Living in a Foreign Language (5 page)

Joanna stuck around, talking to Luca, while we unpacked and got comfortable. Then we all sat around a table on the terrace with a bottle of Grechetto, the local white wine, some olives, some almonds, a little cheese drizzled with
balsamico
—the Italians, it seems, never drink unless they're eating something. Joanna regaled us with a history of the valley, of Umbrans and Etruscans, of Popes and Holy Roman Emperors, of battles and sieges. It seems that pretty much everybody has occupied Spoleto over the centuries. After the fall of Rome, the Goths moved in for a while, then
the Lombards (Germans). Perugia, its sister city just to the north, dominated it for a while, and then it was batted back and forth between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Spoleto did have one notable moment of getting its back up in the third century B.C.—when the city stopped Hannibal in his tracks during his relentless march to Rome. Sitting on the terrace of the Castello, looking down on the valley, we could almost see and hear the clash of the armies below. This was after we cracked the second bottle of Grechetto.

Joanna talked about St. Francis, who lived and breathed in this valley back in the thirteenth century, and of his monumental effect on the church—and on the world in general. Her knowledge is encyclopedic and her delivery was a delightful mixture of cultures—a cross, perhaps, between Alistair Cooke and Jackie Mason. When she talked about St. Francis, it was more like gossip than history, which made it much more fun to listen to. St. Francis was a very complicated piece of work, and Joanna made sure we appreciated the entire spectrum of his personality.

When Jill is really entertained by somebody, she gets a wicked glint in her eye and her cheeks get rosy. That's what she looked like sitting on that terrace listening to Joanna's stories. Caroline, who has a very high tolerance for gossip and slander, was enchanted as well. And Joanna, clearly at home in the spotlight, sucked up the attention like a sponge. The more wine that went down, the more salacious her history became, until it seemed that the story of the relationship between the sainted Francis and Clare had been ripped from the pages of the
National Enquirer
.

“What about your history?” Jill asked her as we watched the setting sun turn the valley to gold. “How did you end up in this incredible place?”

“Well, I have a checkered past,” she said with a raised eyebrow, “and I'm married to a very interesting man.”

Joanna was born into the theater. Her father was Duncan Ross, a British actor / director who came over to the States around the time of the great American regional theater movement. Shortly after Tyrone Guthrie founded his seminal theater in Minneapolis, Duncan Ross went to the Seattle Repertory Theater, where he would become the artistic director. His daughter, Joanna, always the rebel, horrified her parents by spurning a university education and heading straight to New York to jump into the professional theater scene. She worked at Ellen Stewart's famous La Mama troupe for a while, and then moved on to the casting office at Joe Papp's Public Theater. That's around the time she met Bruce. Shortly after, they were married, and not long after that they had their son, Miles.

“Bruce can do anything—and has,” she boasted. “When I met him, he was still doing some acting. He had been with La Mama from the beginning. That's how we first knew about Spoleto. The troupe came here on one of their European tours and Bruce fell totally in love with it.

“But then he figured he had to earn a living—being married with a kid and all—so he got into film editing, which he quickly mastered. That's about the time I got into the agent business. We were the classic successful New York couple. I was working twelve, fourteen hours a day; then I'd go home and read scripts all evening. Bruce was cutting commercials, which took up a huge amount of time as well. We never saw each other; we never had any time to spend with our kid; and after a few years of this we decided to chuck it all and move the whole family over here and start over.

“Bruce went back to school and got a degree in teaching
English as a second language—I told you, he can do anything. Now he's teaching English to the Italian Army, which sounds like the beginning of an old joke, but it's not.”

“What about you?” asked Jill.

“I sell a little real estate on the side. You know, to people like you.”

I nodded and said nothing. Jill smiled and shook her head. We all sat there quietly and took in the view, the setting sun and the warm feeling of the wine creeping up our spines and massaging our shoulders. After a moment, we asked Joanna if she'd like to join us for our farmhouse lunch the next day.

