Under the Tuscan Sun (22 page)

Remains of the Etruscan, then Roman, town lie out in the
field—stone foundations and bits of floor, some with black
and white mosaic, subterranean passageways and remnants of baths:
a floor plan of the town, actually, so that you walk around
imagining the walls around you, the activities, the views across
to the bridge. Off to the side, we see the stark Roman remains of a
brick building, walls, a few windows, and holes for beams to hold
up a floor. Vulci, a lavish archeological area. Unfortunately, the
area's painted tombs are closed today—another reason to
return.

We're amazed by the restaurants, too. Enoteca Passaparola, on
the road leading up to Montemerano, serves robust food in a very
casual ambience—paper napkins, chalkboard menu, plank floors.
If there are cowboys left in the Maremma, I think they would head
here. We order big plates of grilled vegetables and wonderful green
salads with a bottle of Lunaia, a Bianco di Pitigliano made by
La Stellata, another gorgeous local wine. The waiter tells us about
the area's Cantina Cooperativa del Morellino di Scansano, then
brings over a glass for us to taste. We find our house wine for
the rest of the summer. At about $1.70 a bottle, it has a deep
mellifluous taste that surprises us. More straightforward than
the
reserve
Morellinos we've tried, this wine definitely
stands up to be counted. We still have the backseat where we can
pile a couple of cases.

At the next table an artist draws caricatures of us. Mine
looks like Picasso's Dora Maar. When we toast him and begin to chat,
he opens a satchel and starts showing us catalogues of his shows.
Soon we're nodding politely. He pulls out reviews, pours more wine.
His wife looks not mortified but resigned; she's been to restaurants
with him before. They're at the
terme,
taking the waters
for his liver. I can imagine him cornering people there as they
sip their measures of mineral water. He slides his chair over,
leaving her at their table. I'm torn between the pleasure of the
berry tart listed on the chalkboard and the pleasure of getting the
check and leaving. Ed asks for the check and we exit. Up in town
we have coffee, then on the way back to the car, we look in the
window and see that Signor Picasso is gone. So we have the berry
tart after all. The waiter brings us a complimentary
amaro.
“They come here every night,” he complains. “We're counting the
days until he goes back to Milano with his liver.”

Saturated with the Etruscans, well fed, pleased with the
hotel, we pack and take off for Talamone, a high-walled town over
the sea. The water must be pure here. It's clear as far out as I
can wade and quite cold. At our modern hotel, there's no beach, just
rocks jutting straight up, with concrete platforms on the water
where you can sit in a striped chair and sunbathe. We chose Talamone
because it is adjacent to the Maremma's preserved seashore, the only
long stretch of Tuscan coast unblemished by development. Most sand
beaches are a series of concessions for umbrellas and rows of chairs
as deep as the beach is wide, leaving only a strip along the water
for walking. Often these concessions have changing rooms, showers,
and snack bars. Italians seem to like this way of being at the
beach. So many people to talk to! And, usually, families or groups
of friends are together. As a Californian, I'm unhappy to be
surrounded. Beaches I grew up on in Georgia and my years of loving
the raw windy stretches of sand at Point Reyes unequip me for the
Old World beaches. Ed and my daughter like the umbrellas. They've
dragged me to Viareggio, Marina di Pisa, Pietrasanta, insist it's
just different; you have to get into it. I like to lie on the beach
and listen to the waves, to walk with no one in sight. The Tuscan
beaches are as crowded as streets. The Maremma preserve, however,
even has wild horses, foxes, boar, and deer, according to the
brochure. I love the smell of the
macchia,
the wild
salty shrubs sailors say they can smell when still out of sight
of land. Mostly there's nothing—trails with wild rosemary
and sea lavender through sandy hills, the vacant beaches. We walk
and sit on the beach all morning. Tyrrhenian, Tyrrhenian the
waves say, that ancient sea. We've brought mortadella sandwiches, a
hunk of
parmigiano,
and iced tea. Except for a small
group of people down the beach, I have my wish to be in nature alone.
What color is the sea? Cobalt is close. No, it's lapis lazuli,
exactly the color of Mary's dress in so many paintings, with a
tesselated sheen of silver. It's good to walk, after days of chasing
sites in the car. I'm trying to read but the sun is
blaring—perhaps an umbrella
would
be nice.

