Every Day in Tuscany (20 page)

I
N RECENT YEARS
, we’ve been attracted to the south. Matera, way down in Basilicata, is a strange town where people once—not long ago—lived in a vast hive of caves, most now eerily empty, some restored to use. The rest of the town seems to thrive, but at its heart lies this primitive maze, a place to wander and contemplate life as you don’t know it.

Then on to Alberobello in Apulia, with white conical houses called
trulli
, which look both ancient and at the same time like something from another planet. You half-expect space cadets to emerge.

You could happily spend a month exploring the castles and hunting lodges of Frederick II, the unique Baroque town of Lecce, and the charming port town of Gallipoli. Despite growing tourism, this whole region is still fresh with the possibility of discovery. I especially like the duomo towns of Trani, Bitonto, and Otranto. It’s worth the trip just for the bread, gargantuan loaves that could feed a tribe of forty, and for the hearty pasta dishes created by those who worked hard on the land.

Amalfi, Capri, Vicenza, Cormons, Verona, Torino, Trieste. Italy
is
endless.

Signorelli’s Bones

Vade Mecum—Come with me
.

—R
OMAN TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTION

IF YOU ARE DEAD IN ITALY, YOU ARE NOT AS
dead as you could be. Looking out from the Piazza del Duomo, I see the walled cemetery just below town, on the same slope. From here it seems to mirror the town, only the paths among the graves are more ordered than the snaky streets of Cortona. I can’t see the flowers that I know are there—fresh, too, not just dusty plastic. The comune recently constructed a sidewalk down to the cemetery for all those who walk that way on Saturday afternoon with their armfuls of glads or jars of yard roses. They’re on their way to the weekly care and feeding of the dead. Funerals, too, go on foot from the churches in town. Mourners, sleet or sun, follow the hearse for the second part of the service.

I am walking down myself, though it is Monday. I am going to lay a spray of lavender on the grave of our friend Alain, who died last week. Lavender because he was French and I associate lavender always with Provence. I must meander, because I don’t know where he lies.

In the past few years, we’d unaccountably lost touch with Alain and I didn’t even know he had died until three days after. In our early years here, we were tangentially part of a tight circle of older writers who’d been expats together in Rome. All of them permanently migrated up to Cortona, where several had bought houses earlier, during the Red Brigade years. Alain was the wittiest of the group and entertained often. They were, one and all, imbued with the fatalism, ribald humor, and cynicism that overcomes expats.

Even in the country, he maintained a formality. I’m sure he wore a nifty sport coat and tie even sitting at his bedroom desk. He held forth, a one-man show, and never repeated an anecdote. He loved to talk books and politics. Muriel Spark often was at his table when we dined. At least once a week for years, we met at each other’s houses, often for feasts under the olive trees or at Il Vallone, a pizzeria where the sun-loving owner wore bronze makeup in winter. With her also bronze ringlets piled above her head, she looked like a misplaced opera singer, except that she wore slip-on scuffs that reminded me of an exhausted housewife. It was at Alain and his partner Ben’s house that we met Ann Cornelisen, that strong prose stylist, who became our closest friend in Italy. Now, it seems impossible, almost all of these forces lie under the earth.

At the cemetery entrance, two large bins mounded with empty soda bottles attest to the number of people who come to water plants on graves. Through the dark of an arched corridor, I emerge into the harsh light of the bone yard. As they lived in town, so they lie—the stone dwellings with hardly a handspan between them. The first name I notice—the painter Gino Severini. His is a plain box above ground, rather like an Etruscan sarcophagus. Here he is, dead as anyone. But his epitaph proclaims otherwise:
Non omnis moriar
. Not all of me shall die. I wonder if Signorelli lies anywhere near, though no grave seems to be older than 1850.

The walls hold chest-of-drawer graves, each with a heartrending photo of the inhabitant, caught at a moment of full life. There are the motorcycle graves. At least every year we lose a young man to the adrenaline rush of passing on a curve. Many photos show the gnarly faces of the old
contadini
generations that are now quickly passing. Others proclaim Conte and Contessa, superior even in death. I run my finger along the worn carved letters: Artemisia, Laudomia, Sparteo. Lovely old names—Girolamo, Oreste, Assuntina, Felicino, Salvatore, Conforta, Oliviero, Guglielmina, Ersilia, Zeffiro, Quintilio, Italo, Candida. Will anyone ever again choose to name a boy Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist?

So many Umbertos from the late nineteenth century when Umberto I reigned, so many Elenas a little later, namesakes of Elena of Montenegro, mother of Italy’s last king. I stop before Orte Baracci, whose stone simply says,
Fronte Russo, 1943
. His rough wool uniform probably did not protect him from Russia’s frozen steppes, but he’s smiling under his regimental hat with an outrageous feather plume drooping to his shoulder. And near him a man born in 1918, end of another war, with the strong name of Libero, Free.

