The Joys of Autumn

One day, everything is different. Growing up in Florida, then living most of my adult life in California, I’m used to a more gradual shift into Fall, but here in Tuscany it’s a precipice, like stepping from one room into another. During the first week of September the scorching, take-no-prisoners heat of summer abruptly changes. So does nearly everything else. Here’s what I notice, and love, about Fall.

The hunt

I woke up on September 1st at 7:00 am sharp. Not because I had transitioned from sleep in a gentle hug from the conscious world kind of way, but was jolted awake by the sounds of gunshots. Hunting season had started. Officially, the guns can be shot at 7 am and clearly there was not a moment to waste. These guys (I think exclusively) were shooting in the valley we overlook and the sound ricochets. As the shots came from that direction it must be birds they are after—pheasants, partridges, and the occasional hare. The cinghiale, or wild boar, hunters are usually in the woods, only affecting my walks—and the boar. There’s nothing like a group of armed men dressed in orange shooting their guns, with packs of barking hunting dogs, and danger signs on the trail, to interrupt a “forest bathing” mood.

I have yet to infiltrate the close knit group of hunters, although I once tried. They meet at a bar very early in the morning to fortify themselves with caffè corretto, or corrected coffee. “Corrected with what?” you might ask. Take your pick of grappa, sambuca, brandy, or whiskey. They have a couple of these and then go out and stand in a big circle shooting at the boars in the center. Nothing to be alarmed about. This could be the reason they don’t want me along.

Cinghiale

The wild boar, or cinghiale, come in close to the village for safety, trying to avoid the hunters. As our land hugs the village’s defensive walls, this often means they are living in, or passing through, our yard, which is 10 acres. They have a lot of babies, so we often look out our windows to see a family of eight to ten, sometimes mere yards from our house. It turns out that they have a passion for the lemongrass I’ve planted, as I can’t buy it locally. (Pork with lemongrass. Yum.) They are cute in the abstract, or further away from the house, but dangerous and destructive in the garden. One evening, John and I returned in our car after dark, parking at the back of the house. We got out of our car and heard at least two boar, on opposite sides of the house, and there was no way to get to the front door without chasing them away. Not for the faint of heart.

John’s idea was to get firecrackers and throw them out the window when he hears them, to discourage getting too comfy in our foliage. We were recently buying some pretty big fireworks to set off for a friend’s wedding, and John asked the owner for the most powerful firecrackers he had. The bright yellow “Titan” firecrackers were produced from the vault. The label warns that these are “not to be used for fun”. An acceptable use, according to the label, is to “frighten wild animals”. Last night John threw some in the direction of a happy family of boar in the field and said that he could feel the recoil. Amazingly, this plan seems to be working as there are fewer boar in our yard.

Firecrackers are often set off by pre-teen boys under the walls of town, seemingly an unending source of fun for them, and terror for our dog, Lola. She particularly hates it when John hurls firecrackers from our windows. This is not the way a senior member of the pack is supposed to behave and it upsets her to an alarming degree. She leaps into my arms in bed with her heart pounding. We hope that the local boys can’t get their hands on Titans, as we will never sleep again. Usually the places where one buys these things are pretty careful not to sell anything to powerful to kids, but eight-year-old Sebastian was able to purchase, without our knowledge, some firecrackers from “under the counter” at one of the local tobacco shops. These were all shot off within minutes.

Tobacco

Along with the sound of gunfire, the most common thing I wake up to in the Fall is the smell of the smoke from the fires used to dry tobacco. This area grows a lot of tobacco. Some native friends swear that it is some of the finest tobacco in the world. The rest say it is garbage. Not knowing my tobacco I cannot weigh in. All I know is that whenever there’s a movement to limit growing it in any way it is defeated in the local elections. Tobacco is big money, partially subsidized by the government and the E.U. for reasons driven more by votes than public health.

The tiny plants go in at the height of summer, after the cover crops are plowed under, usually fava beans. The tobacco plants grow quickly, aided by copious amounts of irrigated water and tanks full of toxic sprays. At this time of year, pickers are out harvesting individual leaves and hanging them upside down on frames pulled by tractors. These frames are then placed in barns around a fire where they are dried until golden brown—a smell that wafts across the valley. As our house is within sight of two of these drying barns, we get exposed to quite a bit of the smell when the wind blows in a certain direction. Sometimes I kind of like it. Our kids have said that this smell represents Fall for them. But it has started to get to me more and occasionally is quite irritating—on the days when the smell is strong I often wake up congested and with eyes burning. A village friend with lung damage from the mold in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has a great deal of difficulty breathing during this season. Nothing to be done about this except for an air filter, which we just fetched from our attic storage.

