A momentous change has occurred at Bramasole. “Can you find someone to take care of the place?” I asked signor Martini at the end of last summer. We were leaving and had no one to keep the rampant forces of nature at bay in our garden. Francesco and Beppe, who've worked this land for several years, only want to care for fruit trees, grapes, and olives. Once we asked Beppe to cut the grass. He wielded his weed machine as though clearing brambles, leaving the yard looking like a dust bowl. When he and Francesco saw the lawn mower Ed bought, they took a couple of steps back and said, “No, no, professore, grazie.” They, men of the fields, did not see themselves pushing the little humming mower across some lawn.
Signor Martini, who sold us the house, knows everyone. Perhaps some friend would like a part-time job.
He pushed back from his desk and pointed to his chest. “Io,” he pronounced. “I will make the garden.” He took down something framed above his desk, blew off the dust on top, and held out his agricultural diploma. A small photo stuck in the corner of the frame showed him at twenty with his hand on the rump of a cow. He grew up on a farm and always missed the country life he'd known as a boy. After World War II, he sold pigs before moving to town and taking up real estate. Because he is eligible for a pension, he planned to close his office at the end of the year, he explained, and was moving to a large estate as caretaker. Because so many Italians start work in their teens, they become pensionati, pensioners, while still relatively young. He wanted to make a mid-course correction.
Usually we arrive at the end of May, when it's too late to plant vegetables. By the time we've cleared a space, turned the soil, and bought seeds, the planting season has left us behind. We look longingly at the fagiolini, string beans, climbing tepees of bamboo in our neighbors' gardens. If a few tomato plants happen to survive our ineptitude and lateness, we sit staring at the runty green blobs the morning of our leaving for San Francisco, shaking our heads at the unfulfilled dream of snapping luscious tomatoes from our own labor.
Now, signor Martini has metamorphosed into a gardener. A couple of times a week, he comes here to work, often bringing his sister-in-law as well.
Every day involves a trip to a nursery—we've visited every one within twenty miles—or a walk around the terraces and yard sketching possible gardens. Winter rains have softened the soil so that I sink slightly as I walk. Since we're here in time, I aim to have the most riotous, flamboyant, flourishing garden this side of the Boboli in Florence. I want every bird, butterfly, and bee in Tuscany to feel drawn to my lilies, surfinias, jasmine, roses, honeysuckle, lavender, anemones, and to the hundred scents drifting from them. Even though the risk of freeze is still a consideration, I barely can restrain myself from planting. In the nursery greenhouses, the humid air and the narcotizing effect of bright geraniums, hydrangeas, petunias, impatiens, begonias, and dozens of other rosy pinks and corals, entice me to load the car immediately.
“Whoa, slow down,” Ed says. “We should buy only what we can plant now, the lavender, rosemary, and sage.” These replace what was damaged by the paralyzing winter storm, when it snowed, melted, then froze all in one day. “And more trees can be planted immediately. There's plenty of time.”
Plenty of time. What a musical phrase.
Five cypresses, two pears, a cherry, a peach, and two apricots delivered from the nursery line the driveway, awaiting Francesco and Beppe, who already have argued over where each will receive the right amount of sun. They have pruned the olives, which also suffered in the hard freeze. They whipped around the terraces with a ladder, ruthlessly cutting off freeze-burned limbs, then took us on an inspection tour, examining each tree for damage. We stand before a scrawny olive on the first terrace. They shake their heads sadly, as over the deceased body of a friend. Ed grieves, too, since the casualties are his three-year-olds. On the surviving young ones, the usually glistening leaves are dry. The worst sign is split bark; the farther down the tree a split occurs, the more damage. Those split at the base cause the men to shake their heads and say in low tones, “Buttare via.” Get it out. We will have to dig out at least ten; others they're iffy about—wait and see. A few scraggly leaves on one, shoots at the bottom of another, offer just enough hope to leave it. On the lower slopes of town and in the valley, many groves look dead, and grim-faced men are sawing off thick branches. Hard as it is, the lesson from the record-low 1985 freeze was to prune severely and the trees will regenerate in time.
