A Small Place in Italy (17 page)

And at that time there were charcoal burners in the woods. All of them, and their families if they lived on the site, men, women and children, as black as night from the charcoal. They lived in huts, the roofs covered with boughs and turf, and they slept on beds made with leafy branches. The men who did the burning never left the big, earth-covered cones of tree trunks that looked a bit like wigwams with smoke coming out of the tops of them. The wood had to combust night and day without bursting into flame until the wood was charred through completely.

There were no longer any
carbonari
in this part of Tuscany, few people used charcoal for cooking any more, but the platforms they constructed, dug out of the mountainsides, could still be seen in their hundreds here and almost everywhere else in the mountains of Italy. And if you dug down a few inches in one of these platforms you would be almost certain to find numbers of what looked like oversize pencil leads, which were lengths of pure, combusted charcoal. I found these abandoned settlements very sad. I could remember the way these people looked and the things they said, just as I could remember the things the woodcutters
and their families used to say, and I expected to hear them now, but they would never come back.

Now most of the tracks the woodcutters and the charcoal burners had made through the woods all those years ago had grown over. Then, when I was hiding in similar woods in the Apennines, they used to form huge labyrinths of tunnels, filled with light and shade when the sun shone down into them, just as it had done at the place where we had eaten Rina’s
merenda
on the first day of the Dadà
vendemmia
.

Using these tunnels I could move across country invisible to anyone more than a few feet away. If the families had brought their dogs with them into the woods it would have been impossible but most of them left their dogs in their farmyards to guard the house, tethered on running wires. These secret journeys continued until the November winds stripped the trees bare and the snow came,
la piccola neve
, the small snow. Then, everyone said, ‘When the big snow comes they will take you away.’ And they did.

Altogether, after the
funghi
hunt, we had ten large, loaded baskets of assorted
boleti
between the five of us.
‘E un fenomeno!’
was how Signor Giuseppe, never at a loss for the right word, described the proceeds of our labours, when we all assembled in his back yard to lay them out for acceptance or rejection.

‘Eccellente!’, ‘mangereccio!’, ‘mangiabile!’
were just some of the complimentary epithets Signor Giuseppe reserved for the
funghi
picked by his own side. They were strictly confined to three sorts:
boletus edulis
(the real
porcino), boletus badius
and
boletus scaber.
But some of the others Wanda and I had picked, though undoubtedly
boleti
, he subjected to a particularly severe inspection.
‘Sospetto!’
(‘suspect!’), ‘
da gettar via!
’ (‘to throw away!’), ‘
velenoso, probabilmente mortale!
’ (‘poisonous, probably fatal!’) were just
some of the epithets he heaped on some of the species, such as
boletus luteus
, we had expended much energy in looking for, one of which,
boletus rufus
, was, in the opinion of some experts, even better than
boletus scaber
.

‘If we listen to Signor Giuseppe we won’t have anything left at all,’ Wanda said. ‘We’ve eaten
boletus luteus
for years and personally I’m not going to give up now.’ So we didn’t.

That evening Wanda cooked them under the grill with olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper, a mixture of those
funghi
that Signor Giuseppe and his family considered to be
commestibili
, and the ones that we knew to be harmless but they were convinced were
velenosi
or
da gettar via
.

The first thing that Signor Giuseppe did the following morning, suspecting quite correctly that Wanda would have wilfully disregarded his various prohibitions, was to send Signora Fernanda down to our house at a hideously early hour to find out if we had already succumbed.

And it was her strident cries of
‘SIGNOORA! SIGNOORE! STATE BENE, VOI DUE ANCORA?
’ (‘Are you still all right?’) that caused us both to shoot into an upright sitting position, leap out of bed – this time without my capsizing the
vaso da notte
– and tumble down the outside staircase to prove to her, at 5 a.m., that we were not in our death agonies.

All she said when she did finally set eyes on us was
‘mosca!’,
as if she was ever so slightly disappointed at finding us still alive.

But in spite of this promising beginning the
funghi
that year never reached anything like the astronomical number that had been predicted. Two days later we went back with Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda and found none at all. It was not only in their part of the woods. It was the same everywhere. Like Attilio, the
funghi
had simply decided to make no further appearance. It was
as if they had taken fright in the face of so many ruthless hunters, being by nature timid but determined creatures who did not enjoy having their roots plucked from the earth, and had therefore disappeared, fearing total extinction, to whence they came, leaving behind a suicide squad composed of the terrible
amanita phalloides
with a sprinkling of destroying angels to annihilate as many of their persecutors as possible.

