Life is good

The week of San Valentino has made me think of those moments when you get slapped upside the head by someone’s kindness, humor or grace and it lights you up inside, and how those moments can feel like a kind of love. I’ve been lucky enough to have had, or witnessed, a couple of these in the last week or so.

A village mystery

Friends rent a house in the village on a busy, straight, steep street that is often lined by parked cars. The friends do not live in Italy full time but visit often from their home in Paris, so the house is frequently vacant. There’s a hardware store next door to the house that is run by three generations. Our friends have fallen in love with the hardware store family, and vice versa. The son of the hardware store looks after some of their potted herbs when they are gone which is often rewarded with freshly baked cookies upon their return.

They threw a fantastic party before the holidays with about 60 locals in attendance. As part of the decoration they’d purchased two inexpensive, potted cypress trees less than two feet tall to put on either side of the front door and festoon with lights. The little trees remained guarding the door after they returned to Paris, joining the potted herbs.

One morning they received a text from the hardware store son who had terrible news to report. One of the cypresses was missing, he was horrified to report. Several texts followed to the effect of “What is our village coming to? Who would do this? Take an innocent cypress? People know you! I am deeply ashamed and apologize on behalf of the village.” Minutes later more texts arrived, this time from a lovely woman who does gardening for both of us. She texts that she just drove by and saw that one of the cypress trees was missing. She wrote that she was deeply sorry and sad that such a fate had befallen the potted tree, and also wondered how the village could have gone so deeply wrong. And both were puzzled by the fact that only one tree was gone. What kind of person would do that? (The remaining cypress, and assorted herbs, grace the hero shot above.)

About half an hour later our friend received another text from the son with a video of his mother triumphantly walking up the hill carrying a mangled cypress tree in a broken pot. She was beaming. The village had been vindicated. The cypress had not been stolen at all but clearly a car had managed to entangle the cypress under a bumper while parking and dragged it down hill before it was dislodged.

Peace and civility returned to the village. All the small potted plants can sleep more peacefully now.

Paris

We go to BHV, the large, wonderful 160-year old department store in central Paris near the Hotel de Ville—its full name is the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville. I am searching for a very unusual size fitted sheet to put on a bed we are due to take delivery of. We decided after 26 years of marriage we’d earned the right to a proper bed frame, which we’d never had in our married lives, always sleeping on a mattress with legs. Friends led us to a woman restoring antique bed frames and we’d fallen in love with a very wide one with a curved base, necessitating not only new sheets but a whole new mattress.

I asked the clerk for this uncommon size and she said she’d have to get it from the stockroom. Winter sales were in full swing and I asked if the sheet was on sale and she said unfortunately no. I was paying and she asked if I had a loyalty card and I instinctively replied no. Then I suddenly realized that I actually did—I’d signed up for one when I bought the mattress. I corrected myself and we went through a long process of finding my loyalty account. Phone number didn’t work, I was having a hard time remembering my French letters to spell my name. She finally found it and said, “Ah, you live in the 11th arrondissement.” I said no, thinking there must be a mistake and that she had the wrong Nancy Raff—oddly enough there is another Nancy Raff who lives in Paris—she used to work for HP while I was doing consulting with HP and we often got one another’s emails. On a trip to Paris years ago she and her husband had us over for a drink. The patient clerk pulled me around the counter and showed me the listing on her screen, which had my email address. I realized that the address was for the workshop where I had the mattress delivered and that the 11th arrondissement was actually correct.

By this point I am a candidate for the world’s worst customer. I can’t speak the language and have gotten even the simplest things wrong. Like being able to spell my name. And my address. But yet this clerk was still calm. She then said something about 130 euros. I was concerned. Was the mattress delivery not free? Did I owe 130 euros? She then managed to convey that I could apply 130 euros to the sale, taking the price of the sheet from 145 to a mere 15 euros—a much better price than what was on sale. At this point she starts punching the air saying “Fantastique!” “Incroyable!” I add a “C’est chouette” and call her a goddess. She is beaming and it has clearly made her day to pull off this coup.