As the tobacco moves from the fields to the drying barns there’s usually a road involved. Which means that most times I’m driving anywhere—on narrow country roads—there’s a loaded tractor to pass. They are very slow, as one might expect, so this is less of a problem than other forms of passing.

Sunflowers

When I say “sunflower” and ask you to picture something in your mind, those gorgeous yellow flowers that might pop up first are only a short part of the flower’s life cycle. Before they are ready to harvest, with a fascinating machine that cuts them off at about three feet high and digests the seeds, spitting out the rest of the flower and stem onto the ground, they need to get totally and completely dry. Meaning totally black and dead. I actually think they are quite beautiful in this state, in a Morticia Addams kind of way. Everywhere I go fields are being completely transformed from summer to winter, sometimes in just a day.

Swimming

Last time I wrote about how the pool saves my life during the hot weather. When it was still scorching at the end of August I asked the owner how much longer the pool would stay open. He looked at me like I was crazy and said “Until the 1st, of course.” After that milestone things cool down and school starts. Absolutely no need for a pool. The precipice of Fall.

The views

The air is crystal clear, despite the tobacco drying, and you can see for miles, finally breaking the haze of the summer high pressure zones. The angle of the sun makes all the colors pop in an extraordinary way. And the clouds are just as beautiful as the mountains and fields. Global warming is making the clouds more spectacular, a small silver lining.

Sagre

Fall is the season for harvest festivals, called sagre. Each village, and sometimes even a tinier hamlet, has their own festival. Last night, we went to a nearby local village for a celebration of polenta. Yes, that’s correct, polenta. Polenta is cooked in huge vats, stirred by volunteers with big wooden paddles. It’s served with either a mushroom topping, or meat ragu, in plastic bowls to thousands of people seated at long tables in tents. These festivals are one of my favorite things about the season. I will write more after I go to the ciaccia fritta festival in a tiny hamlet in the suburbs of our small village. Ciaccia fritta is a Tuscan delicacy—fried dough—every bit as delicious, and heavy, as one would expect.

Thanks, once again, for reading and to my new subscribers—some even paid—much to my amazement. It’s an honor to have your time and support. Ci vediamo presto—we’ll see each other soon.

Pregnanxiety

I love my village. And what I love the most is not the food, or the wine, or the rolling Tuscan hills, or the thousand years of defensive hilltop architecture, but the spirit of the place. I treasure the events that mark the seasons every year—festivities profoundly of this place, created by this place, and for the locals. Almost every month something rolls around. More in the summer. The fall festival honoring our patron saint and a fat spaghetti, called bringoli, that’s only made in our town. The vintage bicycle race that attracted over 900 participants this year. The local Vespa club that dresses in Santa costumes and races into the square on Christmas Eve, at exactly 6pm, to distribute toys to the assembled kids under the enormous Christmas tree. Carnivale, when hundreds of spectators dress in costume and watch the farmers pull floats with their freshly-washed tractors. The polenta festival to cheese rolling, we are always busy.

But in late summer, the local play, Tovaglia a Quadri, has a special place in my heart. The play is written fresh every year by Andrea Merendelli and Paolo Pennacchini who delight in collecting everything from the small details of daily life to huge societal trends and synthesizing them into a rapid-fire, witty, and farcical play, the acts separated by aperitivi, pasta, the main course, and dessert. It runs for ten evenings, and they have done it for 28 years without a break.

The play takes place in the courtyard of a neighborhood castle dating from 1234 with long tables set in the middle. The action occurs all around the diners, with the sixteen actors popping out of windows to deliver lines, and walking through the middle of the diners. We booked four tickets together at one of the long tables and sat down to greetings by our dining neighbors and large, open flasks of red wine.

