In Tuscany

I count the days. I know that I shouldn’t. And I try not to. But I do it all the same, because I’m superstitious and need to dampen the magic each time I’m ready to let go and embrace this dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime. Like a lover who knows he’s in way over his head, I niggle and fuss and am all too hasty to find fault with the small things, because the large ones can, with just a few colors and a few tones and the toll of bells all over the valley, easily shame my puny attempts to rehearse the wake-up call that is to take everything away.

So I count the days. Two down, five to go. By this time tomorrow, it’ll be three down and four to go. Mustn’t forget to plan for the day when I’ll have spent more days here than I’ll have days left to stay. On that morning, I’ll brace myself and remember standing outside this very gatehouse with the gardener while stealing a few seconds from our improvised chat to think of the end. From every hour that goes by, I waste a few seconds to invoke my last day here, the way the ancients tipped their goblets and spilled some of their wine when the harvest was plentiful—to keep the envious gods quiet. Thus, I shoo the unavoidable by staring at it all the time. It is also my way of picking up the pieces I’ll be putting together in the weeks ahead. This view of the valley outside Lucca. These candlelit dinners in the garden. And the litany of names that never seems to end: Monticchiello, Montepulciano, Montalcino, Montefioralle—Monte-this and Monte-that, a lifetime of Montes.

It seems ages ago that we sat in our living room one Sunday evening in New York and leafed through endless catalogs of farmhouses, which for weeks kept streaming into our mailbox. Houses with or without swimming pool, with or without cook, with or without vineyard and/or olive grove, with or without vista panoramica—we wanted vista panoramica. And we wanted the cypresses and the ocher-tiled roofs and the faded brown doors and rusted hinges, and we wanted a brook—must have a brook—and all around we wanted pomodori (tomatoes) and girasoli (sunflowers) and fattened zucche (squash), the whole thing bathed in steaming parched fields of rosemary and oregano. We wanted a swimming pool that looks out straight into infinity. And we wanted to see the adjoining hills and fields through half-opened windows whose frames themselves are part of the picture.

The villas came in lavish centerfolds, with informal, whimsical names, each promising bliss by stoking timeless dreamscapes of an inner Tuscany that all of us, especially those who have read the Romantics and post-Romantics, secretly cradle in ourselves. A reader’s Tuscany. Eternal.

And then I saw it. The house was called Il Leccio. That one! I said. That one could—if I let it, if I didn’t stand in the way and if I let my guard down for once—that one could change my life, become my life, turn my life into what I’ve always, always wanted and known that life could be, even if for only a week: a life where everything is life-size, where timeless and time-bound are one and the same.

A house in Tuscany can help us turn over a new leaf, give us a new life, and stir another us—the us that’s crying to step out every morning into a sun-washed, ancient land, an us we always keep on the sidelines, under wraps, forever bottled up like a sluggish genie we don’t quite trust or know what to do with or how to please—the basic us that needs basic things but likes them with gusto, the way it likes wines and cheeses, aged and not too pasteurized, but things not too wild either, authentic but refurbished, old but not dated. In Tuscany, the world as we know it turns into a world we all imagine must have been once. Agriturismo, this Italian invention that converts farmhouses and barns into expensive rental homes, is the ultimate in fantatourism. It allows us to live as country people—or, more accurately, as rustic, frugal feudal landowners did here in bygone days.

Even our food reflects a country squire’s fare. For breakfast we have bread, butter, and peach jam—all of it made no more than a few hundred yards away. At lunch we gorge ourselves on the juiciest tomatoes, seasoned with olive oil, lemon, basil—all from around here. The large, brittle crystals of salt, however, are from Sicily. Very frugal. The wine is of the simplest vintage. Nothing fancy anywhere.

We buy into their world, their customs, their temper, their elaborate kindness, and we want to take intimate, furtive peeks at their history these past eight hundred years. We like to touch the ground and feel how each clod of earth has already been trampled on and held, if not bled on, by other human beings. Here have walked artists, poets, braggarts, and ruthless mercenaries. They drank from the very well our children enjoy throwing pebbles in; they serenaded, brawled, and cursed down the very same alleys where just last night we stood waiting for a table for four.

I am talking to the gardener and getting driving directions. I am headed for Chianti. Someone mentioned Sant’Andrea in Percussina, near San Casciano, where Niccolò Machiavelli whiled away his years of exile from his beloved Florence. An unusual place, everyone says, because it personifies unassuming, ramshackle aristocracy.

As I’m getting directions, I am already earmarking this morning. The gardener, who probably suspects something like this is going on in my mind, hands me a sprig of dark sage. “Here, smell.” Tourists have ways of finding mementos in almost anything a native gives them. He is right. Tuscany is made for these mnemonic earmarks. One comes here to feel that this clear sky, these small towns and valleys with complicated names, these towers where Baron So-and-so punished his unfaithful wife or where Count Such-and-such starved with his children and, as legend has it, ended up devouring them, this little terra-cotta town that suddenly rises from nowhere, like a cluttered ziggurat made of clay, and as suddenly slinks back into a tufted valley mottled by entire swatches of girasoli; that all these are indeed meant to outlast so many lifetimes that they probably won’t change till the very last minute, when planet Earth runs headlong into the sun. You want to jot each instant down.

