Under the Tuscan Sun

by Frances Mayes

  We shop here every day. Every day she says, “Guardi, signora,” and holds up a misshapen carrot that looks obscene to her, a luscious basket of tomatoes, or a cunning little bunch of radishes. Every garlic head, lemon, and watermelon in her shop has been lavished with attention. She has washed and arranged. She makes sure her best customers get the most select produce. If I pick out plums (touching is a no-no in produce shops and I sometimes forget), she inspects each, points out any deficiency she detects, mumbles, takes another. Each purchase comes with cooking tips. You can't make minestrone without bietola; chard is what makes minestrone. And toss in a heel of parmigiano for flavor. Just melt these onions for a long time in olive oil, a dash of balsamic vinegar, serve them on bruschetta.

  Many of her customers are tourists, stopping in for some grapes or a few peaches. A man buys fruit and makes motions of washing his hands. He points to the fruit. She figures out that he's asking her where he can wash it. She explains that it is washed, no one has touched it, but, of course, he can't understand, so she leads him by the elbow down the street and points to the public water fountain. She finds this amusing. “Where is he from that he thinks the fruit isn't clean?”

  All along the streets, artisans open their shop doors to the front light. As I glimpse the work inside, I think medieval guilds might still be practicing their crafts. A young man works on elaborate fruit and flower marquetry of a seventeenth-century desk. As he trims a sliver of pear wood, he's as intent as a surgeon reattaching a severed thumb. In another shop near the Porto Sant'Agostino, Antonio of the dark intent gaze is framing botanical prints. I step in to look and spot a lovely old mirror on his shelf. “Posso?” May I, I ask before I touch it. When I lift it, the top of the frame comes loose in my hand and the fragile, silver-backed antique mirror crashes to the floor. I want to dissolve. But his main concern is my seven years of bad luck. I insist on paying for the mirror, over his protests. He will make a couple of small mirrors with the old foxed shards and he will repair my frame and put in a new mirror. As I leave, I see him carefully picking up the pieces.

  Most fascinating to look into is the place where paintings are restored. Strong fumes emanate from this workshop where two women in white deftly clean layers of time off canvases and rework spots that have been punctured or damaged. Renaissance painters used marble dust, chalk, and eggshells as paint bases. Sometimes they applied gold leaf onto a mordant made of garlic. Their black paint came from lampblack, burned olive sticks, and nutshells; some reds from insect secretions, often imported from Asia. Ground stones, berries, peach pits, and glass yielded other colors, which were applied with brushes made from boar, ermine, feathers, and quills: spiritual art coming directly out of nature. To duplicate the colors of those mulberry dresses, mauve cloaks, azurite robes, modern alchemical processes must go on in this little shop.

  In holes in the wall all over town, the refinishing of furniture goes on. Many men make tables and chests from old wood. There's no subterfuge involved, no attempt to pass them off as antiques; they know the aged wood won't crack, will take the stain and wax, in short, will look right, that is, old. We take our tools to be sharpened in a blackened room where the fabbro apologizes because he can't get them back before tomorrow. When we pick up the ten hoes, scythes, sickles, etc., their knife edges gleam. Tempting, but I do not run my finger across the edge.

  The tailor does not wear glasses and his stitches could be done by mice. In his dark shop with the sewing machine by the window and the spools lined up on the sill, I see a new white bicycle, a water bottle attached for long trips, nifty leather saddlebags over the back wheel. When I see him later, though, he is only in the town park, feeding three stray cats food from his saddlebags. He unwraps the scraps they are so clearly expecting. He and I are the only ones out on Sunday morning, when most people who live here are doing something else. When I gave him my pants to hem last week, he showed me a circle of photos tacked up on the back wall. His young wife with parted lips and wavy, parted hair. Morta. His mother like an apple doll, also dead. His sister. There was one of him, too, as a young soldier for the Pope, restored to youth, with black hair, his legs apart and shoulders back. He was twenty-five in Rome, the war just ended. Now fifty more years have passed, everyone gone. He pats the white bicycle. I never thought I'd be the one left.

