In Maremma (9 page)

“
Quanti
?” the butcher, Vito, asked.

She hesitated. “Eighteen.”

Impatience, then, first prompted us to try Andrea, a younger butcher who had set up in Semproniano. His
macelleria
provided an altogether more pleasant (not to mention speedier) experience. Like most Italian
artigiani,
Andrea took great pride in the quality of his meat, all of which was raised at a small
azienda
a few kilometers from Semproniano. Among his specialties was an extraordinarily good pancetta from just over the hill in Cortevecchia, and
capicollo,
a fennel-seasoned salami made from the neck of the pig. That Maremman taste was not necessarily ourtaste, however, was brought home the morning we saw displayed in Andrea's gleaming glass case the brains, lungs, heart, and liver of a lamb, to be eaten fried. This was a favorite dish of Maria Pia's.

The most distinguished person in Semproniano was the pharmacist. She was in her late sixties and always dressed with sober elegance, her hair drawn into a chignon. When she had no customers, she would read—always a work of literature or philosophy—at a lectern in her study off the pharmacy proper. She had an adopted son, Antonio Russo, who was a year older than us and whom we met a couple of times. (Once we had dinner with him and Signora Idia at Il Mulino.) He was an investigative journalist at that time (2000) documenting the war in Chechnya—in particular the atrocities committed against the Chechen people by Russia. During one of his trips to Chechnya, he was captured, subjected to tortures recognizable as those practiced by military special forces, and murdered. His body was found off
a small road near Tbilisi, Georgia. (The library in Semproniano was named for him: Biblioteca Comunale A. Russo.) His mother bore this ultimate grief with the dignity of a queen.

On the Fibbianello, the road that linked Semproniano and Saturnia, was a small refuge for injured or abandoned animals run by a local branch of the World Wildlife Fund. The occupants here included peregrine falcons, hawks, several varieties of owl, a tamed
daino
(fallow deer) who rubbed his velvety antlers against your leg, two wolves who were fed entire lamb carcasses and whose area of the refuge was littered with wool and bones, and a baby wild boar, whom Elda bottle-fed each day. There was also, curiously enough, a pair of obese raccoons who had stowed away on a ship from Canada, escaped for a while into the port city of Livorno, and were eventually brought here. When recently we brought some Canadian friends to see the refuge, Brunella, who volunteered there, asked them if they might be willing to repatriate their countrymen.

When we first started living at Podere Fiume, we attempted to have the mail delivered to a box at the end of the road, but this did not work out very well. Owing to the convolutions of the Italian postal service, mail for Podere Fiume had to be routed through Santa Caterina, quite a distance away on an extremely curvy road. In those days, the road between Santa Caterina and Podere Fiume was still unpaved, so as often as not the postman would not deliver the mail if it was raining, or if it was cold, or if he thought there was not enough to justify the effort. During a period when he was delivering the
mail more or less regularly, the postman one day taped a note to our box informing us that he had seen a wasp crawl into the opening and therefore would not deliver any more mail to us until we met him at the mailbox and proved that we had removed the wasp's nest from it. After that, on no fewer than three separate occasions, we found tarantulas in the box.

It was Maurizio, the postmaster in Saturnia, who proposed that we take a
casella
(box) there. That way, we would not have to worry about wasps or tarantulas. Moreover, we would get our mail at least two days sooner, since it would no longer have to be routed through Santa Caterina.

The first Christmas we had a
casella postale,
we gave both Maurizio and Florio, the Saturnia postman, a bag of coffee beans from Tazza d'Oro, a famous coffee shop near the Pantheon in Rome. Maurizio and Florio were at a loss:
Maremmani
are not ungenerous people, but they are unused to receiving presents. When we arrived at the post office to pick up our mail the next day, Maurizio loaded bottles of olive oil, wine, and grappa from his family's farm into our arms. Everyone in that part of the world farmed at least a little.

15

P
INA'S RESTAURANT WAS located in a former flour mill not far from Maria Pia's house. There were eight tables, and a big fireplace that roared and crackled in winter (at midnight on New Year's Eve, Pina threw laurel branches on it), and over the fireplace a portrait of Pellegrino Artusi, author of
La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene
and considered the father of Tuscan cookery.

The first time we ate at Il Mulino (this was in 1993), we were with a lawyer friend from Salerno who was offended when Pina addressed him familiarly (that is, with “
tu
” rather than “
lei
”) even though
he
had addressed
her
familiarly. Since English has no distinction between formal and informal modes of address, we weren't offended. Besides, as our late friend Lou once pointed out, the formal mode of address is quite often used ironically—the “ironic
lei
,” he called it.

With Pina and her husband, Giampaolo, there was none of this. We all took to each other from the beginning. If on busy nights they had trouble finding a babysitter to take care of Martino, their ten-year-old son, and Margherita, their three-year-old daughter, the children would have dinner at our table. If we had been working hard in the garden in the cold months, Pina would
make polenta with
ragú
and little rolls of veal filled with asparagus and mozzarella specially for us.

Pina was lean and sexy: usually she wore miniskirts and silk stockings, a crisp white coat, and, to finish off the ensemble, a towering and equally crisp chef's toque. Except in August, and maybe also the end of July and the beginning of September, the restaurant was open only from lunch on Friday through dinner on Sunday. Like many Italians, Giampaolo owned a quantity of real estate (including two apartments with a view of the dome of St. Peter's), which was how they could afford to keep Il Mulino open only on weekends.

