Bella Tuscany (15 page)

Frozen Sunset

Just a plain ice, but anything with blood oranges seems exotic and primal. Is it the word “blood” that enters the imagination as a glass of the scarlet juice pours into a glass? Or is it just the jolt of slicing the orange, seeing the two rounds falling open, glistening scarlet, and vinous. The mind is cooled and soothed by the sweet-tart layers of taste in the icy melting of this blood orange sorbet.

— 
Make a sugar syrup by boiling together 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar, then simmering it for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add 2 cups of blood orange juice, and the juice of a lemon. Cool in the fridge. When well-chilled, process in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions. Or you can freeze it in ice trays until slushy, break up the icy mixture, then partially freeze again. Garnish with lemon balm or mint.

Ginger Pound Cake

Baking must be a deeply encoded instinct. When it comes to dessert, I find that I often return to something I know from my mother and Willie Bell's kitchen. Ginger has nothing to do with Italy but it has a great deal to do with fruit. My carry-on luggage would puzzle a customs inspector, if one ever bothered to look inside. She might find a bottle of cane syrup—because how can one have biscuits at breakfast without butter and cane syrup—or a bottle of corn syrup for various desserts such as this old favorite.

— 
Sift 31/3 cups of flour, 1/2 t. salt, 1 t. baking powder, 1 t. baking soda, 1 t. nutmeg, and 11/2 T. ginger. Cream 1 cup of butter and 1 cup of sugar. Separate 4 eggs. Stir beaten yolks into sugar mixture. Beat in 1 cup of light corn syrup, then stir in flour alternately with 1/2 cup of cream. Beat the 4 whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold egg whites into cake mixture. Pour into a non-stick tube pan that has been lightly buttered for good measure. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour. Cool briefly then invert on a plate.

Blood Oranges with Vin Santo

If you do not have
vin santo
, substitute brandy. This is a vibrant dessert, especially paired with slivers of Ginger Pound Cake. Later in the season, prepare peaches this way, too, simmering them only five minutes.

— 
Boil 2 cups of water, 1 cup of sugar, 4 T. of
vin santo
and 3 or 4 cloves. Add sections of 6 peeled blood oranges, then turn heat down and simmer for 10 minutes. Drain and cool. Mix 3 cups of mascarpone with 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of white wine, and the juice of a lemon. Serve the mascarpone in 6 bowls, topped with the oranges.

Circles on My Map

Monte Oliveto Maggiore

A DREAMY DAY TO DRIVE. THE GREEN
LANDSCAPE
smears across the windshield. Flowering chestnut trees begin to droop under the rain. We cross the valley, skirt the hilltown of Sinalunga, and drive toward Monte Oliveto Maggiore, one of the great monasteries of Italy. The greens! Hills look as though footlights angle across them—neon green, poison green, green velvet, Life Saver green. When I was five, I saw an irresistible green moss and jumped on it. I quickly sank into sludge and my father, in a pale linen suit and shouting “Jesus H. Christ,” had to fish me out. I had jumped through a brilliant, thick algae covering the surface of an open septic tank behind the cotton mill. But this green is innocent; I could jump into it and roll like a horse.

We start to glimpse the wild landscape of eroded
crete,
clay, which you see in many Sienese paintings. Dramatic and forbidding in late summer, the crevices are still softened by grasses. The monks who chose this spot definitely wanted to leave the world behind for a place of contemplative seclusion. I try to think of travelling here in the 1500s, when twenty miles was the most you could count on covering in a day and the maps that existed rarely showed roads. A curvy one like this must have been a tortuous track susceptible to washout in storms. Italian roads still depend on a directional sense rather than highway numbers. You see signs to specific places rather than 580 East or 880 North, a custom probably connected with early travel. One traveller in the 1500s wrote, “I have had so little respite that my bottom has been constantly a-fire from the saddle.” Obviously a common problem; earlier, the rigors of the road inspired Cato to give a bit of advice, “To prevent chafing: When you set out on a journey, keep a small branch of Pontic wormwood under the anus.” The more comfortable Alfa hugs the road nicely and Ed loves the constant downshifting on hills and hairpin loops.

Around a curve, suddenly the red brick complex looms. The moat and stronghold effect of the massive structure remind me that even here in the Middle Ages defense was an issue. Cypresses and chapels and footpaths surround the monastery, which looks like a beautiful prison. At the entrance, a Benedictine monk in an ankle-length white robe that looks unbearably scratchy and hot checks everyone for proper attire. My daughter was turned away last summer by this fashion policeman when she presented herself at the door in a sleeveless Lycra top and a short skirt. The monk wagged his finger in her face and shook his head. Arms may not be exposed. She was furious when she saw men in shorts being admitted but she went back to the car, borrowed her boyfriend's baggy T-shirt and then was allowed to enter. Today, I see him turn away a man in short shorts. If the Benedictines must wear those wooly robes, I suppose flesh has to be a philosophical concept. At least today proves it's not a misogynistic one. He scans my mid-calf–length skirt and yellow sweater and nods me in.

