Every Day in Tuscany (39 page)

T
HE MORNING BEFORE
we leave for four months, I walk into town with my notebook. In the bar, I silently nod to Luca’s portrait and take my coffee outside. Before I can open my notebook, Claudio joins me, then Sheryl, who’s shopping early for the imminent arrival of guests, then Ed pulls up on his Vespa and orders a coffee. Eta and Marco, just opening their doors, come out to chat. Taut Jacqueline plops down like a puppet whose strings have been relaxed. Placido is here, talking to Lucio.

We’re all here, in the piazza on a bright September morning. The pigeons are too excitable today and keep toddling toward our table and swooping low. I see the mayor look out his medieval window. He has stopped smoking and must pace. Delivery men step fast to haul goods into shops before they must clear their trucks out of the piazza. Jim walks up with his paper and takes his place. Alessandra stops with her dog, then moves on toward her shop under the Teatro. Angela—“pride of Cortona”—passes with her big smile and outspoken breasts. Massimo brings more cappuccinos, and suddenly a low helicopter crosses the sky above the town hall. I recall the Fellini scene, where the crucifix dangles over Rome. In the spring, I daydreamed that the airlifted Placido was waving down at all of us.

The helicopter pulls up from the scene, leaving us below, around a table in the piazza, up and up until we are indistinguishable from others visiting at tables, then up higher until we are specks, and the town spreads along the hillside, narrow streets, domes, bell towers, and rooftops left in a broad swath of green and stone and tile that could be framed and called
A View of Cortona
.

Envoi—Fox Song

VENUS CATCHES IN A FLAT BUBBLE OF THE OLD
glass in my bedroom window. For a moment, the spangling planet seems trapped. The blue light splits, pulsates: deep-sea fish eye flashing, quartz crystal I scooped from a stream in Alabama, ice cube splintering under a pick. A fox begins to yap in the olive grove. I lie on my side watching Venus traverse from middle pane to top, cross to the right, sliding over other imperfections in the glass, then out of sight. The night before I leave here, I don’t sleep. I dwell—my sisters say, “You dwell on things”—on the unnatural act of flying in a silver bullet seven miles above the earth.

One hour, two? At a glance, how fixed the stars seem—but how quickly this handful of light moves across the window. I’ve never comprehended the basics: birth, random suffering, death, the momentum of earth wobbling on its axis.
“Swiftly tilting planet,”
a poet called it.
¹
I do understand the natural state of two feet on the ground.

The snappy fox, Venus in the glass, and me, thirsty, sleepless, hot—a chance triangulation. I shift my mind back through space, beyond this sparkling darling named for love. A spider, traveling as she goes: my mind raveling farther than my imagination, farther than lenses can see, out into the gray abyss where one waits to be born. (I smile in the dark, remembering when I asked Willie at four where he was before he was born and he replied, “I think Phoenix.”) Out there, free-fall for centuries. Touch nothing until the universe curves.

Does it turn back on itself, bringing time back? Inside the globe of my skull, gliding too far, vertiginously, and that plane I’ll board, with its false world inside, as though hurtling through black space were a normal act. Is the universe—at some megadistance—shaped like the bones of the cranium? Am I lying in the canaliculi of a colossal mind? Or lying on soft sheets in my earthly iron bed with a boat painted on a tin disk above my head?

Oh, yes, it’s the earth that moves around an axis I used to think was real, like a skewer through a tomato, and we ride on this ball suspended in space only by a concatenation of whirling magnetic forces which, according to a smart-mouth friend, add up to God. Any other god, says he, is firmly in the realm of
Jack and the Beanstalk
and cows jumping over the moon. I twirled my lemonade straw and asked, “What made the universe?” The inverse square law, he proclaimed, though right now I don’t remember what equals what.

The fox simply calls out in the night. I would like to feel my hand around the shape of his foxy little head, raised in a silvery cry, his feet tensing in earth wet from afternoon rain, his rusty fur smelling of the lair. Soaked grasses, fallen sunflowers, earthworms, black holes, meteors, constellations like lions and a crown of laurel. This bed by the window, traction of fox paws, traction of Venus. Water from the well in a silver cup.

Then the first bird’s piercing notes. The black sky, overlaid with a bridal veil of stars, shows no faint ray at the brink of the hills nor a subtle lightening of the eastern sky. But this
merlo
, this blackbird, knows. How, I wonder.

NOTES

A
HOUSE
F
LYING

1.
Anneli Rufus recounts much lively lore in her
Magnificant Corpses
. Caroline Walker Bynum’s work is extraordinary, especially
Holy Feast and Holy Fast
and
The Resurrection of the Body
.

2.
A study for that fresco is owned by the Getty in Los Angeles, while the Gatti hangs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

O
RTO AND
O
VEN

1.
There are also succulent little clams called
dateri
in Sicily. This points to the importance and ascendancy of Arab cuisine in the area. The desert dates provide the metaphor; note that the dates were
not
called tomato and clam!

G
ITE AL
M
ARE

1.
The designation Blue Banner, awarded by the European Foundation for Environmental Education, goes to clean, environmentally well-managed beaches with high water quality. The Marche’s current Blue Banner beaches are, from north to south, Gabicce Mare, Pesaro, Fano, Senigallia, Sirolo, Numana, Porto Recanati, Civitanova Marche, Porto San Giorgio, Grottammare, and San Benedetto del Tronto.

