Every Day in Tuscany (5 page)

For the racy chianti, Arnaldo selected a tasty gnocchi with ragù made from local Chianina beef. The combination could not be more
genuino
. I’d like to stand up and quote Cesare Pavese: “A gulp of my drink,” he wrote, “and my body can taste the life / of plants and of rivers.”

For the four heavy-hitter reds, we’re served stuffed guinea hen and roasted potatoes. We’re supposed to guess—which is the aged cepparello, which is the aged syrah? I get them all wrong. Never mind, most of us do, though Ed scores well. The fruit
torta
I pass by, but I do try a sip of the Isole e Olena Vin Santo, 2000. It tastes like late Thanksgiving afternoon by the fire, a cashmere throw over my legs, lines of a poem running through my head. I’d like to make a walnut cake, just to serve with this smooth elixir. Just as I imagine this vin santo held up to the flames and sloshed around for the play of toast and topaz colors, I feel a surge of homesickness for my daughter, my grandson Willie, my writer neighbors, even for Willie’s goofy labradoodle. Isn’t this the best response to a wine, that
taste
provokes a fierce emotion? And maybe surreal associations? The ginger-curled, bouncing labradoodle is exactly the color of this elegant vin santo.

We fall in bed after one, dreading the alarm set for an early departure tomorrow. Falling asleep, I catch an iconic image from a Fellini movie, a helicopter dangling a crucifix over Rome. But I see it angling through the skies toward Siena, spiriting Placido away. As the blades tilt, Placido waves from the window.

A House Flying

ED’S THEORY CONFIRMED: GOOD WINE CAUSES
no problems the next day. By nine, we manage to back out of the driveway, both feeling quite fine. We’re off to the Marche. Often our most memorable travels are short car trips, with a map, a book bag, and a change of clothes.

If I were moving to Italy today, I might choose to live in the Marche. The region is studded with unspoiled villages and luscious countryside. There may not be a more divine piazza than in Ascoli Piceno. Drinking cold tea in the retro café, watching the daily bustle of shopping and visiting, meanwhile marking my map with other hidden towns to visit, is a fine way to spend a summer morning. I especially like the town of Macerata, where an opera festival is held every summer. The noble Urbino may be the magnetic star in the crown, but simply drifting around lost on back roads in that region defines an earthly heaven.

I keep reading that the Marche is “the next Tuscany.” That’s not likely because, with the exception of the coastal road, navigating this province is rough. Traversing the Marche, en route from Tuscany, you always seem to find yourself behind a truck, winding slowly, slowly to your destination. A particularly rugged stretch of the Apennines sawtooths all the way down the region, just inland, so that narrow lateral roads run up into the mountains. The map looks like a fish skeleton when you pull it out all at once. But few of the rib roads connect with each other. This keeps the inland area quite unspoiled and remote. We speed along, ready for a two-day visit to Urbino and Loreto, homes to major Signorelli paintings.

F
ROM A DISTANCE
, turreted Urbino looks like a town created by a clever six-year-old from architectural blocks bought by indulgent grandparents. Dome, towers,
campanile
, and stacked buildings of golden brick layer and rise as you approach by an upwardly swooping road. Some fairy with wand might fly out of an arch, inviting you to a ball. Or boys of the local, famed Montefeltro clan might thunder out of gates, looking for a dust-up with some longtime foes.

We drive too far into town and immediately find ourselves in the no-car zone, facing a
vigile
. All glittering brass buttons and ribbons, he leans from on high into the window—oh no, we’ll be thrown into a Montefeltro oubliette—and suddenly laughs.
“Ogni dieci minuti, gli stranieri senza occhi,”
he says. Every ten minutes, foreigners without eyes. He draws circles in the air with his forefinger, directing us back downhill and around several loops. We slink down the hill and never see the sign we should have seen but somehow land at our hotel right in front of the immense treasure trove, the Palazzo Ducale—
casa dolce casa
, home sweet home of the aforementioned Montefeltros.

