by Bill Barich
Our wine merchant was a shy man with prematurely gray hair. He wore a gray smock. Two gray cats were always prowling his shelves. They ate from his hand. The scene in the store reminded me of Yeats’s account of Ezra Pound feeding the cats of Rapallo, taking bones and pieces of meat from his pocket. “He knows all their histories,” said Yeats. The merchant sold us chianti classico in plastic-covered flasks. (Tuscans don’t use straw so much anymore; it tends to rot.) The best flasks had three stars on their labels, beneath the black cock that serves as the classico logo.
The fish we bought were kept in a bin of crushed ice at the pescheria. We had snapper, shark, some type of bass. Once, we tried mullet. It was awful, the worst fish I’ve eaten anywhere. Mullet are bottom-feeders, muck-lovers. They ingest mouthfuls of mud, then sift through it for microscopic particles of animal or vegetable matter. That explains their flavor—muddy, with a soupçon of algae bloom. Better to stick to beef or chicken, or even rabbit. One of the produce ladies had a hutch in her backyard. If we ordered an execution on Thursday, we could pick up the dressed corpse on Friday morning. For those too faint of heart to give the necessary command, there are always sausages, including strongly scented links made of cinghiale, or wild boar. And there are all kinds of pasta:
anelli, or rings
anellini, little rings
anellini rigati, little grooved rings
cannellini, little reeds
cannelloni, big reeds
cappelli di prete, priests’ hats
farfalle, butterflies
linguine, little tongues
maruzze, seashells
mostaccioli, little mustaches
penne, pens
stelle, stars
vermicelli, little worms
ziti, bridegrooms
A comprehensive list can be had from the Museo Storico degli Spaghetti—the Historical Museum of Spaghetti—in Pontedassio, near the Italian Riviera.
One morning when I was gathering wood to burn in our fireplace I met our neighbor, Signor Mancini, who lived with his wife in a cramped little cottage near the hotelier’s house. Mancini was in his seventies, a tall, handsome, cheerful man who often wore a black beret. He had a garden that was about the size of a parking spot in any municipal garage. The residue of his winter crop was tossed onto the tilled earth, left to mulch into the soil—onion tops, cabbage leaves, decaying brussels sprouts. I watched him digging with a pitchfork, preparing the ground for some tomato plants he’d started in his greenhouse. He had an apron tied around his waist in the manner of a Tuscan paesano—somebody who’d been born and bred in the countryside and had been taught early on how to work in the fields with the most basic of tools.
We talked for a while, quite pleasantly, but then we reached a point beyond which we could not continue. There were limits to what I could say and understand. I felt bad about this, because it made Mancini impatient. He wanted to tell me things, tried to tell me things, and there I stood, as unresponsive as the wood in my arms. “Ma, non so,” he’d say, repeating the sentence in frustration—”I just don’t know.” I think he was relieved when I walked away. After this, we were always friendly when we met, discussing the weather or the price of food, but there was a tension beneath the interchanges. Mancini had the Tuscan peasant’s contempt for anything frivolous. Instead of words, he gave me heads of lettuce from his garden, occasionally three at a time.
I had no problems communicating with Signora Mancini. She had no use for complexity. She was the hotelier’s former maid, and she still did some housekeeping for a family on Pian dei Giullari. I’d run into her at the foot of the steep lane that led to our compound. She would wave, she would smile. “Buon giorno, signore!” she’d cry. Her voice was the voice of old Italian women in movies—the ones who survive. Her face was round, pretty, unscarred by expectations. Whenever she looked at me, she took all of me in without blinking. It was like being embraced, forgiven, a kind of nourishment. Signora Mancini trudged uphill. She was a happy soldier. She spoke of people, trees, old age, careless drivers who went ripping past. If I understood her, fine; if not, also fine. One afternoon as we were trudging along she found a blue plastic spaceman in the grass by the path. “Te-soro,” I said—a treasure. Signora Mancini thought this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
Sunday was family day for the Mancinis. I’d see them outside the cottage in their best clothes, waiting for the arrival of relatives, or for their daughter to drop off her only child—the nipote, the grandson. The boy was eight or nine. He had glasses and a homemade haircut—blondish hair, like a stranger from the north. He sat on the ground and played in the dirt, drawing pictures with a stick. The Mancinis sat in straight-backed chairs and watched the nipote run around, glad just to be near him. When the nipote went home at night, the Mancinis would go back to their ordinary routine, turning down the lamps in the cottage to save on electricity—this happens everywhere in Italy, an entire country reducing itself to a dull continental glow—and switching on the TV.