She then asks what brand mattress we’d purchased, which, of course, I can’t remember. She walks with me all around the extensive mattress department until I locate the model of the one we’d bought at the far end of the store from her area. She calls over the mattress clerk to get the measurement of the mattress to make sure that the sheet would be deep enough.

The humanity and generosity of this woman lit me up for the rest of the day. Her job can’t be easy and her grace at dealing with my ineptitude and linguistic incompetence seemed boundless. Such a lesson in how the most mundane of encounters can add such texture and warmth to life.

Paris: Groupies

A friend kindly invited me to Le Meurice for high tea to celebrate my birthday. This hotel is one of the fanciest in Paris and tea there is an event. We were shown to one end of a table for four that we shared with two Parisian women in their seventies. We nodded hello and then retreated into our own worlds.

The food part of the tea service arrived on a stand with three levels—savory at the bottom, scones in the middle, and some very beautiful and unusual pastries on the top. We work our way from bottom to top, as instructed by our waiter, and by the time we get to the pastry level we can hardly even think about eating them. Which is a problem as the desserts are a product of the hottest pastry chef working in Paris right now, Cedric Grolet, and not eating the top tier was out of the question. One of the pastries looked like a miniature mango, with an airbrushed surface that was indistinguishable from the real thing, except for its size. It wasn’t marzipan but an amazing few layers of white chocolate and something crunchy around a core of mango puree. There was a small, round chocolate tart in the middle, covered with hazelnuts. Then on the other end was a round chocolate ball constructed to look like a nut, sprayed with gold. You can see the mango and the chocolate ball below.

This was about two hours in and the going was getting hard. We were gamely sampling the desserts and my friend was telling me a little about the pastry chef when I realized that the woman to my right was talking to me. She was saying under her breath “He was right here! He was just behind you. He was standing right behind you!” Her friend went on to say that they were “groupies” (said with that fantastic French “r”) of Cedric and came often. The woman to my right whips out her phone and starts to show me his impressive Instagram feed (@cedricgrolet). She knows every video and photo he’s posted.

They then proceed to give us some of the best life advice I’ve received in years. Ignore what the waiter says about the order in which to eat the food—who says it has to be savory to sweet. They’ve learned to always start with the desserts and work your way down. This may just apply to more than high tea.

The living nativity gets complicated

Those of you who have been with me for awhile know that my favorite part of the holidays is the impressive presepe vivente, or living nativity, that the neighboring village of La Ville puts on. I have missed it dearly the last two years when it was suspended due to Covid. It was epic—200 volunteers, 50 scenes of ancient Jerusalem lit by 1500 candles over a route over a kilometer long. It had it all—nasty Romans with a slave market, donkeys turning a oil press, women washing clothes in a stream, a field of lepers, culminating in a manger with a rotating Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus cast from families who had recently given birth in the local hospital.

I kept driving past the location eagerly looking for signs of activity and notices of the dates it would happen; it always ran a few days between Christmas day and Epiphany. But nothing.

Doing some research I discovered that there is a new parish priest in the church that was located at the center of the event. The church had always given space to the volunteers to house the sets and props, and to build and repair things from year to year. The new priest wanted to end the arrangement causing the organizers to find a new home. They mustered and moved it to another nearby village, but have a much smaller area to work with. We went and it was impressive how much they had managed to recreate, the Jerusalem part was very similar, but the truly magical bits that occurred out in open fields weren’t possible. They still had a few lepers, but it just wasn’t the same without a field of them, it turns out.

Should I send the new parish priest a Grinch outfit?

