Under the Tuscan Sun
C
ontents
BRAMARE
: (ARCHAIC) TO YEARN FOR
A HOUSE AND THE LAND IT TAKES TWO OXEN TWO DAYS TO PLOW
FESTINA TARDE
(MAKE HASTE SLOWLY)
RIVA, MAREMMA
: INTO WILDEST TUSCANY
FLOATING WORLD: A WINTER SEASON
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
Under the Tuscan Sun
For Ann Cornelisen
A
cknowledgments
Many thanks to my agent, Peter Ginsberg, of Curtis Brown Ltd., to Charlie
Conrad, my editor at Broadway Books, and to the spectacular staff at Broadway Books. Jane Piorko of the
New York Times,
Elaine Greene of
House Beautiful,
and Rosellen Brown, guest editor of
Ploughshares,
published early versions of parts of this book:
mille grazie.
Friends and family members deserve at least a bottle of Chianti and a handful of Tuscan poppies: Todd Alden, Paul Bertolli, Anselmo Bettarelli, Josephine Carson, Ben Hernandez, Charlotte Painter, Donatella di Palme, Rupert Palmer, Lyndall Passerini, Tom Sterling, Alain Vidal, Marcia and Dick Wertime, and all the Willcoxons. Homage to the memory of Clare Sterling for the gift of her verve and knowledge. To Ed Kleinschmidt and Ashley King, incalculable thanks.
P
reface
“WHAT ARE YOU GROWING HERE
?” the upholsterer lugs an armchair up the walkway to the house but his quick eyes are
on the land.
“Olives and grapes,” I answer.
“Of course, olives and grapes, but what else?”
“Herbs, flowers—we're not here in the spring to plant
much else.”
He puts the chair down on the damp grass and scans the
carefully pruned olive trees on the terraces where we now are
uncovering and restoring the former vineyard. “Grow potatoes,” he advises. “They'll take care of themselves.” He points to the third terrace. “There, full sun, the right place for potatoes, red potatoes, yellow, potatoes for
gnocchi di patate.
”
And so, at the beginning of our fifth summer here, we
now dig the potatoes for ourdinner. They come up so easily; it's like finding Easter eggs. I'm surprised how clean they are. Just a rinse and they shine.
The way we have potatoes is the way most everything has come about, as we've transformed this abandoned Tuscan house and
land over the past four years. We watch Francesco Falco, who has spent
most of his seventy-five years attending to grapes, bury the tendril
of an old vine so that it shoots out new growth. We do the same.
The grapes thrive. As foreigners who have landed here by grace,
we'll try anything. Much of the restoration we did ourselves; an
accomplishment, as my grandfather would say, out of the fullness of
our ignorance.
In 1990, our first summer here, I bought an oversized blank
book with Florentine paper covers and blue leather binding. On the
first page I wrote ITALY. The book looked as though it should have
immortal poetry in it, but I began with lists of wildflowers, lists of
projects, new words, sketches of tile in Pompeii. I described rooms,
trees, bird calls. I added planting advice: “Plant sunflowers when
the moon crosses Libra,” although I had no clue myself as to when
that might be. I wrote about the people we met and the food we
cooked. The book became a chronicle of our first four years here.
Today it is stuffed with menus, postcards of paintings, a drawing of
a floor plan of an abbey, Italian poems, and diagrams of the garden.
Because it is thick, I still have room in it for a few more summers.
Now the blue book has become
Under the Tuscan Sun,
a
natural outgrowth of my first pleasures here. Restoring, then
improving, the house; transforming an overgrown jungle into its
proper function as a farm for olives and grapes; exploring the
layers and layers of Tuscany and Umbria; cooking in a foreign kitchen
and discovering the many links between the food and the
culture—these intense joys frame the deeper pleasure
of learning to live another kind of life. To bury the grape tendril in
such a way that it shoots out new growth I recognize easily as a
metaphor for the way life must change from time to time if we are to
go forward in our thinking.
During these early June days, we must clear the terraces of the wild grasses so that when the heat of July strikes and the land dries, we'll be protected from fire. Outside my window, three men with weed
machines sound like giant bees. Domenico will be arriving tomorrow
to disc the terraces, returning the chopped grasses to the soil. His
tractor follows the looping turns established by oxen long ago.
