My Tuscan house faces southeast, poised high over a road lined with cypress trees. The facade looks down into a sweep of valley, toward the foothills of the Apennines and distant Lago Trasimeno, where Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 B.C. I’m amazed at how often Hannibal comes up in daily conversation around here—previously, I had not heard him mentioned since World History in eighth grade. Now I know the weather conditions (foggy) on the morning of battle, the pass he took over the Alps en route to Rome, the number of elephants—he was down to only one—that he’d lost an eye, even what the Roman soldiers wore as they were driven into the misty lake and drowned.
Since I grew up in the American South—where hardly a day went by without a mention of the Civil War, some dim relative’s elderberry wine, the Depression, or dead Aunt Besta’s bread-and-butter pickles, or Uncle Jack spending his navy years during World War II cavorting in San Francisco—I’m used to the past layering onto the present. However, 217 B.C. lies beyond the reaches of memory of even the most indefatigable old bores. Hannibal is only the beginning, because in Tuscany, the past seems eternally present. I’m driving with a friend, and she points out the villa of a friend of hers, “That’s where Luca Signorelli died when he stepped backward on the scaffolding to get a better perspective on his fresco.” She speaks as though recalling a painter’s unfortunate accident last year, not the Signorelli who died in 1523.
I wonder if this is why I came here, why I felt so instantly at home in Tuscany, when I have not a drop of blood from the Mediterranean world. Art lasts, in story and in fact. Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” comes as no revelation.
Cortona remains essentially medieval, with layers that peel back to pre-Etruscan times. Farmers turn up small bronze votive figures in their furrows and take them to the local Etruscan museum, where they’re dated to the sixth century B.C. At the same time, the Jovanotti rock concert on a summer evening draws thousands to the parking area in front of the church, where the incorruptible body of Margherita of Cortona (rap-rock pulsating in her bones?) has lain since the thirteenth century. She’s behind glass in her striped dress. Shops thrive in dark twelfth-century rabbit warrens with glass fronts, the owners perched on chairs in sunlight outside the doors.
In 1990, buying a house in a foreign country was drastic. Hardly any Americans rented houses here, and no one I ever heard of bought run-down Italian property. The end of my long marriage seemed to return me to a more audacious self, the adventurer I was in my youth. When the fur from the divorce settled, I found myself with a full-time job, my daughter in college, a modest stash of our stocks, my part of the sale of our home, and a new life to invent.
I was in no hurry, but I had a clear desire to transform those static blue chips into something pleasurable—a house with land. I heard the long echo of my grandfather saying, “Buy land, they aren’t making it anymore.”
As I have written in other books, I began to vacation in Italy. I’d always loved Italy, the food, landscape, perched villages, the great repository of art. Surely, I thought, it’s an adequate substitute for just one man. Because I was teaching poetry at a university, I had three months off—my cherished writing time. For five summers, I rented farmhouses all over Tuscany. The first one, which I took for a month with Ed, new to me then, and two other writer friends, was outside Cortona. I’d found a listing in the little column The New York Review of Books ran for professors seeking research havens for sabbaticals. The thrifty English writer’s country house was bare. The four upstairs rooms had lumpy, damp beds and rickety chests. Inside the drawers I found pyramids of ground-up wood. Tarli, a woman from the farm across the field explained. I’ve never known what tarli are, only what they do. The living room was furnished with cheap bamboo. We didn’t care. The woman, Annette, stopped by often, dropping off eggs and armfuls of wildflowers. I remember the blue bowl of soft teal, malt, and ivory eggs, the weedy flowers, and her raucous laugh at our pitiful attempt to roll out fresh pasta on the worn worktable in the kitchen. Annette taught us that even our irregular pieces had a name, maltagliata, badly cut, and were still very good. We chopped and quoted Rilke and danced. I loved these friends, C. D. Wright and Forrest Gander. (Both went on to become important poets.) We were all four charged with that rustling awareness of possibility. There’s a bond to make with a few people, close to a sense of family—but chosen family. Carolyn, although from Arkansas, had an accent similar to mine. We spent mornings interviewing each other about women writers and memoir and childhood. Always audacious, Carolyn came downstairs one evening as Ed and I chopped vegetables. Forrest was still up in their room. Pausing at the foot of the stairs, she announced, “I am freshly fucked and childless.” We swam in the priest’s icy spring-fed pool, gossiping because the priest had a girlfriend.
