A Thousand Days in Tuscany (17 page)

“And what are we calling this, Chou?” Barlozzo asks, as though he’d decided the cocoa was ashes of hemlock and had already disapproved the thing no matter what its name or its savor.

“Mont Blanc.
A French sweet from the haute cuisine repertoire,” I say in my chef’s voice.

He tastes it, saying nothing, tastes it again, begins to spoon it up with an almost imperceptibly piqued emotion and yet when he finishes, he says, “That was very nice, but we’re not in France and somehow making a thing dainty as this with chestnuts seems a mockery. Like being creative with the recipe for communion bread. It feels like too much forgetting. Next Friday will you bake a
castagnaccio
with pine nuts and rosemary?” asks the Tuscan duke in a half-cracked stammer that might once have been his eleven-year-old voice.

“You know I will. But why must you be so arrogant? You sit there crossing and uncrossing your legs, flinging out damnations like
Mephistopheles. Fernando really loves this dessert and I think condemning it for all of us might be just a bit too absolute.”

Fernando is shaking his head in dismay at my outburst. His eyes say
“stai tranquilla,
stay calm”—the constant Italian prayer used to stave off all unpleasantness and secure the sacred state of
bella figura,
good impression. But Barlozzo doesn’t seem offended. Like wild mint is the duke. Bruise him and he gives up more sweetness.
“Va bene,
OK, but do I still get the
castagnaccio?
And can we eat it with a spoonful of ricotta and drink a glass of
vin santo?”
His laugh is warmed honey then as he says, “Will you listen to me, rolling out melodies, anticipating all the pieces of my supper just like you do.”

O
UR CHESTNUT FORAGES
continue for weeks, interspersed and sometimes in tandem with porcini hunts. After night rains, in Wellies and wielding viper-discouraging sticks, we follow Barlozzo into thickets of oak woods, stalking wild mushrooms. Fernando and I sing.

“Must
you provide accompaniment? Please be quiet,” he hisses.

He’s the only viper in these woods, I think. “Why do we have to be quiet? Who will we wake if we sing?”

“Eventually you’ll wake the moldering dead. You disturb concentration. I start listening to you, start trying to learn the words, and I get confounded.”

Fernando and I slide our full-voice duet down to a vampy whispering of “I’ve Got a Crush on You” and trot virtuously behind our conqueror deeper yet into the woods.

Though he was somewhat proprietary about his chestnut trees, Barlozzo is ruthless about guarding and concealing his own muddy haunts where porcini flourish. Sliding his way into gullies, prowling every chine and niche, lifting the camouflage of ancient ferns, the fraud of gnarled roots, he is conspiratorial, silent save his craggy breathing, as he digs the fungi called porcini—the name a titillating allegory to fat, newborn piglets. And while he’s at it, Barlozzo grabs a handful of berries from between the branches of a juniper, snatches a pinecone fat with the soft white jewels of his childhood.

We take the haul back to our place, wipe the porcini gently with a soft cloth, cleave them into thick, uneven slices which are ready, then, for the sauté pan. A sprig of
mentuccia,
wild mint, six, only six crushed junipers to a kilo of porcini, garlic, unpeeled, bruised with the thud of a black iron pan, a splash of white wine hissing up the fumes of earth and musk, a fistful of roasted pine nuts, and lunch is ready. Barlozzo is pouring wine, Fernando is tearing into the bread.
Buon appetito.

“H
OW MANY KILOS
of chestnuts do you think we’ve consumed, you and Barlozzo and me, over this past month?” I ask
Fernando one night in bed, transfixed by the Buddha dome of my chestnut-swollen belly, gleaming up at me in the candlelight. And how many kilos of porcini?” I add, checking myself for mold.

I’m full, plumped from this autumn chestnut/mushroom regime. Though I’ve rejoiced in their harvesting, rejoiced in the roasting and cooking of them, it’s a week of clear, strong broth and bits of beef off the bones from which it seeped that I want now. It’s longings for bread and butter and tea that come creeping in the night.

Hoping to trifle what he knows has been pure debauchery, Fernando says, “Not that many. Maybe a half-kilo a day of chestnuts and that much again of the porcini.” I watch him ticking off the dishes on his fingers. “Between the ones we roasted and the ones in the soup or the polenta or the pasta, maybe it’s more.”

I adjust my desires. It will be a week of broth without beef, without bread. Without butter.

