Tuscany Journal: 2007 part 1

The earth embraces you here. The honey is light light yellow, from chestnut trees. The butter is perfumed. The chicken, wild boar, venison, and rabbit all come from the property, mushrooms the same in season. The vegetables come from that patch yonder behind the vines. The wine is their business, also their pleasure to share. The herbs come fresh from here and there, screaming in Tuscan accented perfumes. At the moment one of Anna’s chickens lies marinating in the kitchen, fragrant with rosemary and olive oil from the plants outside the window. It will end up on the grill. The wild boar is marinating, and the pasta dough defrosting for a quick dip in boiling water for Sunday dinner. Even the water comes from their own well.

I had my morning walk along the ribbon of road that runs past the vineyard. The land is seamed with steep crevasses so densely wooded that you have to look carefully to realize that one false step would pitch you into trouble.

There is birdsong all day, from the break of dawn, but the birds are far enough away from the windows that they don’t wake you like the birds of Hawaii, which are thick in the jungle which spreads right up to your window The trees and bushes in Tuscany are more orderly and considerate. There are swallows, hawks, songbirds, crow-like birds of which I don’t know the names. They are profuse, twittering and cooing in the dense woods, suddenly taking flight from a tree in the medium distance, soaring overhead. Paolo has been known to fire his rifle at a hawk threatening the chickens. There are hundreds of birds, thousands of them, seen and unseen. I even heard a cuckoo this morning clear as a bell. At night their mammalian counterparts, the bats, are beeping signals around the rooftops.

Tuscany is soft. The light is soft, the colors are soft, attenuated, the hills are soft, the crevasses are clothed in green so as to soften their dangers. There is enough humidity to keep the earth soft most of the time.

The customs of hospitality are deep in Tuscan life. When I come to visit, I am cooked for and my dishes are washed. Whatever I would like to eat, I get, even if it is a nuisance to make. The difficulties of pleasing me are graciously hidden – the costs, the time, the change in schedule. Over the 45 years we have known each other I have become a sister. Pappa died, so did Mamma. One brother died, and the other is estranged. I am the closest Paolo has to a sister – how strange after all these years when we saw each other so rarely that such a tight bond should have been forged. I know all of his people, how they died, how they lived.

Since my new husband’s arrival Anna has enjoyed calling him “the guest,” serving him first, before me, saying, “Guests first,” with a mischievous smile. “I’m not a guest any more, am I. My husband smiles and receives the beautiful food – the homemade pasta, tomato sauce out of the freezer made from tomatoes picked at their sweet height in August, the chestnut honey from their own hives, rabbit and chicken from the fattoria, truly fine wine from downstairs, water from their own well, salad from their own garden, homemade biscotti and torta for dessert.

One discovery is what they called in Hawaii “plumeria” which they call something else here. It is the yellow flower with heady perfume which they weave into leis in Hawaii, and here it lines the road, bathing the air with perfume. There is also honeysuckle, and touchingly red poppies. They are no more than ornament here in Tuscany, but I was traveling just after Memorial Day, and pictured these beautiful flowers in the mud and blood of Belgium in the First World War. The contrast between glory and gore was so striking when it was first made that it has never faded, and strikes my heart as I walk down these soft Tuscan roads.

We went into Florence, hopping the crowded train. Once in Florence it is clear why people take the train. It is like an exploding box stuffed with too many people and their accoutrements, including their motorbikes and cars. The old stone palaces and bell towers, and the less imposing apartment buildings around them (all tightly controlled under historic preservation laws) stand their ground stolidly against the onslaught of tourists and Italians doing business with them. The crush of tourists is unique. There are lines of them threading the streets, following guides who hold high flags of various colors so as not to get lost in the crush. There are tourist groups on Segways gliding in formation along the stone pavement. Good idea, I guess, but it looks a little ridiculous to me. What would the Medicis have said?

I like so much the Italian tolerance of bumbling tourists trying to speak their language. They do not usually break into English, but will humor us by answering in Italian. This contrasts markedly with many other European countries, where efforts to speak the language are met with natives trying to practice their English. In this part of Italy, despite the raucous and unruly politics, the frustrating regulation, the corruption, the inertia which sometimes weighs down even the best efforts, people like their culture, like themselves. If you ate as well as they do, you might like it too. Walking past a vegetable stand on the left bank of the Arno was as overpowering as passing a heavily perfumed woman. If a cantaloupe screamed as loud in the A&P the shoppers would be scandalized. The seasons here are a bit ahead of ours and there were fraises du bois (wild strawberries – fragole di campo), cantaloupes, peaches, and apricots.

In the morning, our first goal was scotched by the long lines of tourists waiting to enter the Duomo, the cathedral. We were not going to spend our day standing in a long line of Americans, Japanese, Australian, English, and Other tourists. We wandered on to the Uffizi, which was closed on Mondays, and then to the shopping area around the Ponte Vecchio. The leather goods were soft and well made, the clothes no better than anywhere else, the jewelry held little interest. We landed in a small café attached to the Hotel Lungarno for a lunch of high class sandwiches along the Arno, watching the skulls and kayaks go back and forth on the still water. Perfect run for boating. On a stone landing below the bridge parallel to the Ponte Vecchio a young couple was making out, in plain view to us, though quite far away, unseen by the people passing on the bridge above them. The service in the café had the slightly bored, slightly servile attitude that I have found also elsewhere in Florence, where the sheer, incessant weight of tourists seems to have exhausted shopkeepers and waiters, welcome as the tourists are to the ledgers of their shops and restaurants.

In one shop I asked for the bathroom. It was tucked under the stairway to the basement, complete with shower. I could not for the life of me find the light switch, so had to close the door on any light at all. Afterwards I could not find the door handle in the total blackness, and claustrophobia began to take hold. I called for my husband, but he was standing in the street outside the store waiting for me, and the storekeeper was vacuuming the shirts in the front window with a vacuum cleaner attachment seemingly made for the purpose – just strong enough to remove dirt without disturbing his artistic window arrangement. I calmed myself down and made a studied manual search along the door jamb for the door handle, which was on the near side of the door instead of the far side, where I initially searched. It took me quite a while, and I had one of those experiences where you live as a blind person for a few minutes. I didn’t like it, but realize that one would cope.

By four o’clock we were tired from walking, and Anna picked us up at the train station, and brought us home for a supper of leftover pasta with tomato or wild boar (our choice), homemade broth with pastina (an enormous bumblebee has just flown in through the open window), freshly cut prosciutto, four-year old parmesan cheese, “crostini” (toast dipped in broth on one side, spread with homemade pate on the other, toast spread with a certain kind of tasty sausage mixed with mild, mild stracchino cheese, and for dessert sliced strawberries in their chianti riserva.

One evening my husband and Gianni tried the various vintages and types of wine made on the fattoria, and chatted about the wine business and afterwards Paolo brought out a bottle with a soda label on it.

“Do you want some soda?” he asked my husband.

“What kind of soda?” He sensed irony there, although they were speaking different languages.

“Actually, artisanal water,” Paolo grinned.

“Ummmm. Very special water.”

“It was made by the lady up the road.”

My husband offered me his glass to take a sip.

“Stai attente (Be careful),” Anna advised, in on the joke.

I took a sip of burning grappa, too strong to take more than a sip of at a time. It is poured out a half inch at a time, into small glasses. Only a Russian could drink more.

Tuscany, underneath, is not the ever-sweet, soft place. As mentioned in another posting, there are passions afoot which are dangerous and threatening, but on the surface no place is so sweet and soft.