Amore and Amaretti (3 page)

On these mushroom expeditions I am fascinated by delicate, beautiful specimens in iridescent colours, which Gianfranco warns me are deadly. I dare not even stand too close, lest the air is contaminated by their garish toxicity. We pick, pluck and gather and, because he is a country boy, we have no need to carry our collection into the nearest
farmacia
, where they would readily identify the various types for us. We dine on massive porcini, with lots of bread for the luscious juices.

Several months into my Florentine life, life with Gianfranco, I hear about permanent contact lenses. Lavish advertisements depict their miraculous powers: lenses you can keep in for days at a time, lenses you can sleep in, lenses that will change your life. Having been desperately short-sighted since my teens, as I juggled glasses with contact lenses I must remove every night, I am naturally intrigued, then seduced. And despite their tremendous cost – but then what value can be placed on a miracle? – Gianfranco is marching me briskly into Pisacchi the optometrist.

I submit to the sort of eye examination I have had regularly since I was thirteen, and the optometrist speaks slowly and carefully to make sure I understand. My two years of university Italian, combined with the six weeks or so at the Michelangelo Institute, all reinforced by the past months in which Italian is what I mostly hear and speak (if not perfectly understand), have made me a little reckless, even cocky in my confidence.
‘Si, capisco'
– Yes, I understand – I say. We pay for my exciting new lenses with half my month's salary and then speed off to Viareggio to spend what remains of our day at the beach. The world seems brimming with possibilities that the past decade and a half of myopia had closed to me. As we drive, Gianfranco is telling me how Italy has long been at the forefront of optical technologies, pioneering techniques and equipment.

We arrive at the beach in blazing sunshine, change into swimming attire and hurl ourselves into the water. I am so accustomed to keeping my eyes fiercely shut under water that it has become instinct. And yet the optometrist had spoken so enthusiastically about
‘il fare la doccia'
– having a shower – or
‘un bagno'
– a bath, or bathing – that the next time I go under I stare wide-eyed and defiant into the glassy curl of wave.

In that moment a strange sensation takes place as the sharp clarity of my vision gives way to a soft and familiar blur. The expensive lenses have floated out of my eyes, lost in the infinite expanse of ocean, possibly even drifting towards Australia. I can hardly believe it has happened, that I possessed those permanent lenses so temporarily. It is only afterwards, when I confess to Gianfranco what has happened, that the optometrist's directions are revealed to me. The only thing you
cannot
do, Gianfranco smiles as he reports what had apparently been said in one of those sentences I pretended to understand, is to open your eyes under water.

The Fiat is slipping through drifts of snow and navigating treacherous bends to bring our carload of friends, unharmed, to Pettino. A lone farmhouse glows amber, welcoming us in. We are the only guests tonight at this trattoria, where the family, clustering around the fireplace, springs into attendance. The dining room is merely long wooden tables and wooden benches. The ambience soon softens around the curl of cigarette smoke, the uncorking of wine bottles and our shrill exuberance at having risked such roads in such conditions. There is no menu; we have come to eat truffles. I have heard about the nonchalance with which Umbrians treat this precious ingredient, like parsley or potatoes. Instead of being finely grated or shaved, they are often cut into chunks.

First arrives the crostini, crisp little toasts piled with a mixture of anchovies and finely chopped mushrooms specked with black truffles. There is a frittata perfumed with pecorino and truffles. Eggy threads of fresh tagliatelle arrive truffle-flecked and glistening with green oil. Everything else – the snow outside, the members of the family coming and going, the sharp wooden contours of the austere room – becomes a fuzzy frame for our truffle tasting. We stay for hours and the euphoria carries us all the way, dangerously back, cosy beyond caring.

Wherever we end up – at the midnight end of busy restaurant days, on our precious one day off, during an impromptu arrival of friends, in Florence or out – our meals are always memorable. Gianfranco possesses the happy combination of both peasant background and swish Swiss hospitality training, so I am mostly happy to let him do the choosing. He knows about food; his palate is impeccable. The other sides I begin to see of him – the moody volatility, the surly suspiciousness – are often with us now, like unwanted guests at a feast, faceless and brooding. He has begun to ignore me inexplicably and we live in the thick walls of my love's jealous silences. Later, when his mood has recovered, he justifies it on the grounds of jealousy towards someone like the corner greengrocer whose name I do not even know. And yet, when I watch his skill at mealtimes, my admiration for him enables easy forgiveness.

We invariably eat whatever is seasonal, freshest,
del giorno
, and a little unusual. He heads immediately for the kitchen of whatever establishment we are visiting, where through the servery windows I watch him dip fingers into steamy cauldrons. All the places we frequent are staffed by waiters or chefs whom he knows, or with whom he has worked. Their stories are told to me over crisp-crusted pizza with curls of prosciutto on top, and are continued through the last lemon vodkas of the night. How Tonino squandered a family inheritance on gambling and is now forced to work three jobs; why one of Silvio's legs is shorter than the other; where Paolo takes his mistress to dine on the nights he is able to escape his overbearing, cruel wife.

Massive Claudio's pizzeria in Piazza Santa Croce is one of our favourites. I love best his spinach sautéed quickly in garlic, chilli and olive oil, which I eat with too much bread, while all around me waiters knock off for the night to play cards, smoke and drink with up-rolled sleeves.

We eat often at the elegant Antica Toscana, which specialises in tour groups and is owned by a gravel-voiced man called Lorenzo, one of Gianfranco's partners. I warm to Lorenzo immediately, to the fact that he is not only urbane but clearly a devoted family man who takes great pride in the two sons who are often there helping out. It is here that I meet a multilingual, accordion-playing, walrus-moustachioed waiter called Raimondo, who is to become a great friend. We pull up at service stations along the
autostrada
, where in sparse, near-empty dining rooms Gianfranco knows to order soupy stews of intestinal organs, salt cod with silverbeet, wide ribbons of pasta glistening with duck sauce, fresh figs draped with pancetta, a log of creamy tomino bathing in golden oil. In summer, we drive 110 kilometres to the seaside town of Viareggio one evening just to eat fish. In an art deco building on the promenade we are served, naturally, by ex-colleagues of Gianfranco, a banquet of endless platters piled high with seafood stirred through spaghetti or chunked into risotto, or simply gloriously grilled. Sometimes we choose the traditional Tuscan
baccalà
, peasant food now fashionable again.

Gianfranco's ancient mother shuffles through the service station, a tiny figure dressed in black, moustachioed, hair bandaged in a scarf. I find her toothless, colloquial Italian incomprehensible, yet we smile at each other constantly, shyly. She prepares all the meals, her fingers pressing breadcrumbs onto veal cutlets, podding beans and twisting tubes of spinach-stuffed pastry into snakes. Her broad practical hands show me how to iron and fold Gianfranco's white work T-shirts. (I iron them quickly and badly, humiliated by this servile role.) When all the dishes have been brought out to the dining room and the extended family – which now includes ‘
la Veeky'
, the earnest
Australiana
– is noisily jostling with platters, Mamma slips back into the kitchen, where she eats on a chair by the stove.