A Year in the World (18 page)

The restaurant of the country villa, Quinta das Lágrimas, is called Agua. Open just two weeks, it’s in the modern addition to the villa. For my taste, they’ve made a mistake with this addition. It feels like an industrial park café. But the young German chef is deft, and I am blessed with salmon in a poppy sesame crust, a game pie with a dark truffle sauce. Ed has spinach lasagne with saffron and figs. Yikes! But he says, “Not bad.” And because he loves cod in all its forms, he orders it with mustard and shallots. This is the first meal we have had in Portugal that only tangentially refers to local tradition. Instead the chef takes in the influences of colonial Portugal. Maybe the people of Coimbra will enjoy this fusion of Portuguese ingredients with references to all the discoverers’ conquests in the Americas and the East. I don’t know about that saffron and figs, though.

Our trip is coming to an end. So much of Portugal we have missed. We’ve seen only a few towns in the north, and nothing of the lower Alentejo or the Algarve. I would love to go to Madeira and the Azores. To those ancient gods of the crossroads, I acknowledge how little our choices allow us. Will we return, take another month to explore Portugal? I would like to come back every year and see another piece of this rich puzzle. How little I know. The privilege of this kind of trip is the immersion course in history, art, cuisine, and landscape. How fortunate that our last stop in the north becomes our favorite town.

Guimarães, in the Minho area, is absolutely spectacular, an entirely livable town with wooden and iron balconies, and many half-timbered buildings so that you think you’ve entered a stage set for a Shakespearean play. Is this Amsterdam? England? If so, a sunny England. All around town we come upon shrines with life-size figures, below whom are placed lighted candles and wax ex-votos of heads and limbs. In 1727 these stations of the cross were erected; five remain. In the residential section, among camellia
trees
, we pass houses in total ruin next to normal houses with gardens and cherry trees in bloom. On some, wooden shingles have been painted to look like tile in blue and white, though there is not much real tile.

Difficult to find, the small
pousada
is one of our favorite places we’ve ever stayed, partly because it opens onto a
praça
of pleasing dimensions and has the same austere comfort and style of the others, but mainly because of the waiter who tells us, when we say how much we love Portugal, “My country is very small but very much.” At breakfast I chat with a woman at the buffet, and somehow she recognizes me as an author she had read, which leads her to invite an entire tour of southern women over to say hello. We have friends in common and much to say. The waiters are all amazed at the furor, and later one discreetly asks me, when their bus has pulled away, “Was madame once a film star?”

In Guimarães, a center for cotton and weaving, I buy more sheets, these finer than the ones I found in Óbidos. “Be careful,” the woman who owns the shop tells me, “many are embroidered in China.” I find a soft throw and a matelassé blanket cover. Ed is dismayed at what this does to our luggage, especially since we already have a goat scent in our sweaters from the skins we bought in Estremoz.

This is a serene town of beauty and “the birthplace of the nation,” as is frequently proclaimed. This slogan goes back to the time when the settlement, a far feifdom of Afonso VI, the ruler of Castile and León, was given to his daughter and her husband. Their son, also an Afonso, turned against his mother after his father’s death and grabbed power from her. He then drove out the Moors and in 1139 secured for himself the title of King of Portugal. By 1143 the capital shifted to Coimbra, but memory is long here. I hope they record that he was a terrible son.

The Guimarães area had an extensive previous history, as you can see outside town at the Citânia de Briteiros (Celtic City) archaeological site. The remains partly predate the Celts (600–500
B.C.
), with some artifacts dating back to Neolithic times. Many of the votives and carved stones are displayed at the archaeological museum in Guimarães, named Martins Sarmento after the local archaeologist who discovered the site.

Before the medieval Afonso asserted himself, a powerful woman with the fantastic name of Mumadona built the castle that dominates the hilltop. Salazar, the dreary twentieth-century dictator of Portugal, used the adjacent palace for a residence. I’m not much on exploring castles anymore—there’s a redundancy to the experience—but this one is fun. It anchors one end of the town and opens to a broad view with Mount Penha in the distance.

