Bella Tuscany (18 page)

Soon we come to Panicale, home of Boldrino, a famous mercenary and one of the chief troublemakers of the fourteenth century. Several towns paid him a regular salary just to guarantee he wouldn't turn on them. Despite his pillaging and murders, he is commemorated by a plaque. Could it be that the Mafia is a descendant of these medieval mercenaries? Panicale has much more attractive features than the memory of this bad boy. The impressive gate leads to a fountain in the central
piazza,
which once was a well cleverly designed to catch rainwater in the Middle Ages. Like many towns in Italy, Panicale has a Church of the Virgin of the Snows, commemorating a rare snowfall on August 5, 552. Though Masolino was born here, only one of his paintings is on view, an Annunciation in San Michele. The branching streets invite roaming and the distant views of the lake from this high position can't help but remind you of paintings. Perugino's
Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,
in the church of San Sebastiano, shows, through the arches in the background, the unchanged Umbrian landscape.

Two other Peruginos hang in the same church, his
Madonna and Child
and
The Virgin in Glory.
The artist is buried about two miles away, near Fontignano, where he succumbed to the plague. The Church of the Annunciation there contains his (modern) tomb and a fresco. He lies just down the road from where he was born Pietro Vannucci.

Città della Pieve is one of my favorite towns. This lively and odd little city, the last stop on our tour of the lake country, seems like a wonderful place to live. We sit down at a caffè to take in the daily rhythms of the place. Large groups of men play cards under an arbor, a girl shouts up to a man in the most picturesque jail, monks stride along with shopping baskets, rainbow banners flap above the
piazza
. After all the pale, lovely limestone of Umbrian villages, this one comes as a shock: It's all red brick. With the tile roofs and the human scale of the architecture, Città della Pieve seems especially warm and amiable. The red brick isn't the only quirk. The “narrowest street in Italy,” Via Baciadonna,
is
narrow enough for two people to lean out their windows and kiss. The central
piazza
, irregularly shaped, forms a rough triangle with the cathedral as hypotenuse. The cathedral was built over ancient temple foundations; it, too, has its idiosyncrasy. The dark interior is wildly painted with
faux
marble: spiraled columns, bars, panels, circles in all the colors and patterns marble can have and then some. Elaborate painted frames surround the elaborate actual frames of paintings. Of the many paintings here, Perugino's
The Baptism
and
Mary in Glory
are the most arresting. To see them, we dropped
lire
in the
luce
box; the lights then came on briefly.

I knew about the Peruginos in Città della Pieve. I didn't know about the stunning object across the street in the Palazzo della Corgna: a rare, tall Etruscan obelisk from the eighth century
B.C.
There are Etruscan sarcophagi as well. The town's other local artistic highlight, undoubtably, is Perugino's
Adoration of the Magi
in the Oratorio di Santa Maria dei Bianchi, next to the church of that name. Restored in 1984, the painting is truly splendid. How did he get those colors, dusky lavender, saffron, almond green, sea blues, and that luminous, sourceless light? Because it is the sole painting in the room, and because we are about to leave this idyllic town, I linger over each detail, an angel in the upper right, a shepherd, a white dog in motion, feathery trees, horses, and there in the background, the landscape Perugino knew best—the gentle hills sloping down to the waters of Lago Trasimeno.

From a Yellow Book:
Thinking of Travel

I TOOK MY FIRST TRIP ALONE AT AGE SIX. I
begged to be allowed to go to Vidalia to visit my favorite aunt and my blind grandmother. My mother drove me twenty miles to Abbeville to catch the train. As we pulled up, the train started to chug away. I don't know why this would have been at night, but in my memory the lighted train is bright. My mother leaps out of the car, calling “Stop, stop!” and somehow the train stops, I am shoved aboard, and we are moving, my mother's blue Oldsmobile scratching off, her arm waving out the window.

The car is empty except for me. I have my round blue overnight bag and a Bobbsey Twins book to read. I would soon be at Aunt Mary's. Tomorrow my grandmother will make biscuits and I'll watch her groping hands do the work of both eyes and hands. She will complain of her liver and sinus headaches without stopping. I will count the diseases to see how many she can have. She's up to seventeen. She'll let me use the green-handled circle to cut the soft dough rounds. I'll play in the damp

caves behind their house, make horses and birds with the mucky red clay. The train! Zipping through the dark, all the way—seventy miles—to Vidalia, I am leaving my wicker carriage of dolls, my black cocker spaniel, Tish. Will the conductor tell me when to get off? My mother asked him.

