Every Day in Tuscany (4 page)

P
OLLO AL
M
ATTONE
Chicken Under a Brick

Weighing down a chicken with bricks seems so ancient. Did the advisors to Roman emperors hatch the slogan, “A chicken under every brick,” to go along with the bread and circus motif?

Brick morphed so naturally from the good earth—add water and high heat (
ecco fatto, terracotta
) and civilization started to build in a big way.

Roman bricks were longer and narrower than present-day bricks, but any brick will do. If you have a few handy, you should wash them, let them air-dry, and wrap them in a few sheets of aluminum foil. Otherwise, you can use a heavy pan of some sort. I’ve used an 8-quart Le Creuset, covering the bottom with aluminum foil.

Serves 4

2 garlic cloves

1 handful of parsley

Zest from 1 orange

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

½
teaspoon salt

½
teaspoon pepper

1 chicken, 3 to 4 pounds

MARINADE

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

½
cup extra-virgin olive oil

½
cup white wine

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Mince the garlic and parsley and combine with the zest, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and salt and pepper. Set aside.

Wash the chicken under cold running water and dry. With poultry shears, remove the wing tips, any excess fat, and cut out the backbone. Put them aside for stock. You may want to remove the ribs and breastbone, too.

Mix together the marinade ingedients. Lay the chicken flat, skin side up. Stuff the garlic mixture under the skin, place in the marinade, then cover and marinate for a few hours or, even better, overnight. Turn two or three times.

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a cast-iron pan large enough to hold the chicken (I use a 12-inch cast-iron skillet). Place the chicken skin side down and weigh it down with the two clean bricks wrapped in foil. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, then place the skillet and bricks in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes, after which you’ll remove the weights and turn the chicken over, cooking another 10 minutes or so, until done. Cut into serving-sized pieces.

Andiamo a Casa—Let’s Go Home

MARZO È PAZZO. YES, MARCH IS TOTALLY CRAZY
. The wind could pick me up and set me down in another world. The rain slants sideways, turns back, forward, and almost rains upside down. From a duffle under the bed, I dig out an old alpaca-lined coat and some scruffy black boots lined with fake fur. The sleek black coat, pale green twinset, and silk pants I brought with me go back in the suitcase. March can be balmy but, instead, out come the cotton undershirt, big sweaters, and corduroy pants.

Between bouts of driving rain, we dash out for walks in waterlogged air. Hawthorn blooms in white drifts and a few beaten-down daffodils lean off the terraces. Prune trees let off a pinkish, pre-blossom glow, and lush, long grasses slush under our boots. We’ve lost a plum tree to the
tramontana
winds. Several garden chairs have blown into each other and flowerpots have tumped over and cracked open. We roam the countryside, huddling under trees when the rain doubles back, checking on the wild asparagus (not yet), and our neighbor Alberto’s pool, where we find the weighted cover blown into the water.

“Should we bother him?” Ed asks. Alberto is thousands of miles away in Tampa. “Or just let it sink quietly?”

“We’ll tell his gardener. I saw him in the piazza this morning.”

The sixty cypresses we donated for our road are thriving. Only one lies on its side. Each new tree is planted near a mammoth old one. Along this Strada della Memoria, Road of Memory, the original cypresses, planted after World War I, commemorated each soldier from Cortona who lost his life. Over the century, many of the six hundred trees had died. When I was given an award by Barilla (no, not for being the biggest pasta eater in Italy), I passed the money on to the comune to reinstate these memorials. I watch over each. The small trees near the old giants thrill me. They seem anthropomorphized, like children with their tall parents. We see that the comune gardeners have trimmed dead limbs from the nearly centenarian soldiers and treated them in spots with some blue medicine.

Each time we return, we comb our land, as we do the town, to see changes—how much have the hedges grown, what pool has been dug in the valley below, if the Castellis have finished building their house, and if all the stone walls survived the storms. Although winter still reigns, she’s an old queen by now; soon all the pastel princesses of primavera will return. We’re reconnecting with our house, too, in the fastest ways we know. Unpack, visit the neighbors, stock the kitchen, buy summer lily bulbs, plant bare-root roses, wash the dusty wineglasses, reboot the computers, stack the books we intend to read on top of the bookcase—there, we’re home.