 

Giampaolo and Pina, Il Mulino
(Photo by MM)

On Wednesdays, Pina and Giampaolo drove all over the Maremma to find the best and freshest provisions—
marzoli,
a local truffle so called because it has its season in March, or vegetables from a secret market near the coast that operated like a speakeasy: if you knew who to say had sent you, you would be admitted to a room
full of produce of incomparable savor—including such rarities, in Italy, as tomatillos, Chinese watermelons, yellow tomatoes, and sweet white corn to be eaten on the cob. Not far from this place was a farm that sold nectarines with
carne bianca
(white flesh), white eggplants that looked like mozzarella cheeses, sheep's milk yogurt flavored with lemon or apricot or wild berries, tiny and pungent fresh goat's milk cheeses decorated with peppercorns or juniper berries, and aged pecorino. Another farm, this one organic and run by Germans, sold
a passata di pomodoro
so flavorful you could eat it out of the jar as tomato soup. In June, these expeditions often concluded with lunch—invariably, spaghetti with chopped razor clams and wild fennel, then an espresso—at a beachside restaurant on the poorer side of the Monte Argentario. Pina was shrewd enough to keep a few secrets to herself, however. We never learned where she got her carrots, her lemons, her guinea fowls, or her lamb.

There was no written menu at Il Mulino. Instead Pina came to the table and described what she had on offer, and never troubled to write anything down. Sometimes she actually brought out a tray of raw meat to show you how beautifully marbled it was, how perfectly aged. And what choice! Among the first courses (tailored to the season), herb-laced
pappardelle
with a white rabbit
ragú
(the
ragú
was white, not the rabbit), or
bucatini
in a tomato sauce slow-cooked with lamb, the meat crumbling off the bone, or gnocchi made with a combination of potato and beetroot and dressed with a pumpkin sauce, or plain potato gnocchi served with
guttus,
a local version of gorgonzola made with sheep's milk. Or what about spaghetti with those March truffles, or
tortelli
filled with fresh ricotta and borage?
And then there were the
minestre
(soups):
scottiglia
(a broth of guinea fowl and pork poured over a subtle slice of olive oil—drenched toast), an ever-consoling
pasta e
ceci, or a virtuosic
aqua cotta
. And then, after that, there were the
secondi
to consider . . .

There were many regulars: a couple from a few doors down who jarred the most delicious honey; a lesbian math professor from Rome who brought both her companion and her dog; a man who, having worked in a Rome bank for thirty-three years and lost his wife—she developed a psychosis after giving birth to a stillborn child, was institutionalized and, after twenty-one years, committed suicide—found India, grew his hair long, and chanted mantras while he ate.

One day when we were having lunch there, a thrilling number of powerful black cars pulled up. One of them held a Milan judge prominent in the anticorrup-tion investigations called
Mani Pulite
(Clean Hands), the others his bodyguards. Before the judge entered, the bodyguards searched the dining room, the kitchen, and the storage rooms, located every means of ingress and egress, then posted soldiers bearing machine guns at each of them. The judge enjoyed his lunch without incident.

The thing about Pina was this: one warmed to her either at once or not at all. Over the years we learned to tell which of the newcomers would return and which would not. The ones who would not were those who found themselves at a loss for just what to do in a place where they were not specially fussed over simply because they had deigned to bring their custom. And so they'd get up and down from their tables. They'd take restaurant guides from the top of the enormous wooden chest and
read them through until the food arrived. They'd pace in front of the restaurant, where sometimes Martino played with Margherita or rode his bicycle. We knew that tomorrow night these people would eat at one of the more famous restaurants in Saturnia or Montemerano, where they would be given a complimentary flute of champagne and be addressed as “
lei.
”

Pina and Giampaolo were orphaned when they were teenagers, which might have been why they knew how to make one feel that one belonged somewhere. Even their dog, Becky, was profoundly maternal, if in Giampaolo's words “
un po' mignotta
” (“a girl of easy virtue”). Once, when she had had an abortion, Becky was discovered in the piazza giving milk to a litter of orphaned kittens. Everyone gathered round. Tourists took pictures. Such a sight had never before been seen in Semproniano.

16

T
HE CHALLENGE OF writing about
acqua cotta
, the Maremma's signature dish, is the same as the challenge of cooking it: how to make something out of next to nothing. In those years we witnessed the gentrification of some of the poorest Tuscan foods, with the result that soups such as
panzanella
and
pappa al pomodoro
and
ribollita,
once eaten only by farmers, fetched thirty dollars a bowl in New York restaurants. And
acqua cotta
—“cooked water”—is the poorest of them all.

According to Mauro, at the heart of every
acqua cotta
was the phrase “se
c'era...
” If there was a carrot, you'd put it in. If there was a little ricotta, you'd put it in. The basic ingredients were humble: onion, celery leaves, olive oil, and old unsalted Tuscan bread. (These are just about the only ingredients upon which recipes for
acqua cotta
agree.) To this soup, however, most cooks add a little tomato; perhaps sprinkle some grated pecorino cheese on the bread. Grander ingredients—
bietola
(Swiss chard), a few porcini mushrooms, or slices of sweet red peppers; basil, sage, parsley, garlic,
peperoncino
—are
facoltativo
(optional), as is using broth instead of water. Finally—but this is very rare; indeed, one might almost call it putting on airs—some cooks throw in a few pieces of sausage.