Under the Tuscan Sun (34 page)

The landscape appears cool although it's cooking. The terraces
aren't bleached this year, as they sometimes are. Our view to the
Apennines is green and forested. In someone's swimming pool at the
bottom of the valley, I see a little stick figure jump in.

Since we're up high, nights cool off to a lovely softness.
In late afternoon, heaps and piles of clouds cross over, their
shadows roving across the green hills. Tonight the Perseids shower,
it's San Lorenzo's night of the shooting stars—cause for a
celebratory dinner. We've seen them before and we know the gasps,
our quick pointing a second too late, the bright cascade of a
meteor, so momentary, so long expired. The garlic soup, chosen
over Boethius, is chilling in the fridge. Lemon and Basil Chicken,
an accidental discovery, and a terra-cotta dish of Gratin
Dauphinois, an old Julia Child potato favorite I've made for
years, are ready to cook. I have enough ripe pears to peel and
slice and improvise a mascarpone custard for them to bake into. I
scrub the bird droppings off the yellow table, spread the cloth I
made over the winter from leftover fabric I used for the wicker
on my Palo Alto patio fifteen years ago. I spent days on the double
welting around the cushion for the chaise longue. I could walk out
of that dining room door right now, fluff those cushions, tell the
dog “Down,” walk into the yard filled with kumquat and loquat,
mock orange and olive. Or could I? Everything stays. What chance,
when I bought that yellow-flowered bolt at Calico Corners, to think
it would end up on a table in Italy, with me in a new life.

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the
thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create
this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be
elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression “a place
in the sun” first come from? My rational thought processes cling
always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however,
streams easily along a current of fate. I'm here because I climbed
out the window at night when I was four.

ALL THE SUMMER FRUITS OF THE GREAT MEDITERRANEAN SUN
have ripened.
Beginning with cherries when I arrive, the summer progresses to
yellow peaches. Along the Roman road up Sant'Egidio, we pick
handfuls of the most divine fruit of all, the minute wild strawberries
that dangle like jewels under their jagged leaves. Then come the
white peaches with pale and fragrant flesh. Gelato made of these
makes you want to dance. Then the plums, all the varieties—the
small round gold, the dusky purple-blue, and the pale green ones
larger than golf balls. Grapes start to arrive from farther south. A
few ruddy apples, then the first pears ripen. The small green ones
couldn't be ripe but they are, then the globular speckled yellows.
In August, the figs just start to plump up, not reaching their peak
until September. But, finally, the blackberries, that heart-of-summer
fruit, are ripe.

Days before I go home, at the end of August, I can take out
my colander and pick enough for breakfast. Every morning the birds
are wild for them but can't manage to eat quite all. Picking
blackberries—a back-to-basics pleasure—passing over
the ones still touched with a hint of red and those that squish to
the touch, pulling off only the perfectly ripe ones until my fingers
are rosy. The taste of sun-warmed berries brings me the memory of
filling my jar with them in an abandoned cemetery. As a child, I
sat down on a heaped mound of dirt, unconsciously eating luscious
berries from a plant whose roots intertwined with old bones.

Bees burrow in the pears. Where they've fallen, thrushes feast.
Who knows how the wants of our ancestors act out in us? The mellow
scents somehow remind me of my mean Grandmother Davis. My
father privately called her The Snake. She was blind, with
Greek-statue eyes, but I always believed she could see. Her charming
husband had lost all the land she inherited from her parents, who
owned a big corner of South Georgia. On Sunday rides, she'd always
want Mother to drive her by the property she'd lost. She couldn't
see when we got there but she could smell peanut and cotton crops
in the humid air. “All this,” she'd mutter, “all
this.”
I'd look up from my book. The brown earth on either side of the car
spread flat to the horizon. From there, who could believe the
world is round? I first thought of her when we had the terraces
plowed and the upturned earth was ready for planting. Fertile
earth, rich as chocolate cake. Big Mama, I thought, biscuit-face, old
snake, just look at this dirt, all
this.