Nothing is more sacred than the olive. Francesco eyes two oaks on the olive terraces and shakes his head. “Good for the fireplace. Too much shade for the olives.” Ed is careful not to disagree but also to point out emphatically that because of me, the trees have to stay. I have a log bench under one and like to read there. Otherwise, we might come home one day to find the trees cut, Francesco having assumed we agreed. I'm blamed for all deviations of the weed machine around flowers and for any decision that interferes with the self-evident rights of olives and grapes. Ed certainly would lose face if they suspected that he will transplant a wildflower in the tractor path. The men prune and fertilize all morning. Beppe and Francesco tie each new cypress to a giant stake. Between the stake and the tree they stuff a handful of grasses to keep the stake from sawing into the slender trunk.
Although the December freeze totally killed my hedge of herbs and the floppy blue plumbago by the cistern, the balmy, delicious early spring compensates. The laurel hedge Ed doesn't like but doesn't have the heart to eliminate, has, of course, thrived. We work all morning, chopping, digging out, and clearing the dried plants. I feel my neck and arms start to turn red. Is the breeze balmy? Or do I feel its sharp origins in the Swiss Alps?
The worst loss by far is one of the two palm trees on either side of the front door. One looks better than ever. The other is now a tall trunk with a fan of brown, drooping forlornly. From my third-floor study window, I can see a green frond emerging. A hand-span wide, it does not look promising.
Signor Martini is now Anselmo to us. He arrives in his real estate clothes, driving his big Alfa and shouting into his telefonino, but soon he reappears from the limonaia transformed into a farmer—tall rubber boots, flannel shirt, and a beret. What I did not expect is how completely he would take over. “Don't touch!” he warns. “If you touch while the dew is wet on the leaves, the plants will die.” I'm startled; he's so emphatic.
“Why?”
He repeats himself. No reason. Usually, these pronouncements have some basis. Perhaps certain funguses are transmitted more easily—or something logical.
“What is that?” I ask him, gesturing to the thriving, knee-high plants he has put in on the third terrace. “There are so many of them.” I scan the rows; eight rows of ten—eighty plants. He has neglected to consult with me about expanding the garden exponentially. Formerly, we had potatoes, lettuces, basil.
“Baccelli,” he answers. “To eat with fresh pecorino.”
“What are baccelli?”
He is uncharacteristically silent. “Baccelli sono baccelli.” They are what they are. He keeps chopping weeds, shrugs.
I look up the word in the dictionary but it says only “pods,” so I call my friend, Donatella. “Ah, sì, i baccelli, as we call them—they are the fave he has planted, but in the local dialect, ‘fava' means penis so I am sure he would not say the word to you.”
The baccelli flowers are tender white wings with a second pair of petals inside, each marked with a purple-black dot. I examine the leaves, looking for the dark veins forming the letter , which made the Greeks consider the fava dangerous and unlucky because thanatos (death) also starts with theta. So far, these are simply green and vigorous.
In our absence, Anselmo has planted enough vegetables for several families. He has converted two terraces to an enormous garden. A Sardinian shepherd sold him fifteen great bags of sheep manure, which he works into the soil. So far, I've counted, besides the eighty fava plants, forty potato plants, twenty artichokes, four rows of chard, a patch of carrots, a large b
ed of onions, enough garlic for all the ragù in Cortona, and a beautiful triangle of lettuces. He has put in asparagus, too, but he says not to pick the scraggly spears coming up. Asparagus is ready after two years. Zucchini, melon, and eggplant are germinating in the limonaia, and sharpened bamboo stakes for tomatoes—quite a few stakes—he has stacked at the end of the garden until the weather stabilizes. I may have to set up a stand and sell zucchini flowers at the Saturday market. Since he is paid by the hour, we dread to know how many he already has spent.
He also has pruned the roses, cut down three of my favorite wild plum trees that were in the way of the garden, and has begun to espalier a line of plums along the edge of the terrace. They look tortured. When he sees me looking at them, he shakes his finger, as though to a child contemplating a dash into the street. “Wild trees,” he says contemptuously. Whose land is this, I suddenly wonder. Like Beppe and Francesco, he considers anything that interferes with his domain to be a nuisance. And like them, he knows everything, so we do as he says.