Although the capital for only a few years, Guimarães still displays a proud public aspect—gardens, castle, esplanade, statues. You easily sense that the residents have pride in themselves and cherish their well-preserved medieval buildings and many monuments. Tight cobbled streets lined with handsome townhouses wind off the plazas. Iron grill works ornament windows curtained inside with linen or lace. The commercial main street, planted with flowers, remains completely nontouristy. We discuss whether we would have settled in Portugal if we’d known it instead of Italy. The country is fantastically varied within its small borders. I certainly would be happy getting to know the cuisine for a decade or two. History, beauty, endless beaches, and jewel towns like this one lead us to conclude that we would love the chance to live here part time. And Guimarães would be a fine choice. I even pass a dilapidated house with Moorish touches and an overgrown garden that I could walk into and start scraping and painting.

We stop for several local pastries.
Toucinho-do-céu
’ must be one of those sweets you have to eat from age four to appreciate. Essentially little flans made of many eggs, pumpkin marmalade, and almonds, they taste cloying and goopy. Pumpkin is used in many local desserts. Pig’s blood is another unexpected ingredient in sweets. Today I select only the almond cookies, and Ed has one pastry that is a ringer for a plain old chocolate éclair.

As in the other
pousadas
, the dining room is a bastion of local recipes and ingredients. The young goat, roasted on a bed of herbs, tastes meltingly tender and zesty. Ed likes the bountiful stew made with a mixture of meats and sausages. We’ve only had a brief glimpse of the Minho area. We admire the neat hilly vineyards and smart villages, the quick-to-smile faces, and the love lavished on the place by people who live here. Tomorrow we must leave for Sintra and our last night in Portugal.

The
hotel in Sintra had a previous life as a fabulous villa called House of Seven Sighs. I feel like sighing, too, since this trip must end. Portugal has surprised me more than any country I’ve ever visited. With the
pousadas
waiting each night, the driving became less stressful—we are assured of a destination with character and a kitchen that knows its business. This must be the least expensive country in Europe for travelling. The
pousadas
, such grand treats, are expensive here but would be considered moderate anywhere else. Wine, pastries, even hand-embroidered sheets bear retro prices. This last hotel, Palácio de Seteais, is not a
pousada
, but in the light room with large windows with the sea far behind the formal garden, we find the same hallmark tray with champagne, plus a few silver dishes of dried apricots, dates, figs, and walnuts. On a crystal compote, they’ve left us sliced fresh fruits. How gracious that hotels routinely welcome guests with such a civilized gesture. Halls and sitting rooms are painted with mythological scenes in soft colors mellowed by a passing century. The floors are covered in the famous Portuguese needlepoint rugs, which we have not seen anywhere else in Portugal.

Only a few hours south of Guimarães, Sintra is worlds away: a hilly green enclave with a small town clustered around the National Palace, formerly a Moorish palace, which shows in the ground-floor arches, the trim around the roofline. Manueline/ Venetian windows on the second floor somehow adhere stylistically. Inside, we find whole rooms in Sevillian and Mudéjar (Muslim converts to Christianity) tiles. One bedroom’s walls are covered in biscuit-colored tiles with raised grape leaves. Tile “rugs” imitate Oriental ones. Some of the decor is downright bizarre. One ceiling is painted with 136 magpies, one for each of Queen Filipa’s ladies-in-waiting. King João considered them gossips because they reported to the queen that he’d been seen kissing another woman. He maintained that he was kissing her “for the good,” whatever that meant, and he painted a banner with that motto,
“Por Bem.”
Whether the queen was convinced, we don’t know. I suspect not. In another room blue-and-white-tile hunting scenes cover the walls, and the octagonal paneled ceiling is inlaid with seventy-two deer, each holding the arms of a noble family. Having said earlier that I’m not too inclined to tour castles and palaces, I find this one so odd and fascinating. Sintra has several other storybook castles. Someday I will bring my grandson to explore them, if he is interested in arcane knights and legends of buried gold. The Castle of the Moors at the top of the hill would be a great hike if it were not pouring rain. The crenellations slice across the sky, interrupted by merloned towers. Several other exotic palaces lend a fabled aspect to the hills.

