Under the Tuscan Sun (9 page)

Ferro battuto,
wrought iron, is an ancient craft
in Tuscany. Every town has intricate locks on medieval doors,
curly lanterns, holders for standards, garden gates, even fanciful
iron animals and serpents shaped into rings for tying horses to
the wall. Like other artisan traditions, this one is fast
disappearing and it's easy to see why. The key word in blacksmith
is black. His shop is charred, soot covers him, the antiquated
equipment, and the forges that seem to have changed very little
since Hephaestus lit the fire in Aphrodite's stove. Even the air
seems hung with a fine veil of soot. All his neighbors have gates
made by him. It must be satisfying to see one's work all around
like that. His own house has a square patterned balcony, a
flirtation, no doubt, with
moderne,
redeemed by attached
baskets for flowers. The shop faces the house and between them
are hens, ten or so cages of rabbits, a vegetable garden, and a
plum tree with a handmade wooden ladder leaning up into the
laden branches. After supper, he must climb up a few rungs and pick
his dessert. My impression that he stepped out of time strengthens.
Where
is
Aphrodite, surely somewhere near this forge?

“Time. Time is the only thing,” he says. “I am
solo.
I have a son but         .         .         .”

I can't imagine, at the end of the twentieth century, someone
choosing this dark forge with traffic whizzing by, this collection of
bands for wine barrels, andirons, fences, and gates. But I hope his
son does step into it, or someone does. He brings over a rod that
ends with a squared head of a wolf. He just holds it out to me,
without a word. It reminds me of torch holders in Siena and Gubbio.
We ask for an estimate to repair the
cancello,
also for
an estimate for a new gate, rather simple but with a running form
similar to the iron stair railing in the house, maybe a sun shape
at the top closing, to go with the house's name. For once, we don't
start asking for the date of completion, the one thing we've
learned to insist on to counter the enviable Latin sense
of endless time.

Do we really need a handmade gate? We keep saying, Let's
keep it simple, this is not our real home. But somehow I know we'll
want one he makes, even if it takes months. Before we leave, he
forgets us. He's picking up pieces of iron, holding them in both
hands for the heft or balance. He wanders among the anvils and hot
grates. The gate will be in good hands. Already I can imagine its
clank as I close it behind me.

THE WELL AND THE WALL FEEL LIKE SIGNIFICANT
accomplishments. The
house, however, still is untouched. Until the main jobs are finished,
there is little to do. No point in painting, when the walls will
have to be opened for the heating pipes. The Poles have stripped
the windows and have begun scrubbing down the whitewash in
preparation for painting. Ed and I work on the terraces or travel
around selecting bathroom tile, fixtures, hardware, paint; we look,
too, for the old thin bricks for the new kitchen's floor. One day
we buy two armchairs at a local furniture store. By the time
they're delivered, we realize they're awkward and the dark paisley
fabric rather weird, but we find them sumptuously comfortable, after
sitting upright in the garden chairs for weeks. On rainy nights we
pull them face-to-face with a cloth-covered crate between them,
our dining table with a candle, jam jar with wildflowers, and a
feast of pasta with eggplant, tomatoes, and basil. On cool
nights we build a twig fire for a few minutes, just to take the
damp chill off the room.

Unlike last summer, this July is rainy. Impressive storms hit
frequently. In the daytime, I'm thrilled because of my childhood in
the South, where they really know how to put on the sound and light.
San Francisco rarely has thunderstorms and I miss them. “This heat
has to break,” my mother would say, and it would, with immense
cracks and bolts followed by sheet lightning when the whole sky
flashes on a million kilowatts. Often the storms seem to arrive at
night. I'm sitting up in bed, drawing kitchen and bathroom plans on
graph paper; Ed is reading something I never expected to see him
reading. Instead of the Roman poets, tonight it's
Plastering
Skills.
Beside him is
The Home Water Supply.
Rain
starts to clatter in the palm trees. I go to the window and
lean out, then quickly step back. Bolts spear into the
ground—jagged like cartoon drawings of lightning—four,
five, six at once, surrounding the house. Thunderheads swarm over
the hills and the quiet rolling suddenly changes its tune and starts
to explode so close it feels like my own backbone snapping. The
house shakes; this is serious. The lights go out. We fasten the
windows inside and still the wind whips rain through cracks we
didn't know were there. Spooky wind sucks in and out of the
chimney. Wild night. Rain lashes the house and the two silly
palms give and give in the wind. I smell ozone. I am certain the
house has been struck. This storm has selected our house. It
won't move on; we're the center and may be washed downhill to Lake
Trasimeno. “Which would you prefer,” I ask, “landslide or
direct hit by lightning?”
We get under the covers like ten-year-olds, shouting “Stop!” and
“No!” each time the sky lights up. Thunder enters the walls and
rearranges the stones.

