A Small Place in Italy (8 page)

What had been, until the arrival on the scene of the
esperti
, a little comedy as it were with a modest cast of half a dozen or so and about the same number of walk-on parts, would now be augmented by the emergence on stage of more and more supporting talent, much of it up to now hidden away from view in the all-embracing undergrowth, or else out of sight within the walls of buildings to which we had not yet gained admittance, or had not yet even seen.

Sometimes, if there was a
festa
, or a sale of cattle, or a funeral, or a wedding, or a meal given to those who were participating in a
vendemmia
, then the cast, swollen temporarily by the enrolment of extras, could amount to hundreds so that at times I used to wonder if we were participating in a Cecil B. de Mille epic or something like a musical without the music.

At around half-past twelve on Easter Sunday, having swept away the last of the now all dead
scarafaggi
, and having had a very perfunctory wash in a basin that was the size of the smallest sort of holy water stoup, we put on what were the best clothes we had available and presented ourselves at the kitchen door of the Dadà farmhouse, Mosso the dog having been locked up for the occasion.

In view of what Signora Angiolina had told us about the family
we were not without a certain feeling of trepidation when we said,
‘Permesso?’
and knocked on the door, but it turned out that our fears were groundless. We could not have been given a warmer welcome.

The only other time we had seen the kitchen had been by the light of Rina’s oil lamp the previous evening. Now it could be seen to be much larger than it then appeared to be. At one end there was a big open fireplace with, to one side of it, a wood-burning cooking stove which you could sit around on cold days, and on the other a
fornello
of the sort that Wanda had just replaced with a gas ring. Both these cookers now had various pots and pans seething away on them.

Against another wall there was a
madia
, and an
armadio a muro
, both more or less twins of our own. The centre of the room was taken up by a rectangular table covered with a dazzlingly white cloth and laid for what looked like a major lunch. There was no television, and wouldn’t be for some time to come; only a battered radio and that was switched off.

It was Rina who had been doing the cooking with Signora Maria, Rina’s mother-in-law, giving a helping hand. She was a short, good-looking woman in her fifties, with her hair drawn back in a bun, and she emanated a tremendous air of authority, of a sort that she knew she would only rarely have to exercise – the Head of the Family, the
capo famiglia
personified. Signora Angiolina had been right about the
famiglia reale
with women such as Rina and Signora Maria on the distaff side.

Now, as in a play, or it could have been a coronation, other members of the family began to appear.

First Signor Modesto, Signora Maria’s husband, the
capo famiglia
, and their eldest son, Tranquillo, Rina’s husband. They both entered through another door bearing large bottles and straw-covered
fiaschi
of red and white wine that they had been
drawing off from one or other of the many large, wicker-covered glass demi-johns, which each held up to fifty-five litres of wine, in the neighbouring cellar. Here, as in many other farms in Italy, the wine cellar was at ground level, rather than underground.

Signor Modesto was about the same height as his wife and about the same age and apparently as diffident as his name implied; but in spite of his gentle aspect he was really a redoubtable character. Together they made a redoubtable pair. Once we saw them digging a field together, each using a
vanga
, a long-handled spade with a triangular blade, shoulder to shoulder, plunging the blades into the earth and turning the clods in perfect unison, a remark able sight and one that would soon cease to be seen at all, now that even these small, hillside fields were already beginning to be cultivated with the aid of tractors and machinery.

Tranquillo was taller than his parents, without an ounce of spare flesh on him and with a deeply lined face. At that time he must have been in his late twenties. He was a quiet man. When not working the family property he spent much of his time in the huge forests beyond Fosdinovo, cutting wood. It was his trailer, loaded with what would be firewood when it was cut into more manageable chunks, that was now standing in the yard outside.

Tranquillo also hired himself and his tractor and various sorts of agricultural machinery to other farmers.

And there was Tranquillo’s younger brother, Valentino, a rather pale, quiet, intelligent boy who was still at school and wanted to be an engineer. If he succeeded in realizing this ambition he would be the first of the family to leave the land.

And there was Paolo, the son of Tranquillo and Rina.

There were no pre-lunch drinks as there would have been in Britain. Such
aperitivi
were unknown in rural Italy. No hanging about either. As soon as the quorum of participants at the feast
had been made up someone uttered the magic words,
‘Avanti, andiamo a tavola!’
and we went to the table.

The meal was predominantly Tuscan with some Ligurian additions. First of all we ate
bruschetta
, a dish that is Tuscan through and through – slices of homemade bread toasted over the open fire, a job that had fallen to Valentino, until they were brown on the outside and still soft inside; then rubbed on both sides with cloves of garlic that had been cut in two before having the new season’s olive oil poured over the toast, oil made from olives that had been laboriously hand-picked the previous winter. These were gathered using special baskets, worm-eaten examples of which we had seen in Attilio’s ‘secret’ room. By now it was becoming more common for farmers to suspend nets under the branches of the olive trees and then shake them down when the olives were ripe; but many people, including the Dadà, believed that the oil made from olives harvested in this way was inferior to that made from olives gathered by hand.

The olive harvest was no light matter. A family the size of the Dadà needed something like a hundred litres of oil or even more to see them through the year; and a
quintale
of olives, a hundred kilos, yielded between ten and twelve litres of oil, a figure that varied from year to year, sometimes more, sometimes less when it was pressed at the
frantoio
, the olive press, of which there were several in the neighbourhood.

With the
bruschetta
we began to drink the wine, the red or the white but not mixing them. Then came the
salami
:
prosciutto di Parma
, air-cured in barns in the foothills on the far side of the Apennines in the Province of Parma, the best ham of all being made from the pigs fattened on the hillsides above the Pianura Padana, the great plain of the Po, served here and now because, although not of local origin, it was better than any other.

