Every Day in Tuscany (2 page)

O
NE GLORIOUS SUMMER
evening at Bramasole, something unexpected intruded on this paradise. The event and, most of all, what it implied, almost ripped my halcyon-blown silky sails. This third memoir of my Italian life revisits that time of change—internal and external—and allows me to explore what I learned about myself and about this green place where I made my home.

Prima le radici, poi le ali
, an Italian friend writes to me today. First roots, then wings. Have I sometimes sought wings first?

T
HE YEAR 2010
marks the twentieth anniversary of what I still think of as my new life in Italy. Ed and I have the celebration planned for July 5.

When I first drove up to Bramasole with the real estate agent, I jokingly said, “This is it.”

This is it
. I was oblivious to the phenomenal changes I was entering as that rusted gate opened, and I saw the sunrise tints of the house’s facade, colors that have delivered a shiver of wonder every time I have looked up since then. I went to Italy for the cypress-lined lanes, the vibrancy of the piazzas, the pure Romanesque churches in the country, the cuisine, the history. I stayed for the never-ending
festa
of everyday life among the most hospitable people on earth. I made a home here, without really meaning to—the place took hold of me and shaped me in its image.

How did I let this happen? There are many crux marks in one’s life, small ones and large. To
take
a decision, my friend Fulvio says, his usage much more precise than the grammatical
make
. To take a decision also takes you. Even though when I stepped out of that car I did not know how my life would change, I did sense something at that moment. I wanted an aperture, an opportunity to merge with something limitless. I, in the fullness of my ignorance, was willing.

And Italy has proven to be inexhaustible. To
take
the gift of a new and very old country—a whole other sphere of language, literature, history, architecture, art: it falls over me like a shower of gold. It is paradoxical but true that something that takes you out of yourself also restores you to yourself with a greater freedom. A passionate interest also has a true-north needle that keeps you focused. The excitement of exploration sprang me from a life I knew how to live into a challenging space where I was forced—and overjoyed—to invent each day.

The coming twentieth anniversary offers a time to reflect and pore over possibilities for the years coming quickly toward me. I’m old enough to lay claim to owning some wisdom; I fully believe Basho’s pithy sentence, passed on from the seventeenth century:
The journey itself is home
.

The second twenty years
. Transition feels sweet. I’m balanced between worlds and can roam forward and backward along that
strada bianca
, that white road of the innermost journey. Moments of change. A chance to say yes, or possibly, no. A day like no other. A week straight out of a horoscope. Someone standing on the other side of an abyss, holding out a hand. A new life plan. Forty trees to plant. A journey back. A ticket sent. A fountain to build. A swim with dolphins. A gift to give. A mirror reflecting another era. A blue glass heart under my pillow.

Winter into Spring

Buongiorno, Luca

IN WINTER-COLD BLUE LIGHT, THE BELLS OF
Cortona ring louder. The cold iron clapper hitting the frozen bell produces clear, shocked, hard gongs that reverberate in the heads of us frozen ones in the piazza, ringing in our skulls and down to our heels, striking the paving stones. In leafy summer, when softened air diffuses the bells, the clarion call accompanies but does not insist; the bells remind, punctuate, inspire. As a benison to the day, the reverberations settle on those nursing cappuccino in the piazza, then fade, sending last vibrations out to the circling swallows. But in winter, the solitary sounds feel more personal, as though they ring especially for you. I even can feel the sound waves in my teeth as I smile my umpteenth greeting of the morning.

Returning in early March, I’m thrilled to see my friends in the piazza. We greet each other as though I have been gone for a year instead of four months. I love the first trip back into town after an absence. I walk every street, assessing the state of the union. What has changed, who has traveled to Brazil, what’s on display at the vegetable market, who has married, died, moved to the country? What’s on exhibit at the museum? Half of an enormous cow hangs by a hook in the butcher’s, a square of paper towel on the floor to catch the last three splats of blood. Under neon, red meat in the cases reflects a lavender light on the faces of two venerable signoras leaning in to inspect today’s veal cheeks and pork roasts. Orange lilies against the glass steam the flower shop window with their hothouse breath, and there’s Mario, a blur among them, arranging a row of primroses.

