by Matthew Fort
He explains that the house is round because it had once been a mill. Shorn of the superstructure that carried the sails, only the round base remains, looking out across the sea to Elba, the mysterious cone of Montecristo, and to Corsica beyond. The interior is as round as the exterior, with one room to each floor. Each room and the stairs between are cluttered with books, books and yet more books. The ground floor serves as kitchen and dining room. It’s quite the tiniest kitchen I’ve ever seen.
Francesco leads me down some steps to the more conventionally configured base below the truncated tower. ‘You will sleep with the bottles,’ he says grandly, as if the bottles are sentient and responsive. The room with my bed is largely filled with boxes of wine stacked in partitioning walls, as is each of the other rooms, all part of a large order, he informs me, for a Japanese client and due for dispatch in a few days. It’s snugly comfortable, with my own bathroom, shower and a small kitchen where I can make coffee and breakfast.
Presently his wife, Gabriella, joins us. She’s beautiful, with broad, almost Slavic, lines to her face, high cheekbones, a full mouth, short light brown hair without a trace of white, and eyes the colour of toasted hazelnuts. She apologises for not being there to greet me, as she’s been visiting a sick friend. Sadly she wouldn’t be joining us for dinner either as she had to return to the friend. Her expression changes with almost every word she speaks, like wind passing over a field of wheat. She departs in a flurry of further apologies.
Before he starts cooking in the smallest kitchen in the world, Francesco brings up a couple of two-litre bottles of his wine, Ansonaco. It’s the colour of winter sunshine. We drink it at cellar temperature, as he prefers. Chilling it, he says, reduces its distinctive flavours.
‘It’s from the bottom of the container,’ says Francesco. ‘It’s – how do you say? – better than the clear wine. It has more character.’
The wine has a curious, astringent nose of crab apple and mirabelle plums, but tastes ethereal, gentle, sunny and fresh, with a slight resinous edge. It has an exquisite balance and dawdles expansively around my mouth.
‘What’s your philosophy of wine making?’ I ask him, mindful of Stefano Farkas’s eloquent expositions of his approach to making wine.
‘I don’t have a philosophy,’ Francesco says. ‘Philosophy is blah, blah, blah. The wine is the wine. That is the philosophy.’
‘There are standard wines,’ he goes on. ‘And there’re wines like mine, that aren’t standard.’
He pours me a glass of sangiovese produced by a colleague in mainland Tuscany. It’s smooth, handsome and immaculately tailored with suave, well-behaved fruit, something of a Savile Row wine. It’s a style that I recognise immediately and enjoy.
‘That’s a standard wine,’ explains Francesco. ‘It’s a good wine, well-made. The standard is high. But it’s a standard. It has no individuality. It’ll never be much better or much worse.’
Modern winemaking techniques and knowledge have improved the general quality of wines immeasurably since the days when I first started drinking the stuff. It’s very rare to get an absolute stinker these days, while memories of Don Cortes Spanish Burgundy, Bull’s Blood, Blue Nun and Black Tower of my student days still cause involuntary acid reflux. However, along the way, it seems to me that many wines have lost some of their distinctive character. Overall the palate of contemporary wines has narrowed, become smoother, sweeter and more predictable. The depths to which some wines were once prone to sink might have vanished, but so, too, have the individualistic heights.
As we drink, Francesco prepares dinner. He cooks as he speaks, with great deliberation, attending to each detail with meticulous care. It isn’t a speedy process.
We start with salted anchovies that he’s made himself.
‘You can eat them after a couple of months, but they are better after a year,’ he says.
He’s already washed off the salt and taken out the backbones before submerging the fillets in olive oil for a day. He takes them out of the oil, and, while they drain, slowly chops a green shoot of a Tropea onion against his thumb with the scarred blade of an old Opinel knife. He slices some flakes of peel from a lemon and griddles a few slices of bread and rubs them with garlic. He heaps three or four of the anchovy fillets, onion shoots and lemon peel onto the bread and hands it to me. The anchovies have the texture of chilled butter and a mellow meatiness, carrying sweet onion and citrus oil and garlic and the slight bitterness from where the ridges of the griddle pan have burnt the bread.