I curl against the window, feeling the clacking metallic noises of the tracks in my shoulder, watching for the lighted windows of farmhouses.
Who lives there?
I wonder about
them,
about the life inside the houses way in the country.

I can almost inhabit the hard little body, almost feel my forehead against the glass. All the mysteries and allures of travel were there at the outset, even the long fascination with the life in a place, that common mystery I recognized years later in one of the last haikus of Basho, written at the end of the seventeenth century:

Deep autumn,
My neighbor, how
Does he live, I wonder?

At the end of his life he was still wondering what I began to wonder at the beginning of mine, and still wonder.

Even earlier, at four or five, I pinched my friend Jane Walker's arm hard and asked her, “How can you
be
and not be me,” a preconscious stab at the metaphysical. It's a lifetime quest, finding out who “the other” is, and how life is lived outside your own thin skin.

Setting off to see another country, I set off to see what is more grandly other—whole cultures, geographies, languages. Who am I in the new place? And who are they who live there?

If you settle in, even for two weeks, live in a house not a hotel, and you buy figs and soap at the local places, sit in cafés and restaurants, go to a local concert or church service, you cannot help but open to the resonance of a place and the deeper you go, the stranger the people become because they're like you and they're not. In Pienza, I was struck on that hot night, when I saw the TV dragged out into the
piazza
so the neighborhood could watch the soccer match together. That's not going to happen in Pacific Heights, where I live. Even the smallest things reveal that it's a new world.

I was on a travel-writing panel at the San Francisco Book Fair. One of our topics was “Now that the world is the same everywhere, how do you find a place to write about? And then how do you write about it in a way that distinguishes it from other places?”

There's a short answer to the first: It isn't. To the second, I always think of what Gerard Manley Hopkins advised: Look long enough at an object until it begins to look back at you. It can be dangerous to travel. A strong reflecting light is cast back on “real life,” sometimes a disquieting experience. Sometimes you go to the far interior and who knows what you might find there?

I read a lot of travel narratives and newspaper and magazine travel pieces that stop with observation. They tell you where to sleep, where to eat well, and what not to miss. Those articles can become fictions, idylls. An article about a German town that goes on about the colorful characters, the beer and hand-painted toys draws you. Three pages later in the news section there's a huge article on a Neo-Nazi movement shadowing the same town. The
Gemütlichkeit
dissolves. You turn back to the travel article, puzzled. When I've written travel articles, a few times I have been told not to mention poverty or unpleasantness. Well, fair enough. It's a rainy Sunday morning and the reader wants to dream awhile, having waded through the harsh stories of women on death row and starvation in the Sudan.

But the passionate traveller looks for something. What? Something must change you, some ineffable something—or nothing happens. “Change me,” Ed writes in a poem. “Change me into something I am.” Change—the transforming experience—is part of the quest in travelling.

Often we take America with us. How can we not, being thoroughly products of our culture? We see what we know how to see. Powerful built-in genetic strands that go back to Stone Age territorial instincts make us secretly believe the Danes or Hungarians go home and speak English at night. How much is that in dollars? What are these terrible breakfasts? Where's real coffee? More harrowingly, we are wary everywhere of being robbed and mugged. We fear the violence of America everywhere.

We're not alone in carrying our own country before us. The desire for the familiar is a powerful drive. I've seen the Japanese lined up in Perugia for a table at the Asian restaurant. With all the glories of Italian food right there, they opt for some peculiar version of the food of their homeland and then most likely think it's terrible. It's totally natural, even inevitable, to compare the Via Veneto with Main Street. Unfortunately, if extreme, this acts as a preventative to experience; what we know is simply confirmed. Another Japanese poet wrote: Ride naked on a naked horse. But we are profoundly displaced when we travel and denial of that displacement sets in quickly. If only we could recognize this—suspend the rush to judgement and compartmentalizing. Travel can reinforce the primitive urge to bring the new into the circle of the known.

