Every day in tuscany, p.10
Every Day in Tuscany, page 10
TRAVEL WRITER JAN Morris writes about her take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward art before she encountered a painting by Giorgione. She’d looked up at one of his luminous, mysterious paintings in a church in Venice and lightning seemed to strike. Obviously she fell in love. Since, she’s seen every remaining Giorgione in the world and can tell, with a lover’s instinct, if the authorship is doubtful.
I had a similar experience with music in Granada when I heard Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. We were staying in a hotel just under the Alhambra and a stone’s throw from the blue front door of de Falla’s house, where he once wrote his music and entertained García Lorca. Then I heard Angel Barrios, another composer of the period. I already loved Lorca. The music and poetry and the stunning experience of seeing the Alhambra—well, yes, I was in love. And still am.
Cypress shadows striping the road black/gray/black/gray.
Circle of flames inside the bread oven. A little hell.
Oak tree reflected in water. A creepy, bony hand outspread.
Chickpea bushes drying in crotches of olive trees.
How to go forward? Pick up the pebbles already dropped in the big woods. Are some of the ways forward also the ways back? Then gather the crumbs.
La mia cucina, my kitchen life, makes a difference in how time adheres to my skin. The kitchen stays serene with music wafting in from the living room. But now I turn up the sound. Up, up until the house pulses with vibrato. Tune out. Tune in. Lang Lang, Hélène Grimaud on the piano or Joshua Bell on the violin, Jovanotti, Buddha Bar, Barry White, Giorgia.
The voices seep into the pan heating on the stove, the arias of Jussi Björling cause my apron to swirl, Bobby McFerrin’s verbal play with Yo-Yo Ma brings back the prelinguistic jubilation we all were born with. Chopin, Villa-Lobos, Penguin Café, and all our friends who grace the Tuscan Sun Festival. Music lifts the air as I snap the beans in rhythm with “The Great Pretender,” whisk the whites in the swirls of Shostakovich, letting the music in, raising my natural exhilaration and zest, washing the blood stream free from lead.
Delight. Joy. Excitement. Surprise. And then, flip side: Wisdom. Tolerance. Knowledge. Worldview. Occhi spalancati sul mondo—eyes wide open on the world. My thoughts magnetize around these words.
2
Summer into Fall
Orto and Oven
GARLIC BURNS EASILY. EVEN THOUGH I START with a splash of cool olive oil, the slivers begin to brown by the time I swab off the cutting board. From the braid hanging by the fireplace, I snap off a bulb and start over. How tightly the papery crescent moons fit together to form a neat miniature mosque dome. When I return to Tuscany, my senses feel hyperactive for the first few days; even simple things appear super-real. The volatile oil in the just-planted basil, tiny pointillist olive flowers, my neighbor Chiara’s magnificent smile, the jaunty outline of my yellow Fiat, dark cypress trees brushing against the night sky—I experience everything as if for the first time.
My Italian friends always squash the clove with the side of a knife, then give a quick chop. That way the garlic melts into whatever you’re cooking. I’m slicing today, just prolonging opening day in my kitchen. The farro has soaked; I put it on the stove to simmer until barely done. Our garden’s tomatoes won’t be ripe for another month, but Annunziatina at the frutta e verdura recommended oval ones called dateri from Sicily. They’re ripe, taut, and, other than their oblong shape, bear no resemblance to dates.1 Chopped tomatoes, parsley, onion, celery, carrot—all these tastes and textures will seep into the farro all afternoon. By dinner, the salad will be irresistible.
Before you use an outdoor bread oven for the first time, you must season it every day for a week by lighting a small fire and letting the warmth temper the inside dome and base. If you just fire up the forno for a pizza party, high heat might split the brick and stone. Where is that written? If Albano, who works as our uomo fisso, “fixed man,” at the mountain house, had not told me, I would have a damaged oven. When I mention this to Italian friends, they are surprised that I was not aware of this universally known procedure. So many years in Tuscany, and still the learning curve continues to rise. Will I never lose my ingénue status?