From now on, whenever
funghi
were in season, which could be from spring to late autumn, according to the terrain, the sort of
funghi
and the weather conditions, Wanda prepared them in a variety of ways. She was inspired by Rina and by her own favourite cookery book, Pellegrino Artusi’s
La Scienza in Cucina o L’Arte di Mangiar Bene
, by that time in its thirty-ninth edition.

She cooked the other edible varieties,
boletus
mostly,
in umido
with garlic and parsley, oil and tomatoes, a Ligurian dish; and as a risotto, and
fritti
, cooked in olive oil, with salt and pepper. And all through the year they could be used dried.

The only person we knew who wouldn’t eat
funghi
, whether prepared by Wanda or anyone else, even Signora Angiolina, was Attilio.

‘Non mi piacciono. Non li voglio,’
he used to say when Wanda offered him a delicious plateful, as a courtesy, knowing that he would refuse.
‘Vuol favorire,
Attilio?’

‘Sometimes,’ Wanda used to say to me after one of the quiet but determined refusals, ‘I begin to wonder if he refuses because he really is a fungus in disguise. With that pale cap on he looks a bit like one. The sort that grows in fir woods and goes blue when you cut it up and is very good to eat. I can’t remember the name.’

We looked it up in our pocket book on the subject,
Funghi
by Pierre Montarnal, our constant companion in the field. It was
boletus cyanescens
, the one that goes blue when you cut it up,
described by the author as
molto apprezzato.
‘Perhaps we ought to saw Attilio in half and see if he goes blue,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you ought to do it. After all you are
la sua padrona
, his boss.’

‘If only you knew,’ she said, ‘how frightened it makes me being his
padrona.
It’s a bit like having Einstein as a son-in-law.’

A few years later when
sagre
, non-religious festivals mostly connected with food and drink, were all the rage – there were
sagre
of anything from pancakes to eels – a great
Sagra del Fungo
, fungus feast, was held at Casciano Petrosa, a small, lonely village on a very winding road which eventually deposited the traveller in the marble quarries above Carrara in the Apuan Alps.

The
sagra
began at nine in the morning with a celebration of a mass which it seemed to us a wise form of life assurance to attend. This was followed by the opening of an exhibition in which drawings of
funghi
, made by local schoolchildren, were displayed and actual examples of poisonous and non-poisonous varieties found in the region, one of the richest in
funghi
anywhere in Italy in a normal year, were also on show.

At eleven o’clock the Director of Pathology and Microbiology at Pisa University rose to his feet and gave a rather long talk, as directors of anything in Italy tend to do. After this he, the committee and other important guests of whom there were inexhaustible supplies, sat down to a protracted luncheon. At three o’clock, by which time the hoi polloi, ourselves included, were becoming impatient, a truly enormous
degustazione
of
funghi
began. This orgy, for which a very nominal charge was made, and in the course of which great quantities of not very good wine were drunk, took place under the trees of the courtyard of what was a very rustic inn.

There the
funghi, porcini
for the first course,
clavaria
for the second, a sort we had never seen before, let alone eaten, were fried
in batter in an outsize iron frying pan three and a half feet in diameter, over an open fire, by men and women of the village working in relays.

The
clavaria botrytis
which came in the second fry-up were really extraordinary-looking growths. They had trunks and branches with pink tips and looked exactly like coral. They were delicious. Another, very similar,
clavaria fumosa
, according to our book had a laxative effect and was not on the menu.

And copious though the quantity of
funghi
was on offer at this
sagra
in Casciano Petrosa it was such a bad year for
funghi
all over Italy that the organizers almost had to cancel the event, whereas in a good year the inhabitants said the
funghi
would have been arriving in wagon-loads.

The winter that followed our
funghi
hunt was the one in which our mice, sleek from a long summer in the fields, took possession of I Castagni and started their re-furnishing programme by using my favourite red flannel shirt to make bedcovers for their children in one of our chests-of-drawers, which they used as a dormitory whenever we were not in occupation of the house. From then on everything of any value we possessed, which included the mattresses for the beds, had to be parcelled up in thick nylon and hung from the ceilings on wires when the house was unoccupied.