This year’s play, Gravidansia, is a mash-up of the Italian words for pregnancy and anxiety. It wraps the declining Italian birth rate (one of the lowest in the world), the difference in funding between the private and public health sectors, the economic and social reasons people are not starting families, and rodents, into one package. The premise is that the castle is now a state-funded care home for the elderly, the booming demographic. The presiding doctor trained as an OB-GYN, but with nobody having babies he now needs to work in elder care and is always worried about when the state funding will arrive, and if budgets will be cut further.

The swirling plot features an old, male farmer, who now dresses as a woman and is convinced that he is pregnant; two of our waiters shouting at each other while they serve us—a couple on the verge of a breakup as they face their bleak economic future together; a young professional couple who keep circling by the tables as they run laps, checking their times on fitness watches, and eating protein bars—treasuring their child-free lifestyle and too busy to have kids despite their uncle yelling out the window of the care home that he will give them the best apartment on the village square if they provide heirs. Another doctor arrives on the scene, who trained as an OB-GYN with our protagonist, but paths have diverged. He founded a group of very successful, high-end private clinics providing fertility treatments.

All these plots soon center on a loose mouse, long bothering the facility, captured by the local exterminator. Instead of destroying the mice he has captured through the years, he has sold them to the fertility clinic the visiting doctor runs, to be used in genetic research. The doctor has brought the alpha mouse from his clinic in a small cage. She is the mother to a long, important line of mice and has stopped reproducing. The doctor is hoping that by introducing a wild mate she will regain interest in her procreational duties. He has come for the just-captured mouse for his new blood that will rejuvenate the line. The two are put in the same cage but ignore each other.

The visiting doctor goes inside the care home and is touched by the beauty of the place and the frescoes of the old castle as the older residents reminisce about how their families used to be living close to the land—brutally hard times but filled with life. The 11-year old daughter of our protagonist doctor is chased by the doctor and exterminator after she frees the two mice from the cage. The visiting doctor has a change of heart—only by releasing people, and mice, from their cages and returning to beauty and a sense of place will people want to continue the race. He wants to help turn this castle into a center for the beginnings of life, as well as endings.

I remain amazed how this is pulled off with local writers, director, and actors, many of whom I often see around town. I am understanding more every year, but am jealous of Sebastian who gets it all but can only translate highlights as it’s so rapid-fire, and the laughing crowd, enjoying every twist and turn.

In case you were worried about the mice, in the closing moment of the play one of the characters spots them on a rooftop, finally “getting along” rather well in their new, freed state.

Is it getting hot in here?

Yep, it’s hot. And here’s how I am coping in a land with almost no air conditioning and heat into the 100 degrees. Although we have not had it as bad as many places it’s still enough to completely change my daily routine, and mood. In a good moment I can appreciate that the sunflowers are at their crazy best and the cicadas are singing, although the chickens at the farm stand have stopped laying and our cats remain motionless on the stone floor for most of the day, which does remind me of the physical toll of this kind of heat. I read a fascinating article in the NYTimes about the impact that heat has on intelligence and mood. So if you catch any misspellings, you know why.

Our house is made with thick stone walls, around two feet, which provide some insulation. We open the windows at night to try to cool the walls and floors as much as possible and then close the windows, outside shutters, and inside scuri to put as many layers of protection between us and the sun as possible when it starts to heat up around 8 am. The scuri are wooden panels on hinges that you can close over the windows on the inside and it is not an accident that the word scuro also means dark. The effect of these heat shields being in place is quite cave-like in certain rooms. I saw Dune for the first time and the heat protection techniques they were using on Arrakis felt like my daily life. Minus all the really great hair.

We broke down this year and got air conditioning in the rooms on the back side of the house—the kitchen and a couple of bedrooms. This has been a game changer for sleep on particularly hot nights, but we use it the minimum possible, set as high as tolerable, using fans to help keep cool, and with all the other temperature mitigation procedures still in place.

During daylight hours, within our dark rooms, I rarely leave the side of my fan, even with the AC on. Which may, or may not, have had an odd side effect on our dog, Lola. She’s often at my side, so is equally often in front of a fan. Lola likes to pull on the leash and we often forget her walking halter. We’d taken her to lunch with us and on the way into the restaurant she’d seen something interesting and was pulling unusually hard on her collar. Later that day she started having a very dry, continuous cough. I start searching the internet and was convinced that she had developed a collapsed trachea from damage to her throat from pulling on her collar.

