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It was getting dark. I walked out onto a stone porch to take in the view of the ruined stump that had once been Cavalcanti’s home. I couldn’t see it. In good light, you had to know it was there to locate it—the outline was apparent in a deeper, more fluorescent shade of green—but now, the sun setting, the outline was gone. It was late, and we were hungry. Dario suggested we get something to eat, perhaps in the nearby village of Lamole.

22

T
HE RESTAURANT,
normally empty at this time of year, was hosting an anniversary party. As we stood at the entrance, an elderly couple were being led up to a small stage to receive their first lessons in karaoke. The owner, the hardworking, thirty-three-year-old English-German-French-speaking Filippo Masini (who, with his brother, had only recently taken over from their father), knew he should be turning us away. His greeting was excessive and full of panic, as though the mayor had just popped in, unannounced.
“Eccolo!”
Filippo cried. “Dario Cecchini. How
very good
to see you! You are so
very
welcome! I am so lucky. The very grand Dario has come to my humble Restaro di Lamole!” But everything else about Filippo’s manner was conveying how
bad
it was that Dario had turned up (how, for instance, can you say it’s good to see someone without actually smiling?) and that, actually, he was very
un
welcome.

“I want only bistecca, dripping with blood,” Dario said as Filippo seated us at a table on the edge of the anniversary party. “A butcher likes raw,” he explained to me. “A butcher likes the warm tissue of an animal freshly killed, tasting only of blood. Give me blood!” he boomed to the room and enacted a show of masticating, an exaggerated chomping of his teeth, very big-mouthed. Filippo, standing by the table, taking all this in, was starting to fidget. Dario’s display was really a challenge: How good is your bistecca, Filippo? Every Tuscan restaurant has bistecca on the menu, but none of the restaurants in the area offered Dario’s meat: it was too expensive and, on some level, just too ideological. Filippo’s menu advertised that his came from Gabriella’s, a butcher in Greve.

The wine was the first disaster. Filippo was proud of his list, which was many pages long and included all of Tuscany’s established names. He handed it to Dario—a large book, which Dario seized, lifted above his head, and hurled to the floor in disgust. The action was startling in the extreme. I looked to Dario for an explanation, but he was staring at Filippo with loathing.

“You know I don’t want these wines.”

Filippo was baffled.

“Give us a red wine that hasn’t been ruined,” Dario said.

Filippo mentioned a name, stuttering.

“No!” Dario had attracted the attention of one of the family tables. “You know I don’t want a wine made with wood. I want a
real
wine. I want a
simple
wine. I want a wine from here.”

Filippo mentioned another name, an inexpensive red from the village.

Dario grunted, an impatient sound, something between a belch and an inadvertent exhale, as though he’d been hit hard on the back. It was Tuscan for “Duh?” Filippo disappeared to retrieve a bottle, distressed and seemingly engaged in an internal debate over how he should deal with this man’s very high-handed conduct.

The wine dispute was related to another piece of recent Panzano history and another Dario polemic. Around the time that the Alceos and the Dinos were ripping out the neglected vines and blasted roots of successive agricultural failures, a few local landowners had experimented with making wines in a French style. The results were so successful that others imitated them. By some perversity of cultural logic, the new wines were called not Super French but Super Tuscan. The Vigna d’Alceo, for instance, was made with cabernet sauvignon, the principal grape in a Bordeaux, which, prior to 1975, had never been planted in Chianti soil. Dino Manetti’s wines were made with sangiovese, which was a Tuscan grape, but the wine was aged in barriques, small oak barrels, which was very French, although (according to Dario) akin to marinating your wine in a tree.

