Bella Tuscany (2 page)

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 bed 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 resembles 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.

Ed tries the frittata, bolstering it with spring garlic, but the asparagus taste almost disappears, just a crackle of the bony stem to remind us it is there.

On the street in Arezzo, I see another of these woodsy women. The word
strega,
witch, comes to mind, or that old source of wisdom in the South, a conjure-woman. Who could resist? I buy some from her basket, too. A crescent-shaped knife lies in the bottom, its blade worn thin. She is almost toothless, bundled in sweaters with bits of straw sticking out of the wool. “Where did you find so much?” I ask. But she just raises her finger to her lips; her mouth is sealed on that subject. She limps away and I notice she is wearing bright white running shoes. She hoists herself up to the arcade level on the Corso, where sophisticated businessmen at a
caffè
table madly buy her asparagus.

Usually I roast asparagus in the oven—arrange the stalks on a baking sheet, drizzle with oil and salt and pepper and run them in the oven. That's the best asparagus can taste. Without contact with water, even steam, the asparagus retains all succulence and texture without absorbing a watery taste, or worse, going limp. But wild asparagus turned tough as string in the oven, so I learn to steam them very slightly, then roll them around in olive oil. The quality of the oil is crucial; without the best, I'd use butter. With each bite, I imagine the woman foraging in the countryside, her secret hillsides above the vineyards, the years she has attended to this ritual, the surety of her thumb against the curved knife.

When I show Beppe, master grape pruner, the patches of asparagus on the land, he's pleased. He cuts off the dry arching branches. “Like this, cut low under the dirt and more will come next year,” he explains. When he leans to show me, he discovers that someone already has begun this pruning process. Old wands have been cut on the diagonal, not snapped off. The mysterious forager. Or some spirit who lived here a century ago and revisits in spring? Or some canny soul who sells both flowers and asparagus at the market? A woman with a curved knife? Beppe starts to eat a raw asparagus and hands me one: a taste to sharpen the teeth. I'm beginning to like this spring treat.

I've been surprised during winter visits to find the food so truly different from what I'm used to in summer, the season I'm usually here. Now, as spring continues to unroll, almost every day brings some new taste. At Matteo and Gabriella's
frutta e verdura,
I see a basket holding something I've never seen before. Gnarly dwarf kiwi? Moldy walnuts? No,
mandorline,
Matteo tells me, a special treat in the Val di Chiana, the expansive valley below Cortona. Matteo bites one then holds out the basket to me. Ah, bitter
and
sour, not like anything I've ever tasted. I know immediately that I will like this new almond in its casing. He eats the whole thing slowly, fuzzed skin and all, relishing the crunch. Beneath the sage-green exterior, there's a neon-green layer, then a yellow layer, then the tender, embryonic nut, still soft and delicately touched with the taste of almond.

At home I go out on my own land where wild almonds grow, but none seems to be the right variety of the
mandorline.
The shells are hardening. I crack one with a rock and taste the nut: hint of rose, hint of peach, and the aftertaste which reminds me that prussic acid also comes from almonds. When ripe, these almonds retain their intense perfume but the acid tamps down to a twist of bitterness.

The land is a mystery to me. After seven years, I think I know it and then, suddenly, I don't. I am watching the season's benefactions. Rivers of wild irises are about to debut along the terraces. These we share with the forager, too, and with the porcupines, who feast on the rhizomes. Symbol of Florence, the iris used to be widely cultivated in Tuscany for the use of its dried root (orris) for the sensuous, deep violet-grape scent in perfumes. Such an unlikely wildflower. In San Francisco, I buy tight bunches of five at the grocery store, the attenuated buds barely able to open. Now I'm almost alarmed to see so many just volunteering and blooming with blowsy abandon.

As we walk back toward the house after the asparagus expedition, Beppe pulls up a slick, thick-leaved plant. “Boil this. It's good for the liver.”

“What's its name?”

“In this moment, I do not recall. Look.” Beppe points to a spreading ferny plant with tiny fan-shaped leaves.
“Morroncello.”
I have no idea what this is. The dictionary does not tell me. I'll try it—another new greeny green of spring.

 

Very early, I hear voices in the road below the house and look out to see three women, hunter-gatherers, gesturing up to our land. They must see some new plant, I think. They're down there a long time and I don't see any movement toward the side of the hill. Finally, they walk on.

While dressing, I hear a skid of brakes, and two beeps of a horn, but when I look out, a blue Fiat is speeding on down the road. We're going to Petroio today, the home of handmade terra-cotta pots. As we start down the driveway, I sense something. Coming closer, we see the road littered with large stones. We look up. The tall stone wall which supports the shady part of our garden has collapsed in the night, leaving a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot gap, uglier than missing front teeth. We push the stones off the road and go up to look. The lovely clear springs surging forth from the hills saturated the ground, undermining the wall. Sins come back to haunt. The fey builder we hired to reconstruct the major terrace walls six years ago did not leave enough drainage holes. Our long yellow picnic table leans precariously where the wall tumbled.

We call our trusted Primo and he comes immediately.
“Mah,”
he shrugs. “Walls fall.” He comes in the house and calls his crew.

We don't know what else to do, so we take off for Petroio, over in the Siena province. We want to buy large terra-cotta flower pots for the walls—those still standing. We go into the perched, medieval town first for something to drink but everything is closed and the car barely can squeeze through the narrowest street we've yet encountered. Just outside town are several
fabbricanti,
manufacturers, with hundreds of pots of all sizes. One is as large as a California hot tub. The place we choose makes theirs by hand. We've bought the mass-produced ones before and they're attractive too. A ruddy, actually terra-cotta–colored man comes out looking puzzled. We ask if we may look and he explains that he sells only wholesale. Fortunately, he likes to talk about pots. We're taken in a warehouse above the kilns, hot as a sweat lodge. The jars for olive oil, glazed on the inside, come in many sizes. They make herb pots, garden columns, sundials, classic urns and amphoras. Flower pots of every shape known and others unknown are stacked in rows. These handmade ones have rounded edges, a touch of honey color that looks warm and alive, and an occasional thumb print. He shows us the initials or signs of the maker on the bottom.