The first person to see is Placido, our nearest neighbor and, with his wife, Fiorella, and daughter, Chiara, our Italian family. Last year, on September 23, in America, Ed answered the phone and heard sobbing. Chiara’s voice broke, spoke, broke again, “Zucchero slipped on the hill they paved at Torreone and skidded backward. He was falling and throwing Babbo to the ground.”

“No! Plari’s horse skidded?”

“His skull hit hard,” she continued slowly. “He immediately went into seizures.”

Always looking toward the positive, she said he was fortunate that Carlo, the friend on horseback just behind him, was a highly trained police officer, who managed to keep Placido from swallowing his tongue—and simultaneously to call a helicopter. Within the hour, Placido was in the good care of the Siena hospital. The messages we received from Chiara over the weeks said
the situation is grave
and
three large hematomas
and
I’m afraid
. He lay in a coma for a month, gradually emerging to the shock of what had happened to him. We lived with the image of him sliding backward, falling, falling off the horse like St. Paul in Caravaggio’s painting in Rome.

We visited him in October when we were back for the olive harvest and found our friend, this robust, joking, vital man, deeply compromised, weakened, alternately agitated and distant. The tubes down his throat, which he jerked out several times, left him hardly able to speak. He did not want to be in the hospital room with three near-death men, one of whom seemed already over the divide. Placido kept repeating
Andiamo a casa
, let’s go home, why were they keeping him,
Andiamo a casa
, it was only a slight accident.

We worried, his family worried, the whole town worried. Everywhere we went people said, “How is Placido today?” Droves of friends visited him, taking over soups and tarts. He began to improve as soon as he was released to his falcon, garden, dog, and the bountiful love and table at home.

Before we get to his house, we see him out walking arm in arm with Fiorella. He looks like himself! Ed’s eyes brim as he embraces his friend. Fiorella, looking relaxed at last, says Placido is “Almost ready.” He’s thinner, with a crease on either side of his smile, but he’s Placido. We’re oddly flattered when he says we are the only visitors he remembers from his hospital stint. He lost his zest for smoking cigars and drinking grappa, in fact has lost some sense of taste but expects it back. He’s not yet riding. Zucchero has gone to visit a friend’s horses for an extended stay. The image of Placido placing his foot in the stirrup ever again makes my stomach flip.

In the months of his illness, we faced how unbearable it was to imagine Cortona without Placido. For us, he’s a great love and the essence of Tuscan life. Every morning all year, he’s having coffee at Banchelli’s, often a second with another group of friends. He’s a husband, in the old sense, to his land and animals, tending his falcon, horse, chickens, rabbits, and guinea hens. With his friend Lucio, he combs secret areas to find more porcini mushrooms than anyone. He makes archery shields and pouches out of leather. In summer he works without a shirt and I’ve seen the fading tattoo of Pegasus, the winged horse, on his shoulder. One day he came over and gave us two napkin rings carved from olive wood, our names and the date burned into the wood. Always on his porch there’s a bird or owl he’s rescued. The cages he makes for their recoveries are works of folk art. A
merlo
, blackbird, with a crushed wing has lived in a jolly yellow and red house for fifteen years. It whistles as Placido passes. The Cardinali family hospitality is legendary. When we first bought Bramasole, we’d hear their parties, the singing long into the night, hoots of laughter. From the window I could smell smoke rising from the grill, count cars parked all along the road. We’d wonder if ever two foreigners might be included in such an evening. Hundreds of shared dinners later, the Cardinali family still symbolizes the most profound reasons we love this place. Telling us about the fall, Placido casually mentions that the name of the helicopter was Pegasus.

T
HOSE EARLY VISITS
, when we had solitude and endless time to work our land and write poems and chapters and articles, long ago disappeared. Returning in winter restores some of the time for privacy, and for visiting friends outside the glorious but busy summer season, when our kitchen fills with pasta steam and sounds of chopping, when spare beds are often filled with guests who must be shown Pienza, who develop bronchitis, or graze their rented fenders on a stone wall. Also, winter may be the best time to travel. What’s a bit of Arctic breeze compared to no problems with parking, reservations, or crowds?