In the morning we move on to Riva degli Etruschi, coast of
the Etruscans. We can't get away from them. This beach does have the
rented chairs but, since it joins the preserve, it's not as crowded.
We're able to take a long, long walk on the beach followed by a
siesta in our tiny individual cottage. We're near San Vincenzo, where
Italo Calvino summered. The town shops sell rubber beach balls,
rafts, and sand pails. At evening, everyone strolls around buying
postcards and eating ice cream. Beach towns are beach towns. We
find an outdoor restaurant and order
cacciucco,
a big
fish stew. Several kinds of fish, filleted at the cart, are piled
in a large white bowl and a hot broth is poured over them. The
waiter spreads creamy roasted garlic on slices of toasted bread and
we float them in the soup, breathing in the heady aroma. Two fierce
little bug-eyed lobsters eye us from our bowls. The waiter keeps
coming around, ladling in enough to keep the bread afloat. When
he brings the salad, he wheels over a cart of olive oils in crocks,
clear bottles, colorful ceramic ones, dozens of choices for our
salad. We ask him to select for us and he pours from on high a
thin stream of pale green oil onto a bowl of red and green
radicchio.

En route to Massa Marittima, we detour to Populonia,
simply because it is close and it sounds too ancient to miss. Every
little pause makes me want to linger for days. In a café
where we stop for coffee, two fishermen bring in buckets of fish,
their night's catch. Lunch is not for hours, unfortunately. A
woman from the kitchen starts writing up the menu of the day on a
blackboard. We drive on into town and park under an immense fortress,
the usual castle and wall like those in old books of hours. Ah,
another Etruscan museum and I must see every object. Ed is through,
for now, with anything that happened before the last millennium, so
he goes off to buy honey from bees that have buzzed around in the
coastal shrubs. We meet in a shop where I find an Etruscan clay foot
for sale. Whether it's genuine or fake, I don't know. I decide to
think about it while we take a walk but when we come back to buy it,
the shop is closed. As we leave, I see a sign to an Etruscan site
but Ed presses on the accelerator; he's tombed out.

Last overnight—the town I have chronically
mispronounced. The accent, I find, is on Marit'tima. I've said
Maritti'ma. Will I ever, ever learn Italian? Still so many basic
errors. Once close to the sea, the town gradually became surrounded
by silt, which eventually filled in, leaving Massa Marittima far
inland but with a sense of outlook as it rises high over the
grassy plain. We could be in Brazil, a remote outpost that appeals
to magic realist novelists. It's two towns really, the old town
and the older town, both austere, with deep shadows and sudden
sunlight. We're a little tired. We check in and for the first time,
our room has a TV. A World War II film, faded and in odd Italian, is
on and we get hooked. A village, occupied by Germans, depends on an
American soldier hiding in the countryside to help them. They must
evacuate. They pile everything on a few donkeys and set out, for
where we don't know. I doze. Someone is trying to open the shutters
at Bramasole. I wake up. Another soldier is in the hayloft. Something
is burning. Is Bramasole all right? Suddenly I realize this is our
one day in Massa Marittima.

In two hours, we've covered every street. The Maremma keeps
reminding me of the American West, its little out of the way towns
the freeway missed by fifty miles, the shop owner staring out the
window, the wide sky in his gaze. Certainly the piazza and
fabulous cathedral are nothing like the West—the similarity
is under the skin of the place: a loneliness, an eye on the
stranger.

EN ROUTE HOME, WE PAUSE AT SAN GALGANO, LOVELIEST OF
ruins, a
graceful French Gothic church that lost its floor and roof centuries
ago, leaving the open-windowed skeleton to grass and clouds. A
romantic wedding could take place here. Where the large rose
window was, only the imagination can color the space scarlet and
blue; where monks lit candles at side altars, birds nest in the
corners. A stone stairway leads nowhere. A stone altar remains, so
disassociated from Christian function that human sacrifice could
have taken place on it. The place fell into ruin when an abbot sold
the lead in the roof for some war. Now it's a home for several cats.
One has a litter of multicultural kittens; several fathers must have
contributed to the ginger, black, and striped pile curled around
the large white mother.

Home! Hauling in the wine, throwing open the shutters,
running to water the drooping plants. We settle the wine into crates
in the dark wedge of closet under the stairs. The spirit of all the
grapes we saw ripening, now bottled and mellowing for those
occasions we hope to celebrate. Ed closes the door, leaving them
to dust and scorpions for now. Only a week away. We missed the
house and come back understanding the next few circles around us.
Qualities those of us with northern blood envy—that Italian
insouciance and ability to live in the moment with gusto—I
now see came down straight from the Etruscans. All the painted images
from the tombs seem charged with meaning, if we only had the clues
to read it. I close my eyes and look at the crouching leopards, the
deft figure of death, the endless banqueting. Sometimes Greek myths
come to mind, Persephone, Actaeon and the dogs, Pegasus, but the
instinct I have is that the tomb images—and the Greek
ones—each came from further back, and those further back
came from something even earlier. The archetypes keep appearing
and we find in them what we can, for they speak to our oldest
neurons and synapses.