Me and Sister Ray

I have had about enough. I’d been behaving rather well making sure that between guests and life most of the critical things had been accomplished and no one’s feelings had been ruffled, basically keeping the trains running on time. I’d stifled many a thought and comment and was feeling a little pent up. Standing at the kitchen window, overlooking the olives and doing dishes (the view is above), the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” comes up on shuffle. (According to Spotify, I’ve had quite the year with the Velvet Underground, with it coming up as my most listened to band.) But even though I am a fan, “Sister Ray” pushes it. At 17 minutes 29 seconds it covers all the basics of rebellion and then some—some transvestites bring home some sailors for a drug and sex orgy when one gets shot and killed. The main concern seems to be whether the carpet will get stained. They recorded it in one take and the sound engineer left midway, saying he’d return when it’s over.

But there was something about this song that saved me in that moment. I turned it up, loud, and revelled for all of those 17 minutes and 29 seconds in being bad. Well, bad adjacent. In reality, I actually have no desire to have an orgy with transvestites and sailors, kill one, and shoot up heroin. But when I was describing this moment to John and Sebastian last night at dinner I realized that I wish I’d been badder in my life. They asked how I would define my sense of bad and I had no answer at that moment. They said that it was like I was holding up an empty container labeled “bad” and there was nothing inside. It reminded me of what I just wrote about my mother and the beer garden and Mom wanting to rebel but never doing it. I guess that this apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, indeed. What a terribly frustrating realization.

I’ve been thinking about what caught me with such power that afternoon and what kind of badness I aspire to that doesn’t scale to transvestites, orgies, or murders. I am not sure I have the answer but it does include caring less about whether I am pleasing people, taking care of things, doing things right, and always, always trying to be perfect. Frankly, it’s getting a little old. So if you happen pass our house and you hear “Sister Ray” being played with the volume up, watch out.

Five reasons why I love Autumn in Tuscany

I’m not going to even count the fact that I love orange, because that’s an all-year basic for me.

Going out on a limb I’m going to say that Italy is at her very best in the Fall. Temperatures are perfect—crisp at night but warm in the day, the light is gorgeous—those long slanting beams of sun across the landscape, and most of the tourists have left allowing cities and villages to draw a deep breath.

If that’s not enough, here are a few more reasons to love Italy in the autumn.

The olives are ripe

Every year I turn into a farmer, not something that past Nancy would have imagined on the list of possibilities for future Nancy. I scrutinize weather predictions. John and I walk the orchard to see how far along the olives are in ripeness. I scheme about who I can invite to visit and rope in to help, and beyond that how many additional pairs of hands we’ll need. I call the olive press to see when they open for the season and book our time on press. That appointment starts the picking clock—not good to allow olives to sit any more than 48 hours between when they are picked and pressed.

The decision of when to pick has an impact on the oil. Early and it’s wonderfully peppery and filled with polyphenols, which are rumored to be very good for you and also help the oil last longer. Let them sit on the tree for longer and the quantity of oil increases and the oil is more mellow. We pick as early as we can as we love the intense taste. In case you are curious about what an olive press is like (this one includes wine, grappa, freshly baked cookies, and loads of dogs) here’s an earlier Itch.

This year is in the can, so to speak, and was a good one. Despite record-breaking heat in July, an epic drought in August, a hail storm in September that knocked off about a third of the olives, and an unusually aggressive pruning we did in the Spring where we took off about 2/3 of the main trunks of many trees, the unphased olives trees did their thing and gave us slightly over 500kg. of olives, resulting in about 65 liters of oil. Thank you trees.

L’Intrepida, the vintage bicycle race

One of the most wondrous things our village does, out of many, is L’Intrepida, which, just to be clear, means “The Intrepid”. This year over 900 riders assembled from all over, including a friend of ours from California, to ride either a 42, 85 or 120 kilometer trip through the Tuscan countryside. As charming as this thing sounds, it is not for the faint of heart. All bicycles need to be pre-1987. Hasn’t it been since then that they’ve developed all those good gears and tires that make you actually able to climb mountains on dirt roads? That doesn’t stop this gang. Not only do their bikes look uncomfortable, many are also cycling in vintage wool pants and shirts. Luckily they are well fortified by rest stops at castles with wine, vin santo (a local dessert wine) and pastries. Water is not on offer. Apparently there is a hell of a lot of hydration in red wine.