Next week we will take the train up to Florence for the pleasure of experiencing the city restored to an atmosphere of intimacy and discovery. In this season, I can walk into all the churches and galleries, exhilarated to find myself alone, or almost, with the art. The security guard dozes by his space heater. The locals reclaim their city, walking out in the stony twilight in their well-cut wools and flowing scarves, greeting each other. In the
trattorie
, cooks are grilling sausages and pigeons. The fried rabbit with fennel, the pots of
ribollita
, the pastas with
funghi porcini
are served forth. In cold rain, the architecture suddenly seems more foregrounded. My camera responds to the washed air and gives back the soapy gloss of marble, etched shadows of statues, puddles like foxed mirrors, the Ponte Vecchio’s reflection in the old green river.

At six
A.M
., taking a warm
cornetto
from the just-opened bakery to a bridge over the Arno, you see Dante’s Firenze in the water, the fresh light sliding downstream. This is the season of thickest hot chocolate in elegant pastry shops and bars, the season of delicate truffle sandwiches with afternoon tea. Florence in winter sets me dreaming as Florence in summer cannot.

The secret of winter travel revealed to me by Ed: Plan on
weather
. Dress for it. As one who grew up in a warm climate, I’m always forgetting to put on my coat. But he’s Minnesota born and bred and reminds me: Layers. Socks. Waterproof soles. Gloves. Then we’re prepared for short trips to off-track places such as beautiful Mantova, where the fog can hide all the bicyclists, or Bagno di Romagna, where the wind may be frigid but the air is so deeply fresh you’d think they invented it.

R
ED WINE IN
winter works a spell that I don’t fall under in hot weather. The gorgeous, profound Vino Nobiles, Brunellos, and Super Tuscans can overwhelm summer food. Though Tuscans almost never order white wine, even when it’s one hundred degrees, local makers are undermining that prejudice with some fulsome and spicy whites. I keep my own stash in summer, especially our winemaker friend Riccardo Baracchi’s Astore and some of our recent local whites from D’Alessandro. But when the cold comes down, and in the spirited autumn weather, our biggest Brunello glasses are on the table every night, the decanters filled by six for dinner at eight. The Baracchis, Silvia and Riccardo, the most hospitable people on earth, love to bring over bottles for a vertical tasting of their Ardito. As we go through the courses and vintages, I can taste the concentrated elixir of the dry, scorching summer of ’04, the loose juiciness from the spring rains of ’05, and the tart edges of the April flash freeze of ’06. I love to hear vintners talk about their wines. Like parents, they see the nuanced qualities of their children that others usually don’t notice.

In town, Marco, whose
enoteca
faces the piazza, and Arnaldo, who owns Pane e Vino, sponsor cozy winter dinners with a winemaker. Tonight we meet the smiling Paolo de Marchi in his cherry red sweater. His Chianti estates produce Isole e Olena, so he has much to smile about. He’s a third-generation winemaker whose family began in the north. Recently Paolo has acquired again the old family property up in Piemonte, where his son now makes wine. Among those who own vineyards, family ties seem especially strong. Many sons and daughters follow the tradition and often take the business into new directions.

The cozy, arched-brick trattoria can’t hold another wine lover. The room is filled with, it seems, glasses. Every place setting has seven. Low lighting picks up the crystal sparkle, charging the room with energy. Paolo moves us through his chardonnay, chianti, his two cepparellos (a pure Sangiovese grape content), and two syrahs. With the chardonnay, we start with
crostini neri
, the Tuscan classic made from chicken livers, and
mostarda di peperoni
, a condiment of peppers, and a small cannellini bean salad with sopressata. Because Paolo talks about each wine in Italian and then in English for the benefit of a sprinkling of expats, the dinner extends way into the night. Unlike many tastings I’ve attended in America, wine flows. Arnaldo doesn’t limit us to a taste of each wine, but keeps pouring as people ask questions. By the time we are served the
secondo
, my attention has mellowed. I remember a California friend whose mantra was, “They
all
taste good to me.”