Bella Tuscany (11 page)

 

Anselmo takes his time. Even when he had his office covered with photos of broken-down houses, where he hoped someone would invest their souls, he had time to talk. In his transformation to gardener, he lavishes his attention on perfect bamboo tepees for the tomatoes. He brings me roses from his own garden and flats of strawberries. Best of all, he takes us on excursions. When Ed asks him about a cart for hauling the lemon trees into the
limonaia
in winter, he drives us immediately to his neighbor, a blacksmith in Ossaia. The
fabbro
makes a sketch, promises the low cart, which will slide right under the pot, for next week.

Anselmo motions us to follow him. “What is that flower?” I ask, pointing to a compact bush growing out of a stone wall.

“I've seen that all over the town walls. Looks like the flower on a passion vine,” Ed notices.

Anselmo looks at us incredulously.
“Capperi
.
”
He pulls off several buds. “I'll plant them in your wall, but they are bad for the wall. You must control them.” Capers—wild, everywhere. We'd never known.

In his barn, a royal mess, he leads us far in the back where extensive wine-making equipment is covered with dust: barrels, small casks, bottles, and a grand
torchio,
the slatted vat with iron bands and levers where grapes are pressed. Ed is admiring it the way men admire a new car, nodding his head and walking around it. Anselmo explains the mechanism to us. From a shelf he pulls down two bottles of his own
vin santo
. “Something to drink with
biscotti
.
”

His
vin santo
looks slightly murky. I wonder how long it has waited for us on the shelf.

Since we are close to his sister and brother-in-law's house, he wants us to meet them. We pile back in his huge Alfa and he shortly takes a rough turn up into their yard. His sister comes out and greets him as though she hasn't seen him in years. His brother-in-law, thinning pears on one of his acre-long lines of espaliered fruit trees, comes running. We are introduced as
“stranieri,”
foreigners. Out comes the
vin santo
for the foreigners. “Is this yours?” Ed asks Anselmo, but no, it is the brother-in-law's own. Ed is looking at the orchard. In the distance I see a corrugated roof on poles has been erected over what looks from here like a swimming pool. “May we look at the fruit trees?” Ed asks.

“Certo.”
The rows are elegant. The vase-shaped trees are developing vase-shaped pears. They are vigorous, all except for one section, which has a deep hole around it, causing roots to die and leaves to drop. The brother-in-law seems annoyed. He pulls on a nonexistent beard. His mouth curls in scorn.

“What happened here?” Ed asks.

Anselmo shakes one hand slowly in the air, that flinging gesture which means something like Good God Almighty.
“Porca miseria,”
the brother-in-law says, pig misery. He points toward the roofed structure. “They have discovered a Roman villa, the archeologists, and are making an excavation. They have dug here, and have killed this tree.” Clearly the sacrifice was not justified in his eyes. In Italy, whatever is underground on your property does not belong to you. “They have killed an olive.” He inclines his chin toward an olive now on a raised mound with a ditch around it. We know that to be a cardinal sin.

“A Roman villa?”

“The whole hill is a museum. There was not only a villa, but a whole town. Everyone knows, but now it is a discovery.” He shrugs. “If they asked me, I could show them where Hannibal's house is. But they don't ask. Just dig.”

Hannibal's defeat of Flaminio was a few miles away. Ossaia means ‘‘boneyard'' and derived from the stacks of bodies brought here after the battle. He leads us through his vegetable garden and a field to a ruin of a stone house which does look old but not two thousand years old. “
Sì,
Hannibal lived here.”

We walk back by the dig. Under a temporary roof, we see a black-and-white mosaic Greek key floor, the geometry of rooms. A large villa stood here, with a view right into the sister and brother-in-law's garden. The dig is inactive at this season.

As we drive away Anselmo tells us they added a room years ago. “They found a mosaic floor right where they poured the foundation.”

 

We stop once more to talk to a widow who wants him to sell her house. Even though Anselmo has closed his office, he still does a little business. “Maybe you would like this house. There is everything to restore.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror, almost clipping a bicyclist. He loves his sly little digs.