“But the best yellow plums. . . .” I will have to keep my eye on these trees. One morning I may wake to find them stacked in the woodpile, along with the oaks Francesco would like to attack.
Even the spring night is shocking. The silence of the country sounds loud. I'm not yet accustomed to the shrieks of owls tearing apart the stillness. We're coming from burrito-and-a-movie nights, order-out-for-Chinese nights, seventeen-messages-on-the-answering-machine nights. I wake up at three or four and wander from room to room, looking out the windows. What is this quiet, the big, moony night with a comet ball smearing my study window and the dark valley below? Why can't I erase the image my student wrote: the comet, like a big Q-tip swabbing the sky? A nightingale practices some nightingale version of scales, lingering on each note. This seems to be a lone bird; no answer comes to the plaintive song.
Late every afternoon, Ed hauls in olive wood. We have supper on trays in front of the fire. “Now, we're back,” he says, raising his glass to the flames, perhaps to the humble god of the hearth. Happiness, divine and banal word, a complex proposition which shifts its boundaries constantly, and sometimes feels so very easy. I pull a blanket around me and doze over Italian idioms. A wind comes up. Which one? The tramontana, tinged with frigid air from the Alps, the ponente, bringing rain, or the levante, blowing hard and fast from the east? The cypresses outlined by moonlight seem to swirl their pointed tops in all directions. Certainly it is not the libeccio, the warm, dry wind from the south, or the summery grecale or maestrale. These winds in the chimney are serious, reminding me that in March, spring is only an idea.
Bitter Greens
of Tuscan Spring
SHEER EXCITEMENT WAKES ME UP EARLY. THIS IS the first market day since I arrived. As I dress, I catch a glimpse from the back window of someone moving along one of the upper terraces. A fox? No, someone leaning down, gathering something. A woman, I think, making out through the milky fog a rounded form and dark scarf. Then she's gone, hidden by the ginestre and wild rose bushes. “Probably someone looking for mushrooms,” Ed guesses. As I drive away, I think I see a movement in the hawthorn above the road.
Three closed trucks from way south in Puglia and Basilicata have arrived at the Thursday market in Camucia. They're open at the back and sides to reveal their bounty—artichokes, still attached to stalks. The drivers pull out enormous mounds and stack them under signs that say twenty-five for 8000 lire, about eighteen cents apiece. Women cluster around, buying in quantity. Most favored are the purple-streaked smallest ones. These artichokes, even the peeled stalks, are greatly tender. Too small for a choke, the whole thing is edible, except for a few outer leaves. They're sold on foot-long stalks, tied in a cumbrous bundle so heavy that my market tour must end right here. I struggle home, trying to decide how I will use the twenty-five artichokes I have somehow hoisted under my arm. As I haul them into the kitchen, I see another huge bundle of tiny purple artichokes on the counter. “Oh no! Where did you get these?”
Ed grabs some of my bags. “I was up at Torreone and a pick-up packed with artichokes pulled up to the bar. Everyone ran out to buy from this guy, so I bought some, too.” Fifty artichokes. Two people.
All the restaurants and trattorie have fried artichokes on the menu. In homes, they're often eaten raw, with seasoned olive oil, or quartered and cooked with potatoes, spring onions, lemon juice, and parsley. The textures and flavors complement each other. Steamed briefly and drizzled with olive oil, their astringent taste seems just right on any spring day.
The winter rape is at the end of its tenure but one farmer still shouted out “Polezze,” the dialect word. I've seen it already, flowering in home gardens, at first mistaking it for mustard, which is waving its yellow blooms at home in California wine country right now. By the time the rape flowers, it's too late to savor its particular flavor. Picked early, cleaned of stems, steamed, then sautéed with garlic, the buds and leaves taste like an untamed cousin of broccoli, somewhat bitter and distinct. Rape (both syllables are pronounced) tastes good for you; it must be packed with iron and nitrogen. When I eat it, I feel that I rise from the table a stronger person.
