Potter’s wheel, Marche, Italy

XIV

LA VITA

One of the things I love most about Bond Street, where il Buco is located, is that in a city of avenues, it’s short, and, in a city of speed, it’s slow. Bond runs only the two blocks from Broadway to Bowery and for its entirety is made of uneven cobblestones first laid in the 1800s. You just can’t speed across Bond, neither walking—especially in heels—nor driving. That sense of slowing down the rhythms of daily life is essential to il Buco.

Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve tried to make both il Buco and Alimentari embassies of adagio, a respite from the frantic tempo that marks the rest of life in New York City, even if my own life often speeds ahead at an overwhelming pace.

We’ve done this by creating a world well beyond the plate. It begins in Trapani, where wind and sun, not artificial heat, evaporate the water from the salt, in the attic batterie of Daniela in Montegibbio, and in the gentle pressing of Marco’s oil in Foligno. It is carried closer to these shores by our suppliers at Westwind Orchards in upstate New York, where Fabio Chizzola and Laura Ferrara raise apples, cherries, pears, and pawpaws, and by Nevia No at Bodhitree Farm in the New Jersey Pinelands, who faithfully tends her 65 acres completely chemically free. It’s brought to Bond Street by Sheena’s patient work in the downstairs bakery, allowing natural yeast to do its alchemical work in our dough, and by Bernardo, whose culatello and lonza hang for months in their carefully temperature-and humidity-controlled cave before they’re ready to serve. Hopefully, the cumulative effect is that when you walk into il Buco, the pressing of time is lightened. You don’t move in slow motion, exactly, but you do slow down.

That same sense of wanting to protect and preserve a slower, more mindful way of living is at the heart of Vita, our homeware line, everything from twisted beeswax candles to black terra-cotta cups and plates to linen aprons from Tuscany. Actually, Vita was always a part of the il Buco story. After all, we started off as an antiques store, reselling objects that themselves had been repositories of hours: old radios, tables whose wood had been worn by thousands of meals, quilts that stitched together communities. But we largely abandoned that aspect of the business when the restaurant side began to take off. It was simply too difficult to be serving tables and selling both the tables and chairs, let alone shopping for replacements! For Alberto, who always saw the restaurant as a means for supporting other enterprises, it was one of the reasons he stepped back from il Buco. And for me too, at heart a collector, it was a wrenching choice to make.

Happily, I had partners in crime in this new venture. In the early days of il Buco, Alberto introduced me to his Foligno chums, Antonello and Lorenzo Radi. The Radi boys, attached-at-the-hip cousins of the same age, were neighbors of Alberto, and my visits there were filled with time together.

Antonello, with his chiseled jaw, deeply tanned skin, and cerulean eyes, looks like he walked out of a Renaissance painting. In fact, his side of the family were the bankers and politicians. He did often help in the family business but is much more of a true Renaissance man, rising most mornings before dawn to work in his garden or paint vegetables and plants as the sun peeks over the horizon. A prolific painter, he creates brightly colored, boldly stroked oil paintings of tomatoes, anchovies, and radicchio that adorn the walls of Vita today. An avid collector of antiques and all things of beauty, he seems to know every artisan in Umbria by name and is referred to as a maximalist. Antonello’s apartment, a sixteenth-century palazzo in Foligno, a glorious mishmash of eighteenth-century ceramics, seventeenth-century Nativity scenes, sixteenth-century tables, Mongolian fur pillows, Persian ottomans, and Moroccan platters, has been featured in Elle Décor. The man can shop.

His cousin, Lorenzo, tall and fit, the slightly more serious of the two, is an architect who travels the world, building the interiors for Brunello Cucinelli. His father, Lanfranco, was a well-known architect and fine artist in Foligno, and Lorenzo clearly inherited his father’s aesthetic refinement. His studio is beautifully set up downstairs in the family home, a treasury of antique collectibles blended with midcentury modern furnishings. His sense of style is unmistakable.

