Bella Tuscany (20 page)

My hand towels could not have been hers, but her strong face immediately came to me when I saw the initials. And so it is with all these linens. I like to open the lid of my
cassone,
take out a stack, and imagine the dazzling aunt's Palm Beach cocktail parties, jazz on the record player, the champagne, the tiny napkins passed around, the trays of canapés—what did they eat at fancy soireés in the twenties?—the Atlantic Ocean waves spuming over the breakwater. I imagine Assunta's stone house, the walnut sleigh bed where the young husband lay naked, wanting his back rubbed, and later where the old husband snored while she lay awake, wondering if her son would return from the front in Russia, if unweaned lamb would be good for the
festa,
if the cold had killed her fava beans. AP, embroidered by her mother, given on her name day.

I imagine, too, the white nightgowns I did not buy at the market but looked at with amazement. They were as big as tents, all three of them monogrammed with suitably huge letters:
. A mound of flesh slept in those.
had to roll out of bed, her pink feet cold on the tiles, twins screaming at once in the night, this swift white messenger flying through the dark hall to comfort them.

The monogram is territorial. This is indubitably
mine,
it says. Under that, the monogram is a fixative of memory. The silver cup always goes back to the moment of the baby's christening. The dozen linen napkins for the bride usher in all the Thanksgiving dinners gathering in the future even now toward her table.

Ubi sunt
is carved on ancient stones, short for that most haunting of questions,
Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt,
Where are those who lived before us? Naming is deeply instinctive, a motion against the swallowing up by time of everything that exists. At eighteen, about to go to college, I was given a large supply of green bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths, all duly monogrammed. Green was not a color I liked, but those towels went off to college with me, lasted for years, and, even now, two live in the trunk of my car. Decades later, thanks to Aunt Emmy's graduation gift, I wipe off the car seat where Coca-Cola has spilled, my hand around the balled-up initials of a very distant college freshman who dried her hair with this.
A fleeting touch of wet hair, no, a spilled drink.

Carolyn, Assunta, Mary, Flavia, Donatella, Altrude, Frankye, Luisa, Barbara, Kate, Almeda, Dorothea, Anne, Rena, Robin, Nancy, Susan, Giusi, Patrizia—we're all having dinner at my house.

Breathing Art

ACROSS THE
PIAZZA,
THREE BOYS BOUNCE
A SOC-
cer ball against the side wall of the Orvieto cathedral. The sun strikes the great, gilded facade of that stupendous, dazzling, arrogant building. I'm just basking in the reflected light, sipping a mid-afternoon cappuccino. This month we're free to roam. Primo restored the fallen wall and even improved it with two stone pillars for plants. He and his men “repointed” the stone walls of the cantina, too, closing all the crevices where dust and mice might come in. The planned projects start in July.

Although Cortona is only an hour away, Orvieto seems far. My California sense of distance mysteriously expands here. Sixty or eighty miles usually seem like nothing, but within each kilometer in Tuscany and beyond, something to discover, study, eat, or drink is a potential distraction from the goal. California, at 160,000 square miles, is somehow smaller than Tuscany at 9,000 square miles.

Inside the cathedral, I've already seen the stop-in-your-tracks
Signorelli fresco of judgement day—when skeletons just raised from the dead are caught by the artist as they are about to, and just as they have, melded back into their restored bodies—bodies at their prime of health. I was happy—the reality of seeing what cannot be seen, and also the activation of the phrase,
the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting
: Something known, hoped for, or disbelieved—but unimagined really—suddenly given full verisimilitude.

I looked up until my neck hurt. When I turned away to explore the rest of the cathedral, I passed a woman praying. Her market basket propped beside her was stuffed with vegetables. She'd slipped out of her shoes and was cooling her feet on the tiles. A little girl nearby braided her friend's hair. Their dolls sat upright on a bench. A young priest idly turned the pages of a magazine at a table laden with Catholic family publications.

They are knowing that splendid place through their pores, knowing so intimately and thoroughly that they do not have to know at all.

I, too, recall every inch of the unadorned Central Methodist Church in Fitzgerald, Georgia. I can still see the worn-down claret carpet, a glassy white light, still feel my fascination with the wooden holders for tiny cups of Welch's grape juice, which would magically and creepily turn into the blood of Jesus as it passed through my mouth.

Sitting under the grand Mediterranean sun, poised at the solstice, I say inadequately, “Life would be different if you grew up bouncing your ball against the wall of the Orvieto cathedral.” But Ed is trying to parse some
La Repubblica
article on the latest political imbroglio and so I spoon the foamy milk from my cup. What if the resurrection of the flesh had been painted above the heads of our white-robed choir belting out “I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses. . . .” I would be seven, thirty-seven, seventy-seven—all stages of life, staring at that vision. If I turn my mind's eye around the interior of my hometown church, I see no art at all.

