn’t ignite!

  As far as we were concerned, none of the proposals on offer was going to do. By chance, however, DL had come across an article about a Danish company called Morsø that made wood-burning stoves. In the illustration accompanying the article, one of these stoves—black cast iron and with an image of a squirrel embossed on its side—had been placed inside a big fireplace very much like our own. When we told Domenico what we were considering, he cried, “How can you do that?” as if the mere idea of a stove injured him personally. “A country house without a fireplace . . . that would be terrible! I couldn’t imagine my house in winter without a fire going!” We reminded him that in the case of his own house, he was seldom there in the cold months. We, on the other hand, had the whole winter before us, and could hardly spend it in a haze of wood smoke, our throats sore, our eyes burning, the furniture becoming sooty. “But that doesn’t mean you should do something drastic,” he said. “We just have to study the problem . . . ” (In Italy, as everywhere, “study the problem” is synonymous with “put off the solution.”)

  It was apparent that we had to take matters into our own hands. We found a dealer in wood-burning stoves in Grosseto. His shop was full of immense high-tech models, all gleaming chrome and superb efficiency. Mostly he dealt in the sort of small stoves that Sauro, Ilvo, and Delia kept in their kitchens, and in the summer he sold pizza ovens. Nonetheless we asked him about Morsø. “Quello col scoiattolo!” (“The one with the squirrel!”) he said, his eyes lighting up like those of the chef at a Chinese restaurant when, to his delight, a customer asks for crispy duck with taro root instead of chow mein. Not only did he know it, the Morso distributor was a friend of his. If we wanted, he could have the stove for us in three days.

  The stove fit perfectly inside the fireplace. Piero’s little device for roasting potatoes went into a drawer somewhere. Something had to be sacrificed.

  “A smaller wood-burning stove in the fireplace opening is the owners’ choice for an easy and economical way to heat the room,” Elizabeth wrote in her book.

  Fire on a November Afternoon, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

  8

  The Italians are adorable but au fond they lack mystery. Life is exquisite in Italy but in the end atrociously boring. The French are occasionally nasty but at least they have depth.

  FREDERIC PROKOSCH,

  THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT (1968)

  THE MOST USEFUL thing anyone living in Italy can learn is how to be bored because Italy is the most boring of all European countries: boredom is the nettle among its laurels.

  Sundays are boring days in Italian cities because all the shops are closed (although, poco a poco, this is changing). The summer is boring because all the movie theaters are closed (the American experience of spending a hot afternoon in the dark of a super-airconditioned multiplex is unknown here), and for at least a month (August) everything is closed. (Truly it is like a month of Sundays.) And just how boring after dinner can be was brought home to us by an advertisement we saw one summer in Rome: a dramatic alternative to the ritual of cena, passeggiata, and gelato (dinner, walk, and ice cream) was proposed: cena, passeggiata, and grattacheccha (dinner, walk, and grated ice flavored with syrup; essentially a snow cone). Every February, there is the obligatory settimana bianca (white week) in the Alps or the Dolomites. Christmas is always spent with i tuoi (relatives) and Easter with chi vuoi (whomever you want). In Rome you eat gnocchi on Thursday and fish on Friday. In all of Italy you can find delicious fried sweets during the Carnival season, but only during the Carnival season. In short, it is not so much the ritualization as what might be called the “habitualization” of Italian life that makes it so boring.

  Giuseppe Novello, from Il Signore di Buona Famiglia (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1934): “When even the sour-cherry ice is finished.”

  And yet there one grows to love boredom, even to cultivate it. In a boring country, you find that you are content more often than happy, since we make our own contentment and happiness makes itself. In Florence, the name given to that sense of being overwhelmed—and even made unwell—by beauty is Stendhal syndrome. One could suffer from a similar malady there. Beauty was one of its causes, though not the principal one: its principal cause was the sense of colliding with a happiness in the cosmos that seems endless, that comes almost as a breeze, or a descended magical cloud. This is boredom’s antonym.

  9

  IN OUR PART of Tuscany, there were sagre (festivals) celebrating, among other things, acqua cotta (cooked water), chestnuts, strawberries, strozzapreti (a fresh pasta made without eggs), snails, fava beans and pecorino, artichokes, bruschetta, tripe, panzanella (bread salad), grapes, capitone (eel), and polenta. One sagra was very much like another, however. Our most memorable was our
first. DL is speaking here.

