Marlena de Blasi - A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure

A Thousand Days in Tuscany

ALSO BY MARLENA DE BLASI

Regional Foods of Northern Italy
Regional Foods of Southern Italy
A Thousand Days in Venice

A BITTERSWEET ADVENTURE

by Marlena de Blasi

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
708 Broadway
New York, New York 10003

2004 by Marlena de Blasi. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited. Design by Anne Winslow.

Quotation on page 224 from A Thousand Days in Venice, 2002 by Marlena de Blasi, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

To protect the privacy of friends and neighbors, names and, sometimes, chronology have been changed, while certain characters embrace more than a single person.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

de Blasi, Marlena.

A thousand days in Tuscany; by Marlena de Blasi.1st ed.
p. cm.

ISBN 1-56512-392-1

1. Cookery, ItalianTuscan sytle. 2. FoodItalyTuscany. 3. Tuscany (Italy)Social life and customs. I. Title.
TX723.2.T86D36 2004
641.5945'5dc22 2004051589

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

FOR JILL FOULSTON,
A BEAUTY WHO, LIKE ABRAHAMS ANGELS, STOPPED BY
ONE EVENING AND, BEING HERE, CHANGED THINGS,
ENOBLED THEM FOREVER.

Because being here is much, and because all this thats here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Ce labbiamo fatta, Chou-Chou, we did it, he says, using the name he gave to me, clutching the steering wheel of the old BMW with both hands, elbows out straight like wings, shoulders hunched in glee, wheezing up a conspiratorial laugh.

Yes. We did it, I say, with only a crinkle of disdain riding on the we. I look away from him and out the window to the lights of the Ponte della Libert. The day still sleeps. Creamy shimmers of a waking sun curl about the fading moon, lowering now in the damp, dark blue of the lagoon sky. His childs joy and the whirring of the road beneath us make the only tracks on the silence. The weeping begins, tears pouring hot and fast no matter my will to hold them back. I dont want to go away from Venice. Still, I smile at the aptness of the bridges name. Liberty. What better road for an escape? But this is his escape, his new beginning. Oh, I know its mine as well. Ours. And much of me is rejoicing in this prospect of setting up house in the exquisite Tuscan countryside. Besides, well be a mornings drive away from Venice. Well go back and forth. I know we will. But for now I must call on the enduring vagabond in me and hope she will oblige.

This Venetian husband of mine has unstitched every tie to his city. Having resigned from his work and sold our home, he is tearing up the remains of his past like a punishing letter, strewing the pieces out to a swallowing sea. This willful reformation he performedplodding, sometimes, other times gallopingover these last thousand days since we met. His ending sealed, his says that now he can begin to be a beginner. Though inclined to melancholy, Fernando believes that beginnings, by nature, are joyful and flower-strewn passages, forbidden to pain. He thinks old ghosts wont find their way to Tuscany.

As we hit terra firma and wend through Marghera to the autostrada, he flashes blueberry eyes at me, caressing my tears with the back of his hand. Ancient, faraway eyes made of sadness, made of mischief. It was the eyes I loved first. The eyes and the shy Peter Sellers grin. Unexpected they called it, this story of ours, unexpected, improbable, the stuff of fables. Heno longer youngsits across the tiny room of a wine bar on a stormy Venetian Tuesday and sees a womanno longer youngwho changes something in him, everything in him. This, only days before he begins to change everything in her. A chef, a writer, a journalist paid to trek through Italy and France in search of a perfect thing to eat, to drink, she gathers what she can of her quite lovely, quite lonely life, hugs her two grown and thriving children and goes to live with this stranger on the fringes of the Adriatic Sea. Midst flames of a hundred white candles and musky plumes of frankincense, they marry in a small stone church that looks to the lagoon. They ride the night train to Paris and eat ham sandwiches and chocolate cake in an upper berth. They live this love. They fight and they laugh. They try to learn each others language, each others ways, but soon realize therell never be enough time to know all they want to know, one about the other. There never is.

The scent of them is enough to send up a short, sharp thrill in a hungry person. Seething hot beauties, they repose in a great unruly pile on the white linen. The yellow of the naked blossoms shows through the gilt sheaths of their crackling skin. Skin thin as Venetian glass, I think. But Im far away from Venice. We live in Tuscany, now. As of this morning, we live in Tuscany. I say it breezily to myself as though it was all in a days work. Yesterday, Venice. Today, San Casciano dei Bagni. And six hours after arrival, here I am already in a kitchen: in the small, steamy kitchen of the local bar, watching two white-hatted, blue-smocked cooks preparing antipasti for what seems to have become a village festival.

The gorgeous things theyre cooking are zucchini blossoms, fat and velvety, almost as wide and long as lilies. And the frying dance is precise: drag a blossom quickly through the nearly liquid batter, let the excess drain back into the bowl, lay the blossom gently in the wide, low-hipped pot of hot, very hot shimmering oil. Another blossom and another. Twelve at a time in each of four pots. The blossoms are so light that, as a crust forms on one side, they bob about in the oil and turn themselves over and over until a skimmer is slid in to rescue them, to lay them for a moment on thick brown paper. The paper is then used as a sling to transport the blossoms to a linen-lined tray. One of the cooks fills a red glass bottle with warm sea-salted water. She fits a metal sprayer onto the bottle and, holding it at arms length, spritzes the gold blossoms with the salty water. The hot skins hiss and the perfume of them is whipped up and out into the moist June breeze.

Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, these are sustenance for the twelve-minute interval before supper, and so when the first hundred are ready, the cook, the one called Bice, hands me the tray and says, Vai, go, without looking up. A kitchen directive from one colleague to another, from one chef to another, she says it with familiarity, as though weve worked together for years. But tonight Im not the chef. I think Im a guestor am I the hostess? Im not at all sure how this festival got started, but Im happy it did.

Happy and still unwashed from the mornings journey, from the afternoons work, Im salty as the blossoms I offer to people, who take them without ceremony. The same familiarity is at work here as each one smiles or pats me on the shoulder, says,