I wonder where the English poet lived when he was here. Lord Byron, who really got around in his day, loved Sintra and penned a few lines about the town that are reproduced endlessly in guides and brochures. As one who likes to write about places, I have noticed how grateful towns are when they have been praised in print. Any little sentence from Goethe, Mark Twain, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, any couplet by Shelley, Keats, or Dante will be surely picked up and taken to heart forever. The Majorcans even revere George Sand, who described them in
Winter in Majorca
as brutish and backward.

It’s easy to see why a poet would be drawn to this craggy and forested landscape of palaces, secret gates, views of the sea, and mysterious fog pulled in from the water by the hotter interior. Moisture drips from trees, and the air makes you want to inhale. Not as fashionable as it once was, Sintra still has its share of hidden estates and a few shops for clothes and home decor. Of course it has a good bakery, a perfect place to try the local specialty,
queijadas de Sintra
, cheesecake tarts with a scent of Moorish cinnamon. Ed wonders if we could take a box of mixed pastries home but, remembering the goatskins and bed linens, decides not. We walk back to the hotel, arriving totally drenched. Time to crack open that chilly bottle floating in melted ice and raise a glass. Because it is hard to imagine not always travelling, the Greek toast comes to mind:
Live forever
.

The
plane from Lisbon to Rome is delayed two hours, and we have drawn seats in the rear. I’m squinched in the middle, and Ed is across the aisle in the window seat. A great deal of chaos goes on around us as people take seats wherever they want, ignoring assigned seats. Everyone is speaking Italian. The flight attendants give up. As we take off, several people shout and scream. Ed and I look at each other:
What’s going on?
As soon as the plane is aloft, everyone gets up, visiting, queuing for the bathroom, passing fruit around. The seat belt sign comes on, and the plane starts to jounce. More screams, but no one sits down. So much is being handed back and forth. I am given food and photographs and postcards. The airline’s processed sandwiches are greeted with loud cries of
“Che schifo!”
What shit! We are right in the dead center of a group of rowdy southern Italians who have been on a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Fatima. For most of them, this is the first flight. The party is on. I never have heard so much laughter—or any laughter—on a flight. The man next to me sees my amazement. “Signora, a little confusion is good for the heart.” Ed collects several business cards and hears life stories. The pilot begins the descent into Fumicino, and the aisles remain jammed. No one can hear the voices on the speaker admonishing everyone to buckle their seat belts and raise their tray tables. Finally, the attendants start to shout and ride herd. The pilgrims remain quiet only for a moment. We’re going home to Italy. Let the singing start.

Spaccanapoli

Split Naples

We stop to listen to four musicians who are playing Brazilian music with gusto. Suddenly, a couple steps away from our small crowd and begins to tango in the street. Naples. Where else in the world does someone tango in the street? Where else do you, too, want to break into a tango in the street? Others gather and clap and shout encouragement. We step back into a bar to watch while savoring the best coffee on planet earth. Concentrated and rich, the flavor bursts, then stays in your mouth. We love the local custom of serving a glass of water with coffee. Everyone seems to drink at least half the water. The reason must be to cool you because the coffee is served quite hot. Even the cup is hot to the touch, though the barmen pluck them easily from the racks set in boiling water. I must sip, but I see the Neapolitans step up to the bar, toss down the coffee in a nip, and exit.

A less-expert couple joins the dance. A little girl raises her arms and starts to wiggle. It’s a party. Sometimes all of Naples seems like a party.

