Summer in Tuscany (6 page)

That night we had dinner at Il Volte on the Via della Rotonda, a smartly casual trattoria with a busy outdoor terrace bordered with greenery and soft lamplight.

It was a hot night, and the purple sky was studded with stars. People thronged the streets, escaping their hot apartments, carrying bright-eyed babies, whisking small children from under the wheels of noisy little Vespa motor scooters, sipping wine in cafés, eating
gelati
, talking loudly on cell phones, embracing friends, kissing in doorways. Being Romans.

Tables were crammed close under the blue awning, and there was music in the air and the smell of pizza margherita, a waft of garlicky clam pasta, the cool taste of white Frascati wine, and a bubble of laughter from a wedding group at the long table next to ours.

The bride was English, beautiful in a skintight white lace dress. Her flowing veil, a cloud of tulle and lace, cataracted carelessly over the terrace. Her new husband was Irish, pink-faced and with his jacket off and his collar unbuttoned against the heat. He had his arm around her shoulders, and there it stayed all night. I watched them with wistful memories of my own long-ago wedding day when, at the last minute, even I had not wanted to be there.

The wedding party was a mixture of European nationalities, and they were laughing, feasting, drinking champagne, having a great time. I caught the bride’s eye and lifted my glass to her. “Good luck,” I called, and she gave me a glowing smile and said, “Come join us.”

“We decided to get married only last week,” the bride told me, still thrilled. “We thought it would be so romantic, and Rome was a good meeting point for all our friends. So we just called them. I bought a frock, he bought the plane tickets, we booked the hotels—and here we all are.”

We laughed with them and toasted to their health and happiness, then returned to our own pizza margherita and
caprese
salad with tomatoes that tasted as if they had been really grown in hot summer fields, and the bottle of light red wine that had a tiny touch of bubbles in it, the kind the Italians call
frizzante
.

How lucky they were to find such happiness, I thought enviously.

Ben

Ben Raphael, the “Michelangelo from Long Island,” watched Gemma from a corner of the terrace. His daughter was eating
fragolini
, the tiny, lusciously sweet wild strawberries that are a specialty for a short season in Italy, and which she nibbled as though they were precious as pearls. Ben felt glad that in spite of her mother’s thin-is-better attitude to life, Muffie had inherited his own love of good food.

He glanced again at the American woman, hidden behind those swept-up glasses that matched her swept-up cheekbones, eating pizza with the teenage daughter with the cropped yellow hair and quirky clothes, and the grandmother in her best black.

Odd
was the right word to describe her, he thought, shaking his head and smiling as he recalled their encounters that day. But he also remembered when he had first seen her, just last night. For a second there, she had stopped him in his tracks, made him think for a moment how
real
she looked: un-made-up, uncaring, her exhaustion showing.

He’d been struck by how different she was from the glossy women he knew. Looking at her now, in her simple white shirt and skirt, with sandals on her bare feet and her golden hair haloed by the lamp behind her, he wondered who she was and why she looked as though she wasn’t enjoying herself, and whether it was just her accident-prone clumsiness that made her seem so vulnerable. Somehow he didn’t think so. And somehow, too, she had just stuck in his mind.

Gemma

The next morning we were speeding north in a car like a silver bullet, a flashy and, since I was with an “heiress,” horribly expensive Lancia. The powerful engine hummed soft as a lullaby, the leather had that wonderful new-car smell, and the dash with its high-tech display dazzled. I was in automobile heaven. The signs said
FIRENZE
, but I almost didn’t want to get there. Driving this car was the closest thing to bliss—and bankruptcy—I could imagine. But Nonna had informed us she intended to return to her old village “in style,” and how could I say no to that?

The traffic was a nightmare. Cars charged up behind me, lights flashing, forcing me over, then passed at speeds I knew must be illegal, while the truck driver in his lumbering
camion
coming at me on the other side of the road flashed
his
lights, warning me to get over, until I wondered if maybe I should just leave the road to them.

But soon we were out of the city sprawl, passing signs that said
URBINO
and
PIENZA
, driving down roads lined with umbrella pines and hillsides dotted with cypresses, past tumbledown farmsteads and through tiny hamlets, mere straggles of houses and barns, with old men sitting in the shade, leaning on their sticks, watching the world flash by.