  Florence, late summer: all over the city bright yellow posters advertise a festival of tortellini and wild boar to be celebrated in the town of Ronta. I take this as a sign that the fall has nearly arrived—and about time, too: August was brutal, the Arno a malarial trickle, the city emptied of its inhabitants, an art-historical amusement park roamed by bands of grim-faced tourists. But now the August tourists have left, the Florentines have come stumbling back from the seaside, and fresh rain is flushing the river. It is no longer so hot that the switching on of a lightbulb is painful. Indeed, it is even possible to contemplate wearing sweaters.

  The season of work is also fast approaching, so in preparation for a book I want to write, I have become engaged in looking for images of Tiresias, that mythical seer who came upon two copulating snakes and hit them with a stick, after which he spent seven years living as a woman. Ovid made Tiresias famous, as did T. S. Eliot, but according to my art historian friend Andrea, only one Italian painter, Giulio Carpioni, ever depicted him on canvas. Naturally I’m curious to see the picture. “Is there a book?” I ask.

  “Yes, one, but written by an art historian who brings terrible luck. A boy took this book on an airplane and the plane ha caduto.”

  “But how do you know—”

  “You must never say the name of this art historian, and if anyone ever says his name in your presence, you must touch your coglione.”

  I pause to digest this information. “Do you have a copy of the book?” I then ask.

  “Per carità! I wouldn’t dare.”

  Well, I would. So I go to Libreria Internazionale Seeber on Via Tournabuoni and ask the very knowledgeable clerk if he knows the book. “Yes,” he says, “it is by _________________.” (I touch my coglione.) “We had one copy, but it sold three months ago. We were glad to have it out of the store.”

  “And will you be getting any more?”

  He looks at me as if I’m mad to suggest he take such a risk, so I thank him and leave. Poor Carpioni! I’m thinking. What a fate, to have been studied by ! And poor , who must live his life in exile, shunned by his peers, denied entry to the myriad conferences and congresses, the enjoyment of which, as far as I can tell, is the chief summertime occupation of the academic world. Why, right now just such a conference is taking place in Florence: an international gathering of statisticians, one of whom calls me up when I get home from the bookstore; it seems that twenty years ago, in Paris, she introduced my brother to his wife. We meet for coffee at the Cantinetta Verrazzanno. “At this moment there are three thousand statisticians in Florence;” she tells me. “If you threw a stone in the Piazza della Signoria, you’d probably hit a statistician, and believe me, you’d have my blessing.” I smile. It occurs to me only later that even her joke is in its way statistical.

  On the way home I buy focaccia, tomatoes, and figs, but as is often the case in Florence, the need to prepare dinner is obviated by a phone call. It is our friend Paolo Fiume, who invites us to drive with him to the tortellini and wild boar festival in Ronta.

  And so it is that we find ourselves, two hours later, sitting outdoors among the feasting citizens of Ronta (which locality, if you are curious to look it up on a map, you will find near Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello hills). The atmosphere is one of jocularity verging into violence. Colorfully decked-out women run back and forth, bearing meat on plastic plates; their husbands fill old water bottles with acrid-tasting wine; their sons and daughters don’t help at all, they just scream and sing and eat. And eat.

  Of the Italians, the English writer Edith Templeton wrote in The Surprise of Cremona: “I cannot make them out; they seem to be so much happier than the other nations I know” This was in the years just after the Second World War, when the country was going down the toilet. Now it is going down the toilet again—in Florence, just a few months back, a bomb ripped a hole in the history of art—and still the funghi porcini festivals and pignoli (pine nut) festivals continue. “We are happy for no reason at all,” Mrs. Templeton’s friend tells her, “and it is a very pleasant state to be in. Now, what is it you want to know?”

  What do I want to know? Just that: how to be happy for no reason.

  Meanwhile a boy of alarming beauty alights from a long table near ours, a table populated exclusively by boys of alarming beauty. “Dov’e vai?” one of his friends calls to him. “A vomitare!” he answers cheerfully, and disappears into the night.

  10

  ILVO AND DELIA, with their son Fosco, had lived on the farm next to ours for most of their lives. During the Second World War, Ilvo had left for a time: he had fought in Sicily, where he met several Americans, then spent a couple of years in a British prisoner-of-war camp near Banbury. Otherwise they had been here and were by and large self-sufficient.