Then Francesco cleans and descales the red mullet, bream and scorfano (scorpion fish) he bought from the fishmonger a few hours earlier. He chops a couple of onions and adds them to the olive oil in a sauté pan, mauled and dull from long use. He puts in a little chilli for good measure, scatters a handful of fresh broad beans on top and carefully places the fish in the pan so that they form a single layer, pours a glass of fresh water over them and sets the dish to a gentle simmer.
While he was cleaning the fish, he found a sac of roe. He washes the roe in salt water that he keeps in a bottle on the floor, and squeezes the raw eggs out of the containing membrane into a bowl. He splashes a little olive oil over them and beats them and oil vigorously with a fork. When there’s a smooth emulsion, he hands the bowl to me.
‘Fish mayonnaise,’ he says. ‘If you wash it in sea water, it doesn’t need any salt. Put it on the toast.’ It has a delicate but distinct fishiness. He pours a little more fresh water over the cooking fish. There’s no sense of hurry about Francesco’s cooking, just a steady deliberation about each stage.
He shakes a fine, brindled Mediterranean crayfish (aragosta) out from under a damp cloth in a plastic bag. The creature waves its long antennae in a kind of world-weary protest at its cavalier treatment. Francesco takes a large knife and forcefully cuts off the chunky tail. He sticks the head upright in a bowl to catch the juices. The antennae give one last, despairing twitch, and are still. Painstakingly and precisely he cuts the tail into sections and the head in half.
Before he puts the tail sections into the pan, he carefully extracts the bright orange sacks of raw roe. He pops one into his mouth, opening his eyes wide.
‘Perche no? Why not?’ he says, and adds more water and the crayfish juices to the simmering fish.
I try a sac of roe. It’s gentle, sweet and creamy with a very slight graininess.
Francesco treats each ingredient as if it has a particular point, flavour or virtue. Each action is a stage in a closely observed ritual expanded over many minutes as he stops to tell a story, make an observation, reflect on this or that.
And so while he cooks, he tells me about his life as an engineer in Florence; how he once designed a building that was built without cement; about his daughters from his first marriage; how he met Gabriella, and why they came to Giglio; how they’d run a restaurant together, he cooking, she taking care of the front of house; the politics of wine production on Giglio. At one point he stops, searches for some missing piece of equipment and blames his inability to find it on Cincuit, which or who, says Francesco, is un diavoletto, a Triestino domestic goblin, who hides car keys, slips bills for payment into the wastepaper basket, trips you up with a shoe on the floor, who’s responsible for those tiny, irritating hiccups that interrupt the smooth flow of a well-run life.
We finally begin eating the fish around midnight. With infinite patience Francesco scrapes away the skin and the bones of a mullet, before putting the pearly white flesh on my plate, along with a section of aragosta tail.
‘Take some of the juices,’ he commands, ‘and the broad beans.’
‘Perché no?’ I say. Fish, crayfish, broad beans, juices, simple, complex, all the world in each mouthful, food to eat for the rest of my life. I wipe my plate clean with bread so thoroughly it gleams as if it’s been washed.
The next day the weather bears a closer resemblance to the Lake District in November than the sun-drenched Mediterranean of my dreams. A heavy, wet mist shrou
ds the world. The shrubs around the house limply drip tears of moisture. Those beyond are just looming presences. Nothing moves.
I read and write up my notes and chat intermittently with Francesco and Gabriella as they come and go about their respective businesses. I log onto the BBC News website and try to relate to a world of mayhem, seedy court cases, political posturing and nastiness in a hundred forms, and can’t. How unreal and meaningless it all seems, like a news broadcast from some far-distant galaxy.
And then my daughter, Lois, comes to join me for a short break, and the sun breaks through as she arrives.
Lois is a boon and a delight, the best of companions: curious, humorous, calm in the face of adversity (which I’m not), cheerful and determined to enjoy each adventure to the full. Above all, she’s a warm, loving and generous soul, with a great appetite for life.