When I lived in Somers, New York, I had a large herb garden
beside the eighteenth-century house I still dream of. Often I
turned up brown and amber medicine bottles. As I was planting a
border of santolina, the branches of which used to be spread on
church floors in the Middle Ages to keep the human scents down, my
trowel unearthed a small iron horse, rusty, stretched into
full-out running position. I propped the horse on my desk as my
private totem. Earlier this summer, I was digging up stones and my
shovel sent flying a small object. When I picked it up, I was
stunned to find that it was a horse. Is it Etruscan or is it a
toy from a hundred years ago? This horse, too, is running.

A few years ago I read a section in the
Aeneid
about
the decision to found Carthage on the spot where the wanderers dug
up an omen:

the head of a spirited horse, for by this sign

it was shown that the race would be distinguished

in war and abound with the means of life

(I, 444)

The war in the line doesn't thrill me but “means of life”
does. The hoof of Orlando opened the hot spring. The winged horses
at Tarquinia, unearthed from stone rubble and dirt, keep appearing
in my vision. I prop a postcard photo of them next to my own two
horses. Means of life. The Etruscans had it. In certain times and
places, we find it. We can run full out, if not fly.

T
urning
I
talian

THE ITALIAN ED IS A LIST MAKER. ON THE
dining room
table, the bedside table, the car seat, in shirt and sweater
pockets, I find folded pieces of notepaper and crumpled envelopes.
He makes lists of things to buy, things to accomplish, long-range
plans, garden lists, lists of lists. They're in mixed English
and Italian, whichever word is shorter. Sometimes he knows only
the Italian word if it's a special tool. I should have saved the
lists during the restoration and papered a bathroom with them, as
James Joyce did with his rejection slips. We've exchanged habits;
at home, he rarely makes even a grocery list—I make lists
there, letters to write, chores, and especially of my goals for each
week. Here, I usually don't have any goals.

It is hard to chart such changes of one's own in response to
a new place but shifts are easy to spot in another person. When we
first started coming to Italy, Ed was a tea drinker. As an
undergraduate, he took a semester off to study on his own in London.
He lived in a cold-water bed-sitter near the British Museum and
sustained himself on cups of tea with milk and sugar while reading
Eliot and Conrad. Espresso, of course, is pandemic in Italy; the
whoosh
of steam is heard in every piazza. During our first
summer in Tuscany, I remember seeing him eye the Italians as they
stepped up to the bar and ordered, in a clipped voice,
“un
caffè.”
At that time, espresso was rarely seen in America.
When he ordered like the Italians, at first the bartenders asked
him,
“Normale?”
They thought surely a tourist was making
a mistake. We require big cups of brown coffee, as the Italians,
with a touch of wonder, call it.

“Sì, sì, normale,”
he answered,
with a slight tone of impatience. Soon he was ordering with
authority; no one asked again. He saw the locals down it at once,
instead of sipping. He noticed the brands different bars used:
Illy, Lavazza, Sandy, River.
He began commenting on the
crema
on top. Always he took it black.

“Your life must be sweet,” one
barrista
told
him, “to take your coffee so bitter.” Then Ed began to notice
the sugar boats all the bars have, to notice how when the bartender
put down the saucer and spoon, the sugar bowl would be pushed over
and opened with a flourish. The Italians shoveled in an incredible
amount—two, three mounded spoons. One day, I was shocked to
see Ed, too, pouring in the sugar. “It makes it almost a dessert,”
he explained.

The second year we visited Italy, he went home at the end of
the summer carrying a La Pavoni, purchased in Florence, a gleaming
stainless-steel machine with an eagle on top, a hand-operated
classic. I was the beneficiary of cappuccino in bed, our guests
of after dinner espresso served in tiny cups he bought in Italy.

Here, he also has bought a La Pavoni, this one automatic.
Before going to bed, he has his final cup of elixir, either at
home or in town. There is something he likes about ordering in bars.
Sometimes they have curvy Deco-era La Faema machines, sometimes chic
Ranchillios. He examines the
crema,
swirls the cup once,
and gulps it down. It gives him, he says, the strength to sleep.