 

When I was growing up, a college textbook of my mother's from Georgia State College for Women stood in the living room bookshelf:
Art in Everyday Life
. I remember grainy photos of bowls of fruit on tables. They must have been suggested arrangements for still-life paintings. As a seven-year-old, I had no consciousness that included an act such as painting. I thought the pictures had to do with table settings because I did see my mother endlessly lavishing her attention on tablecloths and polished silver and flower arrangements.

Art meant the English hunting scene over the sofa, the pink ballet dancers in my bedroom, and the oil portrait of me that scared me with its likeness and crude vivacity. There I sat, caught in the hated blue dress with scalloped collar, my thin lips parted to show teeny teeth, the two incisors pointed like an animal's. A woman in town held after-school art classes on her front porch on Wednesday. I dutifully cast plaster-of-Paris shepherdesses and clowns. The next week, after they hardened, and if the teacher's children and dogs had not knocked off the lamb or the big nose, I painted them with brilliant enamel colors that somehow soaked in and mottled disappointingly.

When I went to college in Virginia, many of my classmates were incredibly sophisticated compared to my backwoods upbringing. They chatted knowledgeably about Cubism and Expressionism and the New York School. Soon I was soaking in the pleasures of the National Gallery with them and making further forays to the Museum of Modern Art. I ran up bookstore bills for art books, which enraged my grandfather, who believed in the Public Library, at most. Lautrec, Dufy, Nolde, Manet—it was exactly like falling in love. My connection with art became intense. So it has stayed.

 

Watching the downshifting of light on the facade at Orvieto, I begin to breath slowly, taking in the shouts of the boys, the man at the next table completing a crossword puzzle, two nuns in long white habits, the angled shadow of the cathedral crossing the
piazza
like the blade of a sundial. I feel a grinding shift occurring in the tectonic plates in my brain. In Italy, it would be curious
not
to be intimate with art. You grow up here surrounded by beauty, thinking beauty is natural.

Art always has been
outside,
something I appreciated, loved, sought, but something not exactly natural. American towns often are void of art and are often actively ugly. In schools, art is usually a luxury which falls with no thud when the budget ax swings. Art, music, poetry—natural pleasures we were born to love—are expendables, fancy extras, so very non-binary. The unnaturalness comes, too, from the hushed atmosphere of museums, where most of us experience art. In Italy, so much art is in churches. Italians are only slightly less sociable in church than they are in the
piazza
. Art and the mass come not from on high, but with a familial attitude.

Cortona has an art gallery with its door opening onto Piazza Signorelli—his bust, perched high, overlooks the scene. The show changes every week, with the work ranging from excellent to ludicrous. But there it is, integral, right along with clothing and tobacco and flower shops. The artist sits with the show, thereby meeting directly with those who stop to look. In summer, the nearby Bar Signorelli serves at outdoor tables, and the artist can take a
caffè
when no one is about. Down the street, changing exhibitions of photographs are shown in a
palazzo,
which is also open to anyone interested who walks in off the street. Caffè degli Artisti's walls provide a casual exhibition place for young artists.

These galleries are light-years from the closed, cool exhibition spaces of Soho, Chelsea, and San Francisco, where just looking often makes you feel like an intruder. Country/city difference, of course, but in small country towns at home I don't ever see a vibrant art gallery as a vigorous part of the main street. A forbidding atmosphere is sad. Such a generalization—and isn't it true?

Cortona's signs say Città d'Arte, city of art, and it always has been. Cortona was one of the twelve original Etruscan cities and, since the seventeenth century, the town has had an active Etruscan museum. Their showpiece was found in a ditch in the nineteenth century—a heavy bronze chandelier intricately molded into shapes of crouching, erotically depicted figures. A few years ago, archeologists discovered important new tombs, and the museum now has a large recumbent animal figure and an ever-expanding exhibit of exquisite gold jewelry, carvings, and pots. A stone worker last year found a bronze tablet incised with Etruscan writing.

I have acquired, not by discovery but by gift, a piece of ancient art, an Etruscan foot. The touch of the maker is solidly in the folded-over slab of clay at the heel. I feel the indentations for the toenails, the long bone of the big toe, the knob of anklebone. Broken off before mid-calf, the ankle is hollow except for some ancient dirt caked inside. The foot reminds me of all the centuries of people who have walked over our land. Many, many people have these bits. In our neighbors' houses I have seen a Roman votive and an Etruscan glass vial, a marble head, a carved medieval door. The Italians take such ancient objects casually. Many a garage is a former house chapel, painted with frescoes which the owner keeps quiet about, not wanting the
Belle Arti
committee to make them give up their precious garage, home of that most precious
macchina
.

Even in Italian museums, most guards are dying to talk. I remember the guard in Siracusa giving a spontaneous talk on Caravaggio's
Burial of Santa Lucia.
In dank stone corridors in winter they're usually huddled with other guards around the pitiful space heaters, but, even then, a question will break one of them from the circle of warmth into a conversation about the restorations in progress or a disputed attribution.