One of the few events we were never able to take part in during all the time we were at I Castagni, something we were sorry to miss, although it was really rather a boring job, was the
raccolta d’olive
, the olive harvest.

This was because it took place during the winter months and was a much more protracted affair than the grape harvest. It could also be cold work. Many people used to carry copper heaters fuelled with charcoal into the fields in order to restore their
circulation. One year it was so cold that a lot of the trees split and for some time subsequently the crop was much diminished.

With the number of weeks holiday I was eligible for each year the choice really came between taking them between spring and autumn, when we could do our own
vendemmia
(which was one of the principal reasons for having the place), and helping other families with theirs (which was half the fun of being there); or spending part of the winter at I Castagni and helping with the olive harvest. There was, in fact, when it came to it, no choice because in my job the winter months until after Christmas were the busiest of all.

In fact, all I was ever able to do, so far as the olives were concerned, was to weed and dig the earth around our own trees, which was quite a big job as by the end of the summer the ground was usually iron hard.

It was Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda who actually harvested the olives and it was from them, when we returned in the spring, that we received, with some ceremony, a share of the oil after it had been pressed, which always made us feel both feudal and slightly uncomfortable, having done next to nothing to produce it.

However much oil there was, it was never enough for Wanda’s needs and almost always we had to make a special journey into the country around Montecarlo out beyond Lucca in order to buy more to take back to England.

One of the reasons why I had looked forward to living at I Castagni was that I would be able to return to the Apennines and retrace my steps along the part of the
crinale
, its main ridge, that I had last traversed when I had been escaping.

The Apennines are not particularly impressive in their early stages at their northern end above the Italian Riviera; but in the section which separates the province of Massa Carrara in Tuscany from the provinces of Parma and Emilia they become altogether wilder and higher with peaks rising to over 6000 feet.

This was the section of the Apennines I could see from the Foce il Cuccù above Fosdinovo in what I called Attilio land: snow-covered in winter; swathed in heat haze in summer; often cloud-covered at any season and prone to violent electric storms which made it extremely dangerous to be on it.

Although I was very keen to do the walk, Wanda was not very happy about my doing it alone, and I wasn’t really very happy about it either. There are dense forests on the far, cold, northern side of the
crinale
, in which I still vividly remembered getting lost during the war in 1943. You only had to break or sprain an ankle in one of these forests and be immobilized and no one would ever find you. Everyone tells you to take a whistle when entering such country
but my experience with whistles was that they had a surprisingly short range, especially if any sort of wind was blowing. Anyway, I would look pretty stupid, as travel editor of a national newspaper, if I disappeared and became the subject of a large-scale search.

Then one day I had a lucky encounter with a couple of forest guards in a town called Pontremoli. Pontremoli was then a rather old-fashioned town of about five thousand inhabitants on the upper waters of the Magra at its confluence with a lesser stream, the Torrente Verde.

It has a deep, almost canyon-like main street lined with old
palazzi
, which terminates in a couple of
piazze
, separated from one another by the Torre dell’Orologio, part of a fortress known in the dialect as
‘al campanun’,
‘the bell’, built by the ubiquitous Castruccio Castracani in 1332 in order to separate the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, the two rival factions in the town, and prevent them cutting one another’s throats, one of the few things they really enjoyed doing.

When I discussed with the two
guardie
, who were each about thirty years of age, what had already begun to seem the problem of finding a suitable companion for the walk they immediately offered to come with me, providing their commanding officer had no objections. They didn’t anticipate any trouble from him as this particular part of the Apennines was in their territory anyway, and they could make it a routine patrol. In fact they told me that neither of them had ever walked all of it.

They said we should take crampons, which they would be able to provide, as there would probably still be quite a lot of frozen snow on the ridges, and that I should provide a compass, as they hadn’t got one. I also decided to take my discredited whistle with me, but without telling them.

Altogether, they said, if we weren’t stormbound, we should do the whole thing from the Passo di Lagastrello to the Passo della
Cisa in one long day and part of the next one. There was no mountaineering involved. It was just a hill walk.

I already had the maps, the 1:25,000 editions published by the Istituto Geografico Militare which at that time were only published in black-and-white. They were very detailed (there were eleven different conventional signs for trees) and looked as if they had been drawn by a
scarafaggio
with inky feet. If going any distance you needed a lot of them but at least they were cheap.