Soon we are ordering coffee in the
centro
. University students jam the piazza. What’s happening? If this were the university where I taught, a major political demonstration would be starting. But no, they’re just nipping into the bar for espresso and talking, talking like their parents in piazzas all over Italy. Several wear laurel crowns trailing with red ribbons. They must be graduating with their laureate degrees, even though it is March. On one boy, I spot a Dante nose. The red-gold hair of one girl falls in Botticelli curls. They look so charming, classical poets reincarnated and walking among us. The lovely La Primavera’s friend suddenly laughs, mouth wide open, head back. I can see his molars. How they talk with their bodies! They bend, gesture, smack each other on the back. Their responsive faces are lit. What’s that spark in the DNA and why don’t other cultures have it? If I had another life, I’d definitely want to be an Italian student with that Renaissance hair.

Classes seem to happen all over town, including the palace. Destiny serves the enlightened Federico da Montefeltro well. He gathered the major artists of the last half of the fifteenth century into his orbit, making Urbino, way out in the Marche, a little Florence. Surely the genes of some of them still crop up in these parts. Perhaps there’s a potential Piero della Francesca or a Raffaello among these students.

“I don’t get that
‘ogni dieci minuti’
at all.” Ed looks around us. “We’re the only foreigners in town, with or without eyes.”

“I see a few guidebooks, but in Italian.” The weekends before and after Easter are favored times for Italians to travel. They live by the expression
Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi
—Christmas with your own, Easter with whomever you wish.

At lunch, a group of professors attending a conference and a couple from Milan are the only other diners. My former colleagues would have been in tweed, khaki (“baggy-butt Americans” a chic Cortona friend says), or sweaters. These academics come in wearing leather jackets, scarves tied just so, and well-cut jeans. But like my colleagues, professors everywhere
really
eat. These are running through all the courses and several bottles of wine. After such feasting, the wordy afternoon sessions they face would put me to sleep, but somehow Italians can manage the stupendous
pranzo
and charge forth.

The Milanese diners are hardly less ambitious. The waiter brings them the full antipasto platter, risotto, then steaks. They consult the city map and their books. Those are delicious moments for the traveler—a fine lunch with someone you love, poring over
The Blue Guide
and
Gambero Rosso
, a weekend to explore a new place and each other.

We have our meager scaloppini and salad and a tiny
quarto
of local wine. The restaurant—the back room of a popular bar—looks like a provincial hotel from fifty years back—raspberry tablecloths washed many times, majolica plates on the walls, and scraggly plants madly seeking light. Their sparse tendrils have been encouraged to climb around the windows. Literally creepy. The waiter, concerned that we don’t have enough to eat, brings over a plate of what looks like fried flat bread. “
Cresce sfogliate
, try it.”

“Um, looks good. What is this?” Ed passes the plate. “
Sfogliate
means what, no leaves? Looks kind of like
piadini
.”

“It’s like that Indian bread with onions. Nan?” Ed tears off a piece of delicious layered flat bread with cheese melted in the middle. Whatever foolish abstemiousness we were practicing flies out the big windows.

“Or quesadilla.” Mine has a layer of chopped chard. “Or, flattened puff pastry.”

We ask the waiter about it, but he just shrugs. “No, not a specialty, just local. You find it everywhere.” We tear through the whole plate and ask for more. And since we’ve gone that far, we order a lemon tart and linger as long as the ravenous professors.