I rushed her to the vet as soon as they opened after their four-hour lunch break. Fortunately, unlike most emergency visits to the doctor with our children, she was still coughing and spewing when we got to the vet. He took one look at her and asked if we had air conditioning or were using fans. When he learned that she was frequently in front of the fan he said that was the reason for the cough—he’d seen five other dogs with the same issue in the previous few days. Avoid fans and drafts and she would be fine. I was convinced he was crazy because heat is a trigger for symptoms of a collapsed trachea and it could be that these five dogs also had this undiagnosed condition that the heat brought on. The old correlation/causation chicken and egg. But weirdly enough, she has been fine since we’ve kept her away from me and the fan.

This diagnosis should not have surprised me. The Italians we know fear drafts. We were having lunch in a restaurant that had air conditioning on a particularly scorching day, and we were seated right under it, enjoying the respite. Six people were shown to the adjoining table. They looked with great concern in our direction and I was worried that one of the kids was scared of dogs, because Lola was with us. They exited in about a second with fear on their faces and went to an outside table in the heat. Sebastian said they’d told the waitress that they were all sweaty and couldn’t possibly sit in front of an air conditioner or they would all get sick.

During the height of Covid, in the winter of 2020, we were not eating inside restaurants. On a road trip Donella and I stopped at a restaurant to have lunch which was packed with people eating inside. We asked if we could sit at an outdoor table right next to the front door. The waitress started complaining to the manager that by going in and out into the cold she would surely get sick. She seemed unconcerned about working in a room with a hundred unmasked people in close quarters in the days before the vaccine.

Because I need more exercise than getting out of bed and up from my desk to adjust the fan my big adventure of the day is to go to the local pool, run by a family. It’s a fantastic Italian social scene populated by everyone from grandparents to the tiniest babies. I’ve never heard a word of English spoken. It’s the kind of place where I leave my wallet and phone in full view while I swim, without a problem.

I game my entry carefully and try to get there late enough that most people will be leaving so that I can have the pool relatively empty so I can swim some laps, and so that the dad will let me in at a discount. Even at six the pool is usually packed and I am the only one trying to swim anywhere. There are more kids than I can count and the water is always unusually warm. This makes me glad that I swim with my head above water. The visibility my technique provides is a good thing because it has never entered the head of anyone who is standing in the pool to get out the way of someone trying to swim.

There’s only one lane. For some reason this seems to be the most attractive spot for groups of people to stand in the water and talk. When I am swimming I sometimes remember when we still lived in Berkeley and I was swimming one evening in the pool at the club we belonged to. The whole pool was divided into lanes and there were two people sharing every lane except for one. The lone swimmer was at the other end of the long pool and I slipped into the water and started swimming. When we met in the lane mid pool the other swimmer started shouting at me because she didn’t want to share a lane. I often want to plunk her in this Italian pool, just to watch her reaction.

When I swim in the main part of the pool it gets even more interesting as there are kids diving, people playing ball games, couples cuddling and flirting, and many more people standing in groups talking. Not to mention the occasional pool floating toy days which I can never keep track of. I try the best I can to weave through it all and avoid getting hit in the head by a ball or run into more than once. Today there was a very cute little Italian boy wearing Spiderman arm floaties who had an industrial strength water gun and was soaking everyone in the face. This is when having one’s head above water is not ideal. (Armed Spiderman is much better than Little Lorenzo, who terrorizes the entire pool daily with his screaming when he has to get out of the water, much to his mother and grandmother’s horror.)

There is also a swim class taught by the daughter of the family who runs the pool. The class is mostly made up of eight to ten-year-old boys and the instructor wears a constantly changing selection of the tiniest bikinis I’ve ever seen, either on a Kardashian or in real life. I am sure the boys don’t notice.

Last year, the pool was frequented by about twenty very fit guys. They’d usually arrive en masse just as I was getting out and all jump in, doing laps while waiting for their coach. He’d arrive with a boombox and start yelling out instructions for aqua aerobics like a drill sergeant, while being backed up by bouncy, usually American, pop hits. I found this very amusing to watch while drying off. One day they arrived earlier than usual when I actually got to swim in the one lane, enjoying the blissful emptiness. They started doing a chorus line high kicking move in a circle, with their arms linked. The whirlpool effect was powerful—I’d be hurdled to one end of the pool at lightning speed just to turn around and barely be able to struggle back to the other end. I asked the owner of the pool about them and they were a volleyball team doing some cross-training. They seem to have found another form of exercise this summer, much to my disappointment.