My friend from California had mistranslated the registration form and hadn’t come prepared with a doctor’s report clearing him to participate. The ever-practical Tuscans quickly came up with a solution. He could ride, unofficially, then when he got to the finish and was clearly still alive he could claim his number along with his goody bag. Sadly, upon arriving at the finish he wasn’t given his original number, “123” but did get the locally-sourced goods: a big bag of packaged pre-toasted bread slices, a bag of coffee, a package of feminine douche products, some pasta, and an herbal antibacterial nasal spray and throat wash. Now wasn’t that worth a bunch of kilometers on a gravel road, uphill, on a bike with lousy brakes, wearing wool? Apparently, it is.

What it is really like to ride in the L’Intrepida.

The food festivals

Step back fifty years, complete with a local band playing music from the roaring 1970s over distorted speakers that date back even further. Join the queue to choose and pay for your meal in advance from the volunteers lit by glaring overhead fluorescent lights. In an adjoining tent you’ll find a line up of cooking stations, usually involving large open fires and sometimes cauldrons of polenta, manned by local cooks and volunteers. Go into a large tent and sit down at endless banquet tables, all covered with the latest in plastic tablecloths, hand over the ticket you received when you paid, and you will be rewarded with the local speciality in small plastic bowls, often with plastic sforks. Welcome to the world of the sagra, or village festival.

They mostly take place in the fall, and almost every village has one dedicated to its own speciality food. Just up the hill from us is the sagra of a special kind of chestnuts, called marrone. A nearby village in the other direction celebrates polenta. A tiny hamlet in between has a festival dedicated to ciaccia, the local deep fried bread. Slightly further away you’ll be able to find sagras focused on truffles, or porcini.

Our village’s festival celebrates a really fat spaghetti noodle, called bringoli. You’ve got two choices: meat sauce or mushroom. Next to the pasta cooking stations are these really wonderful grills they have here with roaring fires in an upright chamber in the back and a long flat tray in front in which the hot coals are spread, perfect for grilling sausages and pieces of bread that are then rubbed with garlic and drizzled with just-pressed olive oil. Prior Itch: In praise of fat spaghetti. (I do love this post.)

Although popular with the few tourists who are here at this time of year, it’s mainly locals who attend and a time to catch up, see old friends, and for kids and teens to run loose in packs with their own codes and rules. All is accompanied by young wine, almost undrinkable. Usually a euro for a plastic glass and about four for a bottle.

I adore the purity of these events. There’s no hushed-voice, precious attitude that I sometimes found in the Bay Area around food. This is just what’s always been eaten and celebrated, a justification for pleasure and joy, but not for self-gratification or congratulation. And there are absolutely no long descriptions of the provenance of very element. People just know where it all comes from by who brought it to the festival and who is cooking, which is deeply lovely. Give me a plastic sfork every time.

Melvin gets his winter body

Melvin was born in the woodshed, the product of a fly-by-night father and an indifferent mother. She had clearly had too many children before and did the bare minimum to keep the babies alive, visiting only long enough to feed them. Dad was just out for a good time and never showed his face when it came time to raise the kids.

John found Melvin and his siblings one night while getting wood for the fire and we put Donella, who is our resident feral cat tamer, on the case. I have learned that every locality, from Berkeley to the Upper Tiber Valley has a Feral Cat Woman. You figure out who she is and she will always have a feral cat trap you can borrow to catch the kittens so you can bring them into a small enclosed space (like a bathroom) and start the process of taming them. (As you can tell, we have some experience in this having been “blessed” on three occasions with feral kittens in or around our homes.) We got three of the four siblings adopted but ended up with Melvin.