Cycles. Though the weed machines and the discer make shorter work,
I still feel that I fall into this ancient ritual of summer. Italy
is thousands of years deep and on the top layer I am standing on a
small plot of land, delighted today with the wild orange lilies
spotting the hillside. While I'm admiring them, an old man stops
in the road and asks if I live here. He tells me he knows the land
well. He pauses and looks along the stone wall, then in a quiet
voice tells me his brother was shot here. Age seventeen, suspected
of being a Partisan. He keeps nodding his head and I know the scene
he looks at is not my rose garden, my hedge of sage and lavender.
He has moved beyond me. He blows me a kiss.
“Bella casa,
signora.”
Yesterday I found a patch of blue cornflowers around
an olive tree where his brother must have fallen. Where did they
come from? A seed dropped by a thrush? Will they spread next year
over the crest of the terrace? Old places exist on sine waves of
time and space that bend in some logarithmic motion I'm beginning
to ride.
I open the blue book. Writing about this place, our discoveries,
wanderings, and daily life, also has been a pleasure. A Chinese poet
many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is
like being alive twice. At the taproot, to seek change probably always
is related to the desire to enlarge the psychic place one lives in.
Under the Tuscan Sun
maps such a place. My reader, I hope,
is like a friend who comes to visit, learns to mound flour on the
thick marble counter and work in the egg, a friend who wakes to
the four calls of the cuckoo in the linden and walks down the terrace paths singing to the grapes; who picks jars of plums, drives with me to hill towns of round towers and spilling geraniums, who wants to see the olives the first day they are olives. A guest on holiday is intent on pleasure. Feel the breeze rushing around those hot marble statues? Like old peasants, we could sit by the fireplace, grilling slabs of bread and oil, pour a young Chianti. After rooms of Renaissance virgins and dusty back roads from Umbertide, I cook a pan of small eels fried with garlic and sage. Under the fig where two cats curl, we're cool. I've counted: the dove coos sixty times per minute. The Etruscan wall above the house dates from the eighth century
B.C.
We can talk. We have time.
Cortona, 1995
B
ramare:
(Archaic) To Yearn For
I AM ABOUT TO BUY A HOUSE IN A FOREIGN
country. A house with the beautiful name of Bramasole. It is tall, square, and
apricot-colored with faded green shutters, ancient tile roof, and an
iron balcony on the second level, where ladies might have sat with
their fans to watch some spectacle below. But below, overgrown
briars, tangles of roses, and knee-high weeds run rampant. The
balcony faces southeast, looking into a deep valley, then into the
Tuscan Apennines. When it rains or when the light changes, the
facade of the house turns gold, sienna, ocher; a previous scarlet
paint job seeps through in rosy spots like a box of crayons left
to melt in the sun. In places where the stucco has fallen away,
rugged stone shows what the exterior once was. The house rises
above a
strada bianca,
a road white with pebbles, on a terraced slab of hillside covered with fruit and olive trees.
Bramasole: from
bramare,
to yearn for, and
sole,
sun: something that yearns for the sun, and yes, I do.
The family wisdom runs strongly against this decision. My
mother has said “Ridiculous,” with her certain and forceful stress
on the second syllable, “RiDICulous,” and my sisters, although
excited, fear I am eighteen, about to run off with a sailor in the
family car. I quietly have my own doubts. The upright seats in the
notaio's
outer office don't help. Through my thin white
linen dress, spiky horsehairs pierce me ever time I shift, which
is often in the hundred-degree waiting room. I look over to see
what Ed is writing on the back of a receipt: Parmesan, salami,
coffee, bread. How can he? Finally, the signora opens her door and
her torrential Italian flows over us.