I had just finished writing The Discovery of Poetry, a 500-page poetry textbook, and didn’t care if I ever wrote another word. They worked; I read guidebooks and made lunch, then dragged them to one hot hill town after another, ending up at some wonderful restaurant for a long dinner. I saw that Ed’s attitude toward life was romantic. He was the ideal traveler, lover, writer. We read poetry aloud under an olive tree. Norwegian friends from Princeton days came to stay. A poet from Rome whose translations we knew popped in, along with Gail Tsukiyama, who became a novelist but was then a student of mine. From across the field at night came the plaintive music of Bruno’s accordion as we sat around a fire, outdoing each other with revelations and quotes and flashes of wit. When the fire died down, we had the outrageous Milky Way to teach us a thing or two.
All this remains memorable, but it was something else that skewed the course of my life.
In the distance a tumbledown farmhouse drew me on afternoon walks. The stone outlines of pigpens set me thinking of small studios for writing. The arch for wagons to enter the downstairs would, I saw, nicely transform into a living room window. The deep pleasures of county life. I thought, How can I have that? A first inkling. A chance image can turn your life around. I planted basil the first day there, and by the end of the month, the plants were knee-high. I was rooted, too.
Summers after that, I tried Montisi, Florence, Quercegrossa, Rignano sul Arno, Volterra, Siena, Vicchio—two weeks here, a month there, savoring different areas, always with Ed. (Our friends did not come back.) Always, I was drawn to Cortona, to my first impressions of the tawny old houses placed as though by a large hand on the hilltops, and the bells of Cortona’s thirty-odd churches ringing over the fields, reverberating in the bones of my head. I thought that here I would begin to write poems and essays not in the usual way, on legal pads and computer (primitive then), but with a pen, real ink, in one of those handmade marbled books, a big one, with thick, creamy paper.
That fifth summer, I began to look seriously at houses. Because I was by then establishing a permanent relationship with both Ed and Italy, the house quest felt tied to whatever patterns we would create in the future. Ed had no idea that our shared interest in literature would shift so soon to titles such as The Home Water Supply and The Complete Guide to Plastering.
I was no longer amused at the caprices of renting the greatly charming country houses: sagging beds or kitchens with no hot water, or bats roosting in fireplaces. The quirks were fun at first. The place I rented in Vinci had an odd kitchen current. Every time I touched an appliance, I got a tingling jolt. The refrigerator’s freezer compartment formed an igloo every two days so that I couldn’t shut the door. When it rained, the caretaker flew through the rooms shrieking and banging shutters, oblivious to my state of dress or undress. My daughter, friends who came to visit, and Ed drove with me over back roads that turned into paths, discussed how cow mangers could be turned into banquettes, and cooled my enthusiasm when one enchanting place had no road in at all and a family of black snakes guarded the threshold. We found several houses to love but Tuscans hate to part with property and owners often changed their minds. One ancient contessa cried to think of selling, doubled her price, and seemed cheered as we walked away. This scene later appeared almost verbatim in the movie Under the Tuscan Sun. By now, almost all those roughly authentic farmhouses are restored to the hilt. Comfort and style gained, purity and romance often lost.
Before I saw my house, I’d given up. I was leaving in two days, had thanked the local agent and said goodbye. The next morning, I ran into him in the piazza. He hustled me toward his Fiat. His limp gone, he sprinted, shouting, “A house with the beautiful name Bramasole.” I didn’t catch much else of what he said other than “il disastro.”
This is the story I’ve told in other books and many speeches, yet it always seems a new discovery when I remember it. Out of Cortona, he took the uphill road that climbs toward Città di Castello. At the località Torreone, he turned onto a strada bianca (white road) and, after a kilometer, pulled into a sloping driveway. I caught a glimpse of a shrine with a ceramic Madonna then looked up at a tall, faded gold house with green shutters, a balcony, and rambling overgrown bushes and briars. I was restless as we drove up. “Perfect, I’ll take it,” I joked when we got out. Rusty iron arches created a tunnel for climbing roses. A frog as big as my foot guarded the cistern in a fallen stone wall. I loved the curly fanlight over the double door with two sphinx knockers. The sphinx motif, I’d read, was popular when Mussolini was trying to lay claim to African countries. The house’s walls were as thick as my arm is long, longer! Almost iridescent, glass in the windows quivered with light. I scuffed through silty dust and saw intact cotto (old brick) floors crusty with dirt. He showed me two bathrooms, alarming—I’d never heard of bucket flush—but functioning, after all the houses I’d seen with no water, much less plumbing. No one had lived in the house for thirty years and the five acres seemed enchanted, rampant with weeds, dog roses, and blackberries. Ivy twisted into trees and ran over fallen stone walls. Ivy will survive nuclear blasts.