We first came here fourteen years ago and were impressed with the vibrancy of the city, awed by the archaeological museum, which houses the finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and seduced by the balmy weather. Traffic was memorable. Ed got to drive on the sidewalk. About four years ago we came back, and ever since, weekend by weekend, sometimes week by week, we began to explore the city and its environs. To know Napoli—once you’ve been, you never want to say Naples again—would take two lifetimes. This month we have two weeks. May is the ideal month for a visit because dozens of monuments and churches usually closed are open in the mornings. May is also the month for walking along the fabled bay. Those ancient Romans didn’t miss an aspect of hill or curve of coast. They knew exactly where to site their country villas.

What you read about Naples, you have read over and over. Don’t cross into this area, avoid that street, wear a money belt, leave your jewelry at home. Thieves, indolence, corruption, chaos, grime, and murder by the Mafia. Actually the Mafia is not interested in visitors, and the murder rate is considerably higher in most American cities than here. We’re supposed to be afraid? We live in the Bay Area. I want to ask those writers who admonish you to beware of Naples:
Heard of Oakland?

Writers repeat other writers, not noticing that Naples goes around all 360 degrees and that their impressions travel only about ten percent of the way. Travellers, those who’ve never been there and those who stayed one night en route to Amalfi or Pompeii, also repeat the well-worn words.

This began long ago. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel writers scorched Naples with their prose. “Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils,” goes an adage from back in the fourteenth century. The hot sun was blamed for eighteenth-century travellers’ impressions of laziness. Is Naples hotter than the Côte d’Azur in August? All the writers could agree that Naples was the golden city, situated most fortunately of all cities on a luxurious sweep of calm blue bay, with Vesuvius and the long arm of the Amalfi coast to balance the composition. The volcano smoked, too, smoked most picturesquely, as the thousands of paintings of the bay attest. (It smoked until 1944, when an eruption sealed the opening.) For those leisurely Europeans on Grand Tour, Vesuvius added the dimension of primitive nature at work just at the edge of the seascape. The harbor view includes the felicitous isles of Procida, Capri, and from certain points Ischia. For the ancient people, the spot was first among the many choice locations in the Mediterranean world. For travellers during the Enlightenment, Naples both allured and revolted. The writers considered the poor of Naples to be mindlessly happy and/or extremely lazy. In an essay in
Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel
, Melissa Calaresu has written well about these mostly French visitors in her essay “Looking for Virgil’s Tomb.” “One can say that idleness is the trait truly characteristic of the Neapolitan Nation,” she quotes from Richard de Saint-Non. And she finds in Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançais de Lalande’s writing that the Neapolitan appears as “wicked, indolent, and especially inconstant.” Calaresu describes the Neapolitan writers who fought back in print, accusing the French of pederasty, buffoonery, plagiarism, and ignorance, but the stereotypes of the eighteenth-century writers, especially Lalande and Saint-Non, endure to this day.

Often Italians also look down on the South, especially Naples. “Africa begins south of Rome,” we’ve heard one time too many.

When I exclaimed over the gorgeous Raoul Bova, who starred in the movie of my book
Under the Tuscan Sun
, our friend Amalia shrugged. “He is not pleasing to me. Perhaps it is because he sounds like a Neapolitan.”

As we left for this trip, Beppe, who tends our olives and vegetable garden, arrived with his weed-whacker. “We’ll be back on the twentieth—we’re going to Naples.”

He set down his machine.
“Napoli. Ehhhh. Son’ tutti cattivi. Tutti.”
They are all bad. All.

A friend gave us a ride to the train.
“Caos. Ladri.”
Chaos. Thieves. She held out her hand. “Leave that necklace with me.”

“It’s not even real—who’s going to snatch it off my neck?” I kept the necklace.