The heat breaks with a fast rain, a pelting determined rain
that soaks the ground then quits—gone, finished. The green
landscape smears across the windows. The sun bounces back out but
robbed of its terror now. Here, the edge of autumn. What is it?
The smell of leaves drying. A sudden shift in the air, a slightly
amber cast to the light, then a blue haze hanging over the valley
at evening. I would love to see the leaves turn, pick up the
hazelnuts and almonds, feel the first frost and build a little
olive wood fire to take the chill off the morning. My summer clothes
go in the duffle under the bed. I make a few wreathes of grape
vine and twine them with sage, thyme, and oregano, herbs I can
use in December. The fennel flowers I've been drying on a screen go
in a painted tin I found in the house. Perhaps the
nonna
I've grown fond of kept hers here, too.

The man with his coat over his shoulders stops in front of the
shrine with his handful of dried yarrow. He brushes out the shrine
with the side of his hand. All fall, when I am busy with students,
he will walk the white road, perhaps wearing an old knitted sweater,
later a scarf around his neck. The man is walking away. I see him
stop in the road and look back at the house. I wonder, for the
thousandth time, what he is thinking. He sees me at the window,
adjusts his coat over his shoulders, and turns toward home.

Scattered books go back to their proper shelves: my house in
order. One final blackberry cobbler and I'm gone. A lizard darts in,
panics, flees out the door. The thought of the future spins through
me. What magnet out there is pulling now? I stack pressed sheets
on the
armadio
shelves. Clearing my desk, I find a list:
copper polish, string, call Donatella, plant sunflowers, double
hollyhocks. The sun hits the Etruscan wall, turning the locust trees
to lace. Two white butterflies are mating in midair. I walk from
window to window, taking in the view.

B
en
T
ornati
(Welcome Back)

ON OUR FIRST MORNING BACK IN CORTONA,
after several months in California, my husband Ed and I walk into town for groceries. First, I drop off film to be developed at Giorgio and Lina's photo shop.
“Ben tornati,”
Giorgio shouts, welcome back. Lina comes from behind the counter and all four of us exchange the ritual cheek kisses. Finally, I've learned to go to the right, then left, thereby avoiding head swivels or full-lip encounters. Lina wastes no time. In the confusion of other customers and the small space, I piece together, “We must go for dinner,” “In the country, but close,” and the ultimate praise, “She cooks like my mother.”

Giorgio interrupts. “Saturday or Sunday? I prefer Saturday but would make the supreme sacrifice.” He looks like an older, more mischievous version of Caravaggio's Bacchus. He's the town photographer, present at every wedding and festival, and is known to like dancing. Last summer we shared an all-goose feast with him and Lina—and, of course, about twenty others. Every celebration involves an infinitely expandable table. “The pasta with duck         .         .         .” He shakes his head. “That duck squawked in the pen in the morning and came to the table at night.”

“What's the sacrifice?” Ed asks.

“Soccer in Rome.”

“Then we'll go Saturday.” Ed knows soccer is sacred.

We cross the piazza and run into Alessandra. “Let's go for coffee,” she says, sweeping us into the bar to catch up on news. She is newly pregnant and wants to discuss names. As we leave her and head toward the grocery store, we see Cecilia with her English husband and two magical little girls, Carlotta and Camilla. “Dinner,” they say. “Come when you can. Any night.”

When we arrive home with our groceries, Beppe, who helps us with the olive trees and the vegetable garden, has left a dozen eggs on the outdoor table. His fresh eggs cause any soufflé to hit the top of the oven. Our friend Guisi has left
cenci,
“rags” of fried pastry dusted with powdered sugar.

The next day, Giorgio—another Giorgio, who is Ed's good friend—stops by with a hunk of
cinghiale,
wild boar. We know well his wife Vittoria's vinegar marinade and slowly roasted loin.

“Did you murder this poor pig?” I tease. He knows I'm horrified that Tuscans shoot and eat songbirds, as well as anything else that moves, including porcupine.