Anselmo, the agent, shielded his eyes and surveyed the land. “Molto lavoro,” he pronounced, much work. Also, something that must have meant You’d be out of your gourd to take on this baby. (Italian agents in my experience never try to sell.)
“It’s unbelievably romantic,” I answered. Within five minutes, I envisioned snipping sun-warmed thyme and oregano into a basket over my arm, setting a long table with checked cloth under the linden trees, Ed grilling chops in the big fireplace. I simply wanted to hang my linen dresses on a peg and stack my notebooks under a window looking out at the six hundred cypresses bordering the road, each one planted for a boy who died in World War I.
After summers of looking at houses situated on the Arno’s floodplains or ones with collapsed roofs, or, worse, ludicrous restorations, after miles of dusty roads, this house seemed to have been waiting all along.
The great old Tuscan sun pouring into every room warmed me. There’s something beneficent about the Italian sun; it seems to seep farther in, gently freeing the blood and the mind. I felt renewed, excited, and calmly right, and I suppose that’s the real sensation of feeling at home in the world.
In the United States, I’ve bought and sold houses before—loaded up the car with the blue-and-white Wedgwood, the cat, and the fichus for the three-mile or three-thousand-mile drive to the next doorway, where a new key would fit. Choices were practical, bound to graduate schools, or jobs, or worse, divorce. But this time the new door’s iron key weighed half a pound; the doorway was seven thousand miles from home. The legal language and the baroque arrangements of buying baffled me. Currency rates were falling, then rising. My financial advisor was selling my life savings and gently chiding me about la dolce vita. (Later he told me he was 100 percent behind me.) I can still wake up thinking, what on earth have you done and why, when you could have had a cottage on the California coast where you could buzz up for the weekend, the back seat full of groceries, could plant bulbs at the proper moment and easily see about broken pipes. I’d looked for a place in Sonoma, even made an offer and was instructed by how relieved I felt when it was turned down.
The hitch—I already knew what to expect from my California environs. I considered my home state, Georgia. I love the barrier islands where I spent summers as a child. A white board house with a porch always represents the quintessential image of home. But I was running on instinct, and instinct said time for a new kind of home. Why not, in middle age, remember Dante’s dilemma: What now to do in order to grow? I wanted the unknown, wanted to do something I didn’t know how to do (and didn’t I get my wish!). Italy always had a magnetic allure. No matter how long I spend here, I never will resist turning off the road to explore a walled hill town, a local Saturday market, or a country Romanesque church where I might find a Masaccio triptych or an austere fresco by some unknown hand. Language, art, cuisine, literature, and beauty: Everything attracts me.
My little villa made of stones stands on a terraced hillside covered with olive trees. Close to the house, some kindly soul planted fruit and nut trees—apricot, fig, plum, apple, hazelnut, almond, and many kinds of pears, which bear in sequence so that from summer through late fall I find pears to pick and a reason to stock the kitchen with gorgonzola. A neighbor said, “Your house is only a few hundred years old—mine is a thousand.” He’s right, the house, started in the 1700s, is not old by local standards. Although I admire the type of stone farmhouse called casa colonica, I did not end up buying one; nor is mine a real villa. Although there are fourteen rooms, none has the ample proportions of a house of the nobility. The early builder might have been eager to leave behind the memory of some dank stone farmhouse of his childhood, because he had his stones gentrified with a stucco facing. Over the years, the various coats of paint wore away at different speeds so that the house, now predominantly luxurious apricot, reveals its rosy phase and its time as a vivid yellow. Lichen traces splotchy signatures of black and green. When winter light hits the facade, the house looks bleached and lemony. When summer rain soaks in, the walls turn the color of a blood orange. On bright days, it might have been painted by an amateur watercolorist who imitated flagrant sunrises. The surface bothers the Italian builders I’ve since had in for several restoration projects. “Completely replaster, signora, paint it gold,” they advise. “You need to start over—it will look like new.” When I say I love the color, they look sad. But I’m an American, full of strange caprices and to be indulged like a spoiled child.
