Every Day in Tuscany (9 page)

A
T
B
RAMASOLE
, I often recall raising the big sail called “the genoa” on the boat my former husband and I owned. The genoa was suited to copious wind and when it reached the top of the rigging, suddenly billowed grandly and the boat seemed about to levitate into the sky. The memory parallels the rushes of happiness and the silent tilt toward peace that this
home
gives me. Sometimes houses embody not only memory but also a whole sense of the location itself. In the first months I spent here, I had the intuition that since the house was so at home in the landscape, I too would be at home. Living in these rooms, I linked myself to a force field—I am carried by something larger than myself that is at the same time very much myself. Seamlessly, in such a place, you create what in turn creates you.

Those early impressions about
place
, I later came to realize, all rested on
time
. On a metabolic level, don’t you sense that the mystery of time is how it unfolds and folds simultaneously? Time, which devours, also stretches. Time is elastic and brutally rigid. Memory cuts and comes again. It does not know how to downsize, to render redundant, or to press a delete key. Old friends are not replaceable with new friends, early loves are still alive in bright rooms of the mind, and years and miles apart, what your Big Daddy told you is true,
blood is thicker than water
.

W
HAT AN UNEXPECTED
turn when strangers began to seek Bramasole, too. Occasionally, a personal book that goes forth modestly into the world takes on a life of its own and the author can only hang on and travel where she’s carried. After my memoirs, Bramasole mysteriously transformed from the forlorn, abandoned villa, bought on an iron whim, into a symbol. Although it probably seems awful that one’s house turns into a traveler’s destination, that has not been the case. I think those who travel because of a book they’ve read are not ordinary travelers. Also, I think of my writing as letters to friends, so reciprocation seems natural. After the film of
Under the Tuscan Sun
, a new wave began. Still—romantics, all. With each publication in other countries, new visitors arrive. We’re all amazed to find Estonians, Taiwanese, Tasmanians, Brazilians, et cetera, et cetera, in Cortona. Some officials are pleased that their promotional DVDs sent to tour leaders have been so effective in bringing the far-flung guests to town.

Other local people get it. They began to joke, somewhat ruefully, that Bramasole is more loved than the grand Medici villas, more visited than Santa Margherita, who lies in her glass coffin at the top of the hill.

Italians hate to be caught short, and who among them could have predicted that Bramasole ever would become a world magnet? “Imagine,” the owner of the dry-cleaning shop said to Ed. “It took a foreigner—and a
woman
—to bring this place out.” He handed over the shirts.
“Che vergogna!”
What an embarrassment.

After the man died who used to prop a fistful of flowers daily in our shrine, others began to leave sprigs of wildflowers, pinecones, coins, candles, notes, poems, and small gifts such as Christmas ornaments, books, saints’ medallions, bottles of wine. Today I found a stuffed koala bear holding an Australian flag. Seven paintings of Bramasole line the top of my bookcase, all left by strangers. I love these secret links.

The children born into my family since I acquired Bramasole all inherited emotions similar to those Ed, my daughter, Ashley, and I feel. At two, Willie could say “Bramasole” when shown a picture of an Eden rose, an iron gate, a door knocker. We plant trees with Willie and tell him how high they will be when he’s ten, twenty, forty. My great-niece hides notes under loose bricks,
Nancy Mclnerny was here
, just as Napoleon’s soldiers wrote on the walls of San Francesco in Arezzo. In certain places, we long to leave a mark on the time continuum. Carlos, my editor’s son, runs up the steps after a year away. “I remember this,” he says, and his face shows that the memory is good. I wish I’d kept a guest book. Hundreds of friends, friends of friends, and family have stayed or lunched or dined here. “How’s Bramasole?” they ask, as though the house were a loved person. On the annoying side, rumors constantly sizzle through town.
They’ve sold it
. We’ve heard that a hundred times.
It’s going to become a restaurant. Russian millionaires have bought it
. And most recently,
It’s going to be a museum!
A museum—of what?

This iconic position goes way beyond me. Are there, as the ancients thought, hot spots where raw energy or spirits reside?

Tourists who arrive with their cameras want to see the house more than they want to see me. Some stay for an hour, staring up. Friendships begin in the road, and one marriage resulted from two people meeting there. What these visitors don’t know is how sound carries on the side of a hill. Up in my study with the windows open, I often hear blissful comments (“Isn’t it dreamy, just dreamy,” “Oh, my god, how spectacular—look at those roses”), speculation about my private life (“They got a divorce, you know” and, of course, the most frequent refrain—“She doesn’t live here anymore”). Sometimes I hear, “This can’t be Bramasole—that screen is wonky,” “It’s crumbling,” and “My house is
much
bigger than this.” Tour leaders, I’ve learned, can be quite inventive with facts about the history of the house and its inhabitants. At times, I’ve wanted to lean out the window and call down, “Don’t believe a word he says!”

What I hope is that his captors may look at sun-saturated Bramasole and feel their own secret desires stirring.

L
IKE A LIVING
thing, a house evolves, changes, remains itself at core.

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” W. B. Yeats wrote. Bramasole
is
my dream, Ed’s too. After all the years here, systems in the house need responsible revision. The roof we never replaced must be fixed. After more than two hundred years, it deserves a little work. I remember that it was to cost $30,000 in those first rounds of estimates so long ago. I dread learning what that cost will be today. Regularly, an owl lifts tiles and squeezes itself into the attic, where he romps and tumbles. We wake up thinking a grown man is on the roof. Then, when it next rains, the corner of my study develops a plop, plop. Someone must tread across the dangerous roof and straighten the loose tiles until the owl’s next attic visit.

Irrigating the lawn sucks dry our two water tanks and pulls air out of the house pipes, so that when I turn on the kitchen faucet, the water explodes with enough force to break a glass. The living room has a moisture problem. The house backs up into the hillside and whatever used to drain that area does so no longer. In spring a trickle of water makes its way across the living room floor. We stare at it, mesmerized. The wall develops lacy mildew patterns.
Muffa
—I’m fond of the fuzzy word and the white fluff is pretty but alarming. By summer, it’s dry and I get out the whitewash so we can forget about it for another year. The terrace door is so weak that a stray dog could push it open. That’s for starters. We’re just used to the loose brick in the hall, the washing machine that can deliver a shock as you unload, the little bathroom window that closes with a wooden peg. Poetic? Yes, but …

Part of me wants Bramasole to remain quirky, but some of me wants grounded electricity that does not burn out the modem every time it storms, and yes, the tourist was right, screens that disappear when raised, not these wedged into the stone frames. When it’s windy, they sometimes crash to the ground. The list is long and we are wary. A large construction project at Bramasole is daunting. I’m getting too old and impatient for projects that can run on for years. The dollar is weak, the euro mighty. We don’t have normal jobs anymore. The United States slides irrevocably toward recession. Once I cooked pumpkin soup in a pumpkin. Just as I proudly reached the table, the bottom of the pumpkin gave way and the lovely soup flooded the table. Is my portfolio like that? Will I be left holding a hot sheaf of papers with the numbers falling off? If we live to a hundred, will we be reduced to a gas ring in a freeway motel?

Fonte delle Foglie, the mountain house, gave us the opportunity to work with one of Tuscany’s best restorers, Fulvio Di Rosa, who is now thoroughly occupied with Borgo di Vagli, the medieval village he bought and revived. “Do the minimum,” he advises. “Bramasole’s charm is in how it is.” I keep that advice in mind. Still, work
has
to be done. What will it take to incorporate a few graceful improvements as well?

T
O INVESTIGATE
, we turn to Walter Petrucci, a local architect with an impeccable reputation. Even when he has climbed around a ruin encased in blackberries, his shirt is never wrinkled. His shoes are unscathed. He’s slender, slightly balding, and has a steady gaze with a practiced remoteness. Probably he’s had to shield his true reactions many times to the outlandish ideas of foreigners. Last year, we worked with him and a master of restoration, Rosanno Checcarelli, on an addition to the mountain house. Quickly, we appreciated his genius for solutions. And if you don’t like one, he finds another. I admire resourcefulness.
Get it done
. Like a good surgeon preparing the patient, he knows how to be involved and not involved at the same time. With all this sangfroid intelligence, I’m enchanted to learn the mad fact that he has been restoring his own villa for twenty-seven years.

He invites us there to dinner with his family and a few friends. A Medici would feel right at home. The Renaissance-influenced gardens with walks and geometric paths and pools are formal and perfect. Inside, local artist Eugenio Lucani has adorned walls and ceilings in the charming Pompeian style known as “grotesque.” Walter points out arches and niches, leads us through bedroom suites, an impressive cantina, his library. Silvana, his vivacious wife, serves dinner from a kitchen that must have made a sizable dent in some marble quarry. In the dining room, our voices echo slightly.

Though the house has been ready for years, the family does not
actually
move in. They live, instead, in a comfortable, plain postwar house, nothing like this. “Maybe next year when our daughter graduates. We don’t want to interrupt her studies,” Walter explains. But friends have told us that every year there’s a new reason. Has the villa become
Walter’s Paradigm
, a book to be written and lavishly illustrated?

As we leave, Ed says, “Walter’s dream house is like something in a Borges story. Or Calvino’s invisible cities, if he’d written about houses instead of cities.”

“Yes! Some abstract perfection hovering over Walter’s mind.”

“Maybe it will be reached, maybe never.”

“That house
is
his mind—in 3-D.”

Meanwhile, Walter finishes other projects on time and has designed the plans and overseen several friends’ restorations. The work proceeds smoothly. We’ve admired his ingenuity, and now quickly learn to admire his droll wit and inventiveness.

As we walk around Bramasole together, he reveals to us possibilities we’ve not envisioned. We’ve been set on the practical. New laws allow us to expand
interrato
, into the hillside behind the house. He sketches a floor plan. We could double the size of the downstairs. The
limonaia
could become a phenomenal kitchen and the current small kitchen could be joined to the dining room, creating a place for large feasts. Further, we could request permission to consolidate the bathrooms stuck on the rear facade, and place them outside bedrooms, so that they become en suite. Guests would not have to navigate stairs to reach the bathroom. Removing the back bathrooms would allow the upstairs terrace to run across the entire back of the house.