And there was
mortadella
but not what was generally meant by
mortadella
, a large Bologna sausage that ought to be pure pork
^*
cooked by a steam process and flavoured with coriander and white wine. Here in this part of Tuscany, it was a raw, salt-cured
salame
of irregular shape, good, but not as good as the
salame
of Felino, a village near Parma. Not as good as the
culatello di Zibello
, a village on the banks of the Po, part of the pig’s bottom, the most expensive of all, a delicacy which Gabriel d’Annunzio, that eccentric and erotic patriot, once compared for sweetness in a cannibalistic moment to the breasts of a beautiful woman. Not as good, but good, this
mortadella
made in wintertime and eaten now with pickled gherkins and homemade bread, still warm from the oven.

After the
mortadella
and the
bruschetta
, which was more filling than it perhaps sounds, came
lasagne al forno
, squares of pasta made with eggs – first cooked in salted, boiling water before being transferred to a dish in which layers of it alternated with
ragù
and a thick
besciamella
sauce. They were then baked in an outside oven until they became a beautiful brown colour. This
ragù
was made with onion, celery, carrot, parsley, minced lean beef and chopped
pancetta
, part of the pig’s stomach, a sort of bacon, and
conserva di pomodoro
, preserved tomatoes put into glass jars the previous summer when they were at their ripest and reddest. The
besciamella
was made with flour, milk and butter, salt, black pepper and either grated
pecorino
, or else
grana
, hard Parmesan cheese, which by this time was already extremely expensive.

Sometimes Rina varied the menu at this point by substituting
tortellini al sugo
for the
lasagne
, little packets of pasta filled with a stuffing of which there were innumerable variants, often made from lean pork and veal, breast of capon, ham, brains,
mortadella
(the Bolognese sort),
grana
, eggs, butter, salt, pepper and nutmeg, a considerable work.

So far as Wanda and I were concerned, by the time we had eaten our way through the
lasagne
and had failed to refuse a second helping, both of us had had more than enough; but it was now that the oven yielded up another masterpiece,
polio arrosto
, a free-ranging chicken that had spent its life in the Dadà farmyard, now cooked in olive oil and with a tiny bit of butter to brown it, which Rina had basted with a sprig of rosemary and served with potatoes that had been roasting in the juices given off by the chicken; and with it there was served a very young, green salad.

After this there was a short interval while fresh, creamy
pecorino
was on offer but there were few takers.

It was now that one of Modesto’s sweet table wines made its appearance to accompany the final major offering,
tiramisù
, literally ‘pull me up’, a very fattening sweet made with
mascarpone
, an unsalted cream cheese made in winter with cow’s milk and sold in Tuscany, and other parts such as Lombardy, in little muslin bags; the cheese mixed with sugar, egg yolks, cognac, rum or some sort of
liquore
.

Then walnuts and coffee, which could be
corretto
, spliced with something strong.

So far as I was concerned it was fortunate that, during this copious luncheon, not all that much conversation was directed at me personally. I lacked the capacity that most Italians possess of being able to carry on an animated conversation with their mouths full of
lasagne al forno
, or even more amazingly full-length spaghetti, without displaying the contents of their mouths to those facing them across the table or dropping them into their laps. If any one of the other participants had decided to engage me in an extended exchange of ideas I would have found myself at least one course behind the rest of the company. Wanda, who had spent most of her formative years in Italy, was more adept at keeping up.

Much of the talk was about the vines and the sowing of seeds. This was the time of year when much of the pruning of the vines took place, and it was now that the
contadini
sowed their vegetable seeds, everything from peas to parsley.

That is if the moon was a
luna calante
, waning, not a
luna crescente
, waxing. With a
luna crescente
no one in their right minds would begin to season a ham, or buy anything that could possibly wither or fall to pieces, even furniture. Meanwhile, Valentino, Tranquillo’s younger brother, asked me the same questions I had had to answer during the war about the prevalence of pea-soup fogs in London, something that all
contadini
still believed, and still believe, to be endemic there. He had been disappointed when I told him that the last one of any consequence had been in December 1952 and had lasted four or five days, but cheered up when I said it was a very thick one.

And over the
caffè corretto
, Tranquillo told me about an enormous Italian gun secreted in a concrete casemate on the island of Palmaria across the Gulf of Spezia from Lerici. Manned by the Germans or Fascist Italians in 1945, in the last stages of the war here, on the extreme right of the Gothic Line, it had bombarded the area around Fosdinovo, scaring everyone stiff. Meanwhile the Allies had lobbed large numbers of shells into Fosdinovo. But it was the sheer size of the projectiles that came from Palmaria that had impressed Tranquillo.

‘The first thing we saw when it was fired,’ he said, ‘was this great flame coming out of a cliff at the east end of the island. Then after that we used to count to four, I can’t remember exactly how much, and we could hear the shell coming towards us, with a noise like an express train. And when it exploded it made a hole big enough to put a bus in. Luckily for us they only had enough ammunition for about twelve shots. Then they ran out. We were in a ditch all the time until they did. The only damage was a big
crack in one of the walls of the house, and eventually the Alleati paid for the damage.’

It was almost five o’clock before the proceedings finally came to a halt and we were given a positively regal send-off by the entire family which had assembled in the yard. It had been a memorable occasion and although we did not know it at the time, we had been accepted.

Later, the thing I most enjoyed doing when we were at I Castagni was going with Tranquillo into the great forests around Fosdinovo to load his trailer, with the wood he had cut with a chainsaw the previous year. (Using a cross-cut saw would have involved hiring an extra man, which was why no one used them any more.)