Bella Tuscany (7 page)

We walk across the bridge, through a park, then through a honeycomb of streets. The Museo Archeologico in Siracusa proper is world class. Intelligently arranged and exhibited, the art and craft of succeeding waves of life in this area are displayed. Beginning with prehistory, we trace the eras through one stunning room after another. Artifacts, statues, lion faces from the temple in ruins in Ortigia, Greek ex-votos, and an amazing bronze horse—oh, so much.

The amphitheater in Siracusa—what fabulous siting. The stone cup of the hill was chopped out into natural seating, a 300-degree arrangement focusing on a stage. Corridors were carved out for gladiators to enter and exit. In summer, the Greek plays are still performed here. What fun it would be to act in one. The ruins we've seen are the major ones; hundred of other temples, foundations, baths, and unknown stones cover the island. This must be the ideal time to see them because hardly anyone is around. The solitude of these places sharpens the experience of happening upon them, the sense of discovery that for me lies at the heart of travel.

We vaguely hear a thunderstorm in the night but are so thoroughly exhausted from our day that nothing really wakes us until about three o'clock. The room's wraparound glass creaks ominously in its frames and the bed feels as though someone is shaking the headboard. Earthquake. We leap up and look out at the harbor, where quiet boats just seem to be rocking with the water. We wait, as we have other on nights in San Francisco, for whatever comes next. We've experienced so many by now that we can judge the force on the Richter scale, although the 7.5 quake of October 1989 was so far beyond what we'd felt before that we had no idea. I think of what must have existed in Sicily before the earthquake of 1693 knocked down whole areas. But tonight's was only a hard jolt, perhaps 3.4, a reminder that the earth has its own rhythms having nothing to do with us.

 

In the inland Baroque town of Noto, we come upon my fearful fantasy of the Mafia funeral. Maybe it is only a local patriarch laid to rest but we turn the corner and are among mourners with big jewelry and two Mercedes-Benz sedans. A coffin is hauled into the church on the shoulders of men who could play parts in a refilming of
The Godfather.
Three women weep behind veils. I grab Ed's arm and we turn around quickly.

We've backtracked to visit Noto, not only for another taste of the interior of the country but for the taste of ice cream. A gourmet guide to Italy promises the best ice cream in Sicily is here on a back street. I try the tangerine, melon, and jasmine sorbets. Ed chooses almond, coffee, and pistachio
gelato.
In Italy, one always orders several flavors in the same cup. He tastes all of mine and I taste all of his. We're convinced. A cold slanted rain begins. We get our raincoats and umbrella out of the car and walk anyway. Might as well get soaked—who knows when we'll ever get back to Noto.

 

Briefly lost in Catania, we find the airport and fly out. Below us the coast gradually enlarges so that we see a slice of the eastern edge of the island. “What are you writing?” I see Ed is making one of his lists.

“Reasons to come back—we didn't see the mosaics at Piazza Armerina, the Arab baths at Cefalù. I can't believe we didn't make it to Taormina. A week was short. Let's go to the Aeolian islands—for the name if nothing else—and Pantelleria for the
moscato
dessert wines. What else?”

A wisp of lemon scent escapes from my bag under the seat stuffed with lemon soap, a ceramic platter decorated with lemons and leaves, and a small bag of real lemons. “More of the groves along the coast.” I remember the hills outside the Baroque towns, criss-crossed with intricate stone boundary walls. “More of the inland part. We never even looked at tile for the bathroom. And we have to go back to Siracusa; the map listed forty-eight points of interest. We didn't see half.” I glimpse the slopes of Mount Etna then we bank into clouds, losing Sicily entirely.

A Sicilian Menu

AFTER OUR TRIP TO SICILY, WE
'
RE INSPIRED TO
adapt some of the tastes from that island to our own kitchen. We prepare a dinner for three Cortona friends. Oddly, not one has been to Sicily. We get a glimpse of how they feel about it from Massimo, one of our guests. We use the same plumber he does, and Ed asks him, “You know that man who works for Carlo, the skinny one who talks so fast? Is he Sicilian?”

“Oh no,” Massimo answers, “he's Italian.”

Ed lugged bottles of Moscato and Passito home in his carry-on bag, along with capers, almonds, and the marzipan fruits we couldn't resist. With dessert, we bring out a plate of them. Everyone admires the verisimilitude but at the end of the evening we still have the adorable peaches, pears, and plums.

For Sicilian recipes from the source, I've enjoyed
La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio
by Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, which is published in English and adapted to American ingredients.

MENU
  ——

Caponata

I've made
caponata
for years. The Sicilian version was more flavorful than mine. Why? The concentrated tomato
estratto
(tomato paste made from sun-dried tomatoes) available in Sicily, a freer hand with seasoning, the saltiness of anchovies. Spread this on bread or crackers. It's one of those perfect
hors d'oeuvres
to have on hand for guests. At lunch, a couple of tablespoons turns a plain ham or tomato sandwich into something special, and it's also a great pasta sauce—just toss with
penne
.

— 
Bake two medium-sized eggplants on a piece of foil in the oven at 350 degrees for half an hour. Coarsely chop 1/2 cup each of pitted green and black olives. Sauté one large chopped onion and three or four cloves of minced garlic. Cut the eggplants into small cubes, add to the onions and cook to blend. Lacking the intense tomato sauce of Sicily, add five or six minced sun-dried tomatoes to 1/2 cup of tomato paste and one cup of tomato sauce. Stir into eggplant mixture. Chop three or four anchovy fillets. Add those, 2 T. of capers, a handful of chopped parsley, and the chopped olives to the eggplant. Season with oregano, salt, and pepper. Like many tomato-based recipes, caponata is best if made a day early. It will keep in the fridge for a week. Makes about five cups, depending on the size of the eggplants.

Olive Piccanti

— 
Mince two small hot peppers—one red, one green—and sauté with a small minced onion. Mix with two cups of large green olives, moisten with a little olive oil and lemon juice. Let rest in the fridge overnight.

Pasta al Limone

If I had to say what one ingredient I must have in the kitchen, it would be the lemon because the flavor, both assertive and enhancing, is like liquid sunshine going into the food. Anselmo brought me two lemon trees in pots. As an essential of the Italian garden, lemons are so valued that most old houses have a
limonaia,
a glass-walled room for storing the pots over the winter. Our
limonaia
functions as a storage room for mowers and tools but this winter reclaimed its function with the two pots taking a sunny spot. In spring we dragged them out in front of the house again, to a place near the kitchen door—very handy for grabbing one for this extremely easy and tasty pasta. When I make this in California, I often add a half pound of crab, but it's a marvelous pasta by itself. With a green salad, it's the lightest dinner imaginable, perfect the day after a crippling feast.

— 
Boil pasta—spaghetti or
tagliatelle
—for six. Squeeze enough lemons for 1/2 cup of juice. Drain pasta, season, and toss with 1/2 cup of chopped Italian parsley, the lemon juice, and grated
parmigiano
to taste. If you like, sauté a pound of crabmeat in 2 T. of butter or olive oil. Add a big splash of white wine. Bring to a boil for an instant, stir the lemon juice mixture into the crab and toss with the pasta.

Sea Bass in a Salt Crust

Don't expect a salty fish—the crust seals in the juices but only slightly penetrates. In San Francisco, I go to a fish market on Clement Street for sea bass. They net the fish from a tank, then knock it in the head with a mallet. Not my favorite moment of shopping. Here, we are two hours from both the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Fishmongers come to the Thursday market in Camucia where the fish are safely dead and on ice.

— 
Ask the fishmonger to clean and prepare for cooking a large sea bass, about 31/2 to 4 pounds. Dry the fish well and stuff the inside with slices of lemon, wands of rosemary, and a few sprigs of thyme. Mix the juice of two lemons with 6 T. olive oil and brush the fish all over. Season with pepper and thyme. To the remaining oil and lemon, add some chopped thyme and parsley and reserve this for serving later. For the crust, you'll need about 5 pounds of coarse salt, depending on the size of the fish. Layer the bottom of a baking dish (one that can go to the table as well) with an inch of salt. Place the fish on top then mound the rest of the salt over the fish, completely covering it. Pat in place around the fish. Make a mask of 3/4 c. flour and enough water to thin the flour. Brush the salt with this mixture. Bake in a preheated, hot oven, 400 degrees, for 40 minutes, or until the salt looks toasted. Present the fish at the table, cracking or sawing into the hard crust, then take it back to the kitchen and remove the fish to a platter for serving. Heat and pour the reserved lemon and oil over the fish. Serves six generously.

Zucchini with Mint

— 
Thinly slice or grate eight slender zucchini. If you grate, squeeze out the liquid. Quickly sauté in hot olive oil with some minced garlic. Stir in chopped parsley and mint, season with salt and pepper. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Lemon Pie with Roasted Almonds

I'll never forget the lemon pie of Erice. The crunch of almonds added a wonderful complement to the familiar, luscious textures of lemon meringue pie—the flaky pastry, airy meringue, and the creamy lemon custard. The almonds of Sicily have a perfume and a complex aftertaste. Because fresh nuts make all the difference, at home I order pecans from the South every fall and store the bags in the freezer. I can taste a change in the texture after a couple of months, but still, the nuts keep much better in the freezer. In San Francisco, we have access to fresh walnuts and almonds from California groves through the Saturday farmers' market. Here's my grandmother's lemon pie, enhanced with the Sicilian touch of almonds—and further enhanced when served with the fragrant Moscato of the islands off Sicily. Actually, it's my grandmother's sister Besta's recipe. Besta was otherwise known for her fuming blackberry cordials, which my father refused to drink for fear of going blind.

— 
Beat the juice and zest of four lemons with 11/2 cups of sugar. Mix 2 T. melted butter with 4 T. flour, 1/4 t. of salt. Beat 4 egg yolks. Whip the yolks into the butter and flour and whisk in the juice and sugar. Gently pour in 2 cups of hot water, beating all along, and place on a moderate flame. Cook the custard until very thick, stirring constantly. Keep the flame adjusted so that the mixture cooks but doesn't boil. When thick, add 2 T. cream. Slightly cool. Separately beat 4 egg whites until stiff, whisking in 2 tablespoons of sugar at the end. Toast 1 cup of halved almonds in a 350-degree oven for five to seven minutes, shaking once or twice. Nothing is as easy to burn as nuts! Sprinkle them with a little sugar. Pour the lemon filling into your favorite baked pie shell, arrange nuts on top, then spread the egg whites in a swirling pattern and bake at 350 degrees until the meringue browns.

Resurrection

BEPPE STOPS DIGGING AND COCKS HIS HEAD.
“Senta,”
listen, he says,
“Il cuculo.”
He removes his wool cap and runs his hand over his tight gray curls. “They arrive for Easter.” The light two-note call of the cuckoo repeats. “Exactly on time this year.”

With forbearance, Beppe is planting lavender along the walk to the lake view, where earlier he and Francesco installed five new cypress trees. Planting cypresses is important work but mere flowering bushes do not interest him. At his place, he and his wife hold to the separation of
campo
and
cortile,
field and courtyard. Flowers—woman's work. He's fast. Is it knowing exactly how to angle the shovel so that three or four movements are all it takes? I shake the plant from the plastic pot, and place it in the hole. Quickly, he pushes the shovel back and forth; it's done. While I seem to have to use my whole body to dig, I see him work with his shoulders, not with his lower body. Sort of the opposite of Latino dancers, who stay so still above the waist but are all action below. He lifts the shovel and shoves hard. No
leaping on and off, wiggling it back and forth, no back-wrenching lifting of heavy soil. He raises it as easily as I lift a wooden spoon from cake batter. Whack! Down through the dirt. On to the next one.

Beppe was born in the isolated mountains east of Cortona. He has taken us to his now-abandoned childhood home, an aerie in a tiny
borgo
consisting of a cluster of small, almost windowless stone woodcutters' houses. All his sixty-odd years he has worked the land. Unlike Francesco who is tough (at eighty), wiry, and works with a concentrated vengeance, Beppe's way of working fascinates me. He's upright, and lean. His corduroys and sweater suspend loosely from him as though from a clothes hanger. He works with no wasted motions at a steady pace. I especially like to watch him swing the scythe through long grasses. His rhythm is like a pendulum; he could be marking time in a book of hours rather than cutting weeds.

At ten he pauses and takes a sack from the back of his new green Ape. Time for
spuntino,
a snack. He also takes out a jug covered with woven osier, which he fills with well water. He upends it and takes a long swig, proclaiming it
“Acqua buona,”
as he always does.

While he pauses, I haul water out to the twenty-five lavender plants.
“Un bel secchio d'acqua, signora,”
he calls to me. Idiomatically, he probably means just a good amount, but I hear him literally, a beautiful bucket of water, which makes the carrying easier. Beautiful water, I silently tell the plants, loosen your tight roots, trauma is over, you're home.

The car is full of five-gallon marguerites to be planted in the rose garden. I won't ask him to help me plant the smaller bedding flats or the geraniums for all the pots. The cosmos and hollyhock seeds I've started in the
limonaia
don't get his attention. He wouldn't refuse to help me plant, but he would be in mortal pain. I unload two marguerites. “Would you mind helping me with these big ones?”

To my surprise, he smiles. “Ah, Santa Margherita.” She is the loved patron saint of Cortona and still lies in a glass coffin in the church at the top of this hill. We intersperse her white flowers, about to bloom, with the well-established lavender and roses, softening the line of thorny roses just coming into leaf, and hiding their scrawny legs. Contrary to usual practice, which is to grow roses by themselves, I'm going to try filling the beds profusely and see what happens.
“Venerdì sera,”
Friday evening, “at nine, a procession commencing at Santo Spirito goes up to Santa Margherita,” Beppe tells me. “A long procession.”

Today is Maundy Thursday. The shops in town are filling with life-sized chocolate hens, huge eggs wrapped in bright foil with prizes inside, a mild display compared with Sicily. “What do you eat on Easter?” I want to know. But I'm thinking, what does “maundy” mean?

“Tortellini,
a good shoulder of lamb, potatoes, spinach,
insalata
, a little wine.” Beppe heads up to the olive terraces to help Ed, relieved to quit the
fiori,
I am sure. I bring more beautiful water to Santa Margherita's namesakes. I open the trunk and take out lobelia, ageratum, snapdragons, dahlias, and the ashen-lavender flowers no one knew the name of. I have a bag of sunflower seeds and packets of creeping thyme, trailing nasturtium, and morning glory. Ed will help me plant them tomorrow. Beside a climbing yellow rose on the main wall (called the Polish Wall because it was restored by Polish workers), I plant the bush with velvety, purse-shaped pink flowers. No one at the nursery knew the name of them either.

Death is coming again to the pinned body on the cross. Strange, I always thought it was important whether or not I believed in the factual truth of “on the third day He rose.” My hand around the ball of pale roots, crescents of dirt under my nails, I'm content to believe or not, but to feel a rise in my blood as the sun makes tracks across the equator bringing back my favorite season, the long summer days.

Maybe we were smart enough to make the gods. What better way to explain the darkest moment of the year and how it swings toward light, except by the metaphor of a birth. How to face the incredible rejuvenescence of spring except in a story of a miraculous rising. “Well,” I'm quoting myself aloud to the drooping leaves of the nameless pink plant,

. . . if there's a God dotting lines along spheres for the sun
to cross, good. And if not, we are more
than we know. I can hold the windflower and
the crucifix nail in mind at once. I wanted truth
and find we form the words we need from flesh.

I dig a hole for a gray-green santolina, which they used to toss on the cathedral floors in the Middle Ages to keep down the human smells.

I splash water around the roots. “Rise,” I command.

 

Hail—banging my tender new plants, hopping off the stone wall like popcorn. This tempestuous weather for Good Friday—where is
primavera
now? The hail stops and wind drives rain sideways against the house so that it seeps in my study window, soaking my notes on Sicilian history into swirls of blue ink that look more like tide pools than facts about the Normans. Several louvers sail into the linden trees, smacking the stone wall. From the bedroom window, I watch columns of rain “walking” across the valley, heading straight for us. When sun breaks through, we dash out the door, trowels in hand, plant flowers until rain starts to pelt again and we're driven back to the front door, where we dry out under the balcony.

By evening the air clears. We're stir-crazy and go into town for a
prosecco
. The streets are packed—everyone from miles around has come in for the procession of the stations of the cross. We try four
trattorie
before we find a table at the cozy Osteria, where opera arias fill the small room, and I can have the
strozzapreti,
priest-strangler, pasta with a cream and hazelnut sauce. The waitress, Cinzia, seems always amused. She gestures with her hands constantly, lights the candle with a large swoop. The owner glides around serenely. Once I asked her if she was local and she said no, she was from Castiglion Fiorentino, five miles away. Ed is about to order a bottle of wine but Cinzia puts her finger to her lips, raises her shoulders almost to her ears, and points with her other hand to a Chianti that is half the price. The other, a 1994—she shakes her head and ticks her finger at him. Ed orders the homey beef braised in red wine, a true
casalinga
dish. We split a chocolate charlotte and think with longing of the peach charlotte they make in summer.

Down the hill to Santo Spirito, a church I've never seen open. The doorway is outlined in lights and as we arrive, eight robed and hooded men are hoisting the crucified figure of Christ onto their shoulders. They look scary to me; I flash on the robes worn by the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, I once saw a Klan meeting around a bonfire. “What is that?” I asked my mother. “A bunch of old fools,” she answered. “And there are no fools like old fools.” I remember I've seen these odd peaked hoods in Italian paintings, worn by plague doctors along with bird-beak masks. Behind them, eight women are shouldering a figure of grieving Mary, who looks to weigh about a ton. They walk out, accompanied by people carrying torches and we join the procession up Via Guelfa. The town band is playing a tinny dirge. As we go, more people join us.

At each church, we stop. More sacred figures are brought out and blend into the procession through the darkened town. Some people sing with the music and many carry candles, sheltering the flame with a cupped hand. Through roving clouds, the full moon comes and goes. I have the strange feeling of having slipped behind a curtain of time and entered a place and ceremony both alien and familiar to me. The music sounds atonal, shrill, almost something you could imagine hearing after death. The faces of the people stay private, except for the teenagers who are jostling and jabbing each other. We're all bundled in shapeless raincoats and scarves, further erasing connections with present time. Without the signs of haircuts and glasses, we almost could be in the fifteenth century.

For most local people, this service is one of their yearly rituals. I'm short on rituals myself, especially ones involving torches, hoods, and the agonized Christ aloft in the streets. Good Friday, I realize, is major. In the South of my particular childhood, all emphasis was on Easter Sunday, with the main event for me being my carefully chosen new dress and shoes. I remember the thrill of a blue organdy with hand-embroidered daisies around the hem and on the ends of the sash.

When they start to climb through upper Cortona, along the steep way of the stations of the cross made in mosaic by Gino Severini, and on to Santa Margherita, we drop out and go to a bar for coffee. The raw wind has numbed my ears. How can they carry those beams on the shoulders? Quite quickly it seems, we hear the mournful music again and we rush uphill to join at San Marco, then wind back to the
piazza,
where the bishop delivers a long sermon. It's almost midnight by now and we have a mile to walk back to Bramasole in the dark so we leave the throngs of people who have more stamina than we.

 

Into the spirit of the Easter festivals, we decide to drive over on Easter Saturday to Sansepolcro, Piero della Francesca's hometown, to see his stupendous painting of the resurrection. The countryside between here and there rolls—green valleys and wooded hillsides, a curvy road interrupted by few villages, bucolic Tuscany. Roadsides are flush with dandelions and purple wildflowers, the first poppies are springing out in the grasses, wisteria is climbing over pale stone farmhouses. In this blissful landscape, we are suddenly stunned to see a tall African woman, dressed in tight striped pants and a revealing red shirt, standing on the roadside. Around the next bend we see another, this one equally statuesque and curvaceous. She stares. Every few hundred feet these women are stationed along the road. They stand or sit on wooden crates. One eats from a bag of potato chips. Then we see a parked car, with no woman near her crate. This is surreal. Prostitutes out in rural Italy. Some of the women are regal, with elaborate plaited hair and full red lips. All are wearing red and black.

Who would stop? Surely not local men, who might be seen by their neighbors. And this isn't exactly the autostrada. How many delivery trucks could there be? We must have passed fifteen women just poised on the side of the road, more women than cars. Bizarre and disturbing because this makes no sense in the Arcadian valley of the upper Tiber, which appears in the backgrounds of paintings, this dreamy route known as the Piero della Francesca trail.

 

I like to come to Sansepolcro. On the way we stop either at Anghiari, for its pitched medieval streets, or at Monterchi, an intact and tiny hilltown with a shady
piazza
. Piero della Francesca's mother was from Monterchi so the presence of his painting
Madonna del Parto,
Mary about to give birth, has a personal significance. No longer in the cemetery chapel, the painting is now housed in a building of its own just below the town walls. It has lost some of its former allure because it is now behind glass, and it has lost the tension that came from its location in a place of death. But, still she is staring down, not only remote and austere, as some have described her, but with a quiet inward focus. I don't know of another painting of the Madonna about to give birth. Her hand rests lightly on her stomach. Has she just felt the first mild contraction? It's an unnerving painting—the moment women recognize, when nothing ever will be the same again.

We're so used to hills. The town named for the Holy Sepulchre is flat. It's easy to imagine Piero della Francesca walking diagonally across the
piazza.
His work was here, in Urbino, and in Arezzo. He was a strictly provincial person creating art at the highest level. Walking on Sansepolcro's level streets, feeling the linear perspectives of the
piazza,
and the shadows cutting across upright buildings, I can sense how the town layout influenced his vision.

In the Museo Civico, which we usually find almost empty, some Italian tourists have had the same urge to visit today. It's a typical regional collection, except that the local painter was Piero della Francesca and three of his major works hang in a room of their own, among rooms of prehistoric axes, collections of small boxes, and a couple of dozen other paintings, some of which are quite interesting in themselves but suffer from proximity to Piero. A plump little boy pulls and pulls on his mother's arm, begging to go eat. She's trying to look at the art. He pulls again and she knocks him sharply on the skull with her knuckle and points to a devil in one of the paintings.

Ed and I look first at the
Madonna della Misericordia
—same face as Mary in Monterchi but wearier, tighter. She has gathered many under the protection of her outspread cloak. A standard image in Italian painting, it must have been comforting when the Guelphs and Ghibellines were pouring boiling oil on each other and warring mercenaries ripped around the countryside pillaging and burning. There's still comfort in it.