“You like it! So you have the problem.” He tells us that his hunting group shot twenty boars this season. Later Beppe comes around again, bringing a rabbit.

And so it goes. One day back, and this is only a part of what happens. The return to Cortona always astounds me. The innate hospitality and generosity of the people visit my life like a miracle.

OVER A DECADE AGO, I BOUGHT BRAMASOLE, A GONE-TO-RUIN
house in the Tuscan countryside, and began to spend part of each year there. Slowly, the abandoned olive trees have responded to pruning, plowing, and organic fertilizer. Slowly, the house has awakened from its long slumber and seems itself again, festooned with trailing geraniums and filled with the furniture we have brought in piece by piece from antique markets. Because we loved the restoration process, we have begun another project. Last summer we were picking blackberries with our neighbor Chiara and spotted a stone house where Little Red Ridinghood might have visited Grandmother. We crawled through brambles and found a nine-hundred-year-old structure, so old it had a stone roof. Not long after, we began a historically correct restoration, which drains the coffers but is so exciting. We love the land, especially during the olive harvest every fall, which culminates in a trip to the mill to press our year's supply of pungent green oil. This September, we bought another grove just below us and acquired 250 more of these magical presences, the olive trees. At the corner of the grove, embedded in a stone wall, Ed spotted a slender marble column. We pulled it out of the wall and saw letters engraved. I scrubbed and found incised a memorial to a young soldier who fell in World War I.

We are now accustomed to such finds; the land has a long memory here, constantly giving us something from the past and constantly renewing for the future. Even the ancient grape vines continue to rebound on Bramasole's terraced land. Last October, we made wine, with Beppe's help. Our yield—twelve bottles. When we opened the first one, we thought twelve probably was more than enough, but we like tasting the flinty, sour wine that comes straight from the dirt on our steeply terraced land. When Riccardo heard of our bad wine, he brought us a hundred new vines. Now a friend with a backhoe has dug a deep trench along a terrace. Beppe will tell us when we can plant.

Living here, I've intensely reconnected with nature. The land, we've learned, is always in a state of lively evolution. The lane of cypresses and lavender we planted is beginning to look as though it has always been there. The slender cypresses, just my height when we planted them, now look like those exclamation points we see punctuating the Tuscan landscape. Between them, the lavender's amethystine radiance lights the path. Roses, marguerites, lavender, pale yellow petunias, and lilies on our front terraces have made the ivy and blackberry jungles just a memory. The biggest change is grass. Grass is not Tuscan. We lived with a mown and watered weed lawn for several years. Lovely in spring and early summer, it looked forlorn in August. No amount of precious water kept it alive. One September week, with the help of three neighbors, we unrolled miles of sod trucked from Rome. The irrigation system looks like the Chicago Fire Department's command central. Neither of us understands it completely. Now, a few years later, the clovers and tiny flowers have staged a comeback—grass giving over to weed again.

When we had to disguise a large gas tank for our heating system, we nudged it against a hillside and had a stone wall built in front of it. I asked the masons to incorporate an old window from the house and to build a shrine at one end. They made the top of the wall irregular, and now it looks like a remnant of an old house. The top is planted with lavender, which draws thousands of white butterflies. We were all amused at this little folly. While the workers finished, I slapped cerulean-blue paint inside the shrine, the traditional background for all the shrines in this area. I already had a della Robbia–type ceramic Mary and Jesus ready to hang, but as the paint dried, the workmen began exclaiming, half ironically, half seriously, over the “miracle” in the shrine. “Don't tell the pope,” they advised, “or the
pellegrini
[pilgrims] will arrive by the hundreds.” I had no idea what they were talking about. “Look what has happened.” I looked.

Faintly, but surely, I saw the white wings, face, and flowing robes of a hovering angel. An accident of the thin paint. I quietly propped my ceramic Mary in the corner and left the “miracle” to preside over the pomegranate and hawthorn.

A few weeks later, at the height of red-poppy season, a dozen white poppies sprang into bloom beneath the shrine. In all the fields rampant with bloom in Tuscany, I'd never seen a white poppy, nor had the workmen, who'd moved on to another project. We joked and stared.

