In Maremma (2 page)

We had come to this part of Italy together for the first time in the autumn of 1993. We needed to get out of Florence for a few days, and we wanted to “take” the famous thermal waters at Saturnia. These sulfuric springs, which gush out of the earth at 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 degrees Fahrenheit), were famous even in Roman times for their curative properties. On windy days the smell of sulfur carries all the way up to the village of Saturnia, said to be the oldest in all of Italy. It was to these springs that injured Roman soldiers were sent to be healed after battle. In the twentieth century, a hotel channeled the waters into a modest series of pools and artificial waterfalls, which in turn flowed down through an old and crumbling stone water mill to form the natural falls known as the Cascate del Gorello.

Roughly speaking, the Maremma corresponds to the province of Grosseto, which occupies the southwest corner of Tuscany. “Maremma” means “marsh;” and for centuries this was exactly what the area was. A few rich, noble families had divided the land among them. The
people, poor and accustomed to hardship, were small in stature. Women traveled on donkey back. In fact, our neighbor Ilvo's younger sister, at the age of nine, had been dragged to her death by a donkey whose lead she had tied around her waist. Alas, such tragic accidents were common. This was, in effect, the Wild West of Italy, home to the
butteri
(cowboys) who tended herds of horned Maremmana cattle. (Seeing a horse tied in front of a bank or a bar was still not so unusual in our time.) There were also brigands. The painter Caravaggio was murdered in Maremma, at Porto Ercole. Even during the age of the Grand Tour, the twin threats of brigands and malaria dissuaded all but the most adventurous traveler from stopping here. Nor was the Maremma spared anything of Fascism or the Second World War. Bombs destroyed much of Grosseto, the principal city. Tera-cle, the real estate agent under whose aegis we bought Podere Fiume (Greek, or at least Magna Graecia, names are common here), recalls witnessing, at thirteen, the shooting of an entire family by the
Camicie Nere
(Black Shirts) because they had given refuge for a few weeks to an English soldier. The father of our friend Brunella was beaten when he refused to sing the Fascist hymn (“Giovinezza”) at school.

 

Balilla in Marcia (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure,
edited by Massimo Gennari)

Things started to change in the 1950s, after the threat of malaria was eradicated, and habitable and arable land was claimed from the newly drained marshes. In addition, the government bought up most of the land from its owners and distributed it among the tenant farmers whose families had been working it for generations. This program not only provided funding for hospitals and schools, but also put up houses for the farmers, more or less identical and cobbled together from stone, brick, and blocks of porous and ever-so-slightly radioactive volcanic rock also used by the Etruscans.

Now the Maremma is relatively prosperous: many an abandoned
podere
has been converted into an
agriturismo
(country bed-and-breakfast); vineyards produce sangiovese grapes for Morellino di Scansano. Much of the area has been given over to an enormous national park. Wild boars, roebuck, and chamois abound in the forests; Maremmana sheepdogs—tenaciously loyal, with thick, ivory-colored coats—guard huge flocks on many of the farms. In contrast to Umbria, there is almost no industry; the people still make their living from agriculture. In the summer, when the afternoon temperature regularly reaches a hundred degrees, the older farmers tractor by moonlight. Even after midnight we could hear the cool hum of their machines moving slowly over the fields.

Living there was rather like living between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries: modern inventions
made aspects of life easy, but remnants of ancient ways endured. There were village festivals celebrating the gathering of the hay, and religious processions commemorating salvation from the Black Death in the 1400s. Ancient trades that the Industrial Revolution did much to destroy were practiced still. Gods and goddesses that predated Christ were worshipped (though often obliquely). There, at midnight on New Year's Eve, one burned branches of laurel to invoke the protection of benign deities in the coming year. There, when one moved into a house, one waved branches of myrtle in each room to chase out evil spirits.

2

A
FTER WE SETTLED on settling in Maremma and A before we found Podere Fiume, we looked at about twenty houses that were for sale. Each of them seemed to have an insuperable flaw Finally we did see a house that we quite liked. It was one of a row of attached houses built in the thirties, in a tiny
borgo
just north of Montemerano. (One of these houses belonged to the Toscanini family.) The owner was a Roman real estate agent whose wife, an architect, had restored the small yet high-ceilinged rooms with care, building a reading loft in the bedroom, carving a room for dealing with what Mussolini called
“gli elementi della natura
” from a thick wall, adding a terrace on the roof. In the living room a new fireplace had been installed—on the model of the one that originally was there, but smaller. In front of the house there was a big garden with a grass lawn (rare in this part of the world), stone paths, roses, and an ancient oak tree.

In reality, this house fit our fantasies better than it did ourneeds. For example, it had only two bedrooms, which meant that one of us would have to do without a study and work in the living room or at the dining table: not a big deal, but something to consider. The living room was far too small ever to hold a piano. There were no closets.
And yet, and yet . . . the view from the terrace was so splendid, did it really matter if there weren't enough closets? After all, one didn't buy a house in Italy for the sake of storage space. Both our families had excesses of storage space, and what had they done with it? Stowed away boxes filled with creased sheets of Christmas wrap-pingpaper, fondue sets, Tupperware bowls missing their lids, ancient blenders, and televisions that actually had dials. What need had we of closets?