When the big storm starts passing to the north, the black sky
is left washed clean for stars. Ed opens the window and the breeze
sends in pine scent from blown-down limbs and scattered needles.
The electricity still is out. As we sit propped up on pillows,
waiting for our hearts to slow down, we hear something at the
window. A small owl has landed on the sill. Its head swivels back
and forth. Perhaps its perch was blown down or it is disoriented by
the storm. When the moon breaks through the clouds, we can see the
owl staring inside at us. We don't move. I'm praying, Please don't
come in the room. I am deathly afraid of birds, a holdover phobia
from childhood, and yet I am entranced by the small owl. Owls seem
always to be more than themselves, totemic in America, symbolic at
least, and here, mythological as well. I think of Minerva's owl.
But really it's just a small creature that belongs to this hill.
We have seen its larger forebears several times at evening. Neither
of us speaks. Since it stays, we finally fall asleep and wake in
the morning to see that it has flown. At the window, only the
quarter of six light—raked gold angling across the valley,
suffusing the air briefly before the sun clears the hills and lifts
into the absolved, clear day.

T
he
W
ild
O
rchard

THE WATERMELON HOUR—A FAVORITE
pause in the afternoon.
Watermelon is arguably the best taste in the world, and I must
admit that the Tuscan melons rival in flavor those Sugar Babies we
picked hot out of the fields in South Georgia when I was a child.
I never mastered the art of the thump. Whether the melon is ripe or
not, the thump sounds the same to me. Each one I cut, however, seems
to be at its pinnacle—toothy crispness, audacious sweetness.
When we're sharing melon with the workers, I notice that they eat
the white of the melon. When they finish, their rind is a limp
green strip. Sitting on the stone wall, sun on my face, big slice
of watermelon—I'm seven again, totally engrossed in shooting
seeds between my fingers and spooning out circles from the dripping
quarter moon of fruit.

Suddenly, I notice the five pine trees edging the driveway are
full of activity. It sounds as though squirrels are pulling Velcro
apart, or biting into
panini,
those hard Italian rolls.
A man leaps from his car, quickly picks up three cones, and speeds
off. Then Signor Martini arrives. I expect he's bringing news of
someone who can plow the terraces. He picks up a cone and shakes
it against the wall. Out come black nubs. He cracks one with a
rock and holds up a husk-covered oval.
“Pinolo,”
he
announces. Then he points to the dusky beads scattered all over
the driveway.
“Torta della nonna,”
he states, in case
I missed the significance. Better still, I think, pesto to make with
all the proliferating basil that resulted from sticking six plants
in the ground. I love pine nuts on salads. Pine nuts! And I've
been stepping on them.

Of course I knew that
pinoli
come from pine trees.
I've even inspected trees in my yard at home to see if, somewhere
hidden in the cone, I would find pine nuts. I never thought of the
trees lining the driveway as the bearers; thus far they simply have
been trees that need no immediate attention. They're those
painterly-looking pines, sometimes stunted by coastal winds, that
line many Mediterranean beach towns, the kind Dante wandered among
at Ravenna when he was in exile there. These along the driveway are
feathery and tall. Imagine that plain
pino domestico
(I see in my tree book) will yield those buttery nuts, so
delicious when toasted. One of the
nonnas
who make all
those heavy
pinolo
studded tarts must have lived here.
She must have made delectable ravioli with ground
nocciole,
hazelnut, stuffing, and macaroons and other
torte,
too,
because there also are twenty almonds and a shady hazelnut tree
that droops with its crop of nuts. The
nocciola
grows
with a chartreuse ruff around the nut, as though each one is ready
to be worn in a lapel. The almonds are encased in tender green
velvet. Even the tree that collapsed over the terrace and must be
dying has sent out a plentiful crop.

Perhaps Signor Martini should be back at the office, prepared
to show more foreign clients houses without roofs or water, but he
joins me picking up the
pinoli.
Like most Italians I've
met, he seems to have time to give. I love his quality of becoming
involved in the moment. The sooty covering quickly blackens our
hands. “How do you know so many things—were you born in
the country?” I ask. “Is this the one day the cones fall?” He has
told me previously that the hazelnuts are ripe on August 22,
feast day of the foreign St. Filbert.