We have the rest of the afternoon to lavish our attention on open courtyards, two Egyptian obelisks, golden stones, and on the endless rooms of the Palazzo Ducale. Piero della Francesca’s famous profile portraits of the duke and his wife rightfully should be here, since this is home, but belong instead to the Uffizi in Florence. I remember them from the first time I came to Italy. The duke in his red, red hat and clothes stares forever at his second wife, who bore him seven children and died at twenty-six. You can’t see his lost eye on the right, though you can see the missing wedge at the top of his nose, both disasters the result of jousting. Too bad his striking visage doesn’t hang near his small and curious
studiolo
. How amazing that this witty room-within-a-room survives. Was this his hideout? Love nest? The old duke must have been as passionate for
intarsio
, marquetry, as he was for painting. The
studiolo
is lined with tromp l’oeil shelves holding musical and astrological instruments, a clock, realistic lattice doors half open. The artists obviously loved playing with perspective and managed to create vignettes reflecting the duke’s values and desires. Within, you have the feeling that the images are coded and personal. Maybe no one ever will parse how each image relates to some aspect of Federico’s life, but as an observer, you sense that the
studiolo
is fraught with personal symbols.

Of all the palaces I’ve toured, this one seems the most habitable, with its appealing fireplaces, the variety of decorated ceilings, and the fanciful doorframes to lure you into rooms with those magic proportions that make you feel upright and pleased.

Coming upon two of Tuscany’s Piero della Francesca paintings is like running into an old friend in some remote airport. We stand before two of his greatest hits—
The Flagellation of Christ
and the somber, archaic
Madonna of Senigallia
. Though I have come for the two Signorellis this time, I pause long before the anonymous
La Città Ideale, The Ideal City
, and then before
La Muta
by Raffaello, an Urbino native. He has bequeathed us a portrait of a woman more mysterious than the Mona Lisa. The mute looks as though she has plenty to say, and hence the tension of the sensitive, reserved face and the pent emotions behind her enigmatic glance. She was cut out of her frame and stolen, along with the two della Francescas, in 1975, and found in Switzerland the next year, still mute about the whole experience.

Ah, my Signor Signorelli! We find his work less prominently displayed than his teacher Piero’s. His Virgin sits in a square room flanked by the apostles. The group could be waiting to see the dentist except that all the apostles have flames rising from their heads and the Holy Ghost hovers above. I think they’ve just been given the gift of languages so that they can spread the gospels. As a long struggler with Italian, I wish I had been so visited. The multicolored squares on the floor are foregrounded, as though Luca really most loved the marble’s abstract designs. The open space of the floor forces you to see the waiting group as a static tableau. The painting originally was one side of a standard meant to be hoisted aloft during processions through the streets. The Crucifixion hanging next to it was the other face of the banner. Although the crucified Christ against a muted sky reigns, all the emotional attention centers on his mother below. She has fainted from grief and lies on the ground, surrounded by attentive women.

T
HE ADVANTAGE OF
late dining may lie in the three hours back at the hotel. I’ve brought my green tea
bagno schiuma
, bubble bath, and our room has a tub big enough for two to squeeze into, relax, and laugh.

According to Vasari’s
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, Signorelli lived well. As a visitor to the duke’s court, he probably dined well. If he were here tonight, maybe he would find his way, as we do, to the Trattoria del Leone, a lively place packed with local academics. We immediately spot
Olive all’Ascolana
on the menu. These fried olives originated in Ascoli Piceno. Served all over the country, they’re often prepackaged and therefore diminished—nothing fried should have to travel farther than stove to table. On home turf, they deliver their three taste and texture layers—the crunchy exterior, the hefty olive, and the savory salami (or a mixture of meats) interior. Perfect with a glass of prosecco while you ponder the menu. The
marchigiani
eat well. Their
passatelli in brodo
once cured Ed’s migraine. Not exactly a pasta,
passatelli
looks like short fat spaghetti but is made with cheese, bread crumbs, eggs, and nutmeg, then poached in broth—soul food that’s also served to children with colds and the elderly. More rousing is the famous fish stew,
brodetto
, made with no more, no less than thirteen kinds of seafood pulled out of the Adriatic. These
marchigiani
are big meat eaters, too. They like their
castrato
, which is lamb verging on mutton, and robust pork liver dishes. In down-home restaurants, sometimes you see various preparations of testicles. I draw a line there. Ed goes for almost every other part of the pig and likes
ciauscolo
, a soft salami to spread on bread.