During the years of il Buco, they have become true dear friends of mine, and we passed many hours together in the streets and restaurants of Umbria or in the dining room of il Buco, plotting the day when we would create a line of beautiful artisanal goods to match the style of the restaurants. As we set about transforming the abandoned lumberyard that would become Alimentari, I immediately turned to the Radi boys for help. Lorenzo drew the first renderings for the space, and the two combed the antiques stores and markets of central Italy to find the beautiful elements that married Alimentari to the il Buco brand. Like Alberto, like me, they are fiercely attached to traditional methods of production, and everything they sourced hummed with an artisanal spirit. They saw the beauty in the imperfect. They, like me, agreed with the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who wrote, “Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body. . . . Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. . . . And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty.” Together we sought the handmade, the objects, both new and antique, crafted by artisans.

Antonello would unpack a terra-cotta plate from its crate with the same sort of infectious passion with which Alberto opened a jar of Scalia anchovies. “Beautiful, Donna,” he’d say, “the top. Top.” It was time to bring the dream we shared of the artisanal home line to fruition. Time to bring some of the work of these wonderful Italian artisans to New York, for, as beautiful as their material was, many were still struggling small-business owners. That is, after all, the downside of slow living. And so, as I had done with Alberto years ago, I embarked on another series of journeys to Italy in search of artisans with Antonello and Lorenzo as my guides.

Emanuele’s ceramics drying room

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Ceramicist; ceramic recipes on the wall; glazed ceramic bowl; working a mold; glazing a bowl; potter’s wheel; glazed bowls drying

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Burning double wick beeswax candle; tools of candlemaking; Joaquin twists a candle; more tools of candlemaking; twisted beeswax candle; Marco, candlemaker; drying candles; vat of melted beeswax

And so I find myself in Bevagna, where the temperature is 95°F, and the stones of the medieval buildings radiate heat. But inside the cereria, or candlemaker, an ancient storefront on a narrow side street, the thick walls and shade keep it cool. There, one of our artisans, a redheaded thirty-year-old named Marco, is standing above a wooden cauldron of liquid wax, wearing a leather apron. The vault-like store is lit only by candles—naturally—and by the natural light spilling through the open door. Pairs of candles connected by a joint wick hang on pegs. Hundreds more line the shelves. Reams of hemp for wicks and bars of beeswax—sunflower, nearly black and rare; mille fiore and acacia—wait to be melted. Honeybees buzz around, perhaps confused by how the fruits of their labor are being used.

Here Marco is making candles, the same way they’ve been made for hundreds of years. Steam rises from a vat of liquid wax, kept warm by a bain marie, above which a wheel with fifty-six pegs is suspended. From each peg hangs a hemp wick, and on each end, baby candles are forming. It takes twenty dips, more than three hours, for a basic candle. “If you don’t have patience,” says Marco “you don’t become a candlemaker.” Beeswax candles were once used by the nobles and very wealthy Bevagnese families to decorate altars and palazzi. (Everyday people used animal fat or tallow candles.) Now, they are sold only here and at il Buco. Marco himself learned the craft thanks to an educational program run by the town as part of the annual Mercato delle Gaite, a ten-day festival during which hundreds of Bevagnesi don medieval clothing—white cotton coifs, jerkins, gowns, shifts—and hundreds of craftsmen, from jewelers to weavers to paper producers, open their doors. I had written it off as a Disney-like street fair until I actually experienced the Gaite about ten years ago. It was a mesmerizing spectacle, the full community participating in the rituals of the past, taverns open through the streets of this medieval village, the authentic costumes and performances distinctly tied to the past, preserved.

One hundred thirty kilometers to the west, in a small village in the Marche, Emanuele represents another Vita artisan, whose connection to the past runs in his blood. For 160 years, his family has been ceramicists. From their rustic studio just outside the city walls, Emanuele creates beautiful plates, cups, saucers, vases. There’s a small bottega on the ground level where his pieces are sold. His workshop is on the second story, where he sits perched at a potter’s wheel. Around him are hundreds of vessels in various stages of drying, readying for the kiln. The kiln itself occupies an adjacent room. Its walls are jet black from three centuries’ worth of smoke. The white clay against the black walls, the red clay against Emanuele’s tan hands, the sun through the lace curtains of a window; since 1792, little has changed.