Sometimes after dinner, I fiddled with the TV in the villa and got it to work. The picture was in black-and-white, grainy, snowy, starring faintly transmitted figures who could have been beamed in from another planet. The shows I saw were simply conceived, with a premium placed on production values. I watched many spettacoli—multipart programs that often go on for weeks. The spettacoli feature singing, dancing, comedy routines, midgets in cars—the very essence of Milton Berlismo. Every spettacolo has a theme. I watched one called “What Do You Drink?” Each segment was devoted to a different beverage—wine, beer, vodka. In the beer segment, the dancers dressed like Germans. In the vodka segment, they dressed like Russians. The set remained the same.
I always tried to watch the two most popular shows in Italy, “Portobello” and “Flash.” “Portobello” broadcasts live from various locations around the country. Its set is unique—about six spacious isolation booths with windows and telephones. Guests get to sit in the booths and take calls from the viewing public after they’ve told their story to the host, Enzo Tortora. A woman from Piacenza, say, might have invented a new kind of cheese grater and be in need of an investor. Some nuns from Abruzzi might want to sell their collection of Steuben glass to help the orphans. A lonely Milanese pharmacist might wish to meet and perhaps marry a nice woman, not too big. Va bene, all of you—get into the booths. While the phones ring, two men stripped to the waist sit down at a table for a wrist-wrestling contest. Maybe Enzo sings. Miracles are happening.
“Flash” is a quiz show with musical interludes. The host is Mike Buongiorno, a Roman with a perpetual tan and a lacquered look. Mike Buongiorno pronounces “Flash” as “Flesh.” Every week, he asks a variety of questions—current events, films, politics—to three contestants. If a contestant is slow to answer, Mike Buongiorno teases him. “What’s the matter, Corleone?” he might say. “You didn’t sleep last night? You can’t remember anything?” The winner of the preliminary round goes for the grand prize in a category of his own choosing. One champ, Mignini, was an expert in the history of the Ascoli soccer team. Mignini was about twenty. He dressed in knickers and hoped to become a movie star. He and Mike Buongiorno had an argument one night when they disagreed about a question’s pertinence. Mignini said the question had nothing, niente, to do with Ascoli. Mike Buongiorno said that it did. Shortly after this, Mignini lost his title to a retired police officer, Gubellini. Gubellini’s category of expertise was the life of Jesus.
…
Every day that spring, I took a long walk both for the exercise and the fresh air. Branches of wisteria trailed over the high walls along our lane, falling between shards of broken glass that had been set into the concrete to ward off thieves and terrorists. The lane joins Pian dei Giullari near the villa where Galileo had lived under house arrest after the Inquisition ordered him, in 1633, to recant his heliocentric theory of the universe. Just down from the villa is the only business in Arcetri—Omero, a restaurant. Omero used to be a classic
Tuscan roadhouse offering an uncomplicated menu of regional specialties at modest prices, but it has been discovered, and the prices have gone up. The waiters dress in white shirts and black bow ties, and know how to intimidate tourists.
I liked to stop at Omero to have a glass of beer at the small delicatessen at the front of the restaurant. I liked the deli clerk, Alvaro, very much. Alvaro is a symmetrical person, firmly situated in time and space. A certain part of the community revolves around him. He was the helios of staples—wine, sugar, pasta, cold cuts. He always seemed to be preoccupied with a chronic complaint, either physical or metaphysical, and his behavior was never faked, so I was pleased whenever he chose to share a confidence or sell me a loaf of heavy, multigrain integrale—bread that he reserved for regular customers when it was in short supply.
If I was hungry for a snack, Alvaro would make me a sandwich. With a big bread knife, he’d slice the integrale thickly, then slap whatever I wanted between the slices.
