Under the Tuscan Sun (5 page)

On the bottom floor, the line of rooms is not that convenient.
When we first saw the house, I'd said airily, “We can knock these
walls out and have two big rooms down here.” Now our
geometra
tells us we may open the walls only about six
feet because of earthquake precautions. Staying here has given me an
inner sense of the construction. I see how the first floor walls bow
near the floor, accommodating the large stones in the foundation.
The house was built in a way not unlike the stone terraces, without
mortar, stones stacked and wedged. From the depths of the doorways
and windowsills, I see that the walls thin as they go up. The
yard-thick walls on the first floor are maybe half that on the
third. What holds the house together as it goes up? Can inserting
a few modern I beams of steel in those openings do the job of stones
I couldn't even reach around?

When the great dome of the
duomo
was conceived in
Florence, no one knew the technique for constructing so large a half
sphere. Someone proposed building it over an immense mound of dirt
piled in the cathedral. Money would be hidden throughout the pile
and, on completion of the dome, the peasants would be invited to dig
for coins and cart away the dirt. Fortunately, Brunelleschi figured
out how to engineer his dome. I hope someone built this house on solid
principles also but still I begin to have misgivings about taking out
the fortress-thick walls on the first floor.

The
geometra
is full of opinions. He thinks the
apartment's back staircase should come out. We love it, a secret
escape. He thinks we should replaster the cracked and crumbling
stucco facade, paint it ocher. No way. I like the colors that change
as the light does and the intense glow of golds when it rains, as
though the sun seeps into the walls. He thinks our first priority
should be the roof. “But the roof doesn't leak—why bother it,
when there are so many other pressing things?” We explain to him
that we won't be able to do everything at once. The house cost the
earth. The project will have to be spread out. We will do much of
the work ourselves. Americans, I try to explain, sometimes are
“do it yourself” people. As I say this I see a flash of panic
cross Ed's face. “Do it yourself” doesn't translate. The
geometra
shakes his head as though all is hopeless if
he has to explain things as basic as these.

He speaks to us kindly, as if through precise enunciation we
will understand him. “Listen, the roof must be consolidated. They
will preserve the tiles, number them, place them again in the same
order, but you will have insulation; the roof will be
strengthened.”

At this point, it's either the roof or central heating, not
both. We debate the importance of each. After all, we'll be here
mostly in the summer. But we don't want to freeze at Christmas
when we come over to pick the olives. If we're ever going to put
heat in, it needs to go in at the same time as the water system
and plumbing. The roof can be done anytime—or never. Right
now, water is held in a cistern in the farmer's bedroom. When you
shower or flush, a pump comes on and well water gurgles into the
cistern. Individual hotwater heaters (miraculously, they work) hang
above each shower. We'll need a central water heater, a large
cistern connected to it so that the noisy pump isn't continuously
working.

We decide on the heating. The
geometra,
feeling sure
that we will come to our senses, says he will apply for a roof permit
as well.

At some low point in the house's life, someone madly painted
the chestnut beams in every room with a hideous vinegar varnish. This
unimaginable technique once was popular in the South of Italy. You
paint over real beams with a sticky goo, then comb through it to
simulate wood! Sandblasting, therefore, is a top priority. An ugly
job but fast, and we'll do the sealing and waxing ourselves. I
once refinished a sailor's sea chest and found it fun. We'll need
door and window repairs. All the window casements and interior
shutters are covered with the same faux wood concoction. This genius
of the beams and windows is probably responsible for the fireplace,
which is covered with ceramic tiles that resemble bricks. What a
strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something
real. All this must go, along with the blue tiles covering the wide
windowsill, the butterflies in the bathroom. Both the main kitchen
and the farmers' kitchen sport ugly cement sinks. His list is now
three pages long. The farmers' kitchen has floors made of crushed
marble tiles, super ugly. There are a lot of ancient-looking wires
coiled near the ceilings on white porcelain knobs. Sometimes sparks
come flying out when I switch on a light.

The
geometra
sits on the terrace wall, mopping his
face with an enormous monogrammed linen handkerchief. He looks at us
with pity.

RULE ONE IN A RESTORATION PROJECT: BE THERE. WE WILL BE
seven
thousand miles away when some of the big work is done. We brace
ourselves for bids for the work.

Nando Lucignoli, sent to us by Signor Martini, drives up in
his Lancia and stands at the bottom of the driveway, looking not at
the house but at the view of the valley. I think he must be a deep
admirer of landscape but see that he is talking on a cellular phone,
waving his cigarette and gesturing to the air. He tosses the phone
onto the front seat.