“Almost there, Nonna,” I said, wondering what she was thinking, now she was almost “home.”

Nonna was staring worriedly out of the car window at the passing countryside. I guessed she thought she remembered it, but it had been so long, and she had been only a child.

This was meant to be the big event of her life, of
all
our lives, going back to our roots, visiting long-lost relatives, seeing the old village and the humble little stone house where Nonna was born. Now, though, I thought she looked uneasy. What if her village was not the way she remembered it? What if no one was there from the old days? What if there was no one left who even remembered the Corsini family? I saw her take off the large Hollywood sunglasses she had bought in Rome and wipe her eyes. Oh god, she was
crying
. Perhaps this was a mistake after all.

I could swear we had been circling the same route for the past half hour, following Nonna’s erratic directions. “Are you sure you’ve got this right?” I asked her finally.

“You think I don’t remember my way home?” She sounded hurt.

“Mom,” I said, “I think you haven’t been here in almost fifty years and you just don’t remember
exactly
where Bella Piacere is.”

Livvie got out the road map and studied it one more time. She glanced toward a distant town set high on a crag and said that must be Montepulciano. Then Nonna said to drive on, she would know it when she saw it.

I sighed at her logic as we wound slowly up powdery white roads, with Nonna sitting on the edge of her seat, peering through the windshield like a soldier on military reconnaissance.

“There!” she said suddenly. “Left at the crossroads, the one with the Saint Francis shrine.”

I swerved left at the little plaster roadside shrine with the statue of Saint Francis, arm upraised as though he were blessing the jar of plastic flowers someone had placed at his feet, then followed a narrow lane lined with shady poplars, threading ever upward, past a tiny farm where a lone white cow peeked solemnly at us from a stone barn.

I looked around me. So
this,
I thought, is Tuscany: vineyard-covered hills, silvery olive groves, fields of dazzling sunflowers, old pastel-colored villas and ancient stone villages, cool archways flashed with sunlight, and the village of Bella Piacere on the crest of the hill. Paradise.

Oh
puh-lease,
I thought.
This is too good to be true. It’s a picture-postcard place, a setup for tourists and Kodak moments
. But there were no tourists around, no cameras clicking. Only silence and a feeling of peace.

I parked in the little cobblestoned square, and we got out of the car. We held Nonna’s hands and looked at where we were. At the place we came from.

Bella Piacere dozed peacefully behind closed green shutters in the hot sunshine of siesta. Pink and terra-cotta houses lined the cobbled square; a tabby cat slumbered behind a pot of tumbling scarlet geraniums, bead door curtains clattered in the sudden breeze, and there was a lingering aroma of lunchtime basil and garlic. From the cool dark interior of the tiny honey-colored church came the smell of incense and flowers, and in an alley, a flight of stone steps curved mysteriously upward. There wasn’t a soul in sight, and you could almost hear the silence.

Tears suddenly flooded down Nonna’s face. We flung our arms around her and stood in the middle of her village square in an emotional clump. This was Nonna’s homecoming, and I, for one, was wondering why she had ever left. Because now Bella Piacere tugged at my own heartstrings.

I asked myself, was it was because this was where my mother came from? Because it was my family’s, my own roots? Or was it the peace, the stillness, the sense of stepping back in time?

The Albergo d’Olivia was a faded pink stucco building facing onto the cobblestoned piazza, where a fountain sprayed over a pair of chipped stone cherubs holding aloft a dolphin. Not so many years ago, Nonna told us, the
albergo
had been a cow barn. Tuscan cows were traditionally kept indoors and groomed like prize horses, and in the old days they often had better living quarters than the peasants who owned them. Now, though, the barn was a tiny inn with wide arched windows where the big doors had once been. There was an ornate wrought-iron sign in the shape of an olive tree over the entrance, and a little terrace bar, just a few metal tables and chairs spilling casually onto the piazza.

Oh come on,
I thought, ever the skeptic,
this is too cute to be true. I mean, if you had a picture postcard of the dream Tuscan village inn, this was it!