Domenica, true woman of the mountains, patiently has educated me out here in the wilds. In fall she showed me which are ordinary chestnuts and which are the more prized marroni. “The marroni are bigger,” she explained, “and they look like marroni.” Helpful, but finally I began to see the plumpness of the delectable nuts, which can evolve into marrons glacés, and that towering Tuscan dessert, Monte Bianco, a sweet peak of marrone purée mounded with whipped cream. I’ve disguised my squeamishness as she’s demonstrated the best way to hack a rabbit into pieces or stalk a duck and twist off the head. All the while she’s kindly insisted that I’m “bravissima” in the kitchen; she’s quietly made sure I put a pinch of baking soda into the chard to keep it green, has kept my fridge stocked with her fresh eggs so I won’t use ones from the grocery store, which are bound to be a week old. She’s made sure I push down the tomatoes, releasing all the air in the jar, before we seal it. If she were in my American kitchen, would I have as much subtle instruction for her? I somehow doubt it.
Today she will help me make big batches of pizza dough and teach us how to gauge the temperature of the bread oven.
I’m overprepared. To initiate the new oven, I’ve been gathering ingredients for many different pizzas and reviewing several recipes for dough. I have my cakes of yeast, a vat of tomato sauce, and slabs of mozzarella. Ed wants anchovy and capers. I like gorgonzola and walnut. Locally, the classic, plain margherita is favored, possibly because Margherita is the favorite saint of Cortona. I like the margherita with rucola and parmigiano on top. Our neighbors, the Cardinali family, always crumble raw sausage on theirs. Visiting American friends have suggested shrimp and fennel. My absolute first-choice pizza is the thin-crusted margherita topped with caramelized onions.
The sweetly crafted bread oven is my shrine to the household gods. In fact, it looks like a miniature stone chapel. On either side of the opening there are niches where I can stash olive oil and herbs, but these small indentations could as well hold religious icons. Not only that, the chimney resembles a bell tower.
When we bought the ruin Fonte delle Foglie (Font of Leaves), by the front door we found a large forno, collapsed and strangled with blackberries and nettles. I could still see a portion of the curved brick dome, so much like an apse on a Romanesque church. Had the friars who followed St. Francis of Assisi baked their rude pane here when they built this stone house? And did it serve the potato farmer and woodcutter families who later lived here for centuries?
A house this old profoundly reassures me. Even during the snowed-in months of restoration, the stalwart position of the enduring stone house on the hillside folded me into a continuum of time. I could turn my back on the frozen mud of the construction site and look out at the two eternal volcanoes on the horizon and the distant spur where the ancient outline of Cortona steps down the hill. Even when I wanted to bang the one-handed (other hand held a cigarette) workers with a cement bucket, I could feel the strength of the house planted in the landscape and the generations of contadini, tenant farmers, lifting their own water buckets and walking downhill to the spring surrounded with Etruscan stones. I was eager to step into that stately dance.
Standing among the pulsating cicadas and the weeds, I tried to conjure a whiff of ashy, crusty bread, abundant loaves of it piled in a basket and taken inside—by someone very much like Domenica—for the week’s meals.
The structural engineer immediately pronounced the old oven too crumbled to rebuild, but because it once existed, the strict town board allowed us to construct another. I’ve never been a bread baker—my loaves are good only for propping truck tires to stop them from sliding downhill—but I immediately envisioned myself unfurling a round of dough onto a metal peel and sliding it into the contained inferno inside the oven. In a flash, I saw Ed and me shoving the peel under a toasty crust, removing one after another, lining up an array of proper pizzas on a wooden board for guests to sample, a rising fragrance of smoky chestnut and oak wood lingering in the air. Now that is about to happen.
On another side of the new oven we built in a large grill, so that while the pizzas bake, and everyone eats, we could fire up for another course—skewers of lamb and vegetables, robust Tuscan sausages, or the giant Val di Chiana steaks. As the bread oven heat turns moderate we can slip in a pasta to bake, or chicken under a brick. We’ve learned from Placido to grill on a wood fire, which he makes quick work of building. He forages for ten minutes, comes back with an armful of sticks. Soon the fire lowers and he hoists the great steaks on the grill for a quick sear. Ed says no, Placido really just waves the steak over the coals to warm it. Al sangue, bloody, is the preferred degree of non-doneness, a moment on the heat, a quick dip into a platter of olive oil and rosemary, then onto the plate.