  CORTONA MERITS ALMOST SEVEN PAGES IN THE EXCELLENT Blue Guide: Northern Italy. The writer meticulously directs the walker up each street, pointing out what's of interest. From the gates to the city, further excursions into the surrounding countryside are recommended. Each side altar in the duomo is described according to its cardinal orientation, so that, if you happen to know which way east is, after travelling the winding roads, you can locate yourself and self-guide through the nooks and crannies. The writer has even identified all the murky paintings in the choir area. Reading the guide, I'm overwhelmed once again by all the art, architecture, history in one little hill town. This is only one of hundreds of such former marauder lookouts, perched picturesquely for views now.

  Now that I know this one place a little, I read with doubled perception. The guide directs me to the acacia-shaded lane along the inside wall of the town, and I immediately remember the modest stone houses on one side, the view over the Val di Chiana on the other. I see, too, the three-legged dog I know lives in the house that always has the enormous underpants drying on a line. I see the cane-bottomed chairs all the people who live along that glorious stretch of wall pull out at evening when they view the sunset and check in with the stars. Yesterday, walking there, I almost stepped on a still soft dead rat. Inside one of the doorways that opens right out onto the narrow street, I glimpsed a woman holding her head in her hands at the kitchen table. Whether she was weeping or catching a catnap, I don't know.

  Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct. There are places I've been which are lost to me. When I was there, I followed the guide faithfully from site to site, putting check marks in the margins at night when I plotted my route for the next day. On my first trip to Italy, I was so excited that I made a whirlwind, whistlestop trip to five cities in two weeks. I still remember everything, the revelation of my first espresso under the arcades in Bologna, remarking that it stung my throat. Climbing every tower and soaking my blistered feet in the bidet at night. The candlelit restaurant in Florence where I first met ravioli with butter and sage. The pastries I bought to take to the room, all wrapped and tied like a present. The dark leather smell of the shoe store where I bought (inception of a lifelong predilection) my first pair of Italian shoes. Discovering Allori in a corner of the Uffizi. The room at the foot of the Spanish Steps where Keats died, and dipping my hand in the boat-shaped fountain just outside, thinking Keats had dipped his hand there. I kept no record of that trip. On later trips, I began to carry a travel journal because I realized how much I forgot over time. Memory is, of course, a trickster. I remember little of three days in Innsbruck—the first bite of autumn air, a beautiful woman with red hair at the next table in a restaurant—but I can still touch every stone of Cuzco; little is left of Puerto Vallarta but the Yucatan is bright in memory. I loved the Mayan ruins seen through waves of hallucinatory heat, a large iguana who slept on the porch of my thatched room, the dogged solitude of the people, crazy storms that blew out the lights, mosquito netting waving around the bed, and candles melting astonishingly fast.

  Although a getaway weekend may be just that, most trips have an underlying quest. We're looking for something. What? Fun, escape, adventure—but then what? “This trip is life-changing,” my nephew said. Did he know that at the outset, come to Italy looking for affirmation of a change he felt rising in him? I suspect not; he discovered this in travelling. Another guest compared the water, the architecture, the landscape, the wine—all she saw to her hometown's more excellent version. It irritated me to the point of surliness. I wanted to tape her mouth, point her to an eleventh century
monastery and say “Look.” I felt she went home having seen nothing. Shortly after, she wrote that she was getting a divorce (no word of this while she was here) after a fourteen-year marriage to a man who has decided he is gay. When I thought back on her attitudes here, I understood that she desperately had looked for the comfort of a home which was no longer there. A guest earlier in the summer was on one of those marathon seven countries in three weeks trips. It's tempting to mock that impulse but to me it's extremely interesting when one chooses to power through that many miles. First of all, it's very American. Just drive, please. And far and quickly. There's a strong “get me out of here” impetus behind such trips, even when they're disguised as “seeing the lay of the land so I'll know the places I want to come back to.” It's not the destinations; it's the ability to be on the road, happy trails, out where no one knows or understands or cares about all the deviling things that have been weighing you down, keeping you frantic as a lizard with a rock on its tail. People travel for as many reasons as they don't travel. “I'm so glad I went to London,” a friend told me in college, “Now I don't ever have to go again.” The opposite end of that spectrum is my friend Charlotte who crossed China in the back of a truck, an alternate route into Tibet. In his poem “Words from a Totem Animal,” W.S. Merwin cuts to the core:

  Send me out into another life

  lord because this one is growing faint

  I do not think it goes all the way.