We pushed through a bead door curtain into a long, low-beamed room with terra-cotta tiled floors and the original stone walls. To our left was a dining room, just a half-dozen tables with bright green cloths and little jugs of frilly pink carnations. On our right was a small sitting area with a beat-up green leather sofa, two hard-looking high-backed chairs, and an assortment of little tables topped with dinky lamps and a small TV set. A row of stunted cacti stood under the windows, and on the far wall we could see the iron feeding troughs from when the inn was still a cow barn.

“Buon giorno,”
Nonna called, pressing the bell near the door. It clanged loud as a fire engine in the silence, and a young girl hidden in a cubbyhole under the staircase shrieked and leaped about two feet into the air.

She was small and skinny with round brown eyes. Her black hair was short and uneven, her skin was so pale she might never have seen the light of day, and her mouth was a small pink O of surprise. She looked exactly like an urchin in an Italian movie.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” I smiled.

She waved her hands wildly in the air.
“Prego, un momento, signore,”
she cried, then shot past us and through a door at the back marked
CUCINA
. In a second the door flew open again, and another small round woman shot out. She was a replica of her daughter: same round dark eyes, same round little mouth, same uneven haircut. But this woman was fat, and she was very much in charge. She squeezed herself behind the pine counter under the stairs, drying her hands on her apron and looking expectantly at us.
“Prego, signore?”

Nonna frowned. She leaned over the counter to get a closer look.
“Scusi, signora,”
she said, “but I know your face. You must be related to the Ambrosinis. Carlino and Maria Carmen. They lived at the top of Vicolo ’Scuro.”

“
Sì,
it’s true. They were my grandparents. I’m Amalia Posoli.”

Nonna clutched a hand to her pounding heart. “I went to school with your mother, Renata. We lived next door. I haven’t seen her since we were girls. I was Sophia Maria Lorenza Corsini then. Now, of course, I am
signora
Jericho, and a widow. I’ve traveled from New York to visit Bella Piacere, my old village, again. Before I die,” she added, as I noticed she always did, a hand still clutched dramatically to her breast.

Livvie rolled her eyes at me, but Amalia thumped an enthusiastic fist on the pine counter, making it tremble. “What a surprise my mother will have to see you again,
signora
Jericho. Welcome home, welcome. Mamma will be so excited. She married Ricardo Posoli. Remember him?”

“
Ricci
Posoli?” Nonna beamed. “Of course I remember him, long and skinny as a string bean, and Renata was short and round.”

Amalia laughed, because it was true. “I’ll show you to your rooms. I have the reservations right here.” She pointed to the school exercise book that was the hotel register. “Then, when you are ready, I will take you to see Mamma. She will be so excited.
Madonnina mia!
What a surprise it will be.”

Nonna had a big square room with a window overlooking a grape arbor and an overgrown garden, where tiny tomatoes clung like scarlet roses to the hot stone walls, looking ready to burst with ripeness, and zucchini in rampant yellow bloom triumphed over a patch of struggling lettuces. Livvie had a cute flowery room at the front, and my own room, linked to Livvie’s by a bathroom, was all white. White walls, white lace curtains, white linen coverlet.

Like a virgin’s room, I thought, bouncing on the bed to test it. And of course it might as well have been. I grinned as it squeaked and groaned. Nobody could lose their virginity in here without half the hotel knowing about it; I’d have to hold my breath every time I turned over for fear of waking other guests.

I peeked into the bathroom and saw white tiles with little pink flowers, a deep tub with a flimsy handheld shower, and a pink plastic shower curtain with stars on it.

Back in my virgin’s room, I went to the window, pushed open the rusty green shutters, and stuck my head out. To my left, on the crest of a rounded hill, I caught a glimpse of the grandiose old Villa Piacere, half hidden behind the trees, and home, so Nonna had told me, to the counts of Piacere for more than three hundred years.

Livvie leaned companionably next to me, looking out at the silent square, at the hillsides covered in vines, at the groves of olives. The soft sound of the fountain filtered into the room, and the air was winey and clean. The sun felt hot on our faces, birds twittered, the church clock struck three, and somewhere a dog barked.

“Whatever do people
do
around here?” Livvie whispered.