Fourteen adults, six children arriving in two hours.
Ed hauls every lawn chair he can find. I set a table for the children under the oak. They can roll down the grassy hill, jump in the pool, throw the Frisbee, and play hide-and-seek into the twilight while the grown-ups linger at the long table under the pergola. Before we eat, Albano has promised to give everyone a lesson in how to play bocce. I already know that he will play like a champ. He does everything well. The skill and movement of his compact body always make me wonder why Americans value big, tall men. We have overheard Italian men discussing tall Germans and English tourists. “Brutto. Troppo alto,” ugly, too tall, they said. Albano could only be Italian. His profile looks like a Roman senator on a medallion.
I wonder if anyone ever studied what part immigrants play in maintaining the customs of their new country. You hear about what food and expressions remain from their old country’s ways but never about how they adopt the new folkways, even as the natives abandon them. I remember the Vietnamese manicurist in San Francisco telling me about her Thanksgiving dinner—much more traditional than mine.
When we first came to Cortona, there were several bocce courts and the game seemed integral to the groups of guys who, then and now, gather and play cards at bars. Out back, bare bulbs strung overhead, the muffled clunk of balls striking each other, and the easy fun, the shouts of “you cuckold,” and “porca miseria” and “porca madosca,” a mild slang expression that uses a nonsense word instead of saying the more serious “Madonna,” the usual curse. I teased Ed, “Maybe someday you’ll be invited to play.” Now, only one court in town remains, a roofed one in nearby Tavernelle. We missed this lively piece of local life. When Ed asked Albano if the terrace above the fruit orchard would be wide enough for a court, Albano’s face brightened and he immediately measured. Soon he and Fabio and Bruno, other friends from the mountain, were leveling the land and clearing rocks away. Their enthusiasm for the project showed poignantly that they missed bocce too. A friend of theirs brought in a scavatore and dislodged a stone the size of a woolly mammoth jutting out from the hillside. Ed suggested that the thick, flat stone would make a perfect table beside the court. The men quickly built a stone-faced cement base and in a few days we watched them guide the stone as their friend’s mini-crane lowered it into place. The miracle of Italia—some things are accomplished at the speed of light. Unlikely as it is, I am good at bocce. My secret is eye contact with the target ball, letting my throwing hand just follow my eye. It feels something like walking with a full cup of coffee—if you look ahead, you don’t spill.
“SIGNORA FRANCES!” DOMENICA—whose booming voice raises birds from the trees—announces her presence with a shout at the kitchen door. She strides in, and, oh, wonderful, her son Ivan is with her! They’ve brought two blackberry jam crostate made in their own bread oven. Kisses all around. She’s told us that Ivan is a pizza maestro. The two of them move like dervishes in the kitchen as we look over all the bowls and jars of ingredients I’ve lined up on the counter. Easy to tell that they’ve worked together thousands of times. Ivan’s characteristic posture—arms flung open, kind eyes smiling. He looks like one of the saints in Luca’s paintings, only he’s constantly in motion. Domenica gives the counter a quick scrub and dry just as he’s brought out the flour. She exudes confidence. I suspect she thinks we don’t know the kitchen from borscht but is going with the flow. Ed is strong. Domenica may be stronger.
“Quante pizze?” Ivan asks.
“Oh, maybe thirty. Will that be enough? We’ll be around twenty.” I say “around” because Italians often show up with an extra guest or two. I hand them aprons.
He’s rummaging in the cabinets and sideboard, rejecting one bowl after another. Finally I drag out a gigantic salad bowl and he nods. Flour, yeast, water—he starts the dough by making a huge mound of flour. Soon he’s up to his elbows. He’s as nimble as his mother is solid. She watches with hands on hips. “Lui—bravo,” Yes, he’s good. When the yeast is ready, he quickly forms more than thirty puffy moons on the floury, cool travertine counter, then covers them with dish towels to rest and rise. Like all experts, he makes the work seem effortless.
“You are so fast—why did you quit being a chef?” I ask.