“Patrico? Sure. I'd never turn down a chance to go to Patrico.”

A
N
AGRITURISMO
IS A BED-AND-BREAKFAST
on a real working farm. They're all over Italy and, like anything else, there are good ones and bad ones. The idea—bolstered by some healthy tax incentives—is to encourage rural farmers to stay on their land and continue to farm it. It's an inducement offered by the government to preserve a way of life that's intrinsic to the culture and identity of Italy itself. Sometimes, an enterprising pseudo-farmer looking for a tax break will plant a few crops in the backyard, sex it all up to look like a working farm on paper and call it an
agriturismo
. But some are real farms that have been in the family for generations; they've been growing the crops, tending the animals, unearthing the truffles, harvesting the grapes for wine, distilling the wine for grappa for centuries. Such a place is the Agriturismo Bartoli in Patrico, which sits atop the sacred mountain of Monteluco.

We met Joanna at around eleven at a little gas station off the Flaminia and headed up toward Patrico. She told us to come early because there were lots of things to see along the
way. We all piled into one car and let Joanna be our tour guide. She told us that Monteluco has always been considered a sacred mountain, since before history. Its name is derived from
Lucas
, which means holy wood. The Romans considered the ilex trees that still thrive here to be sacrosanct, and there's a sign from the third century A.D. describing—in Latin—the punishment for anyone who cut one of these trees. It was a stiff fine—it would've cost you a couple of oxen, at least. In the fifth century, Syrian monks fleeing persecution came to the mountain and lived in the tiny caves that you can still crawl through today. Then, in the early thirteenth century, St. Francis founded his first monastery here, which is still up and running. So the mountain fairly seethes with holiness.

We stopped at the monastery and went inside. There's a framed letter on the wall from Michelangelo written back in the fifteenth century and describing his stay at the monastery—the Italian version of George Washington slept here. As we were poking around, a young friar came out and asked us if we wanted to see the very chapel that St. Francis had prayed in every day. It was tiny—as, apparently, Francis was himself, though not so small that he didn't single-handedly postpone the Reformation of the Catholic Church for four hundred years.

Then we got back in the car and drove to the very top of the mountain. Joanna told us to pull over at a promontory that jutted out over the farms below.

“Look over there. That's the whole Spoleto Valley. You see how wide it is—farms and such?”

We nodded.

“Then, look over this way. That's the Valnerina.”

It had a totally different personality—wilder, narrower,
with heavily timbered hills plunging steeply down to the river Nera, which cuts through the valley floor on its way south, joins the Tiber and heads on into Rome. Beyond the valley we could see the snow-covered Apennines, the spine of Italy that makes its way along the whole length of the boot. Jill came up behind me and put her arms around my waist. She held me tightly for a long moment, gazing out over the two valleys. Umbria was getting to her.

We pulled into the Bartoli farm, which encompasses five hundred hectares at the top of the mountain. That's over twelve hundred acres.

The farm is a compound of stone buildings—some very old, some newer—perched here and there among the barns and corrals on the hillside. Caroline, who tends to be painfully shy in new situations, saw a pack of dogs fenced in above one of the barns and ran up to see them.

“Those are truffle dogs,” said Joanna. “Worth their weight in gold.”

Caroline found her way into their pen, knelt down and enjoyed a few minutes of unconditional love from eight or ten frantically licking puppies.

Outside the main house against one wall was a wooden bench, and seated on the bench, his eyes closed to the sun, was Domenico, grandpa and patriarch of the Bartoli family. He's ninety-six years old this year, and we learned from Joanna that when he was in his seventies he committed to memory the entire
Divine Comedy
of Dante, and he can still be called on to recite it on special occasions. There are newspaper articles on the wall inside attesting to this feat.

The dining room has two long tables—each one could seat at least twenty people—that were set with plates, glasses and silverware. Marcella, who is the mama of the
family, the head cook, and clearly in charge of the operation, told us to sit anywhere we liked as the room quickly filled up with family, farmhands and other lucky souls who were either staying at the
agriturismo
or, like us, just catching lunch. There were probably about thirty of us all together.