He tells me he grew up in Teverina, on down the road from
Bramasole's
località,
and lived there until
the war. I would love to know if he turned partisan or if he stuck
to Mussolini until the end, but I merely ask if the war came near
Cortona. He points up to the Medici fortress above the house.
“The Germans occupied the fort as a radio communication center.
Some of the officers quartered in the farmhouses came back after
the war and bought those places.” He laughs. “Never understood
why the peasants weren't helpful.” We've piled twenty or so
cones on the wall.

I don't ask if this house was occupied by Nazis. “What about
the partisans?”

“Everywhere,” he says, gesturing. “Even thirteen-year-old
boys—killed while picking strawberries or tending sheep.
Shot. Mines everywhere.” He does not continue. Abruptly, he says
his mother died at ninety-three a few years ago. “No more
torta della nonna.
” He is in a wry mood today. After I
squash several
pinoli
flat with a stone, he shows me
how to hit so that the shell releases the nut whole. I tell
him my father is dead, my mother confined since a major stroke.
He says he is now alone. I don't dare ask about wife, children. I
have known him two summers and this is the first personal information
we have exchanged. We gather the cones into a paper bag and when
he leaves he says,
“Ciao.”
Regardless what I've
learned in language classes, among adults in rural Tuscany
ciao
is not tossed about.
Arrivederla
or, more
familiarly,
arrivederci
are the usual good-byes. A
little shift has occurred.

After half an hour of banging pine nuts, I have about four
tablespoons. My hands are sticky and black. No wonder the
two-ounce cellophane bags at home are so expensive. I have in
mind that I will make one of those ubiquitous
torta della
nonnas,
which seem sometimes to be the beginning and end of
Italian desserts. The French and American variety of desserts is
simply not of interest in the local cuisine. I'm convinced you
have to have been raised on most Italian sweets to appreciate them;
generally, their cakes and pastries are too dry for my palate.
Torta della nonna,
fruit tarts, perhaps a
tiramisu
(a dessert I loathe)—that's it, except in expensive
restaurants. Most pastry shops and many bars serve this
grandmother's torte. Though they can be pleasing, sometimes they
taste as though
intonaco,
plaster, is one of the
ingredients. No wonder Italians order fruit for dessert. Even
gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably
good anymore. Though many advertise that the gelato is their own,
they neglect to say it's sometimes made with envelopes of powdered
mix. When you find the real peach or strawberry gelato, it's
unforgettable. Fortunately, fruit submerged in bowls of cool water
seems perfect at the end of a summer dinner, especially with the
local
pecorino,
Gorgonzola, or a wedge of
parmigiano.

Translating grams into cups as best I can, I copy a recipe from
a cookbook. Hundreds of versions of
torta della nonna
exist. I like the kind with polenta in the cake and a thin layer
of filling in the middle. I don't mind the extra hour to pound
open the pine nuts that at home I would have pulled from the
freezer. First, I make a thick custard with two egg yolks,
¹
/
₃
cup flour, 2 cups milk, and ½ cup sugar. This makes too
much, for my purposes, so I pour two servings into bowls to eat
later. While the custard cools, I make the dough:
1–½ cups polenta, 1–½ cups
flour,
¹
/
₃
cup sugar, 1–½ teaspoons
baking powder, 4 oz. butter cut into the dry ingredients, one
whole egg plus one yolk stirred in. I halve the dough and spread
one part in a pie pan, cover with custard, then roll out the other
half of the dough and cover the custard, crimping the edges of
the dough together. I sprinkle a handful of toasted pine nuts on
top and bake at 350° for twenty-five minutes. Soon the
kitchen fills with a promising aroma. When it smells done, I
place the golden
torta
on the kitchen windowsill and
dial Signor Martini's number. “My
torta della nonna
is
ready,” I tell him.

When he arrives I brew a pot of espresso, then cut him a
large piece. With the first forkful, he gets a dreamy look in his
eyes.

“Perfetto”
is his verdict.