“Prosciutto?” he’d ask, touching a perfectly cured haunch that dangled from the ceiling beams.
“Sì.”
“Pecorino?” Pecorino is sheep’s-milk cheese. It comes in three varieties. The oldest and driest, for grating, is what’s known as pecorino Romano, or Romano cheese.
“Sì.”
“Finocchiona?” A fatty Tuscan sausage that tastes of fennel.
“Sì.”
Alvaro would smile, symmetrically. “Si mangia bene.” One eats well.
The restaurant smelled of meat and poultry grilling over a wood fire. Alvaro turned the prosciutto haunches, turned the waxed balls of pecorino, seeking just the right amount of exposure for each. The waiters kept ducking into the deli for cigarettes. They’d defy their uniforms, becoming street-corner boys again, ragazzi, laughing and scratching themselves, discussing the girls inside.
Across from Omero is a working vineyard that’s separated from the street by a low stone wall. I often sat on the wall and let the beer settle. Arcetri is not in the chianti zone, but the grapes in the vineyard were probably chianti grapes anyway—Sangiovese or Canaiolo, the wine’s primary constituents. Vintners use Sangiovese for its body and alcohol. Canaiolo imparts a mellowness that tempers the bite of the wine without destroying it entirely.
The landscape in the vineyard resembled the landscape you find in the background of Renaissance paintings, where it shines in miniature, like a diamond seen through a keyhole. Artists could not bring it to the fore, of course, because they were locked into a system of patronage that demanded predominantly religious subject matter. The landscape was not well served when it did shift to center stage. You can see what happened to it if you go to the Gallery of Modern Art at the Pitti Palace. Painters blew it up in size and populated it with peasants they’d borrowed from Millet. The peasants toil and toil ceaselessly, in peasanty costumes, shouldering chubby infants who all have the same expression of weary resignation on their faces. How the infants learned to be resigned at just ten months of age is a mystery, but there is no mistaking the expression.
The worst aspect of these genre paintings is that they fail to capture the wonderful quality of Tuscan light you encounter in the countryside. This light—gold, yellow, always muted—has a tendency to soften the edges of things but not to deprive them of their actual rootedness in the world. Once you’ve been exposed to it, you’ll notice it over and over again, in Ghirlandaio, in Fra Angelico, in almost every great artist of Tuscany. It is completely different from the hard blue marine light of Venice, which draws its strength from the Adriatic. Venetian light is as analytical in its way as the work of Giovanni Bellini, who could not have painted with such precise intensity if he’d been Florentine.
I usually ended my walks at Torre del Gallo, a nineteenth-century reconstruction of a medieval tower with battlements. Torre del Gallo looks like a fairy-tale castle, the sort of place where a hunchback ought to be ringing bells. Next to it is La Gallina, “The Hen,” a ruined villa that once belonged to the Lanfredini family, ambassadors for Lorenzo de’ Medici. I met a glassblower here one day, while I was leaning against the gate. He was old but fit, with lung power that he kept up by riding his bicycle through Arcetri. The hills were no obstacle to him, he said, although he sometimes had to pause to wipe his brow and say hello to a friend. No more glassblowing, he said, the industry’s shot. “Macchine, macchine.” Machines, machines.
The longer we lived in Arcetri, the more oppressive Florence began to seem. The city was distasteful, crowded. The air really wasn’t fit to breathe. Twenty years ago, the expensive dress shops, the purveyors of truffle sandwiches and two-hundred-dollar shoes, were confined mostly to the area around Via Tornabuoni, near the centro, but now pockets of refinement jumped out from the old stones in unexpected districts, driving away the tripe sellers, the rag dealers, the men who sharpen knives on grinding wheels. Everywhere I saw boutiques, neon, shiny plate glass, the spacy mannequins of Giorgio Armani. I heard as much swooning over Missoni as over Masaccio. The statues in the Piazza della Signoria had become backdrops for tourist snapshots, a means of validating one’s presence in a foreign land. The Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, Michelangelo . . .