Melvin lives life on his own terms. He never lets you forget that he is, in his heart, still wild and untamed. But he follows you around the yard when you work, usually directly under foot or in the tree you are working on, demanding snuggles. Indoors he is much more aloof, at least until Sebastian “broke” him this summer and now he will sometimes be cuddled even inside, as deeply conflicted as this makes him.

We see Melvin’s relatives everywhere. There’s the old Melvin, clearly the survivor of many fights, whose body moves like a wooden block—no feline undulation here—who could be dad or granddad. There are teenage Melvins swaggering around. We see mom occasionally, usually escaping from where she has hidden another litter. (Don’t get me started on how spaying and neutering is less common in Italy.)

But all the male cats, not just in Melvin’s family but across the valley, share an extraordinary trait. The Winter Body. Male cats gain significant amounts of weight in the winter and are thin in the summer. The first time we went through this with Melvin I thought there was something wrong and was ready to take him to the vet when I started noticing that the same thing was happening to all the male cats around us. It’s extraordinary to see this skinny cat suddenly add another half-cat or more to his body mass. November is a prime month for beefing (or catting?) up and we are suddenly filling the dog food and cat food bowls several times a day. (Melvin often eats Lola’s dog food as he believes that she is actually his mother.)

Maybe we should all embrace the Winter Body. It would make the season much more fun.

Halloween

The big event in Italy is not Halloween, but All Saints Day on November 1st, which is a national holiday. The roads around the cemetery are packed as people come to clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones with fresh plastic flowers and battery-operated candles. (For more about how Italians celebrate All Saints, or the Day of the Dead.)

When we first moved ten years ago I was feeling guilty that the kids wouldn’t have a proper Halloween. Sebastian and I tried—he dressed in costume, I put on a hat and carried all his Nerf guns, and we went out trick or treating in the piazza to the local merchants who reacted with confusion and tried their best. Sebastian scored a sausage from the butcher. A friend had brought us bags of Halloween candy so I handed it out to people we saw in a sort of reverse Halloween tradition.

Things have changed in ten years. Now Halloween is becoming very popular—it gains momentum every year. Now our village was packed with kids in costume. It’s the most profitable evening of the year for the big disco twenty minutes away. Trick or treat is still going from store to store rather than house to house, which is lucky for us as they don’t yet sell packages of small candies for this purpose.

But what really stopped me in my tracks was the a local grandmother in our hamlet who drives a Lada 4×4 and is about as far from trends as anyone I can imagine put a lit, carved pumpkin in her window, behind her protective metalwork. This was Halloween breaking through in an unprecedented way. When I saw her a day or so later I complimented her on her pumpkin and she beamed. Did you notice that it was smiling, she asked.

Tango, Italian style

“Would you like to come and watch my wife and me dance the tango?” asked Paolo, the dynamo of a contractor and stone mason who rebuilt our house and is now working on the restoration next door for our friends. He’s a whirling dervish of a man, curly grey hair, intense, sparkling eyes and always enthused about an arch he’s built or a particularly nice rock or bit of old beam he can reuse in a creative way. In addition to building walls that are art pieces and controlling a crane he and his wife are professional dancers on the Italian tango circuit. His invitation was several years ago and was our first exposure to Italian tango. We enthusiastically agreed that we’d love to come—it’s always fun to watch passionate, skilled dancers and hear vibrant, sensuous music. We closed our eyes, imagined Italians doing the tango, and couldn’t wait.

That evening they’d closed off one of the smaller streets in town and built a wooden stage. The DJ was readying the sound system to play the best of tango music and the dancers were assembling, all dressed in their finest.

Then the music and dancing started. It was about as different from our preconceptions of the tango as we could imagine. It was like taking the tango and instead of turning it to an eleven (you either get this reference, or you don’t), turning it to a two. Slow, stylized, formal, and to us, not in the ballpark of passion and rhythm of what we’d expected. Dancers barely touched, moving around the floor in predefined patterns. The music as well seemed like a pale interpretation. To say we were puzzled was an understatement but fortunately we ran into an Italian friend of ours who delights in knowing odd bits about his own culture, and he explained.

