Bella Tuscany (16 page)

My grandmother used to take the sulphur waters for a week at White Springs, Florida, down near the Sewanee River. I was deeply bored and considered her a holdover from Victorian times. I only accompanied her so that I could swim in the cold black springs, emerging from the water smelling something like an old Easter egg. She waved from the third latticed balcony around the spring, a small paper cup of the odorous water in her other hand.

I did not expect to be drawn into this passion. Then I went to Bagno Vignoni. I converted. Ed's stone bruise takes us now but we must go at least once a year.

“Her dogs are barking,” my aunt would say when we saw a woman whose feet had swollen over the edges of her pumps. After a few weeks of hauling stone, erecting trellises, and navigating stony streets, my dogs, too, are barking. We like to arrive very early, before anyone has revealed their work-torn, ailing, sometimes frightening feet. We're late today. I take off my sandals, and slowly lower my own miserable feet into the running water. Ed plunges his to the bottom. Then we notice a man with a red, red nose paring his yellow-talon toenails into the water. He must not have cut them for months. We stare as his big toenail, like a curl of wax, falls into the water. We move upstream from him.

At fifty-two degrees Celsius, the shock of hot water on a hot day is intense. Ed's size twelves magnify through the water next to my long rabbit feet. Sometimes the water feels merely warm. Rubbing my heels against the smooth travertine streambed, I concentrate on the invisible but potent minerals which are starting to soothe blisters, relax tendons, muscles, even purify nails and skin. Ed says his purple bruise is fading, fading. The water starts to feel as though it's swirling
through
my feet. When I close my eyes, only my feet seem to exist.

After twenty minutes, I'm back in my sandals, toes glowing lobster-red. Ed slides on his espadrilles under water and squishes out. Cured.

This is the strange part. Walking back into town for a strawberry
gelato,
not only do I feel a surge of euphoria, my feet feel as if they could levitate. Everyday Italian life continues to astound me. What
is
in these Italian waters?

 

We reach Monticchiello by a white road that climbs through fields of purple lupin scattered with the last poppies. The walled town is mysteriously empty. Finally we figure this out: Everyone has simply closed shop and gone home to watch the big soccer match, which we hear blaring from every window. As we wander, we encounter a man peeing outside the closed public
W.C.
on the edge of town. Much of the castle wall is intact. Inside, the streets are so clean they're like swabbed decks.

“It's tarted up,” a friend had warned us. “I've never seen so many geraniums in my life.” True, they're on every stoop, step, and sill. The effect is stunning against the immaculate shuttered houses and the pencils of sunlight falling into medieval lanes. It's one of hundreds of such hilltowns but one we'd never visited. We'll have to come back to find the fabric shop I read is here and, since the church is locked, to see the Lorenzetti Madonna. Even the priest probably is riveted to a small ball being kicked around a TV screen.

Down, down from Monticchiello, leaving it to its rioting geraniums, through the wildflower meadows, vineyards, passing abandoned and forlorn farmhouses on hills, through the mellow early evening and pig smells, toward Pienza, the first Renaissance town.

Pienza doesn't look like other towns. A pope with the splendid name of Enea Silvio Piccolomini built it in honor of his own birthplace. He must have knocked down most of the medieval buildings to put up his ultramodern Renaissance town because it's a harmonious whole.

There's a story about Rossellino, the architect, that stakes the heart of anyone involved in restoration or building. The architect overspent outrageously and concealed it from the Pope. When the excess finally was revealed, the Pope told him he was right to have hidden the sums because never would the pontiff have authorized such expenditures and never would he have had as his monument such a glorious town. He rewarded the architect with gold and a fancy cape. Perhaps our first builder had heard that story!

The
piazza,
bordered by the cathedral and several palaces for bishops, canons, and the Pope, is staggeringly, astonishingly beautiful. Pienza is glorious in all its parts, from the felicitous residential street along the ramparts, to the iron flagholders and cunning rings fashioned in animal shapes, where horses used to be secured while their owners did their business in town. Today no horses, and no cars either, which contributes to the silent and unified feeling of the town. We wander the
vicoli,
the narrow streets, with evocative names: Vicolo Cieco (blind), Via della Fortuna, Via delle Serve Smarrite (the lost servants), Via dell'Amore, Via del Balzello (the heavy tax or, in dialect, the man who looks at women), Via del Bacio (the kiss), Via Buia (dark).