And so we paid a visit to the real estate agent who had taken us to see the house—his name was Marco Rossi, which in Italy is like being named John Smith—during which we expressed some timid interest, then inquired as to how we might proceed. He smiled, then took out a thickly stuffed file from his desk. Because he liked to be completely up front with his clients, he said, he wanted to make sure that we were aware from the beginning of certain
piccoli problemi
with the house—nothing serious, no; still, worth knowing about.

He opened the file.

The first “little problem” had to do with the garden. Although it was for sale along with the house, and had the same owners as the house, the patch of land that led from the front door to the gate belonged to someone else. How was this possible? The piece of land in question was about the size of a large sofa. Marco Rossi explained that the land around the house had originally belonged to a widow who had died intestate. As she had eighteen legitimate heirs, the land had been divided into eighteen parcels. Seventeen of the owners had agreed to sell when the real estate agent and his wife had bought the garden, but one had held out. One always holds out . . . Not that it mattered in this case. The owner of
the sofa-sized patch was very nice, actually a friend of his, Marco Rossi said, and he had no objections to the owners of the garden trespassing on his land in order to reach it.

Marco Rossi turned another page in his file. “Little problem” two, he said, concerned the
cantina
(basement). It did not belong to the owners of the house, but to an old woman who lived down the street, and though she
would
be willing to sell it, she wanted thirty-five million lire (at that time about twenty thousand dollars). The old woman told Marco Rossi to reassure us that if we chose not to buy the
cantina,
she was certain that someone else would—perhaps even someone in the
borgo
who would like to convert it into a playroom for their children. Old Italian women often are subtle practitioners of the art of blackmail.

Anything else?

Just one more “little problem”: if we bought the house, we would have to buy it as
two
separate apartments, the upstairs and the downstairs. This was merely a technicality. As there were two ofus, it even could be perceived as an advantage: we could each buy one apartment.

We went back to Rome with photocopies of the documents relating to the three “little problems.” The next day we called Ada, a real estate agent we had met the summer before in San Francisco, where she was vacationing with her girlfriend, Maura. At a restaurant, they had appealed to us for help in translating the menu and then for advice on where they could go to get married. (This was in the days before same-sex marriage was legalized—and then just as quickly illegalized—in California.) Ada invited us to her apartment, where we gave her the photocopies. It took her about ten minutes
to get through them. The reason the house was being sold as two apartments, she said, was because the major “renovation”—nothing less than the construction of the staircase linking the two floors—had been done without a permit. The electricity, the plumbing, and the roof terrace had also gone in without permits. In short, the whole house was illegal. If we bought it, and the illegal works were discovered, we could be compelled either to undo them or to pay an exorbitant fee in exchange for a
condonno
(certificate of approval).

“You
could
buy that house,” Ada said, “but I wouldn't. I like to sleep at night.”

So we didn't.

When we told Domenico about this adventure, he said, “Oh, that's pretty common. In one house I did, I put in a swimming pool without a permit. When the inspector came, we covered the deck with sheets of sod and said that it was a holding tank for water.”

3

Paestum hurts; it is the only place I know that would move one to tears. A desolate fever-haunted plain with wild shaggy bullocks roaming about in the brush; then lovely mountains; on the other side the sea asleep naked; and near the shore the temple of Neptune, the oldest thing in the world—impressionally at least; older than Greece and Assyria, as old as the oldest Egypt; so solemn and serene and sweet that one burns with shame; what have I done with my life? It hurts and consoles one at once.
HARRY BREWSTER SR., from a letter to Ethel Smyth (1893)

 

N
OTHING TELLS YOU more about a people than their homes. In Maremma, the interior ideal was dazzling white walls, shiny granite floors kept mirror-bright thanks to the chamois-bottomed slippers that many
casalinghe
(housewives) wear indoors, a ceremonial dining room (but rarely a living room), no lamps but bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a mix of inherited rustic furniture with decidedly “modern” pieces that spoke of a remote and faintly unreal urban world. Many homes had only two books: the Holy Bible and the telephone directory. Some, however, had three books: the Holy Bible, the telephone directory, and a hagiography of Silvio Berlusconi that he himself had sent to every Italian household before an election.

Italy has gained general prosperity only since the Second World War. A common phenomenon was to see an old woman dressed in black being driven to the weekly outdoor market by her son in his Jeep Cherokee. The once poor tried to prove their affluence by living among new things, even if they were not so fine as the old ones, yet there was more to it than that: one did not have to look at too many Italian interior-design magazines to see that the country was continuing its long struggle to free itself from an oppressive inheritance. Like most Americans in Italy, we didn't want to furnish our house in massive, dark furniture any more than most Italians did, but we weren't prepared to go to the other extreme, the cruel minimalism of Milan design.