Winter returns Cortona to its original self. The merchants along the main street complain that all winter long the town feels dead.
Non c’è nessuno
. There’s no one. They wonder if the tourists will return this year. “The dollar is broken, the euro like a hot air balloon,” Fabrizio says as he whooshes the imaginary balloon into the sky, then spirals his hands. I visualize a striped balloon heading toward Mars. In Italian, part of every conversation takes place without words. A woman on her cell phone in the piazza paces, gestures, stops, slings back her head, paces again. She says
grazie
fifteen times, laughs. She’s on stage, a monologue actor. When she hangs up, she snaps shut the phone, shoves it in her enormous
borsa
, and charges ahead toward her shopping.

I pause to look at shoes, then sweaters. “That war of yours. It’s costing the whole world,” Daria scolds, as though I personally have bombed Iraq. She’s sweeping off her already clean threshold. They forget that when the lira converted to the euro, almost everyone abruptly raised their prices; some simply started charging in euros the same amount they’d charged in lire, effectively doubling the cost of their pizza, shirts, coffee, albums, and pasta. Since Italian wages hardly have moved, most people today are feeling more than a pinch. “Not to worry,” our friend Arturo says. “There are two Italys. One economy in sight and another whole economy out of sight. Everyone has their own ways never revealed to the statisticians. You get paid in cash—nobody knows.” This, I think, applies more to independent work and less to the shop owners, who have to give receipts. If I walk out of the bar with no receipt for my
panino
, the Guardia di Finanzia could fine the owner and me. When I buy a chicken, I am astonished—14.65 euros—twenty-three dollars at the current exchange rate. I think of the reconstruction South prices after the Civil War. What is happening to our country? Our dollar is
debole
, weak, shockingly so.

With the wind that must have originated in the snowy Alps, thirty-five degrees feels like zero.
“Che bello
, you have returned before the swallows,” Lina says. Because it is Women’s Day, three people give me sprays of mimosa, which I love for its brilliant yellow in the stony gray air. Massimo offers coffee, and later, so does Claudio. Roberto at the
frutta e verdura
gives me an extra-large sack of
odori
, the vegetables and herbs used for seasoning. I see that Marco has closed his art gallery and expanded his
enoteca
into the adjoining space. There are two tables for wine tastings and the new display cases are handsome. Still, it’s sad to lose the gallery, where many regulars exhibited by the week, hanging their own work and sitting out in the piazza with friends or making friends, while people wandered in and out. But then I see Marco in the post office and he says he’s starting a new gallery around the corner. The museum will expand to accommodate recent archaeological discoveries at the Etruscan sites and the Roman villa our friends Maurizio and Helena have excavated. A new chocolate shop has appeared in my absence. It looks as though it landed from Belgium. The hot chocolate tastes creamy and unctuous. An instant hit. The two restaurants that opened last fall are doing well. One already has the reputation for making one of the best coffees in town. It was there, when I stood at the bar sipping my
macchiato
, that I overheard two tourists. One said, “I saw Frances Mayes’s husband, Ed, driving a Fiat. A Fiat—and one of those tiny ones. Wouldn’t you think they’d have something better than that?” I turned away so they would not recognize me and become mortified. I love my yellow Panda.

To everything its season, and this is the season to replaster, repair hinges, revise menus, clean courtyards and stairways. From the corner table at Bar Signorelli, I watch this spirited activity along the street. Everyone prepares for the spring and summer that they hope will bring back those innocents with a passion for shoes, leather books, dining, ceramics, peaches, Super Tuscans, and all the good things on offer in this lively hill town.