The
tango ends. We walk back to the funicular and ride up, straight up, to Piazza Vanvitelli in the new (nineteenth-century) Vomero district, where you lose entirely the raucous energy of Naples. Here you could be in Paris or Verona or any sophisticated city with leafy pedestrian streets lined with cafés, pastry shops, and small businesses of all kinds. The clothing shops are particular to the owner—no look-alike chains here. A group in the street plays—what?—marimbas near a fountain in the abstracted shape of Vesuvius. Water flows instead of lava. In an antique shop we begin to chat with the two owners, Fidele and Roberto, who operate the shop on weekends as a hobby. Their day jobs are internist and lawyer. We buy a small silver cup, and Roberto’s wife wraps it as though it were an important gift. They are about to close for lunch, so we walk out with them, and they take us on a little tour of the area, including their own houses down a quiet street with views of the distant bay. We talk restaurants, opera, how Naples is changing. They invite us in for lunch, but we don’t want to intrude if they are only being polite. Instead, we exchange numbers and plan on dinner another time.

We stroll on—vegetable shops where each asparagus looks squeaky clean and each lettuce like a spring hat. We pass
friggitorie
, the fried-food stores with tempting
arancini
(crisp rice balls stuffed with cheese or meat sauce), fried pizza, and during this season fried artichokes—so very delicious. I smell the heaps of potato croquettes, and
mozzarella in carrozza
, mozzarella put in a “carriage” of milk-soaked bread and deep fried. The famous Tuscan
crostini
, rounds of bread for many delicious toppings, here are deep-fried disks of pizza dough, which are then spread or piled with whatever the cook fancies.

Vocabulary:

pizzaiolo
: a most important occupation, the pizza maker.

mozzarella di bufala
: languorous water buffalo in the Campania countryside produce the milk for the cheese loved most in Napoli.

On
this first day, we want pizza. The restaurant we choose says Dal 1914. If they’ve been making pizza that long, they must know how. The cook shoves them inside the wood oven as fast as he can roll the dough and throw on the tomatoes. Someone else brings them out with a long iron spatula. In the restaurant crowded with local families having Saturday lunch, we are the only tourists. I order the classic Margherita, and Ed has his favorite Napolitana, with anchovies and capers.

Neapolitan pizza Margherita is a thing unto itself: not too thin, not too thick; not confused with a lot of different ingredients; the just-right crust, a flaky bite yielding to a softer interior; the vesuviana tomatoes, the freshest
mozzarella di bufala
, and the hint of basil, bringing another touch of Mediterranean essence. The Margherita is a well-written ode to simplicity of ingredients in perfect balance of taste and texture. Often pizza restaurants offer only Margherita and Marinara, but usually you find pizza with escarole, which has been chopped and mixed with raisins, garlic, capers, and sometimes anchovies.

The
walkway through the fecund and shadowy garden of Vomero’s Villa Floridiana curves enough to make you feel you are in a vast park. The twists ensure that you come all of a sudden upon the elegant white neoclassical villa. In the forecourt, families with babies lie on blankets, and the lawn is a riot of toddlers running, colliding, and being scooped up by their mamas. The eternal soccer game has begun, and the wonk of the ball and the shouts do not disturb a young couple practically making love on the grass nearby. The house is lovelier from the south side, with its long staircase and views across the gulf. This was a pleasure palace for Francesco I di Borbone and his wife, Lucia, Duchess of Floridia. They hired the Tuscan architect Antonio Niccolini, who designed an incarnation of the fabulous San Carlo opera house. He redesigned an existing villa and built in their gardens a private zoo, theatre, round temple, chapel, and fountains. When all the pomp reduced to circumstance, the state acquired the property, which became the home of the Duke of Martina’s collections.

The guard and ticket seller seem happy that someone finally has come to view the villa’s ceramic museum. I want to see the majolica and porcelain, both such strong local traditional arts. This collection, mainly from the eighteenth century, is idiosyncratic. A case of early forks with two sharp tines. A copper reliquary for the relics of Santa Valeria shows her being decapitated on the lid and on the bottom she hands her own head to a saint while the executioner prances away. So many fine items a collector would be thrilled to discover—just as the Duke of Martina did—at an antique market: Napoleon painted on parchment, dinner ware from the eighteenth-century Royal Porcelain Works of Naples, ivory and coral carvings, a tortoiseshell lorgnette—all contribute to a sense of luxury and refinement that existed during the French Bourbon ascendancy in Naples.