I do not find a fresh mound heaped with decaying flowers. Perhaps he is outside the walls. I navigate through internal hallways lined with the floor-to-ceiling dead, pass a dank crypt, and step out into the open field. Ah, better to rest out in the
campo
with the infidels and paupers, amid the blooming lacy white flowers and the weedy grasses. The rose-topped recent grave is not Alain’s. A ladybug tests a rose leaf and promptly flies off.

Most of these lack stones, which will hold down the bones on Judgment Day. Out here the skeletons can just claw through the dirt, stand erect, and assume their bodies again. Signorelli’s great fresco cycle in the duomo at Orvieto depicts souls emerging from under the crust of the earth. In the painting, as in a dream, you can feel a literal rush of ecstasy and astonishment as the beautiful flesh returns. This must be our most profound hope:
Say it isn’t so
. I wish I could summon a particle of belief that a Judgment Day will restore me, along with billions of others. I would again be twenty in a yellow bathing suit, sitting on the side of a pool with three gorgeous boys in the water around my feet. If I were truly religious, I think life would cling to me less. After all, it’s only a proving ground for eternity where I will greet my parents and we’ll dress in snowy cotton and attend a long choir practice. Heaven is a fantastic idea. I’m afraid, though, that death is an absolute. For me, a walk in a cemetery makes me want to throw myself over an Alpha and Omega and weep.

I remember Alain’s upstairs study with all his books in French, English, and Italian. I remember Sunday lunches in winter with the lemon soufflé made on top of the stove and a fire in the grate warming my back. I remember the glint in his eyes before the punch line and the affable laugh afterward. His little salon with draped couches and cushions, deep reds and blues, seemed exotically foreign and I remember the charge of the new I felt encountering the old world. I remember his French cuffs and his big dog, the stepped garden and the grape pergola where he served Campari and soda. I don’t find his grave.

I
N HIS
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, Vasari tells a revealing and moving story. When a plague swept through Cortona in 1502, Signorelli’s son, already training to be a painter, died. Signorelli undressed him and drew his naked body “so that, by the work of his own hand, he would always be able to have before his eyes that which nature had given him and which adverse destiny had snatched away.” Signorelli is said to have made anatomical studies in the local cemetery. Did he have a body exhumed, or did he appear with his sharpened
lapis
before burial? Of all the Renaissance painters, Luca’s forms are the most alive. He loved distracting you from the main subject with a well-placed male buttock, tightly clad, a servant’s copious thighs through her skirt, or the quite buff chest of a minor figure off to the side of a martyrdom in progress. Weird to think his dynamic bodies originated here among the dead. I always look at his paintings and recognize people I see in the piazza. I trace the cast-down eyes of the pizza server to an exalted Annunciation Mary, and the rippled curls and short legs of a local antiques dealer to the flagellated Christ. He must have crouched there, against the wall, with his pens. I like Vasari’s story of his dual life as an artist and as a family man, active in government as a Cortona magistrate. His death at eighty-two catapulted him into a new and eternal relationship with his chosen place.
Where do your bones lie, Luca?

B
Y NOW WE
have attended many funerals. Although I’ve stood by while graves were filled with dirt, I can’t locate any of them. I was sure Lorenzo’s brother Umberto was
there
, but no. And Francesco Zappini. I thought he was in the right wall. When Francesco died, we visited him at home, where he rested on the matrimonial bed with the family’s cat asleep at his feet, as on a medieval marble sarcophagus.

The baker has died, the tailor, Anselmo, and Placido’s brother Bruno, whose liver transplant finally failed him. At the end of the olive harvest season last fall, our dear Primo Bianchi, restorer of Bramasole, fell from a ladder in his grove. In our winter absences, we lost the wandering artist who hitchhiked all over the area with canvases under his arm, and the hunchbacked man who delivered groceries. At Ernesto’s wake, he lay under a veil over the open coffin, surrounded by Anna and his daughters. Margherita would not let go of his cold hand, which seemed to have reached out from under the veil. Then, last winter when we were here, Amalia. On a freezing March day, we sat around the open coffin in the cold church with the family. From my vantage, only her gray nose was visible above the side of the coffin, a little sail setting out for the afterlife.

The church is always jammed. The priest always weeps, which engenders waves of weeping all the way to the back of the church. I find it offensive that volunteers pass baskets for collection. Once I saw that someone had dropped in a breath mint. Hardly anyone sings the hymns, but everyone knows the words to the funeral mass. Even I have picked up phrases. The crowd takes the long walk together to the cemetery, where the gaping grave is not disguised by Astroturf. The coffin goes down and two grave diggers set to. Then final handfuls of dirt are thrown while the priest prays. The grave diggers pound down the dirt into a smooth hump, the headstone is placed, flowers arranged, and that’s that. Everyone knows with total finality that the person is dead.

O
NLY ONE OTHER
person is here. On Mondays the dead are left to their own devices. A woman in a printed housedress is mopping out one of the mausoleums. The family members’ slabs line the side walls. Fresh linen and flowers adorn the altar. One prayer chair furnishes this home away from home. I peer inside several others. Some are neglected, the trinity of plants dead, the altar cloth dusty.