 

Cimabue, it is said, discovered the young Giotto drawing a sheep on a stone at Vicchio, where Giotto tended flocks. Surely this is apocryphal but it points to an amazing moment in history when shepherds—and apprentices and clerks and noblemen's boys—took up the brush or the chisel all over Italy. The middle class was on the rise. The Tuscan vernacular began to be used in literary works. The painters' subjects were mainly religious; commissions for churches were pouring like
vino da tavola
. And while the subject might be assigned—the Annunciation, for sure, or the life of a saint—the painters began to bring to their “sermons” in the art of fresco a sweet domestic air and a sense of
campanilismo,
a word that has to do with the sense of community of those who live within the sound of the local parish bell, the
campanile
.

One senses this new feel of the familiar starting in the thirteenth century when Duccio (1278–1318), allowed the flicker of emotion to haunt the face of the Madonna as Christ is removed from the cross, thereby cracking into the static, iconographic, and formalized painting style dominated by the influence of Byzantine mosaics. One probably could trace this new, more expressive, approach month by month. Imagine hanging around those workshops, when new techniques passed from mouth to mouth, village to village. From here, it's hard to gauge the surprise of Duccio's contemporaries. Giotto (1267–1337) codified the new approach in painting and Nicola Pisano (1258?–1284), and later his son, Giovanni (1265–1314) in sculpture. Then the names unroll: Masaccio (1401–1428?), Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), Fra Angelico (14??–1455), Andrea Mantegna (1430–1506), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), etc., etc.

When art historians discuss this spreading realism in Italian art, they often speak in terms of the new emotion and perspective, but those are only a part of what happened: When the silly little dog wandered into the foreground of a painting, the imagined wag of its tail caused painting and sculpture to enter the imagination of the viewer at a more direct level. In 1430, when Donatello's David in a jaunty hat jutted out his bronze hip, the fluid sensuality of his pubescent body was lost on no one.

Artists were commissioned to paint churches, chapels, grain markets, banks, cloisters, city halls, lay confraternity halls, bedrooms, cemetery memorials, and standards borne through the streets. Sculptors glorified the rich with statues and local
piazze
with playful and joyous fountains. The people began to breathe the art every day.
Art in Everyday Life
. Not only a superhuman act to worship. Not only a bowl of fruit on the table.

There must be 10,000 Annunciations. The angel is witnessing the laser beam of the Holy Ghost angling toward a startled (who wouldn't be?) Mary. There's no mistaking the message. But the local resident—her basket of vegetables wedged next to her while she prays for her son off at war against the Guelphs—stares at the lake in the background where her husband fishes, the line of hills as familiar to her as the curves of her own hips.

In Crivelli's (1435?–1495) version of the Annunciation, the Virgin herself is the main focus. The impregnating light beam from heaven, so much like an airplane's contrails, illuminates her crossed hands and wide forehead. But our visitor with the basket of vegetables looks for a long time. What is that outside the Virgin's door? An apple and a squash, plain as day. And over her head on a shelf, her six white pasta dishes. A cheese box. A bottle of oil—extra virgin, no doubt—and a candlestick. From her window upstairs, hangs a wooden cage with a songbird. An Oriental rug drapes over a stone railing, with a house plant airing on top of it. We are suddenly at home.

All over Italy, they are kneeling or cooling their feet on the church tiles. In a side panel, a horse has skidded into a ravine, a man falls from a ladder, a stone wall collapses on a monk. The baby Jesus looks just like the neighbor's baby, born with no sign of a father. Ugly little
bambino
with a stranglehold on a bird. Or there, Saint Jerome, major man, in his study with the shadowy figure of his companion, a lion. And there's his bath towel dangling from a nail, a note tacked to his desk, a small cat.
My house is your house
.

 

A grand Cortona
palazzo
has been divided into thirteen apartments. Behind the Renaissance facade, the medieval house remains. Cutting and pasting those winding corridors and rooms, joined without hallways, into apartments must have been an architect's nightmare. We're having dinner in Celia and Vittorio's kitchen. Formerly, it must have been a sitting room. Vittorio and Celia have found beneath the whitewash a two-hundred-year old garden scene on all four walls. The
tromp l'oeil
iron fence separates the viewer from the flowers and distant hills. We admire the view as we are dipping fennel slices into Vittorio's parents' olive oil. “Oh, all the flats in this building have frescoes in every room,” he tells us, “but most people never have bothered to uncover them.” He shows us the other rooms, the tantalizing glimpses of melon and aquamarine colors where they have not yet restored the frescoes. How can they bear not to see? I think I'd be up all night, sponging water and rubbing a toothbrush over the powdery whitewash. When we uncovered a fresco in our dining room we thought it was close to a miracle. A fresco! Since then we've learned that almost anytime you start scrubbing in Cortona, you discover a fresco.