Mayes - Bella Tuscany

Contents

CIRCLES ON MY MAP:
MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE

FROM A YELLOW BOOK:
THINKING OF TRAVEL

Acknowledgments

My great thanks to Peter Ginsberg, my agent, and Charles Conrad, my editor at Broadway Books. Special thanks to Dave Barbor, my foreign rights agent, and Douglas Stewart, both of Curtis Brown Ltd. Working with William Shinker, Trigg Robinson, Kathy Spinelli, Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Pei Loi Koay, and the entire staff at Broadway Books has been a pleasure. To Ann Hauk and Jon Chick, many thanks.

Many friends were important to me while I was writing this book: Josephine Carson, Susan MacDonald and Cole Dalton, Ann and Walter Dellinger, Robin and John Heyeck, Kate Abbe, Rena Williams and Steve Harrison, Todd Alden, Toni Mirosevich and Shotsy Faustyou're welcome to pull up a chair at my table anytime. All thanks to my family and to Ed'sBramasole's portone always will swing open to greet you.

The people who live in Cortona have given me this book; all I had to do is write. Special thanks to Donatella di Palme and Rupert Palmer, Giuseppina Paolelli, Serena Caressi, Giorgio Zappini, Giuseppe Agnolucci, Ricardo and Amy Bertocci, Nella Gawronska, the Molesini family, Riccardo and Sylvia Baracchi, Giulio Nocentini, Antonio Giornelli, Lucio Ricci, Edo Perugini, and to our great neighbors, the Cardinali family: Placido, Fiorella, and Chiara. We are fortunate to have landed in their midst. With tremendous gratitude, I thank il Sindaco, Ilio Pasqui, and il Consiglio Comunale di Cortona for conferring on me la cittadinanza onoraria, honorary citizenship.

My thanks to the editors of National Geographic Traveler, Attach,San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, the Lands' End catalogue, and Within Borders for publishing portions of this book in their pages.

FOR EDWARD

Preface

STEPPING INSIDE THE FORNO, I'M SUDDENLY SURrounded by the warm aromas of just-baked bread. Welcome back, a Cortona woman greets me. Maybe I look dazed, having arrived last night from California, a twenty-hour ordeal, because she asks, What do you do for jet lag?

I usually just wait it out. I'm so happy to be here that I don't notice it very muchjust get up at four in the morning for a few days. What do you do?

I stare at the sunset. Then the body knows.

I merely smile, but mentally I make a little bow to her. Maybe it's a small world, maybe we're in a global economy, and maybe we're slowly melting into one pot, but everyday life is still radically particular in rural Italy. Cut a slice anywhere: It remains purely Italian.

When Beppe, who helps in our garden, tells me, La luna dura, the moon is hard, and that we must harvest the onionstoday, I'm reminded that the moon holds sway. But we must wait, he continues, and plant lettuces quando la luna tenera, when the moon is tender.

Walking down into town for coffee, I see a waiter bring out a bowl of water for a customer's dog. Overhead I hear, Buon giorno, una bella giornata, good morning, a beautiful day. An ancient man, who has slipped into a happy dementia, leans from his second-storey window, waving and shouting. Everyone greets him with equal enthusiasm. Shop owners are sprinkling water around their entrances with watering cans, nipping into the bars for a quick coffee, their shops untended, the doors open. After a leisurely half-hour with a cappuccino and a novel, I start to pay and am told that Simonetta has paid. Simonetta? The very quiet woman who owns a profumeria where I sometimes buy soap and lotion. This gentle courtesy happens frequently.

At Matteo and Gabriella's frutta e verdura, I see the first basket of hazelnuts still in their ruffs. The season is changing and soon all the luscious peaches and peppers of summer will give over to citrus and cauliflower, an entirely different selection. Look, Matteo says, the green walnut. He cracks it, carefully peels the skin, and hands me a smooth piece, the color of ivory. You must eat them in three or four days. After that they are too dry. The taste of green walnuts is not unknown to me. When I was a child, our cook Willie Bell used to squeeze the juice and rub it into my hands if I got ringworm or poison ivy. The new walnuts are gold balls, slightly damp. Very good for low blood pressure, Matteo continues, but don't eat too many or you'll have a rise in temperature.

And so another day begins in this Tuscan hilltown. I came to Italy expecting adventure. What I never anticipated is the ab-solute sweet joy of everyday lifela dolce vita.

Under the Tuscan Sun, my first memoir, chronicled the discovery of Bramasole, an abandoned house situated beneath an eighth-century B.C. Etruscan wall. Getting to know the superb hilltown of Cortona, the excitement of cooking in a foreign country, the intense labor of rescuing a house from ruin and the land from brambles, and meeting the people herethese pleasures paralleled the deeper pleasure of learning how to live a new life. Even the name of the house drew me here: Bramasole, something that yearns for the sun, and, yes, I did.

I walk from window to window, taking in the view: When I wrote the last line of Under the Tuscan Sun, I wrote the first line of Bella Tuscany. I knew I was at the beginning of my experience of Italy, the inner experience as well as the outer. Viewsthey are so various. From my upstairs window, I see a green sweep of the Apennines. As the wooded slopes angle toward the valley, olive orchards begin, and mellow stone farmhouses with tile roofs anchor each farm to the land. There is no entrance of time into this view, except for a turquoise postage stamp far below, the swimming pool of friends. Looking outlooking into Italy! North, south, east, west is the allure of the whole country. I know more now, after several seasons of travels. I've been to the heel, to Sicily, to the watery reaches of the Veneto, those revealing extremes of this country. I've fallen in love with Verona, the Basilicata and Marche regions, Bellagio, Asolo, Bologna, and more and more with the castle towns around Lago Trasimeno, which I can see from my land.

Travelling the circles, concentric from Bramasole, enlarges my perception of the endless complexity and richness of this country. At the same time, my travels bring me back to this rose and apricot house facing the valley. Because it seems like paradise, I continue to work to make it so. Gardening is something I always enjoyed on a capricious level. I was interested not so much in gardening as in the effects of gardeningthe flower beds that bloomed on cue and the design of the yardwhere to place big pots and how to see a fine range of colors from the windows. I bought flats of just-about-to-bloom flowers, and plopped them in the ground. Now I am a convert. I've fallen into the sustained rhythm of the garden. I compost the coffee grounds and the potato peels. I've learned to double-dig.

With two men who know everything about the land, Ed and I have created extensive herb and vegetable plots. We acknowledge the distant future by planting chestnut, cypress, and evergreenstrees for the long haulas well as the more winsome and immediate pomegranate, cherry, and pear trees. No trip to a nursery ends without the purchase of still another fragrant rose. Rain reactivates another fragrance, the acrid, steamy smell of sheep dung, delivered by a canny Sardinian shepherd to the second terrace just above the living room. We can't move the stuffed bags, so when it rains,