The
notaio
is nothing like a notary; she's the legal
person who conducts real-estate transactions in Italy. Ours,
Signora Mantucci, is a small, fierce Sicilian woman with thick
tinted glasses that enlarge her green eyes. She talks faster than
any human I have ever heard. She reads long laws aloud. I thought
all Italian was mellifluous; she makes it sound like rocks
crashing down a chute. Ed looks at her raptly; I know he's in thrall
to the sound of her voice. The owner, Dr. Carta, suddenly thinks
he has asked too little; he
must
have, since we have
agreed to buy it. We think his price is exorbitant. We
know
his price is exorbitant. The Sicilian doesn't pause;
she will not be interrupted by anyone except by Giuseppe from the
bar downstairs, who suddenly swings open the dark doors, tray aloft,
and seems surprised to see his
Americani
customers sitting there almost cross-eyed in confusion. He brings the signora her midmorning thimble of espresso, which she downs in a gulp, hardly pausing. The owner expects to claim that the house cost one amount while it really cost much more. “That is just the way it's done,” he insists. “No one is fool enough to declare
the real value.” He proposes we bring one check to the
notaio's
office, then pass him ten smaller checks
literally under the table.
Anselmo Martini, our agent, shrugs.
Ian, the English estate agent we hired to help with
translation, shrugs also.
Dr. Carta concludes, “You Americans! You take things so
seriously. And,
per favore,
date the checks at one-week
intervals so the bank isn't alerted to large sums.”
Was that the same bank I know, whose sloe-eyed teller
languidly conducts a transaction every fifteen minutes, between
smokes and telephone calls? The signora comes to an abrupt halt,
scrambles the papers into a folder and stands up. We are to come
back when the money and papers are ready.
A WINDOW IN OUR HOTEL ROOM OPENS ONTO AN EXPANSIVE
view over the ancient roofs of Cortona, down to the dark expanse of the Val di
Chiana. A hot and wild wind—the
scirocco—
is
driving normal people a little crazy. For me, it seems to reflect
my state of mind. I can't sleep. In the United States, I've bought
and sold a few houses before—loaded up the car with my mother's Spode, the cat, and the ficus for the five- or five-thousand-mile drive to the next doorway where a new key would fit. You
have
to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head
is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of
memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.
And the place, never neutral of course, will cast its influence.
Beyond that, legal complications and contingencies must be worked
out. But here, absolutely everything conspires to keep me staring
into the dark.
Italy always has had a magnetic north pull on my psyche.
Houses have been on my mind for four summers of renting farmhouses
all over Tuscany. In the first place Ed and I rented with friends, we
started calculating on the first night, trying to figure out if our
four pooled savings would buy the tumbled stone farm we could see
from the terrace. Ed immediately fell for farm life and roamed
over our neighbors' land looking at the work in progress. The
Antolinis grew tobacco, a beautiful if hated crop. We could hear
workers shout
“Vipera!”
to warn the others of a poisonous snake. At evening, a violet blue haze rose from the dark leaves. The well-ordered farm looked peaceful from the vantage point of our terrace. Our friends never came back, but for the next three vacations, the circuitous search for a summer home became a quest for us—whether we ever found a place or not,
we were happening on places that made pure green olive oil,
discovering sweet country Romanesque churches in villages,
meandering the back roads of vineyards, and stopping to taste the
softest Brunello and the blackest Vino Nobile. Looking for a house
gives an intense focus. We visited weekly markets not just with the purchase of picnic peaches in mind; we looked carefully at all the produce's quality and variety, mentally forecasting birthday dinners, new holidays, and breakfasts for weekend guests. We spent hours sitting in piazzas or sipping lemonade in local bars, secretly getting a sense of the place's ambiance. I soaked many a heel blister
in a hotel bidet, rubbed bottles of lotion on my feet, which had
covered miles of stony streets. We hauled histories and guides and
wildflower books and novels in and out of rented houses and hotels.
Always we asked local people where they liked to eat and headed to
restaurants our many guidebooks never mentioned. We both have an
insatiable curiosity about each jagged castle ruin on the hillsides.
My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria
and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.
Cortona was the first town we ever stayed in and we always came back to it during the summers we rented near Volterra, Florence, Montisi, Rignano, Vicchio, Quercegrossa, all those fascinating, quirky houses. One had a kitchen two people could not pass in, but there was a slice of a view of the Arno. Another kitchen had no hot water and no knives, but the house was built into medieval ramparts overlooking vineyards. One had several sets of china for forty, countless glasses and silverware, but the refrigerator iced over every day and by four the door swung open, revealing a new igloo. When the weather was damp, I got a tingling shock if I touched anything in the kitchen. On the property, Cimabue, legend says, discovered the young Giotto drawing a sheep in
the dirt. One house had beds with back-crunching dips in the middles.