The meal that followed was like no meal I had ever eaten. This was partly because of the place—the generous room in the solid stone house, straddling the precarious hillside, overlooking the two valleys, one green and wild, the other patch-worked with farms. And it was because of the Bartoli family, who were as solidly grounded on the mountain as the stones they used to build their houses. And it was because of the food, every morsel of which was grown, raised, foraged, butchered, rendered or distilled right here on the farm. This is the most local culinary experience you can get.

First, plates of
salumi
were placed, family style, on the tables, along with baskets of fresh, homemade bread.
Salumi
means “assorted preserved meats”—salami, sausages, ham—that are hung in the cellar for a couple of years until they're aged to perfection. Plates of bruschetta followed, some topped with tomatoes and basil, some with a mixture of wild mushrooms and liver. Each table had two jeroboams of red wine—unlabeled—that continued to circulate, faster and faster as the meal progressed.

Then came the pasta—family style, of course. Handmade
strengozzi
, which is the local dried pasta in this part of Umbria, in a wild boar sauce that had been slow-cooked for hours until the sweet, pungent flesh of the pig melted into the onions, celery, carrots and tomatoes to form a thick ragu that fairly clung to the al dente strands of pasta. A second helping was offered, and I felt it was my duty as a guest to accept.

We talked and laughed, attempting to communicate with family and guests in our fumbling Italian. Joanna helped a lot. She is fairly fluent with the language, though she makes no attempt at all to try to sound like an Italian. She served as the United Nations simultaneous interpreter, barking explanations in both directions at once and sounding—in either language—like the British-born New York talent agent that she is.

The
secondi
was chicken with truffles, served with plates and plates of just-harvested vegetables and potatoes. Never in my life has chicken tasted like this. The deep, powerful, almost gamy taste reached up and grabbed our taste buds by the collar as if to say, “This is chicken, buster.” And the truffles were . . . well, truffles.

Then, a
dolce
, a simple cake with bowls of berries. And then cheese—a pecorino. It seems the sheep are let out into the high meadow to eat the wildflowers when they come into bloom in the early spring. And this cheese was made of the milk that comes from that happy occurrence. Cheese is considered a
digestivo
in Italy, to make everything go down in the proper way.

After lunch, Caroline made her way back to play with the dogs, Jill stood out on the hill, looking at the vista, and Joanna and I went into the bar to be served an espresso by Felice, Marcella's husband and padrone of the establishment.

“Don't ask for cappuccino after ten o'clock in the morning,” said Joanna. “Only espresso. If you order cappuccino after ten, they'll think you're a German.”

We joined up with Jill and Caroline outside by the barn and I asked Joanna how to go about paying for lunch.

“Just find Felice and ask him how much.”

Even I knew that much Italian, so I went back to the bar to pay up. He asked me how many we were and I told him four. He wrote down a figure in euros that, when converted, came to about fifteen bucks a head, wine and tip—and truffles—included.

I went into the kitchen to thank Marcella and the others for cooking so brilliantly and I noticed that she had prepared the entire lunch—for thirty people—on a tiny old four-burner stove. At home, if I don't have my six-burner Viking with a grill in the middle, I find it quite impossible to cook a dinner for eight.

As we were driving back down the mountain, Joanna asked us if we'd like to take a quick tour of Spoleto. We had nothing else to do but digest our lunch, so we said we would. About a mile before we reached the bottom and the Via Flaminia, she directed us to turn off onto a dirt lane not much wider than the car. We parked and followed her up the trail. About two hundred yards along, we found ourselves on the Monteluco side of the Ponte delle Torri, the ancient aqueduct that connects the hill town of Spoleto to the sacred mountain. As we walked across, taking in the splendid view of the valley below, Joanna caught us up on the history of the town, the aqueduct and La Rocca, the medieval fortress that protects the Spoleto side of the bridge.