“Not interested.” He pulls inside the gate and stops in the dirt forecourt, scattering chickens. A woman in the old-fashioned black dress comes out, bent as a comma. She is older than Cortona. When we are introduced, she grabs my hand in her dry, hard one and does not let go as we walk around the property. As if anticipating that she soon will enter a silent eternity, she talks nonstop. I can barely look at the adorable bunnies she has scrooched together in a pen. “She sees something different when she looks at them,” Ed says. “She sees them roasting in the pan with fennel. She's not focused on their soft ears.” She tours the
orto,
where vegetables are thriving, looks in on two cows, flings open the lower doors of the house. Ah, a completely unrestored house, with the mangers and
cantina
still intact. Wine-making equipment crowds every square centimeter, dozens of rotting straw-covered demijohns, oak barrels, and bottles. In a small, immaculate room, she shows me a corner table where she still makes pasta when it's hot up in her kitchen. Jars of tomatoes line the shelves. A straight chair with a cowhide seat stands by the door to catch a breeze and her mending and knitting lie in baskets. Since she is crushing my ring into my fingers in her grip, I wish she would let go, and, at the same time, I am flattered by her instant attachment. “I think she wants us to buy the house,” Ed whispers in English.

“Yes, and it's no later than 1750 in here.”

Upstairs, she opens the rooms where her parents lived until they died. Their iron bed with a white bedspread dips on either side, conjuring the bodies of the two grim-faced sepia photographs framed on the wall. Bed. Chair.
Armadio
. A commode for the
vaso da notte,
the chamberpot. Her room is the same, with the addition of a lugubrious framed print of Christ, with dead palm branches tucked behind, and a yellowing oval photo of her husband as a young man. Fierce-eyed, tight-lipped, probably in his wedding suit, he stares toward the bed they shared as they grew older and older, older than he could have imagined when the camera caught the hot gleam in his eye. In a water glass floats a set of false teeth with plum-pink gums. His?

Like most Italian kitchens, hers looks and smells recently scrubbed. Even the faucets are polished. Inevitably, she pulls out the
vin santo
and pours, then she brings out
biscotti
. They are stone-hard; perhaps they were made in 1750. She is wonderful to behold. Since she's talking mile-a-minute to Anselmo about going to live with her daughter, and how the place is too much for her, I get a chance to look at her darting eyes full of intelligence, her hair tied under a black scarf. Her thin body is all force. I feel the indentations in my fingers where she squeezed—at least she had to let go to serve the wine.

She closes the gate behind us and waves until we're gone. Four feet eight inches at most, she's a whirling dervish of energy. I wish I knew her life story. I wish I could watch her make pasta and buttonholes. I wonder what she dreams.

“I hate for her to leave and live in an apartment in Foligno. Who will buy the place?” I ask as we drive away.

“She is asking twice what it's worth. I don't think she wants to sell.”

“I loved it. The manger could be a fabulous living room with doors opening onto a terrace.”

“I like that upstairs loggia,” Ed says.

Anselmo shakes his head. “You never know what foreigners will like. She'll probably sell to some crazy foreigner.”

 

“Be prepared for a six-hour feast,” our friend Donatella tells us. “Giusi has set up a kitchen in the whole barn so six cooks can work.” Her sister, Giusi, helps take care of our house when we are not here. The sisters are opposite. Donatella has an angular, dark beauty, somewhat like the Mona Lisa's, and an ironic humor. You can look way into her black eyes. Giusi in America would be Homecoming Queen. She could captain any pep squad. She's pretty, sociable, and upbeat. They are sisters and best friends. Each time we arrive at Bramasole, they've left flowers in the house, and the kitchen stocked with fruit, coffee, bread, and cheese so that we don't need to dash out if we are tired from the flight. Both are excellent cooks, who learned directly from a mother who still makes her own ravioli.

Giusi's two young sons are taking their first communion. This calls for a feast. We have not seen Giusi for weeks because she has been preparing the
festa
. After the service, around eighty people gather at the house in the mountains Giusi and her husband, Dario, share with his parents. Dario's sister and her family live in another house on the property. They are close to self-sufficient for all their food. The family takes care of a large vegetable garden, raises chickens, rabbits, lambs, and geese. The men hunt, keeping a supply of wild boar at the ready.

