Under the Tuscan Sun (18 page)

Although a getaway weekend may be just that, most trips have
an underlying quest. We're looking for something. What? Fun, escape,
adventure—but then what? “This trip is life-changing,” my
nephew said. Did he know that at the outset, come to Italy looking
for affirmation of a change he felt rising in him? I suspect not; he
discovered this in travelling. Another guest compared the water, the
architecture, the landscape, the wine—all she saw to her
hometown's more excellent version. It irritated me to the point of
surliness. I wanted to tape her mouth, point her to an eleventh
century monastery and say “Look.” I felt she went home having
seen nothing. Shortly after, she wrote that she was getting a
divorce (no word of this while she was here) after a
fourteen-year marriage to a man who has decided he is gay. When I
thought back on her attitudes here, I understood that she
desperately had looked for the comfort of a home which was no
longer there. A guest earlier in the summer was on one of those
marathon seven countries in three weeks trips. It's tempting to
mock that impulse but to me it's extremely interesting when one
chooses to power through that many miles. First of all, it's very
American. Just
drive,
please. And far and quickly. There's
a strong “get me out of here” impetus behind such trips, even when
they're disguised as “seeing the lay of the land so I'll know the
places I want to come back to.” It's not the destinations; it's the
ability to be on the road, happy trails, out where no one knows or
understands or cares about all the deviling things that have been
weighing you down, keeping you frantic as a lizard with a rock on
its tail. People travel for as many reasons as they don't travel.
“I'm so glad I went to London,” a friend told me in college,
“Now I don't ever have to go again.” The opposite end of that
spectrum is my friend Charlotte who crossed China in the back of
a truck, an alternate route into Tibet. In his poem “Words from a
Totem Animal,” W.S. Merwin cuts to the core:

Send me out into another life

lord because this one is growing faint

I do not think it goes all the way.

Once
in
a place, that journey to the far interior
of the psyche begins or it doesn't. Something must make it yours,
that ineffable
something
no book can capture. It can be
so simple, like the light I saw on the faces of the three women
walking with their arms linked when the late afternoon sun slanted
into the Rugapiana. That
light
seemed to fall like a
benison on everyone beneath it. I, too, wanted to soak my skin
under such a sun.

THE IDEAL APPROACH TO MY NEW HOMETOWN IS FIRST TO SEE
the Etruscan
tombs down in the flatland below the town. There are tombs from 800
to 200
B.C.
near the train station in Camucia and on the
road to Foiano, where the custodian never likes the tip. Maybe he's
in a bad mood because he spends eerie nights. His small farmhouse,
with a bean patch and yard-roaming chickens, coexists with this
tomba
that would appear strangely primordial in the
moonlight. A little uphill, a rusted yellow sign is all that
points to the so-called tomb of Pythagoras. I pull over and walk
along a stream until I reach a short lane, cypress lined, leading
to the tomb. There's a gate but it doesn't look as if anyone ever
bothers to close it. So there it is, just sitting on a round stone
platform. Niches for the upright sarcophagi look like the shrine at
the bottom of my driveway. The ceiling is partially gone but enough
of the curve is left that I can see the dome shape. I'm standing
inside a structure someone put together at least two thousand years
ago. One massive stone over the door is a perfect half moon.

The mysterious Etruscans! My knowledge of them, until I
started to come to Italy, was limited to the fact that they
preceded the Romans and that their language was indecipherable.
Since they built with wood, little remained. I was almost all wrong.
Not much of their written language has been found, but much has been
translated by now, thanks to the crucial find of some strips of linen
shroud from an Egyptian mummy that travelled to Zagreb as a curio
and were preserved later in the museum there. How the Etruscan
linen, inscribed with text in ink made from soot or coal, became
the wrapping for a young girl is still unknown. Possibly Etruscans
migrated to Egypt after they were conquered by Rome around the
first century
B.C.
and the girl was actually Etruscan.
Or perhaps the linen was simply a convenient remnant, torn into
strips by embalmers who used whatever was at hand. The mummy
carried enough Etruscan text to provide several key roots, although
the language still isn't totally translated. It's too bad what they
left written on stone is gravestone information and government fact.
A friend told me that last year a local
geometra
discovered a bronze tablet covered with Etruscan writing. He kicked
it up in the dirt of a farmhouse where he was overseeing a
renovation and took it home. The police heard about this and called
on him that night; presumably, it is in the hands of
archaeologists.