The menu was the second disaster. On the whole, it was very regional, which also means it was very brown. There is a saying in Italy,
brutto ma buono,
ugly but good, which celebrates the amateurish, often irregular integrity of food made by hand. In Tuscany, the phrase could be
brutto e marrone,
ugly and brown. The local
crostini,
for instance, with every available millimeter smeared with chicken liver pâté, were a brown food.
Pappa al pomodoro,
another local dish, was made from stale bread (the unsalted, flavorless Tuscan kind, so you know it had to be very stale) cooked with overripe leftover tomatoes until it degenerated into a dark brown mush: brown on dark brown. The many varieties of local beans: brown. (Dario once took me to an eleven-course banquet honoring the famous bean of Sorana: beans with veal head, beans with tuna roe, beans with
porchetta,
beans with shrimp, a
torta
of beans—a three-hour celebration of brown on brown, ending with a plate of biscotti and a glass of vin santo, another brownly brown variation.) The soppressata, the sausages, the famous Fiorentina: all brown, without so much as a speck of color. That chopped parsley garnish? A corrupting Italian-American intervention. There was one local pasta, called
pici,
thick, like giant earthworms, which was similar to a pasta the Etruscans had made, although it was a mystery why it hadn’t disappeared along with the rest of their civilization: it was inedible if boiled for less than twenty minutes. It was at least chewable if cooked for longer, when it changed color, not to brown, admittedly, but to beige, although the custom was to dress it with the local ragù, which was very brown: a brown-and-beige food. The local vegetables? Green-brown artichokes, green-brown olives, and porcini mushrooms (brown-brown). If indeed Tuscany was responsible for a sizable portion of the world’s best cooking, then it must have been the brown part. Filippo had all these Tuscan standards on his menu, printed, naturally enough, on brown paper. In addition, he had a carpaccio of goose. Carpaccio, a way of preserving meat by air-drying, wasn’t really a Tuscan preparation; geese, too, weren’t very local. There weren’t many geese in Chianti. Actually, there were none.

By the time Filippo returned with our wine—chest out and seeming to comport himself with a swagger—Dario had spotted the goose preparation and was looking at Filippo with hyperventilating bafflement. (Poor Filippo, I thought, as he uncorked the bottle. He has no idea what he has returned to.) Dario’s stare, which Filippo avoided, was intense and full of rage. “What in the name of my testicles,” he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, “is this dish on the menu?”

Filippo glanced casually in Dario’s direction. “What in the dick are you talking about?”
(Che cazzo dici?)
he asked lightly, continuing the line of genitalia metaphors that so robustly characterize male Tuscan exchanges.

“You fat head of a penis,” Dario said loudly. “Why is
this
on your menu?” He was pointing to the carpaccio of goose.
“Carpaccio di oca?!!”

Oca
means “goose.” Dario managed to pronounce the word with an extra long “o”—quiet at first, then much louder—ending it, the “ca” sound, as though he were coughing up his lunch.

“Oca?”
He repeated.

“Oh, Dario, it’s on the menu every year,” Filippo said, and then, despite his effort to pretend that none of this mattered, couldn’t stop himself from looking over his shoulder, just in case the anniversary party was bearing witness to his humiliation. (In fact, the anniversary party was otherwise engaged: the elderly couple were doing some kind of gyration to what sounded like the Beach Boys in Italian.)

“Oca?”
Dario repeated.
“Oooooooohhhh-KA!”

“The regulars expect it,” Filippo persisted. His restaurant had been mentioned in an English walking guide and now had a clientele. “They would be disappointed if they couldn’t order their favorite dishes.”

“Their favorite dish of oooooooohh-KA!” Dario was persuasively incredulous.

“Perhaps you’d like to try some, Dario,” Filippo offered. “It’s really very good.”

“Filippo, this dish is from Friuli. Friuli is in the north. Near Croatia.” Dario could have been talking to a five-year-old. “What are you? Disneyland? There are no geese in Tuscany. You have a panoramic view. How many geese did you see tonight? How many geese, in your dickhead life, have you ever seen? This is fancy food. Like fusion. Fancy Tuscan fusion.” He then threw his menu on the floor. “OooooooOOO-KA!”

Filippo picked up the menu and set it back on the table. “Dario, please,” he said in a whispery voice.

Dario threw it back down.

Filippo picked it up again. It was a tricky diplomatic moment. He had welcomed the mayor into his restaurant, but the mayor wanted to beat him up. “Dario, Dario, Dario,” he said, pleading, and tapped Dario on the head with the menu, an affectionate slap. And expecting a much more aggressive response, Dario flinched, and Filippo, sensing an opportunity, tapped him again: and then again—harder. And then, marginally losing control, he started hitting so hard and fast that Dario had to lift his arms to fend off the menu blows.