The back end of Rossellino's airy cathedral is sinking, the porous limestone soil beneath it giving way a little every year. An ominous crack that looks as if it has been repaired with a staple gun runs down the wall and continues across the floor. I visit my favorite painting here, the martyred virgin Agata, who refused the attentions of Quintino and paid by having her breasts torn off. She comes down through history holding her severed breasts on a platter, which I originally took for a serving of fried eggs. Women who fear for their own breasts invoke her, and she is the patron saint of bell makers, too. Perhaps in a painting somewhere, the dome-shaped breasts were mistaken for little bells.

I once read in a book about the medieval pilgrimage routes that all the towns along the way were crowded with souvenir shops. So, Pienza's plethora of stores selling ceramics to us on our various pilgrimages has a precedent. This area is famous for its
pecorino
. The street leading into the
centro
is lined with so many tempting shops selling the round cheeses wrapped in leaves or ashes that the pungent smell follows us down the street. We buy an aged
pecorino
(
stagionato
) and taste a semi-aged one (
semi-stagionato
). Honey and herbs also are specialties. Some are homeopathic—we see a honey for the liver and one for the respiratory system. One shop has pots of
ruta,
rue, which I'll add to my herb garden.

I'm drawn by all these food shops and also repelled. Pienza has rather too many; I'd like to see the shoe repair and the grocery store back on the main street. What remains of the ancient craft of
ferro battuto,
wrought iron, is an upscale shop selling lamps and tables and a few antique gates and andirons to the tourists down from Bologna or Milano for the weekend. And to us, of course. We look at their hanging iron lanterns with glass globes that end in a rounded teardrop, reproductions of old ones still on some streets of Siena and Arezzo. We need a light outside by the
limonaia
and one for overhead in a bedroom. They have them. I also buy an old iron that opens up to hold hot coals. The worn wooden handle tells me somebody pushed this five pounder over many a work shirt and apron.

Just outside the main gate we find a
trattoria
with a terrace. I'm thrilled anytime to see fried zucchini blossoms. We fall onto pork tenderloin grilled with rosemary, roasted potatoes with lots of pepper, and a salad of young arugula barely touched with good oil.

Around the cathedral
piazza,
the dignified pale stone buildings have travertine extensions around the bases. They serve as benches and over the years have been polished smooth by the bottoms that rested there while viewing the great well and the Pope's magnificent
piazza
. Over one is inscribed
“canton de'bravi,”
corner of the good. Do we qualify? We're feeling dreamy after dinner, the travertine still warm from the sun. We watch a small girl in a white sailor dress chasing a kitten. The full moon is poised over Piccolomini's perfect
piazza
. “Amazing what a little egomania and a lot of gold can do,” Ed says.

“Perhaps he even ordered the full moon to drift overhead every night.”

Another soccer match blares from the TV in the bar, so the women and babies are outside, the men inside. In a
piazza
just off the main one, another TV has been set up outdoors beside a Renaissance well and all the neighbors have brought out their chairs into the early evening to cheer and shout for Italy. The blue light of the screen reflects on the semicircle of rapt faces. Arm-in-arm we walk the rampart road. For the second time today, I'm astounded by everyday life in Italy. Ed holds out his foot and says he feels no pain at all.