Of the local Etruscan culture, an astonishing amount continues
to be unearthed. Beside one of the local tombs, a seven-step
stairway of stone flanked with reclining lions intertwined with
human parts—probably a nightmare vision of the
underworld—was discovered in 1990. Nearby Chiusi, like
Cortona one of the original twelve cities of Etruria, only
recently found its town walls. Both Cortona and Chiusi have
extensive collections of Etruscan artifacts found both by
archeological digs and by farmers turning up bronze figures in their
furrows. In Chiusi, the museum custodian will take you out to see
some of the dozens of tombs found in that area. The Romans
considered Etruscans warlike (the Romans weren't?), so they come
down to us with that rap on them, but the tombs, enormous clay
horses, bronze figures, and household objects reveal them to be a
majestic, inventive, humorous people. Certainly, they must have
been strong. Everywhere they've left remains of walls and tombs
constructed of stupendous stone.

In the land around Cortona, tombs that have been found are
called
meloni
locally, for the curved shape of the
ceilings. To stand under one of these for a few moments is all you
need to absorb the sense of time that prepares you for Cortona.

Leaving the tombs, I start uphill, gently at first, then in a
series of switchbacks, I begin to climb, glimpsing through the
windshield terraced olives, the crenelated tower of Il Palazzone,
where Luca Signorelli fell off scaffolding and died a few months
later, a broken watchtower and tawny farmhouses. A soft palate: the
mellow stone, olive trees flickering moss green to platinum; even
the sky may be veiled by thin mist from the lake nearby. In July,
small mown wheat fields bordering the olives turn the color of
lion's fur. I glimpse Cortona, noble in profile as Nefertiti. At
first I'm below the great Renaissance church of Santa Maria del
Calcinaio, then, for a 280-degree loop of the road, level with
its solid volumes, then above, looking down on the silvery
dome and the Latin cross shape of the whole. The shoe tanners built
this church, after the common occurrence of the appearance of the
Virgin's face on their tannery wall. She is Saint Mary of the Lime
Pits because they used lime in tanning leather and the church is
erected on their quarry grounds. Odd how often sacred ground remains
sacred: The church rests on Etruscan remains, possibly of a temple
or burial ground.

A quick look back—I see how far I have climbed. The
wide-open Val di Chiana spreads a fan of green below me. On clear
days I can spot Monte San Savino, Sinalunga, and Montepulciano in
the distance. They could have sent smoke signals: big
festa
tonight, come on over. Soon I've reached the high
town walls, and to get one more brush with the Etruscans, drive
all the way to the last gate, Porta Colonia, where the big
boggling Etruscan stones support the base, with medieval and later
additions built on top.

Whizzing past, I love the fast glimpses into the gates. In
town, they sell old postcards of these views and they look exactly
the same as now: the gate, the narrow street sloping up, the
palazzi
on either side. When I enter the town, the
immediate sense is that I am
inside
the gates—a
secure feeling if hoards of Ghibellines, Guelfs, or whoever is the
current enemy, are spotted in the distance waving their lances, or
even if I've only managed to survive the
autostrada
without getting my car mirror “kissed” by a demon passing in a
car half the size of mine.

If I come by car, I walk in on Via Dardano, a name from deep
in time. Dardano, believed to have been born here, was the
legendary founder of Troy. Right away on the left, I pass a
four-table trattoria, open only at midday. No menu, the usual
choices. I love their thinly pounded grilled steak served on a bed
of arugula. And love to watch the two women at the wood-fired stove
in the kitchen. Somehow they never appear to be sweltering.

I'm fascinated by the perfect doors of the dead on this
street. Traditionally, they're considered to be exits for the
plague dead—bad juju for them to go out the door the living
use. If this is so, the custom must have come from some
superstition much older than Christianity, which was firmly the
religious preference of that time. Some suggest that the raised,
narrow doors were used in times of strife when the
portone,
the main door, was barricaded. I've wondered if
they were not simply doors used when stepping out of a carriage or
off a horse and right into the house in bad weather—rather
than stepping down into the wet, probably filthy, street—or
even in good weather to protect a long silk skirt. George Dennis,
nineteenth-century archaeologist, described Cortona as “squalid
in the extreme.” That the doors are rather coffin shaped, however,
lends a certain visual reinforcement to the door of the dead
theory.