Two days later Wanda drove me up to Rigoso, a very windswept village with big beech woods looming over it, 1131 metres up on the Parma side of the Passo di Lagastrello, on the road from Aulla to Parma. From it, if everything had not been blotted out by cloud, I would have been able to see the Alpe di Succiso, 2017 metres, the highest peak in the next section of the
crinale
, away to the south-east, but I couldn’t. ‘Take care, my writer,’ Wanda said, which was more or less what I said to her, driving in thick cloud down the steep side of the Apennines back to Fosdinovo in a Land Rover.

In Rigoso I slept in one of three modest inns, all of which were equally clean, friendly and decent, but I can now no longer remember which one as I had a rather wild night with the forest guards, Giovanni and Pietro, in the course of which we visited all three of them.

The following morning at seven o’clock, feeling rather fragile, we set off for the
crinale.
The weather was terrible too, with heavy rain and all the hill and mountain tops covered with cloud; but in spite of this the guards decided to make for Monte Malpasso, the first major eminence on the
crinale
at 1716 metres, by way of a glacial lake, one of fourteen such lakes strung out along the foot of the ridge on its cold eastern side.

The next three quarters of an hour through sodden beech woods to the lake at 1241 metres in what was now sleet, and then to Monte Malpasso in another hour and a half, were awful.

There was hard snow all along the ridge and deep pockets of it on the cold east side. There was no point in climbing Monte Malpasso as it was swaddled in cloud and the wind was very strong, so we continued round the side of it through beech woods, passing some stone shepherds’ huts. Some of the huts had strange, primitive carvings of sheep on their lintels and on the stones lying about outside them. They would remain empty until the sheep were brought up sometime in June.

At around 11 a.m. we reached Monte Bocco, 1791 metres, a grass-grown peak rising from the ridge and falling sheer into Lunigiana on the Tuscan side, with a good deal of snow around the foot of it.

For the next few miles, the ridge was a grassy, icy switchback with every so often a peak rising from it, rather like a giant tooth: Monte Bragalata, 1835 metres, Monte Losanna, 1856 metres, and the Passo di Compione with a mule track leading down to a collection of huts of the same name in Lunigiana, all of which was now completely concealed by a grey void of cloud.

About five hours out from Rigoso we reached Monte Sillara, 1861 metres, the highest peak in this section of the Apennines. At this moment the sun came out and we decided to climb it.

From the top it was almost as if you could see for ever: on one hand down to the Pianura Padana, the great plain of the Po, on the other the Gulf of Spezia, the valley of the Magra and the Apuan Alps; and to the south a big tract of the Apennines, peak after peak. To the north there was the whole of the Alpine chain, much of it still snow-covered, extending from Monviso, on the frontier between France and Italy where the Po rises, to the Dolomites.

While admiring these astonishing vistas, the second time in my life I had done so, we ate bread and
prosciutto
and chocolate, and drank cold red wine. The trouble was that it was very, very cold. Far too cold to be sitting on a rock admiring the view. ‘We should
have brought a bottle of
grappa’,
Pietro, the smaller of the two, said. Then it clouded over and it was colder than ever. It was time to go.

At 1.15 p.m. we reached Monte Matto, 1837 metres. It was from the summit of Monte Matto, in the late autumn of 1943, that I had looked down on the Passo di Badignana, a 1685-metre pass that linked the province of Parma with that of Massa Carrara, and seen columns of men, women, children and pack mules climbing up to it. Those from Massa Carrara, as I subsequently learned, were bringing olive oil and salt; those from Parma bringing all sorts of food to exchange at the pass, transporting these commodities in little handcarts, on pack mules and in backpacks.

At that time I was living in a cave that the people of a village called Lalatta had constructed for me on the side of a mountain called Monte Cajo. It had taken me ten and a half hours’ hard walking to reach Monte Matto from Monte Cajo and I had made the journey to see if there was any chance of my reaching the coast south of La Spezia and being taken off by a British submarine which was supposed to be operating somewhere along it; but, of course, there wasn’t. That night, lost in a dense forest on the cold face of the
crinale
, I met the old man I confused with Attilio.

But now it all seemed a dream, what I had seen from Monte Matto,
matto
meaning mad, something that had never happened, never been. And I looked at Giovanni and Pietro – who I had been glad to discover were not all that fit – and wondered what they would have done if they had been forest guards in the service of what was then a Fascist administration, and they had met me up there. Would they have handed me over to their employers, or to the Germans – that is if they hadn’t shot me out of hand with their carbines – or would they have hidden me and helped me? The last forest guard I had seen was on the way to Monte Matto. He was an ugly-looking customer and I had been told that if he saw me he would take me; but fortunately, he didn’t see me.