  Once in a place, that journey to the far interior of the psyche begins or it doesn't. Something must make it yours, that ineffable something no book can capture. It can be so simple, like the light I saw on the faces of the three women walking with their arms linked when the late afternoon sun slanted into the Rugapiana. That light seemed to fall like a benison on everyone beneath it. I, too, wanted to soak my skin under such a sun.

  THE IDEAL APPROACH TO MY NEW HOMETOWN IS FIRST TO SEE the Etruscan tombs down in the flatland below the town. There are tombs from 800 to 200 B.C. near the train station in Camucia and on the road to Foiano, where the custodian never likes the tip. Maybe he's in a bad mood because he spends eerie nights. His small farmhouse, with a bean patch and yard-roaming chickens, coexists with this tomba that would appear strangely primordial in the moonlight. A little uphill, a rusted yellow sign is all that points to the so-called tomb of Pythagoras. I pull over and walk along a stream until I reach a short lane, cypress lined, leading to the tomb. There's a gate but it doesn't look as if anyone ever bothers to close it. So there it is, just sitting on a round stone platform. Niches for the upright sarcophagi look like the shrine at the bottom of my driveway. The ceiling is partially gone but enough of the curve is left that I can see the dome shape. I'm standing inside a structure someone put together at least two thousand years ago. One massive stone over the door is a perfect half moon.

  The mysterious Etruscans! My knowledge of them, until I started to come to Italy, was limited to the fact that they preceded the Romans and that their language was indecipherable. Since they built with wood, little remained. I was almost all wrong. Not much of their written language has been found, but much has been translated by now, thanks to the crucial find of some strips of linen shroud from an Egyptian mummy that travelled to Zagreb as a curio and were preserved later in the museum there. How the Etruscan linen, inscribed with text in ink made from soot or coal, became the wrapping for a young girl is still unknown. Possibly Etruscans migrated to Egypt after they were conquered by Rome around the first century B.C. and the girl was actually Etruscan. Or perhaps the linen was simply a convenient remnant, torn into strips by embalmers who used whatever was at hand. The mummy carried enough Etruscan text to provide several key roots, although the language still isn't totally translated. It's too bad what they left written on stone is gravestone information and government fact. A friend told me that last year a local geometra discovered a bronze tablet covered with Etruscan writing. He kicked it up in the dirt of a farmhouse where he was overseeing a renovation and took it home. The police heard about this and called on him that night; presumably, it is in the hands of archaeologists.

  Of the local Etruscan culture, an astonishing amount continues to be unearthed. Beside one of the local tombs, a seven-step stairway of stone flanked with reclining lions intertwined with human parts—probably a nightmare vision of the underworld—was discovered in 1990. Nearby Chiusi, like Cortona one of the original twelve cities of Etruria, only recently found its town walls. Both Cortona and Chiusi have extensive collections of Etruscan artifacts found both by archeological digs and by farmers turning up bronze figures in their furrows. In Chiusi, the museum custodian will take you out to see some of the dozens of tombs found in that area. The Romans considered Etruscans warlike (the Romans weren't?), so they come down to us with that rap on them, but the tombs, enormous clay horses, bronze figures, and household objects reveal them to be a majestic, inventive, humorous people. Certainly, they must have been strong. Everywhere they've left remains of walls and tombs constructed of stupendous stone.

  In the land around Cortona, tombs that have been found are called meloni locally, for the curved shape of the ceilings. To stand under one of these for a few moments is all you need to absorb the sense of time that prepares you for Cortona.