The
centro
consists of two irregular piazzas,
joined by a short street. No town planner would design it this
way but it is
charming. A fourteenth-century town hall with
twenty-four broad stone steps dominates the Piazza della Repubblica.
The steps serve as ringside seats at night when everyone is out
having
gelato—
a fine place to take in the evening
spectacle below. From here, you can see a loggia on the level
above across the piazza, where the fish market used to be. Now it's
terrace seating for a restaurant and another perch for viewing. All
around are harmonious buildings, punctuated by streets coming up
from three gates. The life in the street buzzes, thrives. The
miracle of no
cars—how amazingly that restores human
importance. I first feel the scale of the architecture, then see
that the low buildings are completely geared to the body. The
main street, officially named Via Nazionale but known locally
as Rugapiana, the flat street, is only for walking (except for a
delivery period in the morning) and the rest of the town is
inhospitable to drivers, too narrow, too hilly. A street connects to
a higher or lower one by a walkway, a
vicolo.
Even the
names of the
vicoli
make me want to turn into each one and
explore: Vicolo della Notte, night, Vicolo dell'Aurora, dawn, and
Vicolo della Scala, a long rise of shallow steps.

In these stony old Tuscan towns, I get no sense of stepping
back in time that I've had in Yugoslavia, Mexico, or Peru. Tuscans
are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring
the past along with them. If our culture says burn your bridges
behind you—and it does—theirs says cross and recross.
A fourteenth-century plague victim, perhaps once hauled out of one
of the doors of the dead, could find her house and might even find
it intact. Present and past just coexist, like it or not. The old
Medici ball insignia in the piazza until last year had a ceramic
hammer and sickle of the Communist party right beside it.

I walk through the short connecting leg of street to Piazza
Signorelli, named for one of Cortona's hometown boys. Slightly
larger, this piazza swarms on Saturday, market day, year round. It
hosts an antique fair on the third Sunday in summer months. Two
bars' outdoor tables extend into the piazza. I always notice the
rather forlorn-looking Florentine lion slowly eroding on a column.
No matter how late I go into town, people are gathered there; one
last coffee before the strike of midnight.

Here, too, the
comune
sometimes sponsors concerts
at night. Everyone is out anyway, but on these nights the piazza
fills up with people from the nearby
frazioni
and farms
and country villas. In this town of dozens of Catholic churches, a
black gospel choir from America is singing tonight. Of course, this
is no spontaneous Baptist group from a Southern church but a highly
produced, professional choir from Chicago, complete with red and
blue floodlights and cassettes for sale for twenty-thousand lire.
They belt out “Amazing Grace” and “Mary Don't You Weep.” The
acoustics are weird and the sound warps around the eleventh-and
twelfth-century buildings surrounding this piazza, where jousts
and flag throwers have performed regularly, and where on certain
feast days, the bishops hold aloft the relics of saints, priests
swing braziers of burning myrrh, and we walk through town on
flower petals scattered by children. The sound engineer gets
the microphones adjusted and the lead singer begins to pull the
crowd to him. “Repeat after me,” he says in English, and the
crowd responds. “Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus.” The English
and American forces liberated Cortona in 1944. Until tonight, this
many foreigners may never have gathered here since, certainly not
this many black ones. The choir is big. The University of Georgia's
students from the art program in Cortona are all out for a little
down-home nostalgia. They, a smattering of tourists, and almost all
the Cortonese are crushed into Piazza Signorelli. “Oh, Happy Day,”
the black singers belt out, pulling an Italian girl onstage to
sing with them. She has a mighty voice that easily matches any
of theirs, and her small body seems all song. What are they thinking,
this ancient race of Cortonese? Are they remembering the tanks
rolling in, oh happy, happy day, the soldiers throwing oranges
to the children? Are they thinking, Mass in the duomo was never like
this? Or are they simply swaying with the crude American Jesus,
letting themselves be carried on his shoulders by the music?