I am a day and part of an evening into my
slimming
when Barlozzo suggests a journey. “Let’s go to the chestnut fairs on the road to Monte Amiata. Some of the best cooks in Tuscany live up there and it’s beautiful country,” is his simple seduction.

I am a woman loyal to self-imposed embargo and yet, with the duke’s words still hovering, looking for a place to land, I slip my hand, smooth as a lizard, into the waist of my skirt, gauging it might well contain the sins of a few more intemperate days.

“When will we leave?” is all I want to know.

A
T 1,738 METERS,
Monte Amiata is the highest peak in Tuscany. A volcano long spent, its earth is fat and fecund, nourished by old eruptions, and over its steep black flanks grow more than 2,000 hectares of cultivated chestnut trees, their collected annual yield sworn to weigh 60 million pounds. That’s where we’re headed.

Back in the truck and onto the Via Cassia, and then onto the mountain road all the way to the crest where we base ourselves in what’s called a
rifugio,
refuge, a log house used mostly by skiers. It’s divided into small bedrooms, each one with a camp bed or two and a wood stove. Zero stars. And so for three days and nights, we are pilgrims on a
castagne e porcini
crawl, visiting the villages that cling to Amiata’s lower stretches, following the handmade signs to gustatory paradise. Abbadia San Salvatore, Vivo d’Orcia, Campiglia d’Orcia, Bagni San Filippo, Bagnolo, Arcidosso, each one with its characteristic dish—risotto with chestnuts and wild mushrooms; wild mushrooms grilled in chestnut leaves; hand-rolled chestnut pasta with roasted mushrooms; a braise of venison with chestnuts and dried oranges. Of course there are chestnut
gelati
and cornmeal-crusted tarts with chestnut jam and hot, crisp chestnut fritters drizzled with nothing less than chestnut honey.

O
N THE WAY
home, Barlozzo slows down and turns off onto a road not much more than a goat path. We leave the truck and follow him to a ruin set on a hill, its walls thirsty-looking and
crumbling down into the weeds. A fetid wind soughs and the droning of faraway sheep grudges through the silence. There is a group of farmers moving about. Like a room in the sky it seems, smoke climbing like clouds out from a chimney and wrapping the little house and the men and women in Elysian mists. We step inside the pageant and find them at work with a great heap of figs. They are preparing to dry them in a
essiccatoio,
just like the one Barlozzo described to us where chestnuts were once set to be parched of their juices. Some of them work at splitting the fruit, stuffing each one with an almond and a few anise and fennel seeds, laying the figs on trays. Another person is ready to carry the laden trays into the house, up the stairs, to slide the fruit onto the net screens that sit above the stove in a shank of wood smoke.

Smooth as jasper beads are some of the figs now, all stuffed and dried and cooled and set before one last pair of hands, which waits with wooden needle and butcher’s twine. The hands dart about the fruit, fondling the skin of one or another of them, threading them, cradling a soft new bay leaf between each one and laying the finished necklaces in flat baskets.

Barlozzo, Fernando, and I watch. We begin to talk and they offer us wine and bread, the remnants of their working lunch. The spokesman seems reluctant when we ask if we can buy a few strings of the figs, telling us this is late-harvest fruit, the last of the season and not
the best of it. We say they look splendid and he offers us figs from the pile waiting to be strung. I take the fruit from his thick, rough hand, like the paw of a seraph-lion. We chew and close our eyes, saying,
“Quanto buono,
how good.”

They all smile as if on cue. The artisan jeweler rises from her bench and, with a three-cheek kiss, places a necklace about each of our shoulders, saying, “
Dio vi benedica,
God bless you.”

Fernando is reaching in his pockets for lire but she says, “
Un regalo,
a gift.”

I run back to the truck and grab a sack of dried porcini, one of chestnut flour, and the branch of red berries Fernando had cut for me from a roadside bush.

“A gift,” I say back to her. We’re all laughing, understanding, each of us in our way, that this might be a moment of life as life was meant to be.

9
Do Tuscans Drink Wine at Every Meal?

A slashing November rain loops the olive trees in spangles while it darkles the morning sky. Leaning against the yellow brocade curtains on the long-windowed doors in the stable, I watch my husband climb the hill past the henhouse, past the sheepfolds, and up into our garden. Though the road would have been a drier path, he’s chosen the more beautiful way, looking up and around him as he stomps the swollen fields, not caring about the water that drips from his hair, dark and slick now as a beaver’s. He’s been shopping in the village while I’ve been writing. His hat must be in his pocket, his umbrella pitched up against a wall at the bar. How I love looking at him, un-posed. I can do that more often now, as he remains equally un-posed in company these days, this new life on dry land having somewhat loosened the despotic rule of his
bella figura.
He blooms, moves through his own quiet risorgimento. I think even he is
beginning to recognize his beauty—the beauty of who he is and not who he might contrive to be.