“Bella posizione.”
He waves his Gauloises again
as he shakes hands, almost bowing to me. His father is a stonemason
and he has become a contractor, an extraordinarily good-looking
one. Like many Italian men, his cologne or aftershave surrounds
him with a lemony, sunny aura only slightly dispelled by the
cigarette smoke. Before he says anything more, I'm sure he's the
contractor for us. We take him on a tour of the house.
“Niente, niente,”
he repeats, nothing. “We'll run
the heating pipes in channels on the back of the house, a week; the
bathroom—three days, signora. One month, everything. You'll
have a perfect house; just lock the door, leave me the key and when
you come back, everything will be taken care of.” He assures us
he can find old bricks to match the rest of the house for the new
kitchen in the stall. The wiring? He has a friend. The terrace
bricks? He shrugs, oh, some mortar. Opening the walls? His father
is expert in that. His slicked-back black hair, wanting to revert
to curls, falls over his forehead. He looks like Caravaggio's
Bacchus—only he has moss-green eyes and a slight slouch,
probably from leaning into the speed of his Lancia. He thinks my
ideas are wonderful, I should have been an architect, I have
excellent taste. We sit out on the stone wall and have
a glass of wine. Ed goes inside to make coffee for himself.
Nando draws diagrams of the water lines on the back of an envelope.
My Italian is charming, he says. He understands everything I try
to say. He says he will drop off his estimate tomorrow. I am sure
it will be reasonable, that through the winter Nando and his father
and a few trusted workers will transform Bramasole. “Enjoy
yourself—leave it to me,” he says as his tires spin on
the driveway. As I wave good-bye, I notice that Ed has stayed on
the terrace. He's noncommittal about Nando, saying only that he
smelled like a
profumeria,
it's affected to smoke
Gauloises, and that he didn't think the central heating could be
installed that way at all.

Ian brings up Benito Cantoni, a yellow-eyed, solidly built
short man who bears a strange resemblance to Mussolini. He's around
sixty so he must have been a namesake. I remember that Mussolini
actually was named for the Mexican Benito Juárez, who
fought French oppression. Odd to think of that revolutionary name
travelling through the dictator and into this quiet man whose wide,
blank face and bald head shine like a polished nut. When he speaks,
which is little, he uses the local Val di Chiana dialect. He
cannot understand a word either of us says and we certainly
can't understand him. Even Ian has trouble. Benito worked on the
restoration of the chapel at Le Celle, a nearby monastery, a solid
recommendation. We're even more impressed when Ian drives us out to
look at a house he's restoring near Castiglione del Lago, a farmhouse
with a tower supposedly built by the Knights Templar. The work looks
careful. His two masons, unlike Benito, have big smiles.

Back at Bramasole, Benito walks through, not even taking a
note. He radiates a calm confidence. When we ask Ian to request an
estimate, Benito balks. It is impossible to know the problems he
might run into. How much do we want to spend? (What a question!)
He is not sure about the floor tiles, of what he will uncover when
he takes the bricks off the upstairs terrace. A small beam, he
notices, needs replacing on the third floor.

Estimates are foreign to builders around here. They're used to
working by the day, with someone always at home to know how long
they were there. This projecting is just not the way they do
business, although they will sometimes say “Under three days” or
“Quindici giorni.” Quindici giorni—
fifteen
days—we learned is simply a convenient term meaning the speaker
has no idea but imagines that the time is not entirely open ended.
“Quindici minuti,”
we'd learned by missing a train,
means a few minutes, not the fifteen it indicates, even when spoken
by the train conductor about a departure. I think most Italians
have a longer sense of time than we do. What's the hurry? Once up,
a building will stand a long, long time, perhaps a thousand years.
Two weeks, two months, big deal.

Removing the walls? He doesn't advise it. He makes gestures,
indicating the house collapsing around us. Somehow, Benito will come
up with a number and will give it to Ian this week. As he leaves he
flashes a smile at last. His square yellow teeth look strong enough
to bite through brick. Ian endorses him and discounts Nando as
“the playboy of the western world.” Ed looks pleased.

Our
geometra
recommends the third contractor, Primo
Bianchi, who arrives in an Ape, one of those miniature three-wheel
trucks. He, too, is miniature, scarcely five feet tall, stout and
dressed in overalls with a red kerchief around his neck. He rolls
out and salutes us formally with an old word,
“Salve,
signori.”
He looks like one of Santa's workers, with
gold-rimmed glasses, flyaway white hair, tall boots.
“Permesso?”
he asks before we go through the door. At
each door he pauses and repeats,
“Permesso?”
as though he
might surprise someone undressing. He holds his cap in his hand in
a way I recognize from my father's mill workers in the South; he's
used to being the “peasant” speaking to the
“padrone.”
He has, however, a confident sense of himself, a pride I often notice
in waiters, mechanics, delivery people here. He tries the window
latches and swings the doors. Pokes the tip of his knife in beams
to check for rot, wiggles loose bricks.

He comes to a spot in the floor, kneels and rubs two bricks
that are a slightly lighter color.
“Io,”
he says,
beaming, pointing to his chest,
“molti anni fa.”
He replaced them many years ago. He then tells us he was the one who
installed the main bath and that he used to come every December and
help haul the big lemon pots that lined the terrace into the
limonaia
for the winter. The house's owner was his
father's age, a widower then, whose five daughters had grown and
moved away. When he died, the daughters left the house vacant. They
refused to part with it but no one cared for the place for thirty
years. Ah, the five sisters of Perugia I imagine in their narrow
iron beds in five bedrooms, all waking at once and throwing
open the shutters. I don't believe in ghosts, but from the
beginning I sensed their heavy black braids twisted with ribbons,
their white nightgowns embroidered with their initials, their
mother with silver brushes lining them up before the mirror each
night for one hundred strokes.

On the upstairs terrace, he shook his head. The bricks must
come up, then an underlayer of tarpaper and insulation installed. We
had a feeling he knew what he was talking about. The central heating?
“Keep the fire going, dress warmly, signora, the cost is
formidable.” The two walls? Yes, it could be done. Decisions
are irrational. We both knew Primo Bianchi was the right man for
the restoration.