Back at Bramasole. For now, the luggage rack is folded and put away. My desk has space to put down a book without it vanishing into piles of notes and maps. We’ve traveled from the Brenner Pass in the North to Capo Spartivento, the bottom tip of Sicily, and dozens of fascinating places in between. Surely I could fly through PhD orals in Italian history, art, architecture, culinary and oenological history. The greatest gift of travel: the steep learning curve. Second best: how your vision refreshes and you see with infant eyes. Third: memory. How the places seen will layer into life as time moves on.
OUR FRIEND, THE terrific chef Silvia Baracchi, welcomed us home with one of our favorites at her restaurant, delicious steaks coated in dried olives with a tang of green tomatoes. Long into the night we sipped Baracchi wines and talked.
THE NEXT DAY we started to build a new pergola, inspired by our travels. Grapevines covered our old one made of tree limbs, but for the new, we wanted a roof; the linden trees drop ants and pollen constantly. Black ants on ravioli are not appetizing. The iron pergola is topped with a slightly peaked metal roof the color of rust. The view sweeps over the dips and pleats of hills up to green mountains in the distance, and shadows of clouds. Blond light sifts across the valley to the mysterious villa built for a pope’s visit. He stayed there only a single night (or so the story goes).
Everything seems renewed. I feel natural writing in my notebook outside rather than in my study. I relive the immense dunes at Piscinas in Sardegna, the emerald lakes of the Dolomiti, the watercolor harbor of Monopoli in Puglia, my grandson’s delight in taking the dangling cable car to the remote hotel Vigilius, where he found, perhaps for the first time, that undeniable metabolic connection to a new place. Troves of vivid memories. The series of waterfalls at Campo Tures: The higher we climbed, the more plangent the cascades. At the top, we were drenched by mist. We will always remember.
I’VE BEEN UNFAITHFUL to Cortona. I’ve imagined preferring to live in other places—Trento, Scicli, Monopoli, Parma, Massa Marittima, Cividale del Friuli. If I were looking for home now, I might choose one of them. But how would I? My aunt Hazel claimed her thirteen beaux sat on the front steps the afternoon she announced the one she would marry. Although I’m certain that’s apocryphal, I enjoy imagining such a dilemma.
THE FAMOUS QUOTE by T. S. Eliot, is it true?
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
But I don’t find myself awash in discovery. Cortona remains the place I know best, where the compass needle points anytime I’m adrift. Still, Cortona is moved into a new light. Now I understand this town as a jagged little piece in the complex jigsaw of places forming the astounding country of Italy. We never finished the 1,000-piece puzzle in Puglia and I will never finish exploring this country.
T. S. Eliot again:
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from.
Hopeful and true, these words. I’m again relishing walks on the Roman road, coffee in the piazza every morning, cooking from my garden, Wednesday night dinners at the Cardinalis’ house. I know there are amazing people in other places—and some cranks, too—but the friends I’ve known for many years are not replicable. Plus, I’m in love with my rooms full of books and collections, my blue stove, lemon pots and kitchen herbs, the lion’s-head fountain spilling music. This is memory’s crucible: family and friends who blossom here, six-hour feasts under the stars, all the books I’ve written in my third-floor study, even the mysterious hurts that visit now and then.
Trento is gorgeous and refined, Asolo, a fairy-tale setting, Carloforte, knock-out beach town, Campodimele, where everyone lives to be ninety-five, oh, many other contenders. But it turns out that Cortona already has imprinted as home, the perfect place to start from when Ed hauls the luggage from the storeroom, I stuff the book bag, and it’s time again to go.
NOTE:
“Little Gidding,” from The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot.