W
e parked on a narrow street lined with elms and walked toward a house we knew to be Dino's from the incessant yapping of dogs. It was a large neo-Palladian structure with sturdy brick walls and narrow windows cross-hatched with an ominous grid of iron bars. A common feature in a country intensely paranoid about crime, these bars tended to make the houses of most well-to-do Italians look like a home for the criminally insane.
I rang the doorbell and “Brindisi” from
La Traviata
chimed out over the barking of hounds. Dino opened the door, his face aglow with good cheer. I handed him the bottle of
Chianti Riserva
we had paid far too much for at our local
enoteca
. He examined the bottle and concluded that it was of sufficient vintage to merit an appreciative nod, although being store bought, it could never compete with the homemade Chianti he had just decanted for the occasion.
He welcomed us in and as he helped Nancy off with her coat, he asked her about her fungus. I thought this was a rather intimate line of questioning but I soon realized that he was referring to a disease that was attacking our olive trees up at the
piccolo rustico
.
We pretended that we knew about it and casually asked him what he would do. He told us that we should immediately hire his cousin Faustino, who was renowned throughout Tuscany as a mighty warrior against the
funghi
. We were in luck because cousin Faustino was coming for dinner and Dino would arrange for him to help us.
We thanked him for his kindness, and he looked at us in shock that it should be any other way. After all, we were
famiglia
. Dino expressed himself with such sincerity that we almost forgot he was constantly hustling us.
We followed Dino down a narrow stairway, unable to tell where the baying frenzy of the dogs ended and the overheated babble of human voices began. As we descended the stairs, the scent of fermenting grapes grew so intense, it smelled as if this part of the house had been marinating in red wine for centuries. We were entering the cantina, the heart and soul of every Tuscan home. And to dismiss this as an Italian version of the American den, the English drawing room, or the French parlor is to miss a vital facet of its character.
Every Tuscan home, no matter how humble, is guaranteed two things by law: a
forno
for baking bread and a cantina where the family can make wine. No one is guaranteed a bathroom, but every citizen must have their
pane e vino
. For that reason, it was usually the first room built, and many houses in this part of Tuscany were literally constructed around it.
As modern life encroached and winemaking evolved into more of a hobby, albeit a deadly serious one, the cantina was used less for its original purpose and more as a place for social gatherings. Because the cantina is subterranean, it's the coolest place in the house, so in addition to be being an all-purpose party room, it's also used for the storage of food. Along with racks of hundreds of dusty wine bottles, every shelf, tabletop, and nook in Dino's cantina was stocked with glass jars of red peppers, marble-white chunks of mozzarella, silvery anchovies, and olives in every shade between green and black, all preserved in olive oil as golden as Mediterranean sunshine. The net effect of all this stored food and wine was to give one the feeling of being at a party held inside a large pantry.
Dino's cantina was dominated by an aircraft-carrier-sized banquet table and an authentic
pietra serena
fireplace large enough to spit-roast a baby elephant. A dozen people lounging on rickety pine furniture were gathered around the
stufa
, a cast-iron potbellied stove. The guests were drinking wine and munching on bruschetta. Their shrill voices, as well as the scratchy accordion music playing on a phonograph, were harshly amplified by the low ceiling and the lack of either curtains or carpets for muffling.
“Ascolta, tutti, ascolta, eccoli Americani,”
Dino said, announcing our entrance as if we had personally liberated their village from the Germans.
Everyone stopped talking and turned to us in a moment of rare silence for a roomful of Italians.
“Benvenuti nella nostra casa.”
A stout woman in a batik muumuu greeted us with kisses that felt wet on our cheeks.
“This is my wife, Flavia,” Dino said.
Flavia was an energetic lady who, had circumstances been different, could have enjoyed a flourishing career in public relations, given her fondness for throwing in flattering soubriquets for each person she introduced us to. Thus, the dour, cantankerous old man muttering to himself in the corner became the “irrepressible” Uncle Carmuzzi. The hulking, barrelchested guy stuffing his face with crostini was the “urbane” Cousin Aldo. The three black-shrouded old women huddled together like a scene out of
Macbeth
were the “convivial” Nina, Nona, and Nana. And finally, the pompous aesthete holding court on the sofa was introduced as the “genial” Dottore Spotto, with his wife, the “pious” Monica, and their “mythically gifted” children Leonardo, Rafael, and
la bimba
Artemisia.
“Piacere, piacere,”
Nancy and I said with each introduction, our heads bouncing like a couple of bobble-head dolls.
“Cousin Faustino will be here later,” Dino said, taking us aside. “He's still in the olive groves, such a hard worker. And the best part is: he is my cousin, so if he screws up I can strangle him.”
“So he's bonded,” I said.
Dino beckoned over a small, chinless man who had been staring at us from under his continuous eyebrow. “I want you should meet Cousin Spartaco.”
“Ah, piacere, Spartaco. Apprezziamo molto la sua bellissima casa.”
Nancy shook his hand and told him how much we appreciated living in his beautiful houseâthe one whose walls, it must be remembered, had been covered with alternating images of Jesus Christ and naked women.
Nancy kept addressing him, but Spartaco seemed incapable of speech because his eyes were riveted on her chest.
“A-hem.” I cleared my throat.
Cousin Spartaco realized I was staring at him. He clutched at the crucifix hanging around his neck and slinked off, either to pray or masturbate.
Nancy joined the group of women oohing and ahhing over
la bimba
Artemisia as Dottore Spotto came over and poured me a glass of home-bottled Chianti. I took a sip and felt the fullness of the Sangiovese grapes permeate my palate like a long, slow seduction. I held the taste in my mouth as long as I could and then swallowed. I raised my glass in appreciation.
Il dottore
gave me a celestial smile and went off to dispense his ambrosia to the other guests.
No sooner had he left than Uncle Carmuzzi approached. Swooping his weathervane of a nose uncomfortably close to my glass, he made a face as if I had been drinking raw sewage. He then produced his own labelless bottle and poured me a glass of garnet-red
rosso
. I took a sip while he stared at me in anticipation. The wine was so lush, it was like holding the liquid essence of a Tuscan forest in my mouth. I twisted my index finger into my cheek where a dimple might have gone, using the Italian gesture to describe something too delicious for words.
Dottore Spotto strolled past and, seeing me delight in another man's wine, grabbed Uncle Carmuzzi's bottle and swirled it around, disturbing the sediment. This caused much agony for Uncle Carmuzzi, who had been handling his wine with the delicacy of one carrying a vial of anthrax.
Il dottore
peered at the billowing clouds of sediment and clucked as if he were examining a tumorous kidney. Incidentally, I have no idea what kind of
dottore
he was, the Italians being so lavish with that title, they often bestow it on anyone who's knuckled their way through four years at a university.
Sneering at the sediment as proof of the wine's inferiority, Dottore Spotto retrieved the wine I had started and refreshed it. Then, standing arms akimbo in a stance vaguely reminiscent of Mussolini, he stared at me until I began drinking. Uncle Carmuzzi glared angrily when I showed pleasure in the
dottore
's home brew, and the good
dottore
's lips twisted in rage when I gestured that I liked Uncle Carmuzzi's as well.
Both men stood facing me, vigorously extolling the qualities of their particular wine, two sets of hands emphatically flying in the air. Uncle Carmuzzi's hands occupied the horizontal plane, while Dottore Spotto's the vertical. And like airliners stacked up over a busy airport, there were many near misses, but miraculously, no collisions.
I could see no diplomatic way out of this, so I brought the wineglasses over to Nancy. She sampled each as the men stood in rapt anticipation like two Miss America finalists. Addressing them in Italian, she explained that both wines were equally excellent. And just as one couldn't determine the superiority of a sculpture by Donatello over one by Tullio Lombardo, one could not, in good conscience, rate one wine over the other. Both were masterpieces in their own right. This seemed to satisfy them.
Nancy later explained that their rivalry was not just based on wine, but upon the fact that Dottore Spotto was a Florentine, while Uncle Carmuzzi's family was originally from Ravenna. Her clever use of Donatello (who was from Florence) and Lombardo (who hailed from Ravenna) gave each a face-saving way of accepting the quality of each other's vino.
To understand why the citizens of these two cities despise each other, you have to go back to 1309 A.D., when Italy's most renowned poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled from Florence for political reasons. For years he wandered Tuscany, venting his fury by writing the
Inferno
and peopling hell with all the Florentines who had done him wrong. He finally wound up in Ravenna, where he died and was buried. Centuries later, the Florentines realized their mistake and demanded the return of their favorite son's remains. The Ravennese refused, and to this day there is bad blood.
I have a lot of problems with Italy. It's chaotic, confusing, and oftentimes incomprehensible. But I must confess that I find unabashed delight living in a society where people still get
furioso
over the bones of a poet who's been dead for seven hundred years.
“Come here, I show you something.” Dino led me over to a wall hung with hunting rifles, antlers, and the large, snarling head of a wild boar.
“I shot him last month.” He patted the pig on the snout. “On your land.”
“Whoa, he's big.”
“And vicious. Gored two of my dogs. Had to shoot them too.”
I suddenly realized that a scorpion sleeping in my shoe might not be my most serious wildlife problem.
“Do you hunt?”
“Haven't for a while,” I said, thinking about the time eight years ago when I had killed a spider in the bathtub while Nancy screamed in the background.
“What do you do?”
“I'm a writer.”
“Really? What do you write?”
“I've worked on a lot of television shows back in America.”
“I can't believe it, you're a celebrity!”
“No, no, I'm justâ”
“
Mamma mia,
how many movie stars do you know?”
It made me smile that Italians really say
“mamma mia.”
“Do you know Frank Sinatra?” Dino demanded.
“Isn't he dead?”
“Al Pacino?”
“No.”
“Robert De Niro? Sylvester Stallone?”
“Actually, him I've met.”
“Attenti, attenti tutti!”
Dino hollered out. “
L'Americano conosce
Sylvester Stallone!”
I was instantly surrounded by everyone at the party eager to hear all the intimate details of Stallone's life, except for Cousin Spartaco, who urgently needed to know if Britney Spears had had breast implants. Despite Dino's best efforts to translate, it was impossible for me to share the highly nuanced concept that my position in Hollywood hardly afforded me access to the pantheon of movie stars and their sordid little secrets. I was just a behind-the-scenes guy who had worked on a lot of TV shows, some good, some bad, and some too embarrassing to mention.
But the first maxim of show business is to give your audience what it wants, so I just made things up. I told them that, contrary to his dynamic screen persona, Sylvester Stallone was a man of towering intellect and profound depth, prone to reading Kierkegaard in the original Danish and spending long hours in his candlelit study ruminating over the duality of human nature.
As for Cousin Spartaco's burning interest in the after-market enlargement of Britney Spears's chest, I told him I had no firsthand knowledge. I could only offer my own personal philosophy toward beautiful women, which is: “Just fool me, I don't much care how you do it.”
“Buon appetito, tutti, la cena è pronta,”
Flavia announced as she came down the stairs leading a parade of women bearing platters of steaming food.
“Can I help?” Nancy asked.
“No, no, you sit right here by me.” Dino herded us to a table that was now spread, from sea to shining sea, with mammoth mountains of manicotti, cavernous canyons of cannelloni, and roiling rivers of rigatoni.
“So, where's your son Rudolfo?” I asked as we sat down.
“He's coming. He called to say that he's going to be late because he got some important Buddhist thing to do.” A wave of misery washed over Dino's face.
I wanted to say something consoling, but I was distracted by Uncle Carmuzzi and Dottore Spotto insisting I take bread from the baskets each was holding. Of course, one basket was full of the
pane toscano
favored by the Florentines and the other, an oregano loaf loved by the people of Ravenna.