“Frances, the hours. Now when I finish my work at the Co-op, I clean the pool at home, take care of the garden, I see my friends, I can cook for you!” Ed comes in from the garden with baskets of salad greens, which we take outside to rinse several times in a huge bucket, then soak in the sink. I finish my farro salad and a platter of roasted vegetables—simplest of dinners: pizza, three salads, cheeses, their toasty crostate, and my standby lemon hazelnut ice cream that I hope is hardening in the freezer right now. It seemed determined to remain soft and creamy this morning. I’ve always hated it when you get to “freeze according to manufacturer’s directions” in a recipe. I haven’t seen those said directions in many years.
THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF the kitchen—I peel, you scrape, wine spills, bag splits, beans simmer, sink slurps, petals fall, flour drifts, crust splits, aromas spread, lights flicker, chocolate melts, glass shatters, sauce thickens, finger bleeds, cheese ripens, crumbs fall, sweat drips, spoon bangs, meat glistens, oil spatters, wine breathes, garlic smashes, lettuces float, silver shines, apron snags, you sneeze, I sing oh, my love, my darling, and dough rises in soft moons the size of my cupped hand as planet earth tilts us toward dinner.
DOMENICA, WHOSE NAME, Sunday, I love, lives in a mountain house called Il Poggio del Sole, Hill of Sun, with her husband, two grown sons, and her mother-in-law, Annetta, who is a bright-faced woman the size of an eight-year-old girl. She sits by the woodstove in the kitchen in her apron, with a scarf around her head, as she has for all her eighty-six years. She says little but her eyes are so friendly that I always feel that I’ve had a conversation with her. She watches Domenica roll out the pasta and begin cutting it into strips. She rises to stir the pot on the stove and yanks open the oven to check on the hare she’s axed and skinned this morning. I’ve never seen her in town and suspect that long years when getting into town was difficult disincline her now that it’s easy. La vecchia stampa—a person of the old stamp. They’re disappearing fast from Cortona now, those self-sufficient old-timers who used to sit inside the huge fireplaces trading stories and passing around the vin santo. When I see women near town with bundles of sticks on their backs or with their armfuls of greens for their rabbits, I say to myself, We won’t see her kind for long. Simultaneously, my own life is running quickly through the same hourglass. The changes coming fast now to Italy are sometimes painful. Out in the mountains, though, time is not so relentlessly transformative.
Since restoring Fonte delle Foglie, I’ve had the good luck to meet many fiercely independent mountain people of la vecchia stampa. I sense more than know that Signorelli lived nearby. His original name was Luca d’Egidio di Ventura, suggesting that his family was of the mountain Sant’Egidio. In his self-portrait, his face looks determined. He looks like a man who knows exactly who he is, a kind of face I’ve seen on many mountain dwellers. Their isolation promotes independence. Curiously, I’ve found an intense friendliness and a warmth people give forth generously when not bombarded daily with dozens of social encounters. They’ve revealed a wilder side of Tuscany to me.
The first neighbor I met was Angelo, who stepped from behind the house when it was still a ruin and fixed me with a silent stare, which I took for a greeting. His tail-thumping mongrel stood almost eye to eye with Angelo. They were out gathering vinco, a type of willow. A sprite of a person, Angelo carried a carved stick and wore thick brown wool clothes that must have fit when he was more robust. The pants, secured by a rough belt, gathered in folds around his middle. From a strap slung over his shoulder dangled a bottle covered in woven vinca. “We’re buying this place; I know we’re crazy.” I held out my hand, which he regarded as though it were a dead bird before he stuck out his own small hard hand and cracked my metacarpals. He took a swig of whatever was in his distinctive flask. He cocked his head, and lifted his face of a thousand wrinkles to the sun. I realized he was nearly deaf. He seemed otherworldly to me and probably I seemed to have landed on his wild mountainside from another galaxy.
I soon met his wife, Irene, she of the single yellow tooth and big smile, and visited their house, which looked barely changed for hundreds of years, except for the blaring television that dominated the dark cavernous kitchen. Angelo beckoned for me to follow him into an even darker room where, among hanging salamis, rows of cheeses, and the prosciutto secured on a carving stand, I saw the cunning, artistic willow baskets he wove all winter by the fire. I put his egg and vegetable baskets on top of the cabinets in my kitchen where we can admire them every day.