A
S
I
STIR
my cappuccino, I greet the charcoal self-portrait of Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli above the soft-drink fridge. I’m on a Signorelli quest. He was born here, and spent his life painting all over Tuscany, the Marche, and in Rome. Famous, yes, but in my opinion, internationally undervalued. He always presides over my morning-coffee libations. In the local building superintendent’s office, I’ve signed documents under another copy of Signorelli’s self-portrait, which shows my man to be blond as an angel, with direct blue eyes and a strong jaw. A main piazza is named for Signorelli. The local museum features his work. Everyone believes that his fall from scaffolding in the chapel of the Palazzo Passerini caused his death.

Without doubt, he spent charmed parts of his life centered on the piazza, where he most likely ran into a friend one rainy morning and heard the news that da Vinci, what a fantasist, has conceived of a flying machine. Someone tells him that Michelangelo has obtained a great piece of marble (destined to become the
David
), and maybe even that far away a German named Gutenberg just invented a machine to print books. It’s easy to see Signorelli in gold-trimmed green velvet, sun glazing his light hair, intent as his neighbor mentions that the Pope has excommunicated Venice, and, has he heard, an ancient statue called the Laocoön has been excavated in Rome. In his spotted painter’s smock, he raises a glass in his dim studio and listens as his cousin, just back from Rome, describes the newly invented flush toilet. Going home at night, he bumps into Giovanni, the friar at the Dominican convent, whose sweet ways later earned him the name Fra Beato Angelico. His was a heady era. I know that as a local magistrate he was stopped constantly and asked for favors, just as Andrea, our mayor, is this morning. Signorelli, as a preeminent artist and also as a
genius loci
presence, continues to rise up through layers of time. He’s an old friend by now.

T
HE PIAZZA
, for a Roman, for Signorelli, for me, for that baby in the red stroller, exists as a great old savings bank of memory. It
is
a body; it
is
a book to read, if you are alive to its language. I could offer Luca a
caffè
if he would just open the door and with a toss of his yellow hair, stride in. He’s here; he never left.

Campanilismo
, a condition of being: When you live within the sound of the
campanile
, church bell, you belong to the place. Command central, carnival ride, conference center, living room, forum—the piazza also is fun. Never dull. Today the
barista
flourishes my cappuccino to the table. He has formed a chocolate heart in the foam. He shouts to me, “Americans don’t drink coffee; they drink stained water.”

“Sporca miseria!
” I reply, attempting a pun on a mild curse,
porca miseria
, which eloquently means “pig misery.” My wordplay means “dirty misery.” I’m gratified with laughs from both
bariste
.

Lorenzo is just back from Florida. He buys my coffee and I ask about his trip. “Very nice.” And then, staring out at the piazza, he adds,
“Meglio qui a Cortona.”
Better here in Cortona. “America,” he sighs. “Either empty and there is nothing, or there is too much.”

At home in the U.S. of A., I play a CD of the Cortona bells when I feel homesick. Old photos around town show the Allies whizzing in on tanks, liberating Cortona. So familiar is this image, I almost think I was there. The oldest memories, of the Roman forum lying layers below the cobbles, and the even earlier, deeper Etruscan streets, continue to inform the spirit of the place. Memory steams through the baked crust. Old people still call Piazza Garibaldi
carbonaia
, recalling the place where men brought their charcoal to sell. Via Nazionale to some is still the rough and rustic Rugapiana, flat street.

T
HE RHYTHMS OF
the piazza are an ancient folk dance. In summer, the doors of the town hall open and the bride and groom descend the steps into the piazza, where we all gather, even for the weddings of strangers from the Netherlands or England. This is where the new life begins. The newborn is strolled up and down. Boys learn soccer by kicking the ball up against the Etruscan Museum. I’ve been in the piazza at three
A.M
. in February. Someone with a cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder leans against the crumbling Ghibelline lion and gestures with both hands. A young man crosses on the diagonal, whistling, or two people are talking, their breath wreathing their heads. The piazza is never empty. And if it were, it still would not be empty. Luca would be there.