She was born in Columbus, Ohio, and my wife, Lindsay, and I adopted her at birth, flying to Columbus to collect her when she was three weeks old. When you adopt a child, it’s like being a potter who’s given a lump of clay by a stranger. We had no control over the qualities of the clay. All we could do was try to shape it through love and experience.
With Lois, Lindsay and I were fortunate beyond measure. It was soon apparent that the clay from which Lois was made was particularly fine, with a wide seam of purest gold running through her heart and spirit. I fell in love with her the moment I held her in my arms in the suite of the Ramada Hotel in Columbus in which we lived for a week after being given her. I’ve watched her grow with utter astonishment. There has been joy and wonder in every day of her existence.
I can’t think of many people of any age who would have greeted the idiosyncratic arrangements of the Carfagna household with her delight, or adapted to the circumstances with such enthusiasm. Like me, she finds the beauty of the situation, the particularity of the house and the warmth of Gabriella and Francesco extraordinary and beguiling. She takes the dinners that begin at 8 p.m. and finish at 1 a.m. in her stride, observes the banter between Gabriella and Francesco with affection, sleeps easily among the wine bottles and embraces every day.
‘Today, Matthew, we go to the vineyard, Altura, and you and Lois can pick lemons,’ says Francesco one morning.
Altura feels as if it’s at the end of the world because it slopes steeply to where the land falls abruptly 200 metres or so to the rocks and the sea. It’s magnificently terraced, the old retaining walls, carefully restored, descending in a series of long steps beneath an aquamarine sky to an aquamarine sea. But instead of the metal stanchions with taut wires running between them of Stefano Farkas’s vineyard at Valle di Lazzaro, wooden stakes form a pleasing, higgledy-piggledy, abstract pattern. The wires between them for supporting the vines don’t exactly have the tension of violin strings. And the gaps between the vines are a riot of wild flowers, so that the fresh green vine leaves rear up out of a sea of yellow, white, red, purple herbage, beautiful and beguiling.
‘Look at the generosity of those plants,’ Francesco says, waving at the vines like the father of particularly precocious and talented children. He intervenes as little as possible in the way the vines grow, he says.
But doesn’t thinning bunches of grapes help to improve the quality? I ask.
‘The rabbits, birds, the weather, the gods, they reduce the grapes for me.’
What about herbicides or fertilisers?
He frowns.
The wild flowers are regularly cut with a strimmer, and, instead of being tidied away, are allowed to lie where they fall to shade the ground from the fiercest heat of the summer, help keep moisture in the earth, and improve the structure and fertility of the land as they rot.
Francesco’s method of vineyard management resembles that of his cooking: gradual and deliberate, a series of carefully integrated but natural processes. He has help in the form of the tattooed, ponytailed and endlessly smiling Marco. At harvest, members of the family and their friends are drafted in. The nature of the topography makes the use of machinery impossible, so all picking has to be done by hand. Because the vines grow in more or less their own way, there aren’t the neat and regular bunches of grapes that make for easy picking. ‘Sometimes you really have to look for the grapes,’ says Francesco.
He sends Lois and me off to pick lemons from trees in another part of the vineyard. We scramble over a low, lichen-blotched wall in the hot sun, and pick our way gingerly between lines of vines, leaping from one terrace to the next, scraped and scratched by thorns and brambles. It’s a breathless, sweaty business.
The trees grow on the very edge of a sharp vertical drop. We balance precariously over the abyss, trusting to the branches not to break under our weight, reaching into tangles of sharp twigs for the fat, yellow, tear-drop fruit just at the very limit of our reach. We pick clusters rapidly, tossing them as if they are live hand grenades from one to the other, depending on who’s holding the bag, floating in a lemon haze, of citrus oil and leaf. Presently the bag’s full and the tree’s empty, except for the fruit too remote to reach. We make our way, laughing and cursing, back through the spiny undergrowth, to the cool of the old shepherd’s shelter in the main vineyard where Francesco’s preparing lunch of pasta sauced with the remains of the previous night’s fish stew for us.