The symmetrical house rises three stories, with the fanciful iron balcony on the second floor above the double front door. From it, I train hanging pink Mandeville vines and geraniums, but I imagine someone once stepping out to hear a lover sing “Ecco Maggio,” or something equally corny. I bought the place from a doctor, who recently had acquired it from five siblings from Perugia. The five linden trees in a row were named for the children when their father planted them years ago. The doctor thought to make it a summer home then changed his mind. It is not he, because he never lived here, but the five children I think of often. They were four girls, who must have simultaneously pushed open the shutters of their five bedrooms and leaned out in their white nightgowns. The boy must have escaped them, trapping fireflies in a jar.
Such are the kinds of rumination the house inspires. Why? Because it is a dream house. Not a dream house in the sense that it has the perfect proportions and the ideal floor plan—and I don’t think dream houses have albino scorpions in the bidet—but more that it resembles a house from a dream, one of those where you discover a room you did not know existed and in it a dry plant breaks into full bloom, or you come upon it alone, lights blazing in all the windows, and you see yourself in every room. Here, I dream recurrently of swimming without effort in a clear green river, totally at home in the water, buoyantly carried downstream with the flow.
I’m dazzled by the remains of a Roman road over the hill covered with wildflowers. I follow that stony path through the poppies into Cortona for espresso. I’m dazzled by the old cistern with a brick archway underground. Secret passage? The caretaker at the Medici fortress up above claims an underground escape route goes downhill to the valley, then to the lake. Italians take such remains casually; that one is allowed to own such ancient things seems preposterous to me. I’m dazzled, period.
Two improbably tall palms grew on the terrace in front of the house. They clattered gently just under the third-floor window. One friend said, “Cut down those things; they look decadent, like something out of that old movie Last Year at Marienbad.” Italians marvel: that they’ve grown tall means that the house is in a microclimate. Finally, one palm died, leaving the other to asymmetrically punctuate the front of the house. I go for the tropical accent, as though the house could be in Tunisia or Sardinia as easily as here. Even the roof ranks among the extraordinary discoveries of the every day. I climb up the terraces and look down on the old tiles, formed over someone’s knee and now alive with lacy gray moss. What else? The cotto floors, once scrubbed, have been polished by enough rags over the years that even the quickest mopping makes them glow.
We bottle our own olive oil now, but I used to like the deeply satisfying tilt of the demijohn as I drew off enough for the day’s cooking. All these, yes, and the cool marble counters where the semolina gnocchi never stick; the small owl that perches on a windowsill and looks in, where on one bedroom’s walls, a friend painted blue domes over the windows and filled them with Giotto-like gold stars (I marvel that though she has since died, her stars remain as fresh as ever). Some of them escape the dome and fall down the white walls. During dramatic storms, thunder seems to rearrange the stones in the walls. The straight-up stairs have a wrought-iron railing that kept some fabbro, blacksmith, busy an entire winter. Ed stripped and waxed each room’s chestnut beams. Some genius had slathered all of them with a sticky mud-colored veneer. We discovered that all the bedrooms had fanciful designs on the walls. We’ve left “truth windows” that let me imagine what the whole room of lattice and flowers must have looked like, or borders of acanthus, broad blue stripes, and in one, just recently uncovered, drawn-back coral brocade-edged draperies that must have focused the eye on a bed. Everything painted! Which must have lightened the heavy chestnut furniture that furnished these homes. Windows are bare, except for their intricate layers of louvered, solid, and glassed shutters.
At least once a day, I go out on the second-floor patio and look up the hill where the terraces stop. I can see a section of Etruscan wall that has the exact orientation as the house. If the wall had not securely kept vigil over this land for twenty-six centuries, I would be afraid it might tumble on us one day. Blocks of stone as big as Hannibal’s elephants. Blocks on blocks. This Etruscan wall forms part of Cortona’s original town wall. A couple of Etruscan gates and tombs remain scattered about. But this section of wall is different. From its position, historians think it is a remnant of a sun temple. The name of my house, Bramasole, comes from bramare, “to yearn for,” and sole, “sun”: Something that yearns for the sun. I’ve always been surprised that everyone knows this house. “Ah, Bramasole, sì, una bella casa,” they say. Delivery people, even from miles away, do not need a map, “Sì, sì, la villa Bramasole,” they say. They or their parents picked cherries or nuts here during its abandoned thirty years, or even earlier. They’ve gathered mistletoe from the almond trees at Christmas. Their grandmother picked figs every September. A friend’s father was blown to bits after World War II when he unearthed a pipe that turned out to be a German land mine.