The grocery store is another air-conditioned mecca, but equally crowded. Sometimes I forget that the Italian ideal is not one of efficiency—get in and get out as quickly as possible—but one of social optimization. The more people you see and the longer it takes, the better. This often means that I leave my cart in a corner and ferry purchases back to it because it is too complicated to get my cart through the aisles on a Saturday morning, which is prime time. Like at the pool, there’s little of the American sense of personal space—I pull my cart to the side so that others can get by. But I am the only one. Carts are abandoned crosswise in the middle of aisles, or a whole group of carts are grouped around the one with the baby in it. It’s also the kind of place where I went to the customer service booth with a question and the woman there spent about five minutes trying to solve it. With many thousands of euros of cash on the counter next to her in plain view and easy reach. She was completely unphased.

It’s in these moments that my Americanness runs full tilt into my adopted homeland. Why can’t I just efficiently exercise and cool down? Why can’t I get my cart through the aisles on a Saturday morning? Because that’s not what’s important here. Efficiency, competitiveness, and the sense of entitlement of my lane partner in California who didn’t want to share has nothing to do with the daily reality here and I am the better off for it. These things—flirting in the pool, Spiderman with his water gun, Lorenzo’s tantrums, the lateral tossing ball game with six players who use the entire width of the pool—are the things that people remember and that matter. How many laps I swam is meaningless and I know it.

We had American friends visiting and I was hanging out late at night with their eleven-year old in a park watching everyone from three-year olds playing soccer to old men playing bocce ball. I was telling her that everyone knew each other and that the three-year olds would turn into the old men, probably in the same park. She said that she was discovering that Italy was like a peach, easy to break through skin with sweetness inside. And that Americans were more like dragon fruit, very hard to break through the surface, but still sweet inside. I am enjoying that thin skin and the easily accessible sweetness inside.

Six things that are different in Italy

Observations from my recent, quick trip to the States. After ten years of living in Italy I am often amused by the cultural differences between the US and Italy, and in the ways I’ve gone Italian native.

I didn’t see a single Porsche hearse the whole time I was in California.

Nor a Maserati hearse like the one that has, on occasion, passed me in our village when I was going too slow.

All those wasted parking spots

I was in a multi-level parking garage with a friend in her car and we were driving around looking for a spot. It was painful for me (yes, actually, in a way) to pass all these perfectly good places to put a car that somehow had been overlooked by the people painting the little white lines. For instance, every corner. Huge spot for a car to come in at an angle with no possible problem for the cars on either side to back out. Screw the little white lines. AND NO ONE, NOT ONE SINGLE CAR, WAS PARKING THERE ANYWAY. And we continued spiraling up to level four. My driving has definitely become more Italian. (More observations, and photos, about the Italian gift for parking.)

But I want to buy something

I popped in and out of a variety of small stores during my visit. I’d always pause at the entrance, waiting for eye contact and a greeting by the sales clerk, and that faint nod of permission to enter. Never happened. I’d be the only one in the store and the person standing behind the counter, doing nothing, would not look up and say hi. Or goodbye. Completely ignored me. I have a strong response to this as it feels wrong.

Meanwhile, in France and Italy, one would never enter a store without greeting and being greeted—and not in that creepy “how can I help you” kind of way. Leaving a store in Italy usually involves multiple salutations. There’s almost always an exchange of grazie followed by an arrivederci or ciao, depending on how well you know them, topped off by a buona giornata or buona serata, wishing you a nice morning or afternoon.

This evolved from a long history from when most shopkeepers lived above their stores, so the shop below was an extension of their living space. I can imagine that one would have always paused and waited for that nod to enter, and would always say hello and goodbye. And this tradition of greeting still continues, without fail. Some people still live where they work. Many little businesses exist around us where the family lives over their workshop or small factory.

It’s also a great thing for visitors to France and Italy to pay attention to, otherwise it’s easy to come across as rude. And it just feels nicer to say hello and goodbye to the other humans in the room.

Live to work or work to live?