  Leaving the tombs, I start uphill, gently at first, then in a series of switchbacks, I begin to climb, glimpsing through the windshield terraced olives, the crenelated tower of Il Palazzone, where Luca Signorelli fell off scaffolding and died a few months later, a broken watchtower and tawny farmhouses. A soft palate: the mellow stone, olive trees flickering moss green to platinum; even the sky may be veiled by thin mist from the lake nearby. In July, small mown wheat fields bordering the olives turn the color of lion's fur. I glimpse Cortona, noble in profile as Nefertiti. At first I'm below the great Renaissance church of Santa Maria del Calcinaio, then, for a 280-degree loop of the road, level with its solid volumes, then above, looking down on the silvery dome and the Latin cross shape of the whole. The shoe tanners built this church, after the common occurrence of the appearance of the Virgin's face on their tannery wall. She is Saint Mary of the Lime Pits because they used lime in tanning leather and the church is erected on their quarry grounds. Odd how often sacred ground remains sacred: The church rests on Etruscan remains, possibly of a temple or burial ground.

  A quick look back—I see how far I have climbed. The wide-open Val di Chiana spreads a fan of green below me. On clear days I can spot Monte San Savino, Sinalunga, and Montepulciano in the distance. They could have sent smoke signals: big festa tonight, come on over. Soon I've reached the high town walls, and to get one more brush with the Etruscans, drive all the way to the last gate, Porta Colonia, where the big boggling Etruscan stones support the base, with medieval and later additions built on top.

  Whizzing past, I love the fast glimpses into the gates. In town, they sell old postcards of these views and they look exactly the same as now: the gate, the narrow street sloping up, the palazzi on either side. When I enter the town, the immediate sense is that I am inside the gates—a secure feeling if hoards of Ghibellines, Guelfs, or whoever is the current enemy, are spotted in the distance waving their lances, or even if I've only managed to survive the autostrada without getting my car mirror “kissed” by a demon passing in a car half the size of mine.

  If I come by car, I walk in on Via Dardano, a name from deep in time. Dardano, believed to have been born here, was the legendary founder of Troy. Right away on the left, I pass a four-table trattoria, open only at midday. No menu, the usual choices. I love their thinly pounded grilled steak served on a bed of arugula. And love to watch the two women at the wood-fired stove in the kitchen. Somehow they never appear to be sweltering.

  I'm fascinated by the perfect doors of the dead on this street. Traditionally, they're considered to be exits for the plague dead—bad juju for them to go out the door the living use. If this is so, the custom must have come from some superstition much older than Christianit
y, which was firmly the religious preference of that time. Some suggest that the raised, narrow doors were used in times of strife when the portone, the main door, was barricaded. I've wondered if they were not simply doors used when stepping out of a carriage or off a horse and right into the house in bad weather—rather than stepping down into the wet, probably filthy, street—or even in good weather to protect a long silk skirt. George Dennis, nineteenth-century archaeologist, described Cortona as “squalid in the extreme.” That the doors are rather coffin shaped, however, lends a certain visual reinforcement to the door of the dead theory.

  The centro consists of two irregular piazzas, joined by a short street. No town planner would design it this way but it is charming. A fourteenth-century town hall with twenty-four broad stone steps dominates the Piazza della Repubblica. The steps serve as ringside seats at night when everyone is out having gelato—a fine place to take in the evening spectacle below. From here, you can see a loggia on the level above across the piazza, where the fish market used to be. Now it's terrace seating for a restaurant and another perch for viewing. All around are harmonious buildings, punctuated by streets coming up from three gates. The life in the street buzzes, thrives. The miracle of no cars—how amazingly that restores human importance. I first feel the scale of the architecture, then see that the low buildings are completely geared to the body. The main street, officially named Via Nazionale but known locally as Rugapiana, the flat street, is only for walking (except for a delivery period in the morning) and the rest of the town is inhospitable to drivers, too narrow, too hilly. A street connects to a higher or lower one by a walkway, a vicolo. Even the names of the vicoli make me want to turn into each one and explore: Vicolo della Notte, night, Vicolo dell'Aurora, dawn, and Vicolo della Scala, a long rise of shallow steps.