A truce had been achieved: somehow Filippo, in unreasonably hitting Dario over the head with a menu, had persuaded him that he had been acting unreasonably. Everyone relaxed—exhaling all at once—and Filippo was finally able to take our order: two and a half kilos of Gabriella’s bistecca, Dario said, “barely cooked—so that I can taste the blood.”

Relieved, Filippo proceeded through the rituals of ordering a meal, as though he were waiting on a normal table.

“Perhaps an antipasto,” he asked, restaurant-like.

“No!” Dario answered, Dario-like. “Like what?
Carpaccio di’ oca
? No.”

“A primo?” Filippo pressed on, determined.

“No!”

“Maybe a salad, something green.”

“No!”

“Oh, come on, Dario,” Ann Marie said. It was her first utterance. “Let’s get some spinach.”

“No!”

“Dario?”

“No!”

“Dario, I’d like some spinach.”

“Okay. Spinach. And bread.”

Filippo snapped shut his order book and set off for the kitchen. Dario spotted a black bottle on the table. This was the third disaster.

“I don’t believe it,” Dario said, unscrewing the bottle and pouring some liquid on to his hand. He tasted it. It was balsamic vinegar, which comes from Modena, in Emilia-Romagna, about a hundred miles away.

“Filip-PO!” Dario shouted, doing that irritable last-syllable-stress thing, as though he were in his own butcher shop. Filippo froze—he’d almost got to the kitchen—and turned slowly. Dario locked eyes, extended his arm to the side of our table, vinegar in hand, and upturned the bottle, pouring its contents on the floor.

D
URING ALL THIS,
Annie, after making her pitch for a plate of spinach, said nothing. “What could I have said?” she put to me later. “Ask him to stop being such an asshole? This happens almost every time we go out. All the screaming at the proprietor? It’s so bad I hate eating at restaurants.”

In effect, Dario had become a food cop, enforcing a law of no change. Dario was trying to stop time. He’d grown up in a region where people had ceased observing the old ways, and he was determined to get everyone back on track before the old ways disappeared entirely. (Historically, time stoppers don’t have a great win-loss record, although they score high in the sentimental doing-all-the-wrong-things-for-the-right-reasons stakes.) For Dario, implicit in the old ways was an assumption that the culture of a place was in its language and its art
and
its food—maybe the most direct expression because the habits of cooking and eating arise out of the land itself. What is Tuscan food, precisely? I’d asked Dario earlier at his house, and he’d said something vague, and I’d pressed him, and finally he’d said that true Tuscan food was evoked by the unique fragrance of the wet earth at
that
moment—and he pointed outside where it was still wet after a late-afternoon storm, the grass now glistening in the sun. “The smell of the dirt, here, after a rain,” he said. (Which wasn’t ultimately illuminating: Tuscan food is mud?)

The final disaster was the meat. It arrived, a steak five inches thick, sitting in a pool of blood. Dario started cutting it up with a pocketknife he carries with him and distributed slices around the table, until he grew impatient and tore off a chunk directly from the serving platter and speared it with his blade and ate it rapidly, re-enacting the evening’s earlier furious outsized chomping.

“The meat,” he said after taking a deep breath, “is not good.” He resumed chewing and speared another chunk. “No. This is not good meat.”

It was the first time he’d eaten one of Gabriella’s steaks. Gabriella is a rare woman butcher (daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, et cetera, of a family of butchers) whose shop is on the square in Greve. This was where the livestock market had been held, which accounts for the square’s curious nonsquare design: narrow at two ends. The chianine used to come in through the entrance at the top—be displayed, win a prize, be sold—and leave by the exit at the bottom, where, after so much public glory, their lives were dispatched into so many dinners. The square is now dominated by tourists, who are Gabriella’s principal customers. She is in her sixties; has disconcertingly bleached blond hair (more strawberry than lemon), very thick glasses, and a butcher’s outfit that looks like bedtime pajamas. The last time we were in her shop, she had a chicken on a cutting board, its entrails pulled out—she’d started it and forgotten about it—and was hand-feeding raw sausage meat to some queasy Bavarians, barking in Italo-German.
(“Molto gut!”)