BESIDES THE NUTS, THE ORIGINAL
NONNA
PLANNED MORE OF
an Eden here. What's left: three kinds of plums (the plump Santa Rosa
type are called locally
coscia di monaca,
nun's thigh),
figs, apples, apricots, one cherry (half dead), apples, and several
kinds of pears. Those ripening now are small green-going-to-russet,
with a crisp sweetness. Her gnarly apples—I'd love to know
what varieties they are—may not be salvageable, but they're
now putting forth dwarfish fruit that looks like the before
pictures in ads for insect sprays. Many of the trees must be
volunteers; they're too young to have been alive when someone lived
here, and often they're in odd places. Since four plums are directly
below a line of ten on a terrace, they obviously sprang from fallen
fruit.

I'm sure she gathered wild fennel, dried the yellow flowers,
and tossed the still-green bunches onto the fire when she grilled
meat. We uncover grapes buried in the brush along the edges of the
terraces. Some aggressive ones still send out long tangles of stems.
Tiny bunches are forming. Along the terraces like a strange graveyard,
the ancient grape stones are still in place—knee-high
stones shaped like headstones, with a hole for an iron
rod. The rod extends beyond the edge of the terrace, thereby
giving the grower more space. Ed strings wire from rod to rod and
lifts the grapes up to train them along the wire. We're amazed
to realize that the whole place used to be a vineyard.

At the huge
enoteca
in Siena, a
government-sponsored tasting room where wines from all over Italy
are displayed and poured, the waiter told us that most Italian
vineyards are less than five acres, about our size. Many small
growers join local cooperatives in producing various kinds of
wine, including
vino da tavola,
table wine. As we hoe
weeds around the vines, naturally, we begin to think of a year
2000 Bramasole Gamay or Chianti. The uncovered grapes explain the
heaps of bottles we inherited. They may yield the rough-and-ready
red served in pitchers in all the local restaurants. Or perhaps
the flinty Grechetto, a lemon white wine of this area. Ah, yes,
this land was waiting for us. Or we for it.

Nonna's
most essential, elemental ingredient surely
was olive oil. Her woodstove was fired with the prunings; she
dipped her bread in a plate of oil for toast, she doused her soups
and pasta sauces with her lovely green oil. Cloth sacks of olives
hung in the chimney to smoke over the winter. Even her soap was
made from oil and the ashes from her fireplace. Her husband or
his employee spent weeks tending the olive terraces. The old lore
was to prune so that a bird could fly through the main branches
without brushing its wings against the leaves. He had to know
exactly when to pick. The trees can't be wet or the olives will
mildew before you can get them to the mill. To prepare olives to
eat, all the bitter glucoside must be leached out by curing them
in salt or soaking them in lye or brine. Besides the practical,
a host of enduring superstitions determine the best moment to pick
or plant; the moon has bad days and good. Vergil, a long time ago,
observed farmers' beliefs: Choose the seventeenth day after the full
moon to plant, avoid the fifth. He also advises scything at night,
when dew softens the stubble. I'm afraid Ed might veer off a terrace
if he tried that.

Of our olives, some are paradigms—ancient, twisted,
gnarled. Many are clusters of young shoots that sprang up in a
circle around damaged trunks. In this benign crescent of hillside,
it's hard to imagine the temperature dropping to minus six degrees,
as it did in 1985, but gaps between trees reveal huge dead stumps.
The olives will have to be revived from their long neglect. Each
tree needs to be cleared of encroaching sumac, broom, and weeds,
then pruned and fertilized. The terraces must be plowed and
cleaned. This is major work but it will have to wait. Since olives
are almost immortal, another year won't hurt.

“An olive leaf he brings, pacific sign,” Milton wrote in
Paradise Lost.
The dove that flew back to the ark with
the branch in its beak made a good choice. The olive tree does
impart a sense of peace. It must be, simply, the way they participate
in time. These trees are here and will be. They were here.
Whether we are or someone else is or no one, each morning they'll
be twirling their leaves and inching up toward the sun.

A few summers ago, a friend and I hiked in Majorca above
Soller. We climbed across and through miles of dramatic, enormous
olives on broad terraces. Up high, we came upon stone huts where the
grove tenders sheltered themselves. Although we got lost and
encountered a pacing bull in a meadow, we felt this immense peace
all day, walking among those trees that looked and may have been
a thousand years old. Walking these few curving acres here give me
the same feeling. Unnatural as it is, terracing has a natural feel
to it. Some of the earliest methods of writing, called
boustrophedon, run from right to left, then from left to right.
If we were trained that way, it probably is a more efficient way
to read. The etymology of the word reveals Greek roots meaning
“to turn like an ox plowing.” And that writing is like the
rising terraces: The U-turn space required by an ox with
plow suddenly loops up a level and you're going in the other
direction.