I went to Pasadena—the word sets me dreaming, Pasadena—and walking around on a perfect day, I saw Starbucks, Banana Republic, the Gap, Williams Sonoma, Il Fornaio—all the high-end chains with identical merchandise in dozens of other cities. Where am I? Nothing happened to me. And yet, surely if I'd stayed longer than a day, there are layers of Pasadena. Pasadena must be unlike everywhere else. In America, with franchises and TV pouring their solvents over us by the second, you have to look longer and harder.

In Italy, it's easier. Each town, city,
borgo,
or
fattoria
is intensely itself. It has its own particular fountain of dolphins entwined with nymphs, its stone chapel with an Annunciation painting, its Etruscan obelisk, its families with names on the pews since 1500.

A writer told me, “Beware of the exotic; it is so easily available.” And here across the waters, the exotic is more available. We see but we don't see the gorgeous man in the Armani suit taking his espresso in the bar, glancing at
La Repubblica
. In Italy, there's the concept of
la bella figura,
cutting a beautiful figure. The gorgeous man in Armani might live in a depressing back room of a store. At least he can dress well and go out into the
piazza
in a cloud of divine cologne.

 

When I first started writing poetry, I kept what I called an Image Bank, a photo album I stuffed with museum postcards of paintings, photos, typed lists of words I liked, anything that struck me as correlative with the writing process. My way shifted over the years. Although I still keep several kinds of notebooks, the images became more internal. Travelling, living in Italy, I'm especially aware of
storing
what I experience and see. If I ever end up rocking on the porch of a dogtrot house in the backwoods of Georgia, I aim to have plenty to visualize. Landscapes, fine meals, solitary walks—yes, I run my mind over those, but it is the lives of people I return to with the most feeling. A hand pulls back a lace curtain. A face appears in the window. Down-turned mouth, gelid eyes naked with disappointment stare out and catch mine. We look at each other for a moment and the curtain drops.
Hello, good-bye
. At 7
A.M.
, Niccolò, the handsome owner of the tobacco shop, is rinsing the stones around his entrance, sweeping and singing to himself.
Remember him, his hair still wet from the shower, his tune, his sudden smile
—
who he is on his own
. These glimpses make me understand that hard line of Wallace Stevens: “Beauty is momentary in the mind but in the flesh it is immortal.”

It is a miracle to see Pompei, Machu Picchu, Mont-Saint-Michel. It is also a miracle to wander into Cortona, see the young couple at their fruit and vegetable shop. She arranges a pyramid of lemons in a patch of sunlight. She wipes each leaf with a rag so that it gleams. She's fresh-faced and young in her pink-striped apron, probably trying hard to look like a proprietor. Her long and delicate neck gives her the air of having just landed after flight. He looks like the flute player on the wall of an Etruscan tomb—curly black hair, cherubic face. He sets out the baskets of peas he has picked this morning in his mother's garden, then halves a watermelon and tips it up in the window so anyone can see how ripe and delicious it is. She places her sign above the cash register—all the vegetables for minestrone can be ordered a day in advance and prepared by her at home. Each customer is lavishly greeted. If you want three pears, each one is selected and held out for your inspection. I have entered for a moment daily life in a place I don't know, and the red pear held out to me in a work-hardened hand will come back in memory over and over.
Immortal
.

“
THE AREZZO MARKET IS THIS WEEKEND.
”

Ed is mincing parsley, basil, carrots, and celery for his special version of what to do with
odori
—that bunch of flavors tossed in your bag at the
frutta e verdura
. Do I see him wince? Or is that a reaction to the onions he has chopped? “Do you want to go?” he asks.

“Well, yes, don't you?”

“Sure, if you do.” He rolls the blade of the
mezzaluna
over the celery.

“We always find something fantastic.” Is he thinking of the time he carried the cherry cabinet over his head through the crowd for half a mile? I glance at the cabinet hanging on the kitchen wall, its glass doors left open and the espresso cups from all over Italy lining the shelves. Many were given to us by our friend Elizabeth when she moved back to America; others we picked up in our own wanderings. Friends who've visited have added a few. Odd, many things we've acquired here have accumulated meaning quickly, as though they were long-treasured
heirlooms. This confuses me. I thought objects gathered symbolic value only through time, or, if at the outset, by being significant gifts: my father's gold cuff links, my grandmother's silver syrup pitcher, the lapis ring made from an old earring.