The second major cultural experience he took to with zest is
driving. Most travellers here feel that driving in Rome qualifies as
an experience that can be added to one's
vita,
that
everyday
autostrada
trips are examinations in courage
and that the Amalfi coast drive is a definition of hell. “These
people really know how to drive,” I remember him saying as he
swung our no-power rented Fiat into the passing lane, turn signal
blinking. A Maserati zooming forward in the rearview mirror blasted
us back to the right lane. Soon he was admiring daring
maneuvers. “Did you see
that
? He had two wheels
dangling in thin air!” he marveled. “Sure, they have their share
of duffers riding the center lane but most people keep to the
rules.”

“What rules?” I asked as someone in a tiny car like ours
whizzed by going a hundred. Apparently there
are
speed
limits, according to the size of the engine, but I never have seen
anyone stopped for speeding in all my summers in Italy. You're
dangerous if you're going sixty. I'm not sure what the accident rate
is; I rarely see one but I imagine many are caused by slow drivers
(tourists perhaps?) who incite the cars behind them.

“Just watch. If someone starts to pass and it's at all dicey,
the person behind him won't pull out until the person has
passed—he gives him the chance to drop back. No one ever
passes on the right, ever. And they stay out of the left lane
entirely except to pass. You know how at home someone figures he's
going at the speed limit, he can stay in whatever lane he
wants.”

“Yes, but—look!—they pass on curves all the
time. Here comes a curve, time to pass. They must learn that in
driving school. I bet the instructor has an accelerator instead of a
brake on his side of the car. You just
know,
if someone
is behind you, he's planning to pass—it's his
obligation.”

“Yes, but all the oncoming traffic knows that. They adjust
because they know cars are coming out.”

He's delighted to read what the mayor of Naples says about
driving there. Naples is the most chaotic city for drivers on earth.
Ed loved it—he got to drive on the sidewalk while the
pedestrians filled the street. “A green light is a green light,
avanti, avanti,
” the mayor explained. “A red
light—just a suggestion.” And yellow? he was asked.
“Yellow is for gaiety.”

In Tuscany, people are more law abiding. They may jump the
gun but they do stop for signals. Here, the challenge is the
medieval streets with inches to spare on either side of the car
and the sudden turn a bicycle barely could make. Fortunately, most
towns have closed their historic centers to cars, a boon all around
because the scale of piazza life is restored. A boon for my nerves,
too, as the twisted streets lured Ed and we have backed out of too
many when they became impassable, all the locals stopping and
staring as we reverse through their town.

He was most impressed that the police drove Alfa Romeos.
The first year after we went home he bought a twenty-year-old
silver GTV in perfect condition, surely one of the prettiest cars
ever made. He got three speeding tickets in six weeks. One he
protested. He was harassed, he told the judge. The highway patrol
picks on sports cars and this time he was not speeding. In a simple
miscarriage of justice, the judge told him to sell the car if he
didn't like the system and he doubled the fine on the spot.

For a while, we exchanged cars. We had to. He was in danger
of losing his license. I drove the silver arrow to work and never
got a ticket; he drove my vintage Mercedes sedan, unaffectionately
known as the Delta Queen. “It lumbers,” he complained.

“It's
very safe, though—and you haven't been stopped.”

“How could I in the gutless wonder?”

When we returned to Italy, he was back in his element. Most
of our trips are on small roads. We've learned not to hesitate to
take the unpaved roads if the route looks appealing. Usually,
they're well maintained or at least navigable. We've been known
to go off road to get to an abandoned thirteenth-century church
and, as in the tiny towns, to back up when necessary. No problem
to one who has ice water in his veins. To back uphill on a curvy
one-lane road is an experience to delight the manic driver.
“Whoa!” he shouts. He's turned around, one hand on the back of my
seat, the other on the wheel. I'm looking down—straight
down—into a lovely valley far below. There are perhaps
five inches between the wheel and the edge. We encounter a car
coming down. They jump out to confer, then they, too begin to
back up; now we are a convoy of idiots. They're in a red Alfa GTV
like Ed's at home. We all get out where the road widens and they
discuss the car at length, going over its particular kind of
mirror, the problem with the turn signal, value today, ad infinitum.
I've spread the ordinance map on the hot hood of the Fiat, trying
to figure how we can escape this ravine where, obviously, the
collapsed monastery is not located.

One reason Ed likes the
autostrada
so much is
that he gets to combine his pleasures. Autogrills appear every
thirty or so miles. Sometimes they're quick stop places with a bar
and gas. Others arch over the freeway and have a restaurant and shop,
even a motel. He appreciates the clean efficiency of the bars. He
nips his espresso, often has a quick
panino
of thick
bread and mortadella. I will have a capuccino, unorthodox in
afternoon, and he patiently waits. He never would malinger at the
bar. In and out. That's the way it's done. Then back on the road,
with the fully leaded espresso zinging through him, the speedometer
climbing to cruising speed.
Paradiso!