Emanuele, a seventh-generation ceramicist, estimates he has made hundreds of thousands of pieces over the last twenty-one years. “Every piece is beautiful from the first piece I made to the last,” he says proudly, as his well-practiced hand cups a lump of spinning clay. “Each is a step in my life.” He presses the foot pedal, and as we watch, he drives his thumbs into the clay, forming a cup shape. Using one hand, buttressed against his thigh, he exerts pressure that in turn forces the clay upward. The cup turns into a bowl. “I played in this workshop as a child,” he says. “I used to watch these movements before knowing what they were. So when I started at the shop, I wasn’t learning as much as I was remembering.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Emanuele in his studio; unglazed ceramic cups; potter’s wheel detail; Antonello Radi; window in Emanuele’s studio; Donna watches Emanuele at work; assorted glazed bowls; Lorenzo Radi; studio handprints

The bowl’s shape begins to grow clearer. This bowl, large with straight sides, he explains, is an ancient shape his family has been making since the beginning. “They were used to collect the blood of pigs in January and February with which we made sanguinaccio,” a type of blood pudding that is often sweet but is served in this region with onions. Antonello, who’s with me, adds impishly, “They were used for everything from washing vegetables to washing the baby to washing up after sex.”

Emanuele finishes the bowl and, using a wire, cuts it deftly from the wheel. He sets it gently on a shelf to dry, and we head downstairs to the shop. On the wall a hand-lettered sign reads: TERRA IMPASTATA CON L’ACQUA, ASCIUGATA CON ARIA E COTTA COL FUOCO. (Earth mixed with water, dried with air and cooked with fire.)

It’s the definition of his craft, reminiscent of a similar sign that I saw in the Bertoni kitchen about balsamic vinegar. These definitions don’t seem merely to define a product but a way of life, a sense of self. Emanuele flips open a photo album. Black-and-white photographs of his father, his uncle, his grandfather fill the pages. In image after image, they are bent over the wheel just as he was moments before and before them, from the wheel, emerge shapes similar to the one Emanuele just made. As I leave, Emanuele proudly shows me a mug from the shelf. It is slightly more perfectly imperfect than its neighbors. The lip is a bit uneven and the sides curve in and out. “My daughter made this,” he says, happily. “She’s the eighth generation.”

In workshop after workshop all across Italy, I could repeat this story. From the blistering hot furnace there is the free-spirited glassblower Nadia just outside Rome, collecting the recyclable bottles and jars of neighbors far and wide in order to transform broken shards into magical forms, from glassware to lamps, to winged vases with breasts. She pulls the form from the melted matter according to whim or fancy in the small studio behind her home in the countryside where she lives with her partner, their young daughter, and a myriad of dogs and cats. Outside Siena, Marta and Fabrizio craft their own colored glassware of more simple straightforward lines and continue to form ceramics as their father did before them. Traveling back across into Umbria, Carlo and his brother are working with Antonello and Lorenzo to design our black terra-cotta Assisi line with muted tones that carry the Italian patinas to New York City. Then there’s the basement workshop in a small hamlet of Perugia of the terra-cotta master Antonio, whose simple white plateware I have lunched on for years in the enoteca Bottega d’Assu on the edge of my favorite square in Bevagna, where I had my own little townhouse on Vicolo Cinema 2. A few kilometers away the weavers in Montefalco still work tirelessly to make their quality linens of every color under the sun and the metal workers forge our iron candle holders as they have for centuries, while the marble craftsmen carve their mortars from precious stone that has survived the ages. The handwrought cutting boards too are honed by hand, some sanded fine, others showing off the age of the planks from which they were born.

The goods we bring to New York as part of Vita are not only objects to use on a table but are themselves the products of an entire approach to life. These are seen in the patinas on their surfaces, the unevenness of their forms, their very nature.

Vita has been part of a story created over time. It is as much a part of the people and the places as it is about the products. It is about my relationship with Alberto lasting more than twenty-six years, Roberto for twenty-three, and Antonello and Lorenzo, my fratelli Umbri, and all the producers and friends who are now a part of my extended Italian “family,” and whom I have followed through all the turns and twists in their lives as they have in mine, from marriage, to loss, to the births of our children. It is the world my son was free to explore before he had words. It is the magic feeling you get when sitting across the table, sharing stories and ideas. That’s why we call it Vita. Vita is life.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Broken recycled glass for glassblowing; glass work in progress; Nadia’s oven; Nadia at work; finished glass pieces; handblown glass tumbler in progress

Assorted dishware from Vita’s Assisi line