In Maremma (13 page)

The asp was more than a meter long. After we dispatched it, Ilvo invited us over to his house for a grappa. He told us that once, many years ago, he had encountered a pregnant viper on his doorstep. No sooner had he killed it with his pitchfork than it burst open and thirteen
cuccioli
(babies) writhed out. Viper
cuccioli
are so venomous, Ilvo went on, that their mothers, in order to avoid being done in by their offspring during labor,
climbed into the trees and quite literally dropped them onto the ground or onto the heads of unlucky passersby. This was why you had to be sure to wear a hat when you took a walk in the woods.

One windy June afternoon when we were still living in Rome, we were walking through the Forum when we found ourselves being rained upon bywhite myrtle flowers. Another afternoon in the Forum, during the winter, we had seen half of a smallbronze-colored serpent twisting furiously upon the ground. There was something in both happenings that evoked Ovid's
Metamorphoses.
Was the serpent from the union of the copulating snakes that transformed Tiresias into a woman? Were the myrtle flowers transformed lovers' tears?

22

T
OLO WAS BORN in Scansano—in Maremma—on August 18, 1997, and spent the formative first months of his life in Rome. Notwithstanding his having an English father, Champion Harrowhill Hunter's Moon, he was an Italian dog. There just were three puppies in his litter (his mother's first)—two males and one female. Tolo's brother died shortly after being born.

If we had not been about to move to Maremma, we would not have felt that it was right for Tolo to come live with us—which he did on November 29, 1997. A fox terrier deserves better than life in an apartment. These dogs need scope. From
The New York Times
(February 9,1908):

For the first few months of his life, however, life in the
caput mundi
was okay with Tolo. There he learned to be
a cane signorile.

 

Tolo in Maremma: La Caccia
(Photo by MM)

Once we settled in the country, Tolo became the doggiest dog in the world—patrolling the olive grove, chasing wild cats up trees, barking at the sheep, fighting with weasels, murdering hedgehogs, following the shadows of butterflies across the lawn. When he was about a year old, he disappeared. We drove along every road for kilometers looking for him, called neighbors asking them to be on the qui
vive,
and prayed. Our greatest fear was that he had been poisoned: people who own sheep, in order to protect them from the predations of wolves, will put out meat laced with poison. Many blameless dogs have died from getting to this meat before the wolves. A couple of days later, one of the neighbors did call: Tolo was at his house, along with a gang of other male dogs,
since there was a female Maremmana sheepdog in heat. The next morning, we took Tolo to Marco, one of the veterinarians in Semproniano, to be castrated.

He was a perfect traveller and a welcome guest at places where many people were not. Among the hotels at which he stayed were the Principe di Savioa in Milan, the Villa d'Este in Cernobbio, and the Villa Cipriani in Asolo. Sometimes meals were delivered to him by room service at the hotel's initiative—a
cotoletta milanese
or
fegato alla veneziana.
He went to Vienna and to the South of France, to Amsterdam and Brussels, and to America.

What Christopher Hibbert wrote of King Edward VII's fox terrier, Caesar, could be written of Tolo:

Tolo was happy in Maremma—in many ways happier than we were. He took his days and his dreams as a birthright.

23

OF THE MANY agricultural rituals that defined the Maremman year—the cutting of the hay in May, the threshing of the wheat in July, the
vendemmia
(grape harvest) in the autumn—none meant more than the November pressing of the olives. Oil, after all, is the foundation of Maremman life; unlike their cousins to the north, the people here almost never used—indeed, barely comprehended—butter, which no doubt contributed to their famous longevity. (Rosaria told us that heart disease was almost unknown in Semproniano.) Nor did the making of the oil lack its element of pageantry. When the young oil arrived, the people of Semproniano would greet it with the sort of exuberance that the French save—inexplicably—for Beaujolais nouveau. Because it had such a peppery kick, the new oil was never used for cooking but instead drizzled over a salad or a bowl of
zuppa
di
ceci.
The best way to serve the new oil, however, was to pour some onto a
piece of grilled, unsalted bread that had been rubbed with garlic: this was the famed bruschetta, so commonly imitated and so rarely gotten right, even in Tuscany. For bruschetta must be subtle, which is the point so many restaurateurs miss. The fact that the Florentine version is known as
fett'unta
—“greasy slice”—attests to its comparative coarseness.

For a long time, Semproniano had one tourist attraction, the Olivone, an immense olive tree more than two thousand years old. Before Podere Fiume was finished, we visited the Olivone twice, sitting each time for a few moments under its capacious and maternal limbs.

We spoke of how, when we lived here, we would bring all our friends to see it. Then on May 10, 1998—the evening of American Mother's Day—someone torched the Olivone, burning it to the ground. The town went into mourning. In particular the children, who had a tradition of walking to the Olivone for a picnic on the last day of school, grieved the tree's passing. Ettore, Sauro's nine-year-old son, asked if he could borrow one of our computers to write an essay called “The Olivone, Burned and No More.” For months afterwards, every time we ate at Il Mulino, Martino urged us to write a book about the Olivone. (The arsonist, alas, was never arrested, though his identity is known.)

In Italy, politics often matter on a local level far more deeply than they do nationally. Almost immediately after the Olivone burned, dark rumors began to spread that one or another of the two political parties vying for control of the town (it was an election year) had been responsible for this barbarous and selfish act. As it happened, the mayor, who had won the previous election by one vote, was a member of the far right
Alleanza Nazionale. One afternoon (Friday, November 13, 1998), to our great surprise, he knocked at our door and introduced himself. For about ten minutes he outlined his plans for the coming year: the new library to which he hoped we might donate some books, the new sports ground, the roads he was going to have paved (ours included). Apparently he didn't realize that while we were residents of Semproniano, we were not Italian citizens and therefore could not vote. Afterwards, rather delighted by his visit (there is always something grand about a mayor), we walked over to tell Delia and Ilvo that he had been by to see us. (He had
not
been by to see them.) “
Fascistone,”
Delia said. As we soon learned, they, like all our friends here, were lifelong Communists, and were worried lest the mayor, with promises of paving, should lure us to his side.

 

DL at the Olivone
(Photo by MM)

In the end the mayor won the election—by far more than one vote. Our friends said that he had done so by spreading lies throughout the countryside, telling the farmers that if they voted for the Communists, the
ambientalisti
(environmentalists) would set wolves loose to kill their sheep. Then the whole area could be made over into a preserve. Some hinted that it was in order to head off such a transformation that the Olivone was burned—a scenario we thought paranoid at the time, but that now seems highly probable.

 

Oliveto, Podere Fiume
(Photo by MM)

To Ilvo and Delia, the burning of a two-thousand-year-old olive tree was murder. In a town where oil was life, this great mother of a tree was looked to not only as a source of sustenance but a force of good. When Pina offered us oil made from the olives of the Olivone, we accepted it with an almost mystic wonderment, not because the oil tasted any different from any other local oil but because it came from the Olivone, which was born before Christ.

Afterwards we tried to console ourselves with the knowledge that each of our own trees, though mere striplings, had the potential to grow into an Olivone. We had thirty-eight, which was just enough to produce a year's worth of oil for two hungry people and a dog.