Now, there was not much to see at the Passo di Badignana. A long, slender pole stuck in the ground to mark its whereabouts was oscillating in the wind that was funnelling up to it from the Tuscan side, just as its twin had done when I had been there previously. Today the wind was bringing up great puffs of black cloud with it as if someone far below in Treschietto, a village I had already visited with Wanda, had lit a great fire burning some noxious substance. Here at the pass we got water from a spring called the Fontana del Vescovo, the Bishop’s Spring.

The next part, after the Passo di Badignana, was the most exciting of the entire walk. From now on, for a considerable distance, the
crinale
was a real knife-edge. Here, one mis-step to the left and you would fall without a single bounce into the head of some Tuscan valley that had chestnuts, vines and olives growing in it. On the other side, facing the Adriatic, there were beech forests, oaks, some chestnuts, and in some places, larch. There were no olive trees and vines could only be grown in the foothills. On this side the
crinale
fell away between rocky outcrops, sometimes in long screes of pale, silvery grey stones and slabs speckled with yellowish lichen. These marked the upper limits of the alpine meadows in which the sheep grazed in summer and the shepherds had their huts.

Here, beyond the Passo di Badignana, the track on the
crinale
took us along the outer edge of what was a wind-blasted, impenetrable wood of dwarf beeches, the only trees that would grow at such a height, and they looked as if their upper branches had been sawn off diagonally with a hedgecutter.

Somehow these trees had succeeded in reaching the knife-edge at around 1700 metres, from the cold side of the
crinale
, rooting themselves in what looked like solid rock on the way, and partially engulfing the only track along it among the rocks, which was here not more than a foot wide. Forced to abandon it we had to walk along the edge of what was an abyss on the Tuscan side filled with
swirling black cloud. The wind was tremendous and it constantly changed direction, buffeting us from all sides. I began to wish we had brought a rope.

At 3.30 p.m. we reached Monte Brusà, 1796 metres, still in very thick weather, and the Passo della Guadine, 1680 metres, at 4 p.m. Nearby a boundary stone, a bit more grand than Signor Giuseppe’s in his
fungaia
, carved with their coats of arms, marked the division between the territory of the Grand Duke of Tuscany on one hand and that of Maria Luigia, Duchess of Parma, on the other. She was Napoleon’s second wife, the mother of the King of Rome and the daughter of Francis I of Austria, who was given the Duchy to rule in 1816 as a result of one of the more happy decisions arrived at during the Congress of Vienna. Her reign was a felicitous one.

At 4.30 p.m. we reached Monte dell’Aquila, 1707 metres, in what was now pouring rain and a hellish wind. All three of us were beginning to feel pretty miserable, especially as night appeared to be falling although it was the end of the first week in May, and I began to see why my two friends didn’t make a practice of visiting the
crinale
.

At 5 p.m. we got to the Passo dell’Aquila and began the descent on the Parma side to a
rifugio
at the Lago Santo in which the guards had arranged for the three of us to spend the night. All the way down to it we talked about what we were going to eat and drink when we finally arrived there. Roast lamb had been ordered for the main course and the Signora was known to be a notable cook. There was even the possibility of hot baths.

Plodding down this rain-sodden track it was difficult to believe that in a month or two bilberries and wild raspberries would be flourishing here, and in a very few weeks all sorts of
funghi
also. We got to the
rifugio
just after 6 p.m., by which time it was quite dark. The walk had taken us eleven and a half hours from Rigoso.

Awaiting us at the
rifugio
was a young village priest. He was
the bearer of a message from a village whose inhabitants had kept me alive during the war. One of those who had helped me was a man named Silvestre Agnosini who had hidden me and a boon companion, also an escaping prisoner, in his hut high up on the sides of a mountain called Monte Fageto, at a height of 1200 metres. When I first knew him Signor Silvestre was almost blind. Now he was totally blind.

Wanda and I had already made plans to visit him and the other people who had helped me the following week, and those in another couple of villages in the vicinity, something we had been doing for years every time we were in the Apennines, but it was too complicated to do the walk and the visit at the same time.