A Loop Around Lago Trasimeno

With our mad lists of things to do for the house, usually we have a goal, a time limit, a schedule. A sudden “Stop!” or “Let's turn up that road” comes too late. But the landscape around Lago Trasimeno invites you to meander, not to care if the destination you sought turns into another destination. So near, so far from the important towns of Perugia and Assisi and the great Tuscan ones nearby, the lake country is quiet and verdant, with fields of sunflowers and corn around the water. The lake, fifty-four kilometers around, is the largest body of water on the Italian peninsula and its three green islands—Maggiore, Minore, and Polvese—emphasize its size. Little blue and white ferries ply the islands. The lake looks vast. Tumultuous skies cast dramatic moving shadows on water that is dazzling blue on clear middays and often icy silver when the sun rises or sets. Sometimes the lake surface reflects a gaudy, smeared orange and chrome sunset and the surrounding hills go dark purple. I've never seen a more changeable landscape. I've heard that World War II pilots mistook it for a landing field and the lake bottom is littered with crashed planes. The foothills of the Apennines scroll along the horizon, and towers, ruins, and walled towns perch on many hilltops.

I still can't resist the magnetic pull of abandoned farmhouses. Every few miles Ed pulls over, and we step through briars, mentally restoring and moving into the mellow house which often has no roof. In the larger villages, such as Castiglione del Lago, Città della Pieve, and especially in Passignano, which is right on the lake, there are a few other travellers but no one is pouring off buses or streaming through the streets with the kind of determination I often have. Around here, travellers are more inclined to sit on a lakeside patio eating roasted red pepper pizza, or to stroll along a wall under a Renaissance gate, or to drive through the fresh countryside with the windows down, perhaps turning up the tape of Pavarotti singing break-your-heart arias to maximum volume.

The serene villages with panoramas of blue water contradict everything we know about the history of this area. Only the oldest story is romantic: The demigod Trasimeno went to the interior of Italy on a hunting expedition. When he reached the lake, he glimpsed the water nymph Agilla and fell in love. Naturally he dove in after her and naturally, being half mortal, he drowned. The lake was given his name. After that, recorded history lists battle after battle: sackings followed by lootings, castles rebuilt only to be seized, burned, and reoccupied. Mercenaries and warring dukes and foreign kings and the town on the next hill all made constant raids on each settlement, with the castles, so charming today, acting as local bomb shelter equivalents. Their airy positions
were
chosen for the view—but what they looked out for was the next army of marauders. What exactly was at stake? Inland water is a valuable resource, especially in a dry climate. The castles and unwalled towns were therefore of interest in themselves. A glance at the map will make clear the larger significance of this area. Situated right at the heart of Italy, Trasimeno was the crux of many migrations and passages. Commanders of this area determined to a large extent who passed into the north or south. Many of the well-trod pilgrim routes to Rome edged the lake, following ancient routes south.

All that destruction, in a nice irony, left a bucolic legacy.

I love Castiglione del Lago, a walled town almost surrounded by water. On sultry summer days during siesta, we often bring lawn chairs and books to one of the lake beaches. We can cross the prickly grass to a bar for ice cream, walk along the beach, or just sink into midsummer torpor with the lulling sound of Italian sunbathers in the background. I've been in the water once. It was room temperature with a silty bottom. I had to wade forever to get to water deep enough to swim, while little finny creatures brushed my legs.

The local storybook castle, Lion's Castle, has catwalks along the crenelated top and a narrow stone corridor perhaps two blocks long with cut-out windows for defense. Looking forward or backward seems like walking into a mirror. At the tea and coffee store, the owner also stocks local honeys. I've been wanting to try the chestnut honey, very dark, and
tigli
honey from the flowering linden trees. I was curious about the tisanes, homeopathic infusions made from various flowers and herbs, with cures attached to each. She told us that the honey, too, had specific benefits. It didn't sound very homeopathic to me, but she said the sure cure for migraines is acacia honey mixed with
grappa.
I'd always associated
grappa,
that strongest of grape distillations, with
getting
headaches.

After a morning at the lake and a walk, we drive just to the edge of town to the Cantina Sociale, where local farmers sell their grapes. Red wine, produced from these grapes, can be quite good. We could back up our car and lift out a demijohn, which would be filled exactly the way a car is filled with gas. The pump registers the liters and the charge is about a dollar a liter. Bottled wine is more—two to five dollars. Their reds and whites, under the Colli del Trasimeno and Duca di Corgna—one of those old warriors—labels, are DOC (
denominazione di origine controllata
), certifying that the region's wine meets standards that merit this government designation.