Somehow, the art that is the essence of Florence, its true reason for being, manages to withstand the various pressures put upon it. In the Uffizi, in the Bargello, in churches and chapels, I discovered that twenty years had taught me to see with my own eyes instead of the eyes of my teachers. Take Raphael, for instance. True, he was a great painter, but he was also a joker, always darting in and out of the frame, sending up his subjects. Look, he says, confiding, that fat, foolish, hypocritically pious man has paid me to paint his portrait, and he won’t have the nerve to complain when I give him an image that shows every wart and pimple. This madonna, says Raphael, the one who’s about to giggle?: I made love to her last night. Leonardo da Vinci pays no attention to his madonnas. He leaves them stranded, half finished, on insubstantial rocks. He’s a dreamer, an eternal schoolboy with a gyroscope for a mind. It spins from one idea to another, never stopping—good-bye, girls, Leonardo’s off to help some duke win a war.
Some of the most famous paintings in the Uffizi, including many Botticellis, had recently been restored. I found them hard to look at, because they were so different from what I’d come to think of as the “originals.” The colors were bright, glowing, K-Mart clean. I thought they’d been tampered with, touched up, but I was wrong. Only dark coats of varnish, of soot and grime, had been removed. The man who takes care of this work for the museum, Umberto Baldini, made his name by supervising the restoration efforts that followed the terrible 1966 flood. His studio is at the Fortezza da Basso. Baldini is a sophisticated theoretician, a believer in the relevance of technology, but he has a profound respect for an artist’s integrity. Any portion of a canvas or fresco that Baldini has restored must show the restoration, not hide it. (In the past, some restorers tried to improve upon the masters, adding details and brushstrokes, erasing one color to add another.) Baldini uses colore neutro—a blend of red, yellow, and blue—to patch the trouble spots. If the neutro is applied next to a strong red, the red in it becomes stronger; the same formula holds for yellow and blue.
One afternoon, I went to the Church of Santa Croce, to the Bardi Chapel, to visit Giotto’s monks. The chapel was quiet, cool. Candles were burning. The monks were still mourning, still throwing their arms to the sky. I could remember that time, twenty years ago, when their grief had seemed exaggerated, even cute, but now I couldn’t look at them without being reminded of my own irrevocable losses.
Florence was distasteful, yes, but it was still Florence. I couldn’t avoid it for more than a day or two. I’d ride the bus to Ponte di San Niccolò, then walk the banks of the Arno, oblivious of traffic. Men sat on the banks, fishing with long poles—maybe thirteen or fourteen feet. The poles had no reels. The men caught ugly fish, mullet-cousins. I never saw any trout. If the fishing was slow, the men took slingshots from their pockets and scattered pe
llets of bait in the water.
My wife bought a leather purse at a shop near the Pitti Palace. The price was good. The man who’d made the purse was named Silvano. He was proud, a little irascible, definitely from the old school of Florentine craftsmen. To the strap of the purse, he attached a leather tag: Made by hand, Silvano.
Students from Italian high schools came to the city on their Easter break. They dressed with great panache, throwing together wardrobe items to create a lexicon of international teen. On the buses, they behaved abominably, pushing past old people and cripples, singing, causing scraps. Nobody ever scolded them. In Italy, children are sacred, forever indulged.
We learned the word sciopero. It means “strike.”
There were several bus drivers’ strikes. Often we didn’t know about them, because there were several journalists’ strikes when newspapers stopped publishing.
There was a big general strike.
Terrorists were active in the south. In Naples, they stole some diamond-tipped bullets from a government armory and used them to assassinate a high-ranking police official, shooting him through the bulletproof windows of his car.
We ate at a fine little restaurant, Da Noi, and had a risotto made with squid ink. It was so good that we ordered another version of it a week later at a fancier place. The cook substituted tomatoes, onions, and garlic for the squid. The dish was like Spanish rice. I complained to the manager. The manager said, “You think we have time to make a real risotto? Don’t be absurd!”
We ate at a pizzeria where a dwarf was sitting on the back of a German shepherd.
The best place we ate was the trattoria that the train conductor had recommended. It was extremely busy, extremely cheap. The menu was handwritten, with many misspellings. It changed daily, depending on what was in season. The tables were pushed in one against another, jammed with Florentine grotesques. We shared ours with a gangly man in a black suit who did not speak to his two daughters during the meal. We had:
