In Maremma (8 page)

There is no charm in any of this. The cloud has no silver lining. One is not made a better person for having had the experience. But cynicism is not the answer; nor, for that matter, is romanticizing bureaucracy—a thing to look at unflinchingly, and to be made angry by, and finally to grieve for.

 

14

S
EMPRONIANO, HOME TO about six hundred souls, sits more than six hundred meters above sea level, overlooking the valley of the Fiora. The oldest and highest part of the village is medieval (until a few decades ago it was called Samprugnano and its residents
Sam-prugnanesi
)
,
a clutter of dark stone houses piled on their hill like luggage at a train station. Then, down from the piazza, the village flattens; the streets widen. It is here, in modern apartment buildings that could not be more remote from the medieval houses of their ancestors, that most of the
Sempronianini
live today.

 

Semproniano, 1911
(from
Samprugnano 1900-1963: Storie e Figure
)

Semproniano had no sights of great historical interest, which was one of the reasons we were so fond of it. Indeed, the
Blue Guide
to Tuscany (second edition) had only this to say of the village:

In short, no Caravaggios, no Giottos, no Della Robbia babies. Brunelleschi never worked here; neither did Leonardo. And yet the town had sat on its hill for a long time, and at certain times of the day, it looked as if it might have been painted by Giorgio di Chirico. (To understand di Chirico well, you have to know Italy on a summer Sunday afternoon, when everything is shut up.)

Alfred Pellegrini (
Recollections and Collections
):
“There are two streets: a high road and a low road. When the townspeople are not sleeping, eating, or working, they take walks. When it is warm, they walk the high road for the cool breezes. When it is cold, they walk the low to be protected from any breezes.”

Semproniano had one bar—the Bar Sport—and it was here that we began the day, in the Italian fashion, with a cappuccino. Miranda and two of her sons, Alberto and Stefano, ran the bar. The boys' father had been killed in a hunting accident several years before. In contrast to his brother, Alberto was vain, and never came to work looking less than immaculate: he was always scrupulously shaved, cheeks glowing, hair perfectly cut, dressed in a blazing white shirt and pressed black pants. Stefano was more relaxed. He was engaged to Samantha, whose father owned the principal bar in Saturnia.

With Alberto, we had a lighthearted relationship. For instance, when we came into the bar in the morning, he'd smile at us and say, “
Mazzafegato
?” “
Mazzafegato,
” MM would reply, and be handed, instead of a sausage, a Danish pastry filled with cherry jam. DL opted for a Danish pastry with “bechamel” (pastry cream), or sometimes “capers” (raisins). Occasionally Alberto would tell us that since he had run out of cow's milk, he would have to use
latte d'oca
(goose milk) for our
cappuccini.
Presently he might complain about the tropical fish in his aquarium, which had failed to live up to his expectations of them: they weren't at all interesting, and if they didn't start to comport themselves better, he planned to fry them and eat them.

The Bar Sport at about eight in the morning was
the
place to be in Semproniano. Rosaria, the doctor, was
usually there, having just dropped her daughter off at school; because she was the doctor, Stefano told us, she hadn't paid for her own coffee in years. If we needed her to look at something, she'd take us into the second room of the bar, fitted out with pinball machines and a pool table, for a consultation. This was very kind of her, for it meant that we didn't have to wait for an eternity to see her in her clinic, where the elderly began jockeying for appointments early and in considerable numbers—many of them, Rosaria told us, not because they were unwell, but because they were lonely.

The other regulars included Stefano, the owner of a local abattoir (every so often he'd bring a delicacy, such as a fresh sheep's heart, for Tolo); a man with moles who looked as if he'd just stepped out of a painting by Breughel; and a man who looked exactly like the man on the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in a Monopoly set. There was also a coterie of old ladies known as
le donnine
who stopped in while doing their shopping and fought over the bill (“
un terremoto”
—“an earthquake”—Alberto said), and finally the few taciturn old
Maremmani
who took their espresso, at any hour,
corretto
(with liquor; literally “corrected”). On quiet mornings you might encounter three of them sitting on the three bar stools, asleep.

After breakfast came shopping. The Piazza del Popolo, around which most of the shops were clustered, was also a genial meeting place. (One of the neat, though not surprising, things about tiny Italian towns is that their
piazze
often bear the same names as the great ones in big cities.) Here we would often run into Sauro's wife Silvia, peripatetic in her pumpkin-colored Fiat 500, buying bread after taking her son Ettore to school. (Silvia resembled no one so much as Mrs. Tasmanian Devil in
the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Sauro was the spitting image of Barney Rubble.) Perhaps she'd have stopped at the Bar Sport to get her lottery ticket from Alberto, in the hope that she too would have the luck enjoyed by the anonymous
Sempronianina
who had recently won two hundred and two million lire (about one hundred thousand dollars at that time) in the SuperEnalotto.

Disparaging the charmless anonymity of American supermarkets, which sacrificed the personal touch on the altar of efficiency, we would then go to the
frutti-vendolo
for fruits and vegetables, to the
panetteria
for bread, to the
macelleria
for meat, to the
salumeria
for cheese, to the
edicola,
which sold, in addition to cigarettes, teen idol magazines and those maddening
marche da bollo
(stamps) that Italian bureaucracy required one to affix to every official document. In the
edicola
there was a single revolving bookcase displaying, alongside the latest works by Danielle Steel and John Grisham, translations of Proust, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf.

One morning, waiting for our
International Herald Tribune,
we ran into Maria Pia, mother-in-law of Rosaria. Having recently learned that we were writers, she told us that as a girl she had loved to read, but that her mother had warned her that reading would make her go blind. In those days, she said, most people were too poor to buy their own magazines; instead, every month, the women in the village would pool their resources to buy a single copy of
Grand Hotel
, which would be passed from hand to hand over the course of a month. (
Grand
Hotel, the first issue of which was published in 1946, featured the old-fashioned genre known as the
fotoromanzo
: a soap opera in pictures arranged like a comic book.)

Next to Pietro's
edicola
was Carlucci's, the larger of the town's two grocers, which opened right onto the piazza and faced Gigliola's
panetteria.
It was to Carlucci's that we went for basic provisions: mozzarella from Caserta (Silvia's home town; we once witnessed her stealing the Caserta phone book from the Bar Sport), Acqua Panna (to be drunk out of the glass Loando left at the house), and, when nostalgia for America got the better of us, a Kit Kat bar or a box of M&M's. Three generations worked at Carlucci's: Sirio, Aldo (Sirio's son), and Gianni (Aldo's son-in-law).

 

Chianti Roses in the Acqua Panna Glass
(Photo and Roses by MM)

Aldo himself was a repository of local history. From him we learned that once upon a time, at Christmas, a kind of bocce, with the victor receiving a small purse,
was played here; except that instead of bocce balls one used
a panforte,
a traditional rock-hard cake from Siena. Once upon a time, when the
tombola
(an Italian version of Bingo) was played in Semproniano, dried beans were used to cover the numbers, since
tombola
cards pre-equipped with little plastic windows had not yet been invented. We also learned that the old cure for bronchitis was to drink red wine into which a glowing hot iron had been plunged.

With his thick hair and pencil-thin mustache, Aldo looked like a 1950s Italian film star going to seed. His father, Sirio, who was in his seventies, had cold blue eyes and an impressive nose. Years ago, he had directed an
orchestrina
in the town. His wife, Elda, was a beauty then, and loved to dance. Though she remained beautiful, occasions for dancing—at least the sort of dancing that Elda liked—were now all too rare. Occasionally, we also ran into Aldo's grandmother, a vigorous and keen-eyed woman of ninety-six whom nothing got past, and probably never had. She'd greet us jovially, and always remembered our names.

We used to buy our meat in Saturnia, but gave up, as a consequence of the many locals and tourists who shopped at the
macelleria
there. As the customers had a tendency to buy tiny quantities of many different meats—a single slice of prosciutto, one sausage, half a chicken breast, two
etti
of ground beef (a little less than half a pound)—we often found ourselves having to wait as long as forty-five minutes to be served. We also discovered that where food was concerned,
un po'
(a little) could mean quite a lot indeed. For instance,
one afternoon a large woman from Bologna asked for “
un po' di salsiccina.”