Giannutri
Giannutri is an island the shape of a gnawed dog’s bone, about forty-five minutes from Giglio Porto. Francesco has arranged for Antonio and his large inflatable to take Lois and me there and bring us back. The sun’s bright. The sea’s smooth and blue. The light sparkles on wavelets. A sense of adventure bubbles between us.
We disembark at the Cala dello Spalmatoio, a narrow bay where houses, holiday homes, and buildings are scattered through the trees above the landing stage, all apparently deserted. Suddenly a shrivelled raisin of a man materialises on the path. He appears to be the Ancient Mariner’s elder brother, rather nattily done up in a striped shirt of many colours and shorts that are indecent on a man of that age, indeed, of any age.
‘Tedeschi?’ he asks.
‘No!’ I say firmly. He looks disappointed.
‘Olandesi?’
‘Inglesi,’ I say more firmly.
‘Ah,’he says, as if that information provides unexpected illumination. Without further ado, he launches into an account of the last few years of his life, which consist, it seems, of spending winters skiing at Cortona and summers in Giannutri. We listen politely for a minute or two, bid him good day, and, baffled, make our way through the deserted village.
Giannutri isn’t as strange or striking as Pianosa, but it still has that slightly eerie quality of a place where human beings should be, but aren’t. We strike out along the dirt path taking us to Cala Maestri, the other landing spot on the island, where, I fancy, we’ll swim, lunch, snooze and swim some more. Ah, the idyll of summer in the islands.
Or, at least, the dirt path I think is taking us to Cala Maestri. Slowly I come to the conclusion that it isn’t.
You may think it difficult to get lost on a small island with few paths, but it’s really quite easy. The wayward signposting doesn’t help. The solid wall of bush on either side cuts off any long view, making it difficult to identify landmarks. The paths, themselves, seem designed to disorient, more a series of interconnected mazes than logical connections between one place and the next. Some lead to the dead end of a holiday establishment festooned with ‘Proprieta Privatà’ signs. Others just twist and turn until they come to a fork. We study the forks. No signs. It’s a lottery which one to take, a lottery in which invariably I make the wrong decision.
My spirits droop. I become cross. I moan. I feel that I’ve let Lois down. Where’s the swimming I had promised? Where the clear, azure waters? The curious sights? The bold adventure? Even more disturbing, where and when are we going to have lunch?
‘Stop complaining, Dad,’ Lois says sharply. ‘This is an adventure.’
‘Not the one I had in mind,’ I say.
‘Well, I’m enjo
ying it,’ she says, and stomps on.
Were there anyone to see us, we’d make an incongruous sight – a middle-aged man with a red, perspiring face, a straw hat, a rucksack on his back and a plastic bag in each hand, one bulging with lunch, the other with towels, being led at a fast clip by an elegant young woman in a coral T-shirt and black leggings, carrying a Mary-Poppins-sized handbag in one hand and another plastic bag containing God knows what in the other.
Presently, a truck carrying two men, one of whom appears to be North African and the other from Central America, passes us. They stop and give us clear instructions how to find Cala Maestri, and, sure enough, with a right here and then a left, there it is: curious and beautiful, with Roman pillars, mysterious brick archway, landing stage and, best of all, empty.
We hurry down. Joy, rapture. A swim before lunch. A snooze in the sun. This is what it’s all about. Then we notice jellyfish, flotillas of them, pretty pink umbrellas with dangly bits waving below, pulsating gently in the water at our feet. Suddenly swimming doesn’t seem quite so attractive. Oh well, at least we can have lunch and relax in the sunshine. Swimming can come later.
And then a middle-sized cruise boat steams up, heaves to and begins edging its way towards a jetty on the far side of our little cove.
‘It isn’t going to— !’ I exclaim.
‘It is,’ says Lois.
And it does – edges in, ties up and disgorges dozens of families on a day out, who make their way along various paths to our side of the cove. I feel as peaceful villagers on the northeast coast of England must have felt about the arrival of the Vikings. We pack up again and march off.
