Amore and Amaretti (18 page)

All through the afternoon and the evening, and until it becomes dark, we eat and talk and laugh and pose for photos. I am exhausted – the day has been almost too rich. And out come Emba's sticky orange biscuits which she made especially for her small Australian rabbit – and the ones we do not eat she bundles up for me to take home, even though, sated beyond comfort, I have vowed never to eat again.

I am relieved when Piero eventually announces that we must leave; I have almost depleted my store of brightness. The fact that for half a day, however, I have been called a
coniglietta
has had the effect – like a tonic – of dispelling my usual self-regard, that of a middle-aged woman (
di una certa eta
– of a certain age) blundering thickly through the days, creating the occasional miracle of a dessert but mostly making no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. We roar off, Piero and I, into the night, swathed separately and together in the love and generosity of a glorious woman.

Once Ferragosto is over, summer starts to slide away. The groups of glittering golden Florentines – the thin, bosomy women dressed in white, the beautiful ponytailed men dangling linen jackets from one shoulder – are suddenly no longer there to transform Saturday nights into lavish garden parties.

Angelo the mushroom man arrives with crate after crate of porcini mushrooms brought in from Romania and Hungary – it is still too soon for local supply – haggling endlessly with Gianfranco over the price. Porcini feature in risottos, on crostini, as pasta sauces, sliced paper-thin on top of carpaccio, grilled whole, studded with garlic and, of course, cresting Gianfranco's famous
tagliate
.

After he finishes unloading the crates from his truck, Angelo comes into the kitchen and stands so close to me that I can hear the private rumblings of his stomach. The second time he comes to us, he thrusts me up against the sink with his groin and tells me how much he likes me; twenty-five years of untrustworthy men behind me enable me to retort that, since we have never had a conversation, I find it difficult to believe. Nonetheless, his attentions are flattering – I also suspect his untrustworthiness is part of his charm. He is tall and skinny with a moustache that droops, baggy eyes and a husky cigarette voice; his energy and self-confidence make me look forward to his visits, despite Gianfranco's words of caution. Of course he is married, a minor detail which fails to prevent him from asking me out on a date. The date – a drink somewhere, some night, after I have finished work – is mentioned, but never takes place.

Past experience never managed to teach me how to distinguish loneliness from lust. It is Ignazio, for all his wariness, who satisfies the latter on two occasions. We end up in bed together – the first time at his initiation and the second at mine – in the early months of La Cantinetta. Both times are as sweetly, easily, excitingly familiar as love-making with ex-lovers always is, although the second occasion concludes with a serious discussion about his girlfriend Milena, in which we surprise ourselves by agreeing like grown-ups that it isn't really fair on her and that we should desist. Our eyes pointedly refuse to meet when we sit over dinner in her company the following evening. Somehow, this seals the decision.

Several sets of friends visit me over the summer, but the most significant of them are Valerie and Douglas Hammerfield, a couple I had met at a cooking class in Sydney. On the brink of their trip to Tuscany, Valerie had been having her hair styled in a Balmain salon where she happened to read an article about Villa Vignamaggio, the setting for Kenneth Branagh's film version of
Much Ado About Nothing
. This is where they are staying, they tell me breathlessly when they arrive at La Cantinetta for lunch one day. Inspired by its beauty, they have hit upon the idea of bringing small groups of people over from Australia for week-long residential cooking courses there. Would I be interested in the position of cooking teacher?

Some months previously, Ignazio took me to the Villa Vignamaggio. It is one of the smaller estates, comprising a vineyard and olive groves, and its wines are considered to be superior. Various myths surround the villa. One is that Mona Lisa was born there; another is that it has a system of underground caves in which espionage took place during the last war, but one truth is its glorious beauty. For Branagh's film, it was repainted a rosy pink and now sits in its new colour among cool walls of cypress, a huge ornamental garden, lemon trees in giant urns, hedges and shrubbery clipped into topiaries.

Valerie's idea is that, towards late October, when I finish at La Cantinetta, we move into the villa in readiness for the group she will hopefully muster together upon her return to Australia. In the meantime, I am to prepare a week's worth of cooking classes, visits to vineyards, cheese factories and hill towns, and other activities I consider worth including. It seems like a wildly ambitious scheme, even when she assures me that she has already discussed it with the villa's manager. I decide to see how Valerie fares back in Australia before drawing up a programme, although I do talk about it with Gianfranco, who is enthusiastic and promises to help me with the cooking class menus.

My October walks are punctuated by the sounds of rifle shots of the hunting season. Men in camouflage become a common sight at that hour, and my mother writes urging me not to let myself be mistaken for a wild boar. Our menu has various game dishes on it – Gianfranco's casserole of pheasant with pancetta is particularly glorious – and he himself darts off at intervals to go hunting with friends. Now it has turned cool, business has slowed to a point where I am bored and longing for it all to be over; I find myself counting down the time remaining, feeling the absence of home and family and friends more acutely than ever. I sit in my little spot by the stoves, my head lowered purposefully over novel after novel, sipping surreptitious glasses of Chianti and chewing chunks of tangy Parmesan, while all around me the others clown, tell amusing anecdotes, have earnest discussions about sport and watch the little television we have propped up at the end of the workbench.

One of my jobs each evening is to chop handfuls of potatoes and throw them into a baking dish with fresh rosemary, garlic cloves and olive oil, and then roast them until they are crisply golden on the outside and creamy in the middle. I pick at them all night, guilty, furtive nibbling with my mouth barely moving, my thighs encased in larger looser trousers, ever-spreading. (I am already planning a grim campaign of Jenny Craig diet and daily vigorous swimming the minute I arrive back in Australia.)

Valerie confirms that eight people are booked into the Villa Vignamaggio cooking week, and I abandon my ritual of afternoon letter-writing to concentrate instead on organising the programme. Piero has promised to help, as well, offering to escort the group on a day trip to Siena with lunch thrown in at one of his favourite restaurants, and to hold a wine-and-cheese-tasting session another evening. I begin to post parcels of personal belongings back home, and suddenly it is my last week at La Cantinetta and I am packing up the contents of my spartan little room and preparing to leave.

Finchè c'è vita c'è speranza

Where there's life there is hope

‘Much Ado About Chianti' begins with torrents of rain beating down the sides of the hired minivan as we drive to Florence airport to pick up our group. Blessedly the rain disappears overnight, leaving a cool, dry week for our ramblings.

Each day there is a cooking class either in the morning or the afternoon, held in a tiny galley-like kitchen attached to the guests' dining area. Gnocchi, pasta sauces, casseroles and desserts are somehow produced around a domestic electric stove, which dies on the second last day, so that we are forced to rush the
castagnaccia
pressed into its round tin over to the manager's private apartment, where her oven obligingly cooks it for us. (It is still pronounced too odd for enjoyment, this flat, rubbery cake made from chestnuts and seasoned with rosemary.) The rest of the time we are in and out of the minivan, visiting Greve markets, ceramic factories, vineyards, castles, a ricotta factory, and beautiful Siena, where Piero herds us into Osteria le Logge for buttery strands of fresh tagliatelle bathed in
ovoli
mushroom sauce, then later, an
enoteca
to sip
Asti spumante
in the thin afternoon sun.

Valerie, Douglas and I share one of the apartments at the villa and hold exhausted post-mortems most evenings before bed. There is no doubt the week is a great success, and yet we had no idea that entertaining a small group of adults every waking minute would be quite so demanding.