Looking around this house, many “new” things are just as close to me, closer. “Remember, we found the angel painting,” I offer. Over our bed this eighteenth-century angel now presides, a lovely blond presence whose face I've come to love. She's wearing boots, and her brocade skirts part to show a triangular panel of lace. Who knew angels wore lace? She's androgynous, with her or his pert face staring off into the mirror on the opposite side of the room. In the reflection, I get to see the face twice.

Ed scrapes the minced
odori
into the sauté pan. The sizzle sends up a quick scent of earth and rain. Carrots add that underground smell, while celery, which does not seem as though it would grow underground, always gives over a misty, crisp essence.

“The last time we went we found those chains. Do you want
bruschette
or just the fresh bread?” he asks.

Those chains, I know, weighed about twenty pounds. Unfortunately, we found them early in the day, before the three gold-leaf angel wings, the Neapolitan
putto,
cherub, with the missing leg, and the yards and yards of silk brocade that once covered an altar. The hand-forged chains, made of lovely iron circles, once held pots of
ribollita
and polenta over the fire. Ours now hang on either side of our fireplace. “They're favorites of ours.
Bruschette
.”

 

The antique market in Arezzo takes place the first weekend of the month. Except in August, when the heat becomes too formidable, I'm there. The market sprawls all over and around the Piazza Grande, and spills up to the Duomo, covers the
piazza
in front of the church of Piero della Francesca's great fresco cycle, then trails out into side streets. On tables, sidewalks, and streets, fabulous furniture, art, and tawdry junk are displayed. With around eighty shops, on any old weekday, Arezzo is a center for antiques. Behind the fair booths, the regular shops line the streets. Some haul their own furniture out onto the sidewalk for the market. You could find anything there—a fancy cradle, a nineteenth-century still life large enough to cover a wall, embroidered postcards from World War I, garden urns, entire choir stalls. Last year, I began to see World War II ribbons, PW shirts, German war memorabilia, and stiffened uniforms. I even saw a yellow star arm badge with JUDE stitched across it for thirteen dollars. I touched the crosshatch threads around the edges. Someone wore it. It seemed immoral to buy it or to leave it there, an object among objects. Garish glassware and Venetian goblets are abundantly displayed, without ever getting smashed by jostling crowds. There is a buyer, it seems, for everything, no matter how fabulous, dinky, or hideous.

 

I collected as a child. Uncle Wilfred saved his Anthony and Cleopatra cigar boxes for me and I left them open in the sun until most of the pungent smell baked away. I kept arrowheads I found in one; buttons, beads, and pretty rocks in others. In shoe boxes, I saved paper dolls with costumes from around the world, postcards, seashells, and tightly folded triangular notes tossed to me in school by Johnny, Jeff, and Monroe. My oddest collection was brochures. I constantly wrote letters to small towns all over America, addressed to The Chamber of Commerce, saying “Please send me information about your town,” and letters and brochures arrived, with news of the Pioneer Museum, the Future Farmers of America, the recreational opportunities afforded by an artificial lake, the opening of a tire factory. The longing to
go
seized me early. I no longer remember why, but I wanted to live in Cherry, Nebraska.

Opening a box, spreading out the slipper shells, angel wings, jingles, sand dollars, and scallops, I opened also the memory of a place, a string of moments. When I arranged the shells on the floor, a little beach sand sifted out. As I listened to the conch, the whoosh of my own inner ear brought back the wash of coquina shells against my ankles at Fernandina. I made spirals of the pastel colors and barnacle browns, rubbed the dawn-colored pearly insides with my thumb.

I remember my collections so vividly that I think I should be able to go to my closet and take down a box, spend this rainy afternoon playing with the blond Dutch girl paper doll, with her flowered pinafore and wooden shoes, the Polish twins with their black rick-rack skirts, their ribbons and aprons.

Collecting, like writing, is an
aide-memoire
. An ancient relative bored me wildly with her souvenir silver spoons. “Now, this one I got on a vacation to the Smokies in 1950. . . .” But memory
can
make you live twice. As words fall onto paper, I can again marry the cat to the dog.