I got caught up with quite a few friends when I was back and a good bit of the conversation was around work. What was good, what was challenging, what was next. This is a pattern so ingrained in me that I barely notice when I slip back in, and only in retrospect do I realize that in my Italian life work rarely comes up. People talk about vacations, family, food, or complain about bureaucracy, weather, food, or family, but rarely, if ever, is work a topic of conversation. Work is what you do, but not who you are.

And it’s not just this way in Italy. I spend a lot of time in Paris and have been watching in fascination as Macron is attempting to reform the pension system by raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (France is an outlier in retirement age for Europe, for example, Italy’s is at 67, Germany at 65 and 7 months, and the UK at 66.) France is weathering a storm of protest strikes showing that this reform is a dagger to the heart of many of the French people who see work as a means to an end and don’t want to do it a minute more than necessary.

Does this mean that they are all lazy losers? The story is more nuanced than that. Paris has a thriving startup scene which I would have expected to play by the US rules rather than the European ones. But talking with friends who migrated from the Valley to Paris and invest in startups, the informal rules in France are different. There is less pressure to work unbelievably long hours. The work day tends towards 9-5 or 6, but, according to my friends, the employees work with focus and productivity during this time. They noted that at many large and small technology companies they’d worked in America people were there for longer hours, largely because it was culturally impossible not to, but during those extended days there was some time spent basically goofing off. (This supports every scientific thing I’ve read about the brain’s attention span—it is hard work to think and we can’t sustain it for long spans of time with any effectiveness.) Our friends feel that there is a lot less of this in their subset of French companies. They want to work, get out, and live. This is a tiny, totally unscientific sample, but I found it to be an interesting perspective. For me, it’s probably like so much in life where the art is in the middle. I’d be very curious to hear you opinions on the productivity of the American work till you drop model, and if work at home has changed it or not.

Who is tipping who?

Everytime I am back in the US the screens asking for a tip with a transaction seem more ubiquitous. I get it for people making me something but still cringe a little when I am buying a bottle of water or something else packaged and all they need to do is ring me up. I understand the cost of living pressures and the need for a living wage but the awkward moment that arose every time I paid for anything really got to me, especially as I am out of practice tipping.

Here in rural Italy tipping is just not done. I’ve had wait staff run after me with 20 cents when I’ve rounded up. What happens in most transactions is that they knock something off the total—sometimes quite a bit—because you are a frequent customer. Say you are getting a pizza and it comes to €23 they will often say you can pay €20. And it doesn’t matter if you are paying by cash or card. It scales up from there for more major purchases or work on the house. This happens on a substantial percentage of all transactions, and I’ve even had it happen in big cities. The idea is that you are a valued customer and they want to show their appreciation for your business. Tipping is more common in larger cities and where there are tourists, but what’s appreciated, and I have never felt at all expected, is rounding up. Say a bill comes to €48 it’s nice to leave €50.

I didn’t get called tresora, bella, or cara once

I like these endearments probably more than I should. And it’s not just something that is directed to women. These forms of address are equal opportunity. And often men, even professionals, will call each other darling, greeting each other with a “Caro, come va?” Una bella cosa.

Finding a castle out my kitchen window

Certain windows of our house, including the one over the kitchen sink, look out over the Valtiberina, or upper Tiber river valley. We are partway up a hill and look across the valley to a series of hills framing the other side, all of which are a part of my daily life but have never been properly investigated. There’s one distinct hill that I’ve had a passing curiosity about that I’ve never explored as I had no idea how to get there and it was never higher on the list than, say, laundry. The hill sits quite distinctly apart like a giant, softly melted Hershey’s kiss set down in the middle of the terrain.

Last Sunday a friend suggested that we do a hike around the Montedoglio castle, which I’d never heard of. When we arrived at the ruins I realized that I was on top of this distinct formation looking back towards our house. And that I have been looking out every day at a 1,000 year old castle with a rich history that I didn’t know was there. It passed from wealthy family to wealthy family, along with the Camaldoli monastery for a period, usually changing hands at the end of a family’s male line. The Germans took it over in WWII because of its strategic position and it was bombed by the British Royal Air Force during the Anglo-American advancement up the Italian peninsula. The Germans blew up what was left during their retreat and mined the ruins and fields.

One of the joys of living in Italy is that you never know if there’s a 1,000 year old castle right under your nose, or your kitchen window, and that Tuscany seems to always offer up more to explore.