The years around 1890 to 1920 saw a large wave of Italians immigrants to Argentina (up to 60% of immigrants were Italian), mostly young men who came to make money, with many hoping to return to Italy. Buenos Aires became a melting pot with immigrants from all over the world living in close quarters. Into this stew pot the tango was born. Many credit the Italians as being a key influence in the creation of the Argentinian tango, along with mazurkas; milonga (the folk music of the Argentinean pampas which itself combined Indian rhythms with the music of early Spanish colonists); the habanera of Cuba and the candombe rhythms originating in Africa. A dash of traditional polkas and waltzes were thrown into the pot. Scholars say that Italian men were some of the first tango dancers and that they brought a particular note of wistful longing for the homeland that became a trademark of the tango.

The tango bounded around the world and became very popular around 1913-15 and at that time many Italians immigrants returned, eager to share this amazing music and dance with their villages. They tried to teach the music to local musicians and to show off this soulful, passionate dance at festas in the village square. But, apparently, they did not factor in Italian grandmothers, who were appalled and quickly put some decorum around this show of overt sensuality. No more touching than strictly necessary, lose the throbbing, passionate rhythm, make the music sound more familiar. And they would surround the dance floor to make sure all was to their liking. And the Italian tango was born.

Paolo and his wife were at a village event dancing last week and we filmed so that you can get an idea. He’s on vacation now for a couple of weeks and when I asked what they would be doing he quickly replied “Dancing”.

Paolo’s advice for a good life

We’ve spent the last year improving the nest, getting around to things that we haven’t tackled after being in the house close to six years. One category was getting some large mirrors. When you live in a house that’s somewhere north of 600 or so years old the aesthetic choices about something like a mirror get a bit complex. Do you go in-your-face modern, real old (which is often gilded and simply too much for our simple house), or pseudo old, most of it screaming out every bit of its fakery. At the risk of sounding pathetic, we’d not found the solution since we’d moved in and wanted it solved and to never think about it again.

The next small town over from us has an intriguing store, although it rarely seemed to be open. One dusty window facing the street revealed a long, narrow space piled high on both sides with all sorts of old wood, some frames, and assorted furniture. We’d tried to go a few times, with little success. Sometimes a worker or two would be there but they seemed unable to give details on what was available because the owner, Paolo, wasn’t there.

One day, this lovely woman who seems to specialize in decorative and faux painting, offered to contact Paolo, who was in his office, and have him come to the shop. She called, and about a minute later he appeared. He sorted through the mess, sometimes needing to crawl on top of tottering furniture to get to what was behind, while the woman called out warnings, and finally we had several possible frames. He helped us pile them in the car to take home to try out and although we’d met five minutes earlier he wanted neither deposit, name, or phone number. And we drove off with hundreds of euros worth of frames.

Several of the frames worked, so we returned the following week to buy a couple, return some, and have more made. Once again Paolo had to be called from the office. We discussed what needed to be done and he invited us back to the office for a coffee. We had things to do so declined.

Several back and forths to check on progress all yielded a similar pattern and it was revealed that the office was in fact the cafe just around the corner. We finally took Paolo up on his offer of refreshment at the office, and he shared his philosophy of life to the tune of church bells.

You choose a work you enjoy and is fulfilling—he has worked with wood since he was a child at the side of his father—but you never, ever let it dominate the rest of the mix. Your life always needs to be bigger than your work or you are lost. He works (or more from what I saw his charming and talented employee works) but it is only to support life and to provide funds for enough time “in the office,” a cafe adjacent to the town square, in the shadow of one of the most famous paintings of the Renaissance, Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, and filled with his friends and enough new people wandering through to keep life interesting.

With that he invited to come visit him at the office whenever we happened to be in the area for a coffee or glass of wine and more conversation. And we have our mirrors at last.