“Ciao, bambina”
he says hugging me against him so that we press water from his sweatshirt onto mine. He’s full of the morning’s stories as he steps out of his boots, works on the fire, warms his hands. He thrashes about the room, alighting for a few seconds on the sofa, darting back to the hearth, kissing my hair or my shoulder each time he passes me as I sit at the computer. He wants to talk.

“I’m just about ready to close up for the morning. Shall I make some tea?” I ask him.

“No, it’s too close to lunch. And besides, I’ve just had two
cap-puccini
and an
espresso
for the road. I have something I want to show you,” he tells me, opening the armoire with the force to totter a hundred crystal wine glasses. He pulls out a drawer, gathers up the papers he’s been working on for the past few evenings.

As a part of our eventual reinvention plan, we’ve been discussing, for months now, the idea of hosting small groups of travelers on tours through the areas that lie near us. We’ve talked about it long into many nights, picking up the discourse just where we’d left it as we wake the next morning. Once we’d exhausted many of the glossy guides we’d found in the bookstores of Florence and Rome, it was Barlozzo who took us to visit a gentleman, an academic who lives in Siena, for whom he’d worked years ago when the man still kept a
country house near San Casciano, who was willing to lend us texts from his splendid collection of historical works, both culinary and artistic. Since then, Barlozzo, Fernando, and I, and sometimes Florì, have taken turns reading aloud in the evening, the duke being more patient with me than the others when I stumble through a passage or interrupt a narrative when I don’t understand the text. Slowly, deliberately, we plow through these books. The most splendid reward for the work is the realization that what we read about lies outside our door. Neither armchair travelers nor those in preparation for a journey to some distant place, we
live
here.

We draw routes, engage ourselves in sessions with winemakers and cooks and artisinal food makers, seeking collaboration. Scouring the tiniest
borgos,
we find treasures. A bread baker who uses wheat ground in an old water mill, a renegade cheesemaker whose son is a shepherd. Out of league with the health department, she must sell her wares from a truck parked behind her village church or, sometimes, pass her soft, buttery kilo wheels wrapped in kitchen cloths down the pews at eleven o’clock mass, small envelopes passed silently back to her. The parish priests look benignly upon the commerce, so content are they with their gratis
marzolino,
fresh ewe’s milk cheese.

We haunt the Etruscan museum at Chiusi as well as one in Tarquinia, which lies over the regional border in Lazio, and another in
Orvieto in Umbria. We study the art in the churches, the art in the alleyways, the art that is everywhere, sanctified or, like the remnant tenth-century frescos on a courtyard wall of a dentist’s studio, taken for granted as a homely, everyday birthright. We study the offerings of tour guides, visit cooking schools all over the Chianti, rank the beds and breakfasts of small hotels and country houses. What we desire to do is to make a path, both gastronomic and cultural, through rural Tuscany and Umbria. A path for
appassionati
willing to muddy their feet and close their eyes, brave and unphased, as we speed past the Gucci outlet.

We say we’ll host no more than six guests for each weeklong journey and that each program will resonate with its season. In September, we’ll harvest grapes and sit at the white-clothed tables set between the torch-lit vines in Federico’s meadow. In October, we’ll follow the Amiata road for chestnuts and porcini, dine with Adele and Isolina, two of Barlozzo’s old friends whom we visited during the chestnut crawl, perhaps invite our guests to cook together with us in Adele’s kitchen. In December, we’ll climb into the crooks of olive trees or search black diamonds armed with truffle-hunting dogs and a flask of grappa in the predawn woods above Norcia. We know how little we know. This truth is soothed by the sight of the books we’ve yet to read, by our own curiousity, this appetite to learn, by the growing roster of experts we can now count as colleagues. Art
history professors from Perugia and Florence and Siena and even from Urbino, which sits over the hills in Le Marche. Museum curators, village chroniclers, church sacristans. Cooks and bakers and winemakers. We are gathering inside the circle of our project those who are
simpatici,
comrades of a sort, each of them intense in his or her own way about the glories of this countryside.