  Every winter they killed a pig, which gave them enough meat not only to stock their freezer but also to make prosciutto, sausages, mazzafegato (so called not because it is made from liver but because it is so fatty that it “kills the liver” of the person who eats it) and pancetta. Each spring they planted an extensive orto (kitchen garden): carrots, potatoes, celery (the aromatic leaves of which were its particular glory), onions, garlic, basil, red and yellow and in some cases lilac-colored little peppers, and parsley. (According to Rosaria, the only doctor in Semproniano, women used to eat parsley in large quantities when they wanted to abort.) In the spring, Ilvo walked up and down the dirt road on which our houses were located, looking for stalks of wild asparagus, pencil thin and so delicate they needed barely to be cooked. (Hunting for wild asparagus was a community activity in March: driving along, you’d see people of all ages and kinds scanning the roadside, reaching into the underbrush—the prudent among them with gloved hands. March was also the month when the vipers emerged. Should Ilvo share some of his wild asparagus with us, we’d make a carbonara using eggs from Delia’s chickens, grana padano, pancetta) and the wild asparagus.

  The sheep that Ilvo and Fosco tended produced enough manure to fertilize their olive trees, which gave them plenty of oil, as well as their orto and flower garden. From the sheep’s milk, Delia made pecorino and fresh ricotta. Their surplus milk they sold. Each year, just before Easter, a big truck chugged down our road to theirbarn, where Ilvo waited for it along with a dozen trussed lambs, which the truck then carried away to the city. In the fields, Fosco planted—depending on the season—hay, wheat, sunflowers, or favette, a feed for bestiame (farm animals).

  Only on Thursday—market day—would Fosco take his parents into Semproniano. The rest of the week, they depended for the staples they did not themselves produce on a brigade of traveling vendors who passed by once or twice a week. These included Rolando, the baker, his truck always stocked with loaves of dry bread, dry jam tarts, and dry marzipan cakes; the Boutique del Pesce, the side of which opened to reveal all manner of fish and shellfish spread out on ice; a grocer offering sausages, cheese, pasta, and dry goods; a tiny old man who sold potatoes out of the trunk of his car; a handsome youth who drove up once every two weeks from Naples with crates of oranges or artichokes; and a Moroccan and his young son whose van was filled with shoes.

  Ilvo and Delia were never less than generous with what they had. If, for instance, we went over to “borrow” some eggs (their shells were so frail that the merest pressure of a finger broke them) they’d invite us in for a slice of warm crostata and a glass of grappa. (Delia concocted a grappa flavored with coffee beans and the peel of mandarin oranges.) We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, a big room that was cool in summer and warm in winter.

  Delia did all of her cooking on a Zoppas like the one that had been in our house when we bought it. One morning, when we went over to pay Fosco for pruning our olive trees, we found Delia standing at the kitchen table rolling out dough for gnocchi. She asked us to stay for lunch. This surprised us, since Italians, despite their reputation to the contrary, are rarely spontaneous. Though it was hot out, she served not only gnocchi with ragu, in big bo
wls, but grilled pork chops and slices of fried liver. Then came a salad of cucumbers from her garden. When we complimented her on them, she gave us about twenty—small and fanciful as calligraphy, softer than their supermarket cousins, and run through with a watery pulp of sweet seeds.

  When lunch was over, we asked Delia why she made gnocchi on a Wednesday; after all, the Roman tradition is to eat gnocchi only on Thursdays: giovedì gnocchi, ven-erdì pesce, they say.

  “Accidenti!” Delia said, which basically means, “I’ll be damned!” “Here we don’t do that.” Delia had been to Rome perhaps half a dozen times.

  Still, she was in her own way worldly and shrewd. There was not much in world politics that escaped her ken. Thus when the wife of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, appeared on her kitchen television one morning (this was in the middle of the war in Kosovo), she remarked, “I don’t like that woman. She looks mad.” An editorial in that morning’s International Herald Tribune had said the same thing.

  Delia also had strong opinions about local politics. It was to her that we turned when something of a local nature perplexed or maddened us: for instance, the mosquitoes so tiny they could actually fit through the holes in our window screens. “What are they?” we asked. “How long will they last?”