Six thousand plates, vases, statuettes, urns, inkstands, snuffboxes later, we emerge and seek a particularly fragrant pastry shop we passed earlier. We need sustenance before we return to the hotel for a few hours of reading and looking out from the terrace at the magical gulf.

The
dolci
of Naples deserve a book of their own. The French and Spanish heritages, combined with Italian culinary traditions, result in delectable trays of tasty morsels in thousands of shops and bars all over town. We limit ourselves to one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and only split a dessert at night. A little wisp of crunchy
cannolo
pastry slipped around almond cream, another
cannolo
stuffed with chocolate ricotta—what’s the harm in that? Especially with another paradigm coffee—barely a spoonful, with a
crema
to coat the lips. Ed is fascinated to see that the espresso machines are, one and all, the pump kind. In Tuscany these have been replaced with push-the-button models. “Oh, no, no,” the
barista
tells him, “this way you can really tamp the coffee, and the lever pushes the water through it with more pressure.” He points to a gauge and pulls down the lever. He throws up both hands,
What can you do?
“In Tuscany they drink brown water.”

When we return to our room, the management has sent us a plate of
sfogliatelle
and a half-bottle of Villa Matilde wine. A
sfogliatella
resembles a clamshell half opened. The pastry, like
millefleurs
, is tender and layered. You bite into dense, sweet ricotta filling. This is one of the great pastries of the world. To prop oneself in a big bed with linen sheets, the windows open to the Briar Rose view of castle, volcano, gulf; to sip a little wine in the late afternoon and pick up one of these irresistibles—this is sybaritic. The Roman hedonists couldn’t have enjoyed it more. We spread our maps, cross-reference restaurants in various guides, and make a list of all the treasures in Napoli that we want to see.

By the time we go upstairs to dinner, it’s almost ten. But that’s early in Naples, and others are arriving also. Since the evening feels too chilly for the terrace, we sit close to the windows so we can see the bobbing lights on fishing boats moving out into the gulf, and the pavé of lights along the water’s edge below. Vesuvius looms only as a dark presence in the distance. “Vesuvius,” I say. “Just the knowledge of it must influence the minds of people who live here.”

“Like San Francisco. At any given moment, all hell could break loose.” I know Ed is reliving the 1989 earthquake, when we fled from our house, which felt like a mouse being shaken in the mouth of a cat.

“At least here you could see it coming.”

“But they died at Pompeii from the fumes and ashes. That must have happened as fast as an earthquake.”

“I think there’s something good, though.”

“Well, yes, the tomatoes that grow on the slopes. And the grapes.”

“Something else. Remember Blake talked about those who learned to walk on frozen toes?
Neapolitani
must get some energy, some heat for life from the earth. The caloric strength from underground enters their feet as they learn to walk, giving them more passion and life force.”

“It’s a theory.” Ed smiles. The waiter pours our second Villa Matilde wine of the day, and we toast the shadowy outline of Vesuvius.

Spaccanapoli
—the street that splits Naples—symbolizes to me the many split aspects of the city: the sublime and the ugly, the ancient layers of time and the ordinary hustle of the present, the several cultures that shaped the local character (Italian, French, Spanish, and through them a touch of the Moors), the kindness of the climate and the fearful proximity of the volcano, the incredible luxuriant architecture and art and the crumbling, tumbled buildings, the fabulous sophisticated decorative tradition and the folk art religious figures and nativity scenes sold everywhere. This place splits and splits again. The careless beauty of Naples is impossible to contain in a book. The voltage of the city resembles New York’s, but the American version is a commercial energy, a drive into the future, while Naples’ electricity feels connected to largesse, zest for living, a sexual, grounded force—and timelessness. To grow up here must make the rest of the world seem pallid.