At a more fundamental level, he has been changed by the land.
At first we thought we wanted twenty or thirty acres. Five seemed
small, until we started clearing it of jungle, until we started
maintaining it. The
limonaia
is full of tools. At home
we have our tools in a shiny red metal toolbox—the small
size. We did not expect to have pole digger, chain saw, hedge
clippers, weed machine, a whole line of hoes, rakes, a corner for
stakes, innumerable hand tools that look pre-Industrial
Revolution—sickles, grape cutters, and scythe. If we thought,
I suppose we thought we'd clear the land, prune the trees, and
that was it. An occasional mowing, fertilizing, trimming. What we
never knew is the tremendous resurgent power in nature. The land is
implausibly regenerative. My experience with gardening led me to
think plants must be coaxed along. Ivy, fig, sumac, acacia,
blackberry can't be stopped. A vine we call “evil weed” twines
and chokes. It must be dug out down to its carrot-sized root; so
must nettles. It's a wonder nettles have not taken over the world.
Digging them out, even with heavy gloves, it's almost impossible not
to get “stung” by their juices. Bamboo, too, has its runners
constantly sending shoots into the driveway. Limbs fall. New olives
must be restaked after storms. The terraces must be plowed, then
disced. The olives must be hoed around, fertilized. The grapes still
need weeks of attention. In short, we have a little farm here and
we must have a farmer. Without constant work, this place would
revert in months to its previous state. We could either feel
burdened by this or enjoy it.

“How's Johnny Appleseed?” a friend asks. She, too, has seen
Ed up on a high terrace examining each plant, fingering the leaves
of a new cherry tree, picking up stones. He has come to know every
ilex, boulder, stump, and oak. Perhaps it was the clearing that
forged the bond.

Now he walks the terraces daily. He has taken to wearing
shorts, boots, and a “muscle shirt,” one of those cutaway
undershirts my father used to wear. His biceps and chest muscles
bulge like “after” pictures on the backs of old comic books. His
father was a farmer until the age of forty, when he had to give up
and work in town. His ancestors must have come out of the Polish
fields. They, I'm certain, would recognize him across a field.
Although he never remembers to water the houseplants in San
Francisco, he hauls buckets up to the new fruit trees in dry spells,
babies a special lavender with scented foliage, reads into the
night about compost and pruning.

HOW ITALIAN WILL WE EVER BE? NOT VERY, I'M AFRAID. TOO
pale. Too
unable to gesture as a natural accompaniment to talking. I saw a
man step outside the confining telephone booth so he could wave his
hands while talking. Many people pull over to the side of the road
to talk on their car phones because they simply cannot keep a hand
on the wheel, one on the telephone, and talk at the same time. We
never will master the art of everyone talking at once. Often from
the window, I see groups of three or four strolling down our road.
All are talking simultaneously. Who's listening? Talking can be
about talking. After a soccer game, we'll never gun through the
streets blowing the horn or drive a scooter around and around in
circles in the piazza. Politics always will passeth
understanding.

Ferragosto,
at first, baffled us as a holiday until we
began to understand it as a state of mind. We, gradually, have
entered this state of mind ourselves. Simply put,
ferragosto,
August 15, marks the ascension of the
corporeal body and soul of the Virgin Mary into heaven. Why
August 15? Perhaps it was too hot to remain on earth another
day. The domed ceiling of the cathedral in Parma depicts her glorious
skyward rise, accompanied by many others. From the perspective
below, you're looking up their billowing skirts as they balloon
above the cathedral floor. This is a triumph of art—no one's
underwear shows. But the day itself is only a marker in the month,
for the broader meaning of the word is August holidays and a period
of intense
laissez-faire.
We're coming to understand that
everyday work life is suspended for
all
of August. Even
though throngs of tourists descend on a town, the best
trattoria
may have tacked up a
chiuso per ferie
sign, closed for vacation, and the owners have packed and taken
off for Viareggio. American business logic does not bear up; they
do not necessarily rake in money during tourist season and take
their holiday during April or November when tourists are gone. Why
not? Because it is August. The accident rates soar on the highways.
The beach towns are mobbed. We have learned to forget all projects
more complicated than putting up jam. Or to abandon even
that—I fill my hat with plums then sit down under the tree,
suck the juice, and toss skin and seed over the wall. All over
Italy, the feast of the Assumption calls for a celebration. Cortona
throws a grand party: the
Sagra della bistecca,
a
festa
for the great beefsteaks of the area.