Amore and Amaretti (28 page)

I am in Italy on holiday. I am not here to work, unlike the previous two trips. I have three entire weeks, most of which will be spent as a guest of Gianfranco, with the remainder in Perugia with Raimondo. I am here to turn fifty, because I happened to be in Italy for those other two milestones, forty and thirty. I am also here to absorb the food scene in order to fill more evocatively my weekly columns for the local newspaper where I work. I am here because I have left it too long to return to a place and to people responsible for shaping my life so dramatically. I am sharply conscious, moreover, of coming back into this world a woman infinitely more at ease and at peace with herself than at any other time. I even mostly like myself.

The next day, Gianfranco takes us to look at the villa. It confounds me, its warrens and entrances and dining rooms and staircases, its sudden little sitting rooms and archways and secret gardens. It dates from the fourteenth century and one of the rooms is still filled with furniture from that era. Several apartments are out of bounds, belonging to and constituting the home of an elderly family member; the rest of it is at the disposal of Gianfranco and his partners.

The kitchen is enormous and the dining room gracious, formal and polite. There is an arbour outside, long tables under the arch of creeping vines where I imagine sitting until midnight on languid summer nights. Around the panels of one room are black-and-white photographs of dignitaries and celebrities coming to dine in the 1940s and 1950s. There is a very young Elizabeth Taylor and a youthful, dashing Shah of Persia. The grounds are glorious, with their beautifully manicured garden beds, fountains, statuary and huge ceramic urns of lemons trees.

A wash of pride towards Gianfranco briefly suffuses me: the talent he has for finding the most beautiful restaurants in which to work. I am also seeing how much more grandiose an operation this is than any he has undertaken previously. The huge kitchen, for example, accommodates three chefs, including himself. Most of their work so far comes from wedding and communion parties of over a hundred people at a time.

Standing in the middle of that enormous kitchen, I find myself feeling perfectly at home. The familiar low, wide pans containing simmering sauces invite me to give an occasional stir to their contents, and so I do, an instinct, the wooden spoon dipping through the unctuousness of a dark rich ragout, a peppery beef stew. Gianfranco's second chef is a tall beautiful Albanian youth, who clears away stainless-steel bench space for me to set up my cheesecake-making paraphernalia; I can't resist the opportunity to cook. The other chef is short, wiry and florid, and for a while the three of us dance around each other clumsily and politely as we establish our territories.

I am excited about seeing Ignazio. I had been told how he, too, had left La Cantinetta, met a woman, had a baby, bought a restaurant. Within two years, everything collapsed and so now here he is being waiter for Gianfranco all over again, single father of an eight-year-old daughter he sees twice a week. It is not lost on me the extraordinary coincidence of the three of us being together again a decade since the last time, as if we had been one smooth, untrammelled trio all along – something meant by it all.

I hear his voice before I see him – and there he is, hair gelled back into a sharp peak, the same beautiful face I remember, the short compact body a little heavier. We hug tightly and I stand back: was his face always so spectrally white? Gianfranco has murmured mentions of drinking and gambling problems, and to be sure there seems to be a ruined beauty around my Botticelli angel. I always loved the way I could stand eye level to Ignazio and wrap my arms around his neck and we fit so neatly. I love this still. He makes us both an espresso from the coffee machine, which we gulp down, and then I am back to the cheesecake and Ignazio is clicking off to set tables. Smoothing the lemon cream filling onto the crumbed base, I have the strange sensation of never having left Italy at all, as if I am taking up precisely and seamlessly where I left off, like the trick photography that imposes a new entity within the outlines of the old. I have returned to my Italian persona.

Into our midst explodes Gianfranco at his most baggy-eyed, early morning dissolute, barking out instructions to his chefs, stabbing numbers on his mobile phone, cigarette between his lips and the coffee grinder roaring. I slide the cake into the massive oven a little anxiously – Gianfranco has told me that the temperature controls are dubious – and take off to one of the dining rooms to study the menu while I wait for it to cook. Did I ever leave?

Ciò che si mangia con gusto non fa mai male

What you eat with pleasure can never make you ill

Within three days my Italian has returned in torrents. William and I set out early each morning from San Casciano to catch a bus somewhere. It is mostly to Florence, except for one wet day, to San Gimignano, where we join convoys of tourists and squealing school excursions under a canopy of umbrellas. I rediscover the little piazza where eleven years ago I had listened, entranced, to a German flautist ripple through his repertoire, but I am disenchanted by the beautiful old town's determined pursuit of tourism.

Florence that first day threatens to be as disappointing. It is cold and wet and only barely May, so why these throngs of tourists? I charge ahead of William and lose him periodically. I want to feel moved, and nothing happens. Is it over-familiarity? Why is my heart not swelling? Everything begins to irritate me, from the buffeting crowds to the haughty waiters whose frosty disdain I do not remember. I pine for the lira, money whose value I understand, rather than the euro; it seems to me that everything has become inordinately expensive.

Several nights we dine at the villa. This means filling in time till ten o'clock at night, when the preparation begins for the staff meal, which we are joining. There are few customers at this time of year and the process of becoming known is long and slow. The vast imperious dining rooms seem too lofty, too cold for the two or three tables of diners, and Ignazio in bow tie carving meat from a trolley looks stilted, anachronistic, in all that emptiness.

When it comes time to eat, I have to force myself to slow down. I want to try everything on the table. There is soft, sweet pecorino cheese cut into wedges to accompany fresh broad beans, marinated artichoke hearts in their pool of green oil, Gianfranco's heavenly
peposa
, a peppery beef casserole he used to make at La Cantinetta, a chunk of spicy salami to wrap inside the gorgeous, spongy hard-crusted bread which I am never able to resist.

Other nights, Gianfranco drives William and me into Florence for dinner. We arrive late at noisy pizzerias in the centre of town and are naturally whisked to the best table and plied immediately with food and wine. I am remembering his habit of surly taciturnity at the beginnings of meals, when he is concentrating on eating, filling his wine glass several times over with mineral water, and only seeming to cheer up when he has finished eating, extracted a cigarette, splashed out wine.