A
MICI

1.
This and other quests came to us through reading
Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy
by David Mayernik. During a February week in Rome, this book took Ed, Alberto, and me deeper and deeper into the city. The author connects the portico of the mausoleum of Augustus to dimensions of the Pantheon portico. He traces various architectural programs throughout history and gives the reader a way to “read the whole city as a comprehensible story.” Most important to us is Mayernik’s explanation of Roman architectural structure as places to store memories of ideas, i.e., mnemonics such as ancient rhetoricians constructed to aid their remembrance of texts before print. Whole routes of building programs recalled to the ancients places where Romulus and Remus were born, where St. Paul stopped, or where some historical meeting occurred. The buildings were meant to connect with cultural memory. This, for me, is a book to read and read again.

T
HE
S
IGNORELLI
T
RAIL

1.
Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings
, Tom Henry and Laurence Kanter. This great tome is invaluable, since it represents the most recent and authoritative information on many facets of Signorelli’s work. For many facts used in this chapter, I read conflicting information from several authors and Internet sources. I relied on Henry and Kanter for the definitive word. As new research takes place, attributions are subject to expansion or modification, but for now, I think, this is the best information available.

C
ITTÀ DI
C
ASTELLO

1.
Agriturismo
signifies a country bed and breakfast where actual farming takes place. For example, Giusi, who worked at Bramasole for years and is our close friend, converted a sheep pen on her husband’s family farm into a guesthouse, now rented through Classic Tuscan Homes. Such felicitous accommodations exist all over Italy and are a special way to travel. You’re in touch with a family, usually with a traditional way of life, and you experience a highly personal Tuscany. Many Internet sites and several books list
agriturismo
accommodations. A great value, as well as a pleasure.

S
INCE THE
E
TRUSCANS

1.
In
Bringing Tuscany Home
I wrote more extensively about olive oil. It’s bothersome—maddening!—that so much misinformation continues to circulate. Recently I saw an article in a respected food magazine recommending that you keep your oil in a plastic container. Please! The smell of plastic enters oil in less than two days. We bring our oil home from the mill in huge plastic jugs and transfer it immediately into stainless steel containers called
fustini
. As we leave the mill, the owner always reminds us, “Get the oil out of that plastic as soon as you can.” Buy the youngest oil you can find and store it in a cool, dark cupboard. At home in America, we have a
fustino
for the loose oil we ship home in metal containers. We store the bottles we bring back in the wine fridge. The constant 57 degrees and dark location keep the oil in
primo
condition. A bottle of oil left in bright light will start to go “off” in a week. Carefully stored unopened bottles can last three or four years, even longer. The oil doesn’t really expire on a sell-by date. It simply loses its kick very slowly. Tuscans save any oil from last year or the year before and use it for roasting and basting, using the new oil right away for vegetables and salads. The sell-by date on bottles
is
important because one, fresher is better, and two, the oil probably has been exposed to light. See other information in
Bringing Tuscany Home
. If you are traveling in Italy, you can pick up a
fustino
at a hardware store. They come in several sizes and have a spout at the bottom for refilling your bottles.

A L
ARGER
F
REEDOM

1.
I’m mixed on installing contemporary architecture into such particular areas long defined as themselves. Theoretically, the idea is exciting but in reality, landing an anachronism into such a setting rearranges everything. That’s the point—but a point well taken? Does the new building redefine, invigorate, or creatively juxtapose the venerable neighbors? New York seems somehow able to absorb contemporary architecture; the on-going pace of the city takes in all styles. The dirty glass pyramid—now twenty years old—outside the Louvre dismayed me when it landed there and still does. It distracts from the somber heavy weight of the past embodied in the Louvre standing gloomily on its own. I was shocked in Toronto when I saw the Royal Ontario Museum. Out in a field on its own, okay, although I imagine it still would look like a contemporary building that had somehow been dropped from a height and sheared into crash angles. Where it stands, it does not so much wake up the neighborhood with a splash of cold water in the face as put the rest of the area on hold while it tries its best to shock.

Theoretically, such drastic interventions work, but where? I’m looking. I like the atrium designed by Sir Norman Foster at the old patent office in Washington. It neither obscures nor competes with the adjacent structures but instead bridges, shields, and provides a new and welcome interior space. There’s a sense of
enlightening
.

2.
Vernon Lee wrote more than forty books, at least one on beauty. She was known as a writer of supernatural stories, but what I admire is her acute sense of place, as in
The Spirit of Rome
. She was English by parentage, born in France, but loved Italy and chose to live here for half a century. If intrigued, read
Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography
by Vineta Colby.
The Spirit of Rome
is available online through Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook.

E
NVOI

1.
“The Morning Song of Senlin” by Conrad Aiken. A part toward the end often flashes through my mind:
It is morning
, Senlin says,
I ascend from darkness / And depart on the winds of space for I know not where
.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cruttwell, Maud.
Luca Signorelli
. London: George Bell and Sons, 1899.

Gilbert, Creighton E.
How Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli Saw the End of the World
. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Henry, Tom, and Laurence Kanter.
Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings
. New York: Rizzoli, 2002.

Mayernik, David.
Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Westview Press, 2003.

Vasari, Giorgio; translated by Gaston du C. de Vere.
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2006.