Once inside the fifteenth-century cloister, the impression of a fortress dissolves into the serene quiet of a light-drenched courtyard with pots of geraniums. Somewhere in the complex, monks labor over the restoration of old books, or engage in concocting Flora di Monte Oliveto, a herbal liqueur used as a curative. Their other main product is honey. I would like to see them in their robes, opening the hives, an act unchanged since medieval times.

Behind the bordering carved arcades, the Sodoma and Signorelli (a Cortona boy) frescoes of the life and miracles of San Benedetto—holy inspiration for this order—line the inside walls.

During these years of transforming the house, we become obsessed at different times over aspects of construction. For a while, wherever we were we noticed drainpipes, how they were attached, where they leaked, whether they were copper or tin. When we had a humidity problem on a wall, we found ourselves spotting areas of mildew and rippled paint on cathedral and museum walls, ignoring the art and architecture while trying to pinpoint the source of the problem.

Today, we're riveted by the Signorelli fresco of a falling wall. “Walls fall,” in the immortal words of Primo Bianchi when our Lime Tree Bower wall careened into the road below. Falling stone is a particular nightmare of ours. In the background of the fresco, a monk loses his footing when a wall starts to slide, and he tumbles through scaffolding. A little devil hovers above him. Was there a red devil hovering in the linden trees over our wall? In the middle distance, three monks are carrying the lifeless body, and in the foreground the monk is miraculously revived by a blessing from Benedetto. As in other frescoes, this event does not seem to qualify as a major miracle. After all, the monk probably was just knocked out. Benedetto must have been loved and revered, so much so that everything he did seemed miraculous. If I had not bought the guidebook in the monastery shop, I would have no idea of all that is going on in these paintings.

I love the sense of time found in many frescoes: The whole sequence of a narrative is composed as one painting, with past to present depicted from small to large or left to right; the viewer first perceives the whole simultaneously happening event, then “reads” the progression. Time collapses, as it so often does in memory. The painter, seeking to tell a story, is bound by the Alpha-Omega concept of time, but the structured composition of the whole fresco runs back to an earlier intuition: All time is eternally present.

In the next fresco, four monks cannot move a large stone. Look closer—there's a devil in the stone. The monks have long iron poles exactly like ours and have wedged them under the stone, but the evil force keeps it immovable until Benedetto makes the sign of the cross over it. We have confronted many such stones, without the help of divine intervention. Now I'm understanding his sainthood. The power to lift stones surely qualifies him.

Off to the side in another Signorelli, a woman in blue is three-quarters turned away from the viewer. She's as lovely as the famous Vermeer painting of the woman pouring from a pitcher at a window. Two monks, against the rules of their order, are having a fine meal in a house outside the monastery. They're focused on a laden table, which is served by two women and a boy carefully holding a bowl. The woman in blue pours wine from a pitcher into a glass and you almost can hear it splash. Her hair is caught up in a cap which pushes out her ear. The long line of her neck and the faint indentation of her backbone through her dress give you the muscular sensation of her body in the act of pouring. Everything about her feels intent on what she's doing. The other woman in sea-foam green has rushed over from the fireplace, skirts in motion, carrying aloft what looks suspiciously like a
torta della nonna
. For all her delicate, almond-eyed beauty, she has exceptionally large hands and feet. Perhaps an assistant stepped in and painted them while Signorelli himself went out for a pitcher of cool wine. These women flanking the fresco are two of the most arresting images in the whole cycle. Just out the window, it's later. The two well-fed monks have been found out by Benedetto. They're on their knees begging forgiveness, with the taste of the wine and
torta
still lingering in their mouths.

During the decoration of Monte Oliveto, which he began in 1495, Signorelli left after painting six frescoes, and the Benedetto cycle became Sodoma's project in 1505. Il Sodoma, what a name. He was born Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. The monks called him “Il Mattaccio,” which means idiot or madman. On the way over, I pulled Vasari's
Lives of the Artists
out of our travel books in a box on the back seat of the car and read aloud to Ed, “His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable, and he always had boys and beardless youths about him, of whom he was inordinately fond. This earned him the name of Sodoma; but instead of feeling shame he gloried in it, writing stanzas and verses on it, and singing them to the accompaniment of the lute. He loved to fill his house with all manner of curious animals; badgers, squirrels, apes, catamounts, dwarf asses, Barbary racehorses, Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, turtle-doves . . . so that his house resembled a veritable Noah's ark.”

“Maybe his nickname comes from his love of beasts instead of what we assume—bestial,” Ed muses. “I saw somewhere that he also had three wives and fathered thirty children. That seems impossible.”

“He thought of nothing but pleasure. . . .” Vasari continues. There's where he's wrong. I've seen his frescoes all over Tuscany. He thought a great deal about working at his art. Oddly, I think of Warhol, who seems decadent and frivolous, tossing off his art. A visit to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh cures that impression. He worked like a demon, amassing an immense body of varied, imaginative, playful, and seriously iconographic work.