Seven a.m. I like to go out and buy milk and bread. I like the swish of sandals on wet grass, on the gravel, and on the pebbled path farther off before I turn and head out on the dirt road. The shrill cry of birds circling high above the cypress trees. Not a soul anywhere.

Eight a.m. I’m the first to arrive at the bar. I order an espresso while the barista gets me a small carton of milk. The next person to walk in is an American. Has the Herald Tribune arrived yet? Non ancora, signore. The American grumbles as he sits and orders an espresso as well. Obviously a regular early bird who, unlike me, is here for an “extended” stay. On my way to get warm bread, I remember that the baker is always a cuckold in Boccaccio’s tales. Tuscans don’t salt their bread. In Dante, eating salted bread adds bitterness to the wound of exile.

Which reminds me of Machiavelli again. In his famous letter of December 10, 1513, to his friend and benefactor, Francesco Vettori, a disgraced Machiavelli pens an embittered portrait of a squire’s life in the countryside. “I am living on a farm,” writes the man who can’t wait to be recalled to public service in his native city. It is a most anticlimactic portrait of agrotourism by Tuscany’s most famous agroexile. He gets up before dawn to snare thrushes with his own hands. Machiavelli, who in the course of his letter drops a hint that he’s finished a “little work” on princedoms, goes on to describe how he must first prepare the birdlime he’ll need for catching the birds, adding that he knows he must surely look totally ridiculous as he trundles about the country carrying a bundle of birdcages on his back. “I caught at least two thrushes and at most six.”

Ten a.m. Must do something useful before the day wears on. Later, there’ll be no time or willpower left to do anything. The air is still brisk, and you must hasten the pace before intense sunlight sets in. An entire day’s activity squeezed into a few charged, brilliant morning brushstrokes of pure light.

Machiavelli: By this time in the day, he must oversee the tree fellers. He chats awhile with them, taking in his daily dose of their tireless bellyaching, only to turn and bicker with those who purchase firewood but are forever coming up with excuses not to pay. By midday, his monotonous schedule takes him to an inn where he’ll chitchat with a few people and then head home for lunch with his family, “eating such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow.”

Eleven a.m. Blinding light suddenly explodes like an overripe, flushed peach that fell on the ground this morning and is succulent to look at and must be eaten on the spot else it spills all over. Light acquires the color of earth and of the buildings around us: the color of clay, eternal ocher.

Noon. The distant peal of bells—reminders of time, of place, of customs that make of this world another world. On the scented, dry earth, how sound carries. Will I be able to stand the peal of a distant church bell elsewhere and not think back on this?

The road to and from the villa has become familiar. I no longer get lost in the house. Part of me likes knowing my way around so soon: it means I’ve gone native, that I’m settled. But another part of me wishes to remain forever lost, as if I’d just landed here and have days and days to go yet before getting used to anything.

We arrive in the small hamlet of Sant’Andrea, in Percussina, at close to one o’clock. I had expected that it would be as difficult as going back in time, but it was faster to get here than to find a bookshop with an edition of Machiavelli’s letters.

One p.m. Two Latin words: fulgor (radiance) and torpor (lethargy, apathy). At what precise time of the day does fulgor finally become torpor? Light has already lost its transparency, its whiteness, and slides thickly down the slanted rooftops. People automatically seek out the shade. The sun, as people say here, “gives no truce.” A translucent mist rises from the ground and lets everything seen through it sway. The air heaves, but there isn’t a draft. How do you describe the intense, overwhelming silence after lunch—if not by invoking the most immaterial of sounds: insects?

Machiavelli: Having had lunch at home, the author of The Prince will return to the inn, where he’ll seek out the company of the host, a butcher, a miller, and two furnace tenders. But these are no Chaucerian pilgrims. I can just picture these sharp-tongued Tuscans burrowing away from the sun in a dingy inn. “With them,” he continues, “I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca [a card game] and at backgammon, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny and are heard shouting as far as San Casciano.” Niccolò Machiavelli couldn’t have sunk any lower.

What seems so paradoxical is the degree to which he must have hated everything we have come to love about small, rustic Tuscan life—from its local color, its people, down to his dingy home in this dingy hamlet in Chianti. The house is not for sale, of course, but I can’t help myself and am doing something that comes naturally to every New Yorker. I am secretly prospecting. I see potential. What if for a price…? I could winterize the place so that I could come at Christmas, at Easter, during the harvest, at Thanksgiving—let’s face it, year-round. Start a new life. A vita nuova—the title of Dante’s earlier collection of poems dedicated to his beloved Beatrice.

In the mud-ridden, stultifying universe where bad fortune thrust him, the only solace Machiavelli found was in books. Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus, Ovid. “When evening comes,” he writes, “I return home and enter my study; on the threshold, I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on garments that are regal and courtly. Thus fitted out appropriately, I enter the venerable courts of the ancients, where, graciously welcomed by them, I feed on the food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to question them about the reasons for their actions, and they, out of their kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time, I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I give myself over to them wholly.”

And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle. Bookish people.

This is how I have come to love Tuscany, the way I love most things: by drifting ever so slightly from them. I count the days because I love them too much. I count the days, already knowing that one day I will remember how tactless it was of me to have counted the days when I could so easily have enjoyed them. I count the days to pretend that losing all this doesn’t faze me.

But I also know myself and know that I am counting other days, days and months when I’ll come back and find an old house on a patch of land here and, without too much fussing or too much niggling, I’ll begin to make it all my own.