Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language
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.
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.
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 after about 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 means dark. The effect of these heat shields being in place is quite cave-like in certain rooms. I just saw Dune for the first time during this heatwave and the heat protection techniques they were using on Arrakis felt like my daily life. Minus all the really great hair.
During daylight hours, within our dark rooms, I rarely leave the side of my fan. 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 out. 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, 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. 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 to swim some laps, and so 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. 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.
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. Nope, carts abandoned crosswise in the middle of aisles, or a whole group of carts grouped around the one with the baby in it. It’s also the kind of place where I went to the customer service booth recently 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. 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 my daily reality here and I am the better off for it. These things—flirting in the pool, Spiderman with his water gun, the lateral tossing ball game with six players who used 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.
I’m doing something next weekend that really scares me. I am joining a hike from La Verna back to our village. Ten miles a day, mainly up and down over steep terrain, two overnights. I lost a bit of my confidence for such things after the Chamonix helicopter rescue debacle. To prepare, I decided to pick up some things, like hiking boots, at Decathlon which is located in the big box store area of the larger town near us. I want to be fit and ready.
We timed our shopping excursion around having lunch in the next town to break up the routine. Although this town has a beautiful medieval center that includes Roman ruins we chose an easy to get to restaurant in the suburbs near the box stores, not our usual neighborhood for restaurants. John found a simple, family Italian place that people seemed to love in a modern building on a modern street, I Bottega.
We entered the restaurant with the best of intentions. It’s been long past time, for me, to tackle the toll on the waistline of eating and drinking whatever I want in Italy. John and I have been dialing it back and eating mainly vegetables and lean meats. Along the lines of the famed Mediterranean diet.
I keep reading about this mythical way of eating. Loads of fish. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Whole grains. Little red and no processed meat. And I marvel. What Mediterranean are they talking about? I can drive to the body of water known as the Mediterranean in two hours so I think I am in the Mediterranean sphere of influence but you’d never know it from what people eat around here. Every menu is largely identical. A full meal includes appetizers, which are a couple of different toppings on slices of saltless Tuscan bread. The other choice is the cheese and salumi plate which is usually served on a cutting board (it’s called a tagliere, which means cutting board) with five or six different kinds of preserved meats—prosciutto, salumi and the like—and pecorino, in a few different stages of aging. This is followed by the pasta course, and then usually by meat. Almost always a steak as this region is famous for its Chianina beef, or pork. If you are lucky you can order a bit of sauteed spinach on the side. The other ubiquitous food staple is pizza. Where is the fish? The fruit? The vegetables? Where are these people eating this stuff because all the 90 year olds I see are enthusiastically eating prosciutto and pasta?
So back to the restaurant. We walk in, heads held high and backs firm in resolve. We arrive right at 12:30 so are very early and the only ones there. We had our dog and they, as with every other restaurant we’ve ever been in, are delighted to see her. A set designer would have a really hard time replicating this place. Every wall is covered with paintings of different genres, all bad. Between the paintings are shelves filled with nick nacks. Every real Italian restaurant has at least one TV going in every room, and this one is no exception. It’s tuned to a motorcycle race which, it turns out, is hard to look away from. Most Italian restaurants worth the time also have a radio blaring and so did this one.
There’s a huge menu on a board hanging on the wall with about eleven types of freshly made pasta and an equal number of sauces. The trouble with this presentation is that it takes skill and practice to know what you are allowed to pair with what. It looks easy but is a minefield. Pesto on pici? You’d be better off dead. But we are ignoring all of of the pastas and trying to figure out what virtuous bits of meat we will have with a simple salad or maybe some of the ever present sauteed spinach. We are strong and resolute.
Then a lovely, warm 40-ish waiter arrives. He explains that his mother has been working all morning on several types of fresh pasta to go along with some interesting sauces his grandmother makes. He is bearing two very full “amuse bouches” plates of large pieces of bread topped with a traditional chicken liver thing, but this time it was cooked nine hours by his grandmother and was delicious, and sauteed greens with sausage that was also lovely. And the two are more than enough for lunch but here we are and need to order. He says that mom will make us a sampling of what she’s whipped up this morning and we, of course, say yes. We order roasted duck to share and greens. There’s an open bottle of house wine on the table. Our pastas arrive in two small flying pans which are set on the table and are unusual and delicious. The duck is incredible. Yet another meal where the Mediterranean diet ideal hits reality. Over the course of the meal the restaurant becomes packed with couples and families, all happy to be there and content. Three more dogs walk in, one is a Bernese Mountain dog who doesn’t even begin to fit under the table.
And this place touches me and puts everything else in perspective. I marvel at this constantly—there is nothing obvious in this decor, or this cuisine that speaks to me on an inspirational level—stick me in most places in France and I feel inspired and want to live that way, but Italy doesn’t push the same buttons of aspirational desire. But there’s something even deeper here. The acceptance, warmth, and lack of self-aware positioning of this place, the pride in creating simple things of flour and water and meat and tomatoes, the purity of being whole-heartedly comfortable in who you are and what you do still take my breath away when I find it, which I do often. Maybe this way of being in the world is what’s actually at the heart of the famed Mediterranean diet.
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.
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.
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.
Avillage 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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”.
We use cookies to collect and analyze information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customize content. By Clicking “OK” or by clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more or to change your cookie settings, visit the cookies section of our privacy policy.