Bats flew down the chimney and buzzed us, while worms in the
beams sent down a steady sifting of sawdust onto the pillows. The
fireplace was so big we could sit in it while grilling our veal chops
and peppers.
We drove hundreds of dusty miles looking at houses that turned out to be in the flood plain of the Tiber or overlooking strip mines. The Siena agent blithely promised that the view would be wonderful again in twenty years; replanting stripped areas was a law.
A glorious medieval village house was wildly expensive. The
saw-toothed peasant we met in a bar tried to sell us his childhood
home, a windowless stone chicken house joined to another house, with
snarling dogs lunging at us from their ropes. We fell hard for a farm
outside Montisi; the
contessa
who owned it led us on for
days, then decided she needed a sign from God before she could sell
it. We had to leave before the sign arrived.
As I think back over those places, they suddenly seem
preposterously alien and Cortona does, too. Ed doesn't think so.
He's in the piazza every afternoon, gazing at the young couple
trying to wheel their new baby down the street. They're halted
every few steps. Everyone circles the carriage. They're leaning
into the baby's face, making noises, praising the baby. “In my
next life,” Ed tells me, “I want to come back as an Italian
baby.” He steeps in the piazza life: the sultry and buffed man
pushing up his sleeve so his muscles show when he languidly props
his chin in his hand; the pure flute notes of Vivaldi drifting from
an upstairs window; the flower seller's fan of bright flowers
against the stone shop; a man with no neck at all unloading lambs
from his truck. He slings them like flour sacks over his shoulder and
the lambs' eyeballs bulge out. Every few minutes, Ed looks up at the
big clock that has kept time for so long over this piazza. Finally,
he takes a stroll, memorizing the stones in the street.
Across the hotel courtyard a visiting Arab chants his prayers
toward dawn, just when I finally can fall asleep. He sounds as though
he is gargling with salt water. For hours, he rings the voice's
changes over a small register, over and over. I want to lean out
and shout, “Shut up!” Now and then I have to laugh. I look out,
see him nodding in the window, a sweet smile on his face. He reminds
me so much of tobacco auctioneers I heard in hot warehouses in the
South as a child. I am seven thousand miles from home, plunking down
my life savings on a whim. Is it a whim? It feels very close to
falling in love and that's never really whimsical but comes from
some deep source. Or does it?
EACH TIME WE STEP OUT OF THE COOL, HIGH ROOMS OF THE
hotel and into the sharp-edged sun, we walk around town and like it more and
more. The outdoor tables at Bar Sport face the Piazza Signorelli.
A few farmers sell produce on the steps of the nineteenth-century
teatro
every morning. As we drink espresso, we watch them
holding up rusty hand scales to weigh the tomatoes. The rest of the
piazza is lined with perfectly intact medieval or Renaissance
palazzi.
Easily, someone might step out any second and
break into
La Traviata.
Every day we visit each keystoned medieval gate in the Etruscan walls, explore the Fiat-wide stone streets lined with Renaissance and older houses and the even narrower
vicoli,
mysterious pedestrian passageways, often steeply stepped. The bricked-up fourteenth-century “doors of the dead” are still visible. These ghosts of doors beside the main
entrance were designed, some say, to take out the plague
victims—bad luck for them to exit by the main entrance.
I notice in the regular doors, people often leave their keys in
the lock.
Guidebooks describe Cortona as “somber” and “austere.”
They misjudge. The hilltop position, the walls and upright, massive
stone buildings give a distinctly vertical feel to the architecture.
Walking across the piazza, I feel the abrupt, angular shadows fall
with Euclidean purity. I want to stand up straight—the
upright posture of the buildings seems to carry over to the
inhabitants. They walk slowly, with very fine, I want to say,
carriage.
I keep saying, “Isn't she beautiful?”
“Isn't he gorgeous?” “Look at
that
face—pure
Raphael.” By late afternoon, we're sitting again with our espressi,
this time facing the other piazza. A woman of about sixty with her
daughter and the teenage granddaughter pass by us, strolling,
their arms linked, sun on their vibrant faces. We don't know why
light has such a luminous quality. Perhaps the sunflower crops
radiate gold from the surrounding fields. The three women look
peaceful, proud, impressively pleased. There should be a gold coin
with their faces on it.