Bitter is a popular taste in Italy. All those herbal after-dinner drinks and aperitivi, collectively known as amari, bitters, that the Italians knock back are definitely an acquired taste. “Italians seem to have acquired more tastes than many of us,” Ed observes. The first time I tried Cynar, based on artichoke flavor, I remembered my mother chasing me around the house trying to get me to take cough medicine. Even an orange soda is labeled “amara.” At the pasta fresca shop, they're making ravioli with ricotta and borragine, wild borage. Ravioli stuffed with anything and ricotta is usually mellow. With borage, the little pillows prod the taste buds. Dandelion, turnip, and beet greens—all are savored in this season. Even the hated nettles, which we battle on a hillside all summer, have a snappy taste when picked as soon as the leaves unfurl, blanched, then stirred into risotto or pasta and topped with toasted pine nuts.
The green that looks strange and new to me is agretti. It must exist somewhere in America but I've never seen it. Tied with a weed, a bunch of it looks like wild grasses, something to hand-feed a horse. Thrown onto a hard and fast boil for a few moments, it then gets a turn in the sauté pan with oil, salt, and pepper. When I first saw agretti, I thought, uh oh, one of those acquired tastes. While cooking, it had the smell of dirt—that earthiness you recognize when beets are cooking, but with a verdant freshness, too. An Italian friend recommends lemon juice but as soon as I smelled it, I wanted to taste it unadorned. Because the “grass” is about the same thickness as vermicelli, I later tried it tossed with that pasta and slivers of parmigiano. Spinach is the closest taste, but while agretti has the mineral sharpness of spinach, it tastes livelier, full of the energy of spring.
I am surprised to find that the legendary wild asparagus also is extremely bitter. Chiara, a neighbor, is out on her land with a handful of the weedy little spears. She pushes back spiny strands to reveal the plant, which looks like a coarser, meaner asparagus fern. She is eloquent on the subject of frittata with chopped wild asparagus. Eloquent, that is, in gesture. Her quick motion, like pulling a zipper in front of her mouth, means something is extra-delicious. Had she placed her thumb against her cheek and rotated her fist back and forth, we would have seen how words fail to describe just how good something to eat can be.
The early riser I saw up on the terraces must have been after the asparagus. Now someone has raided the daffodils, too. After a morning of looking at toilets and tile for the remodeling project this summer, we come home to find about two hundred tromboni gone from the hillside. Only a few, drooping and past their prime, are left for us.
All along the road in late afternoons, women walk with their sticks and plastic bags, gathering both asparagus and mescolanza, wild greens, most of which are bitter, for their dinner salads. I'm just learning about this insalata mista for the taking. They look for tarassaco, which resemble
s dandelion, several kinds of radicchio, chicory, borage, barbe dei frati—friars' beards—and many others.
What else is bulging in those bags? Why do they suddenly stop and study a piece of ground for a few minutes, poking at it with a stick? They bend over and dig with a penknife—some roots, a few leaves, mushrooms—and move on. We've even seen the well-dressed stop their cars, scamper up a hill, and come down waving two or three bunches of mint or fennel for roasting meat, or some medicinal plant, dirt falling off the roots.
I, too, go out hunting for asparagus. Ed cuts what we think will be the perfect stick for me, a magic stick, as if I will be divining water. Odd how something can be invisible to you, then when it's pointed out, you find it everywhere. The upper terraces flourish with prickly wands. They seem to like growing under a tree or next to a hillside. Right away, I learn to look in hidden places, although sometimes there's a feathery renegade just growing out in the open. Usually a tangle of weeds is between my hand and the dark spears poking out of the dirt. A spear here, one there. Asparagus must have appeared early in the food chain. Cultivated asparagus, despite its many elegant preparations, looks primitive; the wild form is even more so. Some stalks are as thin as yarn and the color ranges from viridian to purple. Those thorns your hand must find its way among are needle-sharp. This is slow work, but good.
I cook my thirty spears to go with roast chicken and neither of us likes the wry, almost medicinal taste. Then, at the market, a strange woman barely four feet tall holds out a newspaper cone full of wild asparagus. She looks as if she just materialized out of a fairy tale and might say, “Come to the woods, children.” But “Genuino, genuino,” she repeats. The real thing. “Fifteen thousand lire” (about nine dollars). Because I have the feeling that I will not be seeing her kind at the market many more times, I hand over the money. Just to be in her presence a little longer, I ask her how to prepare it. Like my neighbor, she likes it cut finely into a frittata.
Bella Tuscany Page 2