Many local people believe that this area is hot in spiritual spots. “Can't you feel something on the steps of San Francesco's church?” I've been asked. Well, no. Nothing. But I consider the rogue white poppies and the cloudy angel, and I venture a small belief in that direction.

Now we are having a new stone wall built so that I can plant a cutting garden. Above that level, at the end of the vegetable garden, we sow hundreds of girasole seeds every year. The sunflowers, just the height of a friend's nine-year-old girl, fill my house with their sunny presence.

I have many plans for other projects—a third fountain, a raspberry patch, a chestnut fence for wild hot-pink rugosas to sprawl over.

The house and garden's changes over a decade (our first years we only hacked and cleared) parallel the changes in our lives among the Italians. Once we were the
stranieri,
the foreigners, who'd been crazy enough to take on a house abandoned for thirty years. Now we just live here. It is a commonly accepted idea that when Americans move to a foreign country, the local people never really accept them. Equally mistaken is the assumption that these expats regard all locals as amusing stereotypes. Cortona is home. We did not intend to make such a spiritual shift but it happened. We have a tribe of Italian friends and everyone we know there is vividly singular. Our neighbors are as close as family. What luck—the intense sense of community that we once observed in this small hilltown now includes us. We are comfortable in a wider, deeper sense than I ever dreamed.

My realization of the profound change in my life happened at the ceremony when I was made an honorary citizen of this noble town. No one does ceremonies like the Italians. I followed a group in medieval dress with trumpets blaring across the piazza. The
carabinieri
in their spiffy uniforms escorted me into the fourteenth-century Town Hall. Thrilling. The horror was that I had to give a ten-minute speech in Italian. I was so scared. But then I looked out at all my friends in the audience, smiling, holding flowers, pleased.

The event symbolized just how wildly unexpected my life had become. We are changed by place. I'm fascinated to the core to learn how fundamentally different Italy is; to learn that the world is not small; that they are not like us. I am so happy for that.

When I first came to Cortona, I used to think, What can I give back? I thought in terms of tutoring or helping to raise money for scholarships. I had no idea that I was about to write three books about a new life in that place, and that the unexpected response to those books would startle not only Ed and me but our adopted town as well. When
Under the Tuscan Sun
was published, I never imagined that anyone in Cortona would read it. Originally published in a tiny edition, I expected it to go forth in the world as my books of poetry had done—to extended family, colleagues, and friends and perhaps to friends of friends. Still, I changed names out of a respect for privacy. After the books appeared in Italian, people would pull me aside and say, “But why did you change my name?” Now, often, someone will tell me of an experience in World War II, or something about old wheat festivals, or a personal story. “You can write about it, can't you?” each one asks. This quite significant for me.

When travellers who had read my books began to come to Cortona, the merchants and the citizens were thrilled, not only for the economy but because those travellers who seek out a place because they have read a book are interested in the culture, art, and history. Everyone dreads oblivious or obnoxious tourists. Cortona has extremely few of those. At our house, we frequently see people in the road below, sketching or taking a picture or visiting with others they've met on the walk from town. If we're outside, we chat. I've met more people in the last five years than I met in my entire previous life. Local artists sell paintings of our house in the shops in town. It's still a shock to see Bramasole hanging on a restaurant wall but I have not minded any of this. I'm flattered that someone would walk a mile to see something I wrote about. Rather than causing a problem, which many people assume, the books actually wove us more deeply into the rich fabric of everyday life. “Where's the house of that American writer?” I heard someone ask the policeman. “Get in the car—I'll take you there,” he answered. We have heard endless stories of travellers who have been invited to dinner, picked up on the road, offered a glass of
vin santo.
The openness and generosity we experience here are offered as well to strangers of three nights.

“Come on, it can't be as idyllic there as you say,” I'm often scolded.

“It's even better,” I reply. If only I could do justice to the beauty of living among the Cortonesi.

NOW DISNEY HAS COME TO TOWN.