Memory, the graduation pearls unstrung, rolling out of reach on the church floor, the choir screeching “Jerusalem.”

Memory, they all rise, young again, able to see without looking. They're clamoring for the wishbone, asking what's for dessert. Close the box, close the album, hang the old lace curtain in the south window where it catches the soft billowing breeze, a breeze for a spirit to ride.

 

As an adult, I have few collections. I started to buy old bells once, but forgot them after a while. I have a number of Mexican ex-votos painted on tin and have accumulated many antique carved or clay hands and feet, and dolls' arms and legs, a collection I never planned and didn't even notice until someone remarked that there were quite a few body parts around my house. My collection must be expanding to other body parts because at the Arezzo market, I've also bought three bisque saints' heads, two bald, one with a golden wig and painted glass eyes. When I find early studio photographs of Italians, I buy them. I'm filling one wall of my study with these portraits, for many of whom I've invented life stories. My real passion at the Arezzo market was never planned, either, but springs from an old source.

I go not only for the chance to find furniture for the many bare spots at Bramasole and to discover treasures, but to see the people, to stop for
gelato,
to wander invisibly at this immense market, which retains the atmosphere of a medieval fair. At 1
P.M.
, the dealers cover their tables with tarps or newspaper and go off to lunch, or they simply set up lawn chairs and a table, complete with tablecloth, right there for family and friends, and bring out cut-up roast chickens, containers of pasta, and loaves of bread. People jam the bars, ordering little sandwiches, slices of pizza, or, in the upscale
gastronomia,
sausage and asparagus
torte
.

Gilded church candlesticks, olive oil jars, stone cherubs—out of all this, what draws me to the vendors of old linens? “This time,” I tell Ed, “I'm not even going to stop. We'll look at iron gates, marble sinks from crumbled monasteries, and crested family silver. I certainly don't need any more pillowcases or . . .”

At first, I succeed. With so much to look at, I can become saturated. Ed is glancing at andirons and a mirror. I spot some painted tin ex-votos. He likes looking at the hand-wrought iron tools, locks, and keys, but after two hours, he gets this set half-smile on his face.

He has an effective way of speeding me along in department stores at home. Other men sit in the comfortable chairs put there for waiting men, but Ed stands, and when I linger at the blouse rack, fingering the silk and examining the buttons, he begins to talk aloud to a mannequin. He gestures and smiles, walks around her. “Love that suit,” he marvels. “You look fabulous.” People stare, the sales staff looks nervous.

Here, he wanders off for coffee or a paper. He comes back to find me sorting through white piles of linen. I can't tell whether he looks astonished or distressed. I wonder if he thinks to himself,
Oh no, an hour in the rag pile
.

In a heap marked 5,000
lire
, I turn up a stash of fine hand towels embroidered
.

 

At home in California and here in Italy, slowly I have amassed a collection of old damask, linen, and cotton house linens, some with monograms, some not. “Why would you want someone else's initials?” a friend asked me as she shook out her napkin at dinner. “I find that a bit creepy.”

“These are my friend Kate's grandmother Beck's napkins,” I answer, aware that nothing has been explained. When Kate had to empty her mother's house, she passed on a stash of linens to me. She wasn't interested in ironing them. They are enormous, with
scrolled in the center, the hump of thread as thick as a child's little finger. “I have a thing for old linens.” Understatement. Spirals and history spinning out from that flip remark.

I do not mention my mother, that I still have in my trunk her monogrammed sheets I slept on as a child. I remember clearly my white spool bed, the sensation of slipping into chilly, fine cotton sheets, with the scalloped pink edge, and right in the center, my mother's curvaceous initials,
, delicate as bird bones. For her room, she had blue sheets with blue monograms, and every other week, white with blue monograms. I have some of those, too, worn to a softness but still good. When she has a house, I intend to give them to my daughter. Dozens of plain towels, sheets, napkins, and pillowcases have passed through my household without a trace, but the hand towels my mother had monogrammed before my marriage are still in service, though the initial K is gone now from my name. When she gave them to me, I was shocked to see my own initials changed:
. I traced the new initial with my finger; K, the letter still carried forward on unused silver napkin rings, silver shot cups, a bread tray, a pepper grinder.