It's easy to see where Sodoma stepped in because his menagerie starts to appear on the walls—ravens, swans, badgers, an anteater, various dogs, and what I take to be an ermine. His seven dancing women represent the temptations of the flesh, which Benedetto was able to resist. He has a whole fresco devoted to the saint's temptation, in which he restores himself by stripping off his robe and throwing himself onto a bush of thorns—probably more effective than a cold shower. He peers down from a balcony, directing the departure of his monks with a mule; obviously he's orchestrating their escape from the seductive women. This is one of the most beautiful frescoes, with the lovely flowing dresses of the women contrasting with the cumbersome robes of the monks, and the two groups divided by a doorway through which we see a distant curving road leading to a lake. I can't help but think that the rowdy Sodoma took special pleasure in creating gorgeous women for the monks to pass every day. When Sodoma painted them, the viewers experienced even more tension because the lovely women were nude. Someone later dressed them, cutting down on the perpetuation of temptation.

One of Sodoma's great moments is easy to miss. In an archway, Ed happened on his Christ bound to a pillar, with rope-burns swelling on his arms and criss-crossed blood marks of flagellation on his torso. Like Piero della Francesca's Christ in
Resurrection,
Sodoma renders him not as slender and pathetic but as a virile, big guy with powerful muscles. Nearby, Sodoma's own self-portrait appears in the fresco of one of Benedetto's first miracles, the mending of a broken tray, again a homely little act accomplished through prayer. Posed as a courtier, Sodoma looks straight out at the viewer with a direct, bemused gaze. At his feet are two badgers and a bird. He's full of life. I'll bet he was a handful for the Benedictines.

Although no one seems to follow the Sodoma trail, as they do the Piero della Francesca route, we could. In the time-stopped town of Trequanda, in a church with a checkerboard facade, SS. Pietro e Andrea, he's left a fresco. In the Pinacoteca and in Sant'Agostino in Siena, I've come upon paintings and enamels. His San Sebastiano in the Pitti Palace in Florence again shows his luminous talent for the glories of the male body: the delight in shoulder and stomach muscles, the filmy scarf around the genitals looped just so to suggest what is covered. I hardly notice poor Sebastiano's upturned face imploring an angel, or the arrow piercing his neck.

We take a stone stairway up to see the library. On the way, we pass a door marked “Clausura,” behind which monks are cloistered, then we pass the door to the monks' dining room, which is open for a deliveryman to wheel in cases of water. The enormous U-arrangement of tables is covered in white cloths. Flowers, water and wine bottles, and a delicious smell drifting from the kitchen tell us that monks don't have to creep outside the walls for a good meal anymore. The room looks inviting and the lectern suggests that they will hear a reading while they eat in silence. I would love to join them.

Despite fellow-tourists here, it's easy to absorb the isolation of this place, the silence that exists in the closed parts and in the courtyard when the last visitor departs. The men are left to commune with time. I leave feeling that I have read a complex biography, and I have. The scenes from the lives of the holy are everywhere in Italian painting. Each panel or fresco is a chapter. “Put the action into scene,” my fiction colleagues tell their writing students. Sodoma and Signorelli were particularly good at that.

I collect more images to conjure in nights of insomnia: The pink pate of the monk who nodded to me in the corridor; the fir and spice smell of the frankincense and myrrh in the chapel; an African child staring at the only fresco with a black person in it; a bold intarsia cat on a lectern, a wild-looking thing with eyes fixed on what must be a mouse; a monk singing in the cypress lane. He could be good Benedetto, walking out to help plague victims, or maybe he's just going out to check the hives, to see if the bees have awakened to spring.

Bagno Vignoni and Pienza

Ed is limping from a stone bruise. He leapt when his hoe suddenly disturbed a snake. His foot came down on a jagged rock. “What kind?” I asked.

“A very snaky-looking snake. Scared hell out of me. We were eye-to-eye.” He's rubbing his foot with lotion.

“Let's go take the cure. We can be there by four.”

“Then we can go on to Pienza for dinner. I'd like to drive up to Monticchiello, too. We've never been there.”

Bagno Vignoni, the tiny hilltop town near San Quirico d'Orcia, and within sight of the castle on top of Rocca d'Orcia, is built around a large thermal pool where the Medicis used to soak themselves. Where the central
piazza
is located in most towns, the pool (no longer used) reflects tumbling plumbago, tawny stone houses and stone arcades. Not much is going on in Bagno Vignoni. Right behind the village, a hot stream runs downhill, through a travertine ditch. On either side you can sit down and soak your feet, just as Lorenzo il Magnifico did in 1490.

When I first started spending summers here, I read in an Italian newspaper a heated debate over whether or not health insurance should continue to cover yearly sojourns to spas and thermal springs, a practice many Italians take as a birthright. I had been to Chianciano Terme and had seen people clutching their livers while sipping small glasses of water. They otherwise looked tan and fit. I glimpsed tanks where various body parts or the whole
corpo
could be immersed for the absorption of the healing properties of local waters. I've heard workers at our house discuss the merits of various waters as though they were discussing wine. Italians are great connoisseurs of the plainest elixir of all. I see them at various roadside springs filling demijohns. Water is not just water; it has properties.