Everything they produce, and a lot more, goes into the first communion dinner. When we arrive at noon, the party is in full swing. Giusi gives me a tour of the house. For almost two years she has endured an extensive remodeling. She's kept the warm feel of the ancient farmhouse, but has installed lovely bathrooms, stone stairs, and an up-to-the-minute kitchen, which, of course, includes a wood-burning stove for cooking. Every knob and surface gleams. Every window sparkles. Outside, the
prosecco
already is flowing and women are passing trays of
crostini,
Tuscan
antipasti
of rounds of bread spread with various toppings:
porcini
mushrooms, spicy cheese, and chopped, seasoned chicken liver. Under a white tent, they've set a U-shaped table under balloons and twisted colored-paper streamers. The two boys are seated at the head, flanked by their parents. We've peered in the barn where many hands are at work. A table down the center is crowded with fruit tarts, enormous bowls of salad greens. Each woman has on a flowered dress. The barn whirls with color and motion. They're still chopping and peeling, putting the finishing garnishes together. For each plate, spring leeks, carrots, and asparagus are deftly tied in bundles with a blade of chive. I'm surprised to meet Guisi's mother. Young and red-haired, she looks nothing like her daughters. She has made
cappelli del prete,
pasta called priest's hats, for eighty-odd people.

As we soon find out, there are two pastas. Everyone is served a large helping of
tagliatelle
with a rich sauce of
cinghiale,
the wild boar. Many have seconds of this and I'm wiping the edge of the plate with bread for every drop of the delicious sauce. Then comes the priest's hats with four cheeses. And seconds of that. The efficient army of women swoops down and replaces our plates after each course. Someone in the barn is washing dishes like mad. Lamb with the vegetable bundles comes next, their own lamb roasted in the outdoor oven. In the distance we can hear sheep and cows, who don't yet know they will not always dwell in the lush pasture below but will be appearing on these same flowered plates. Two spotted puppies are passed around the table, petted and rocked. In earlier years it would have been babies, but with the Italian birthrate the lowest in Europe, babies are in short supply. A four-year-old flirt in a red dress is making the most of her position. She's practically ambushed by admirers. Toasts begin but the two boys, along with several friends, have absconded from the table. One gift to them was a computer with games so they've run inside to strafe the enemy. New carafes of wine replace the empties immediately. I am through. This is a stupendous groaning board. But Ed keeps eating. A little more lamb? I see him look up and smile,
“Sì.”
And
patate
? Again,
“Sì.”

Suddenly three men appear, carrying something heavy. People rush forward shouting and snapping pictures. Too large for their ovens, a gigantic thigh of a Val di Chiana cow has been roasted in a hotel oven in town and has just arrived on a tray that could hold a human. Soon platters of beef and more crisp potatoes circulate. I give in and have some. Oh no, it's too good. I can't have more, maybe a taste. Ed is eating like a lord. Two Italian women have asked him if he's in films so he feels particularly expansive. Salad arrives. Then fruit tart,
tiramisù,
and the reemergence of the two boys, galloping out like ponies. They shyly cut a three-tiered cake and offer the first pieces to their parents. The cake has rich layers of lemon filling. Out comes the
grappa
and
vin santo
. I'm astonished. Ed has some of both. He finds himself arm-in-arm with several men, singing a song he's never heard. An accordion starts and the dancing begins. I have never eaten this much at once in my life. Ed has eaten a prodigious amount.

At five, we are the first to leave. Our friends Susan and Cole, who married at our house during the restoration, are arriving in time for dinner. We find out later that most guests stayed until eleven, with the beef making several more appearances.

Our friends have arrived early and are sitting on the terrace. Happy as we are to see them, we barely can walk or speak. Ed describes the meal, ending with, “I just hope we're around when those boys get married. Imagine what that will be like.” We collapse for two hours then emerge in the sweet time of day to take them around our garden, gathering lettuces, zucchini, onions, and herbs for a simple salad and frittata. For them. We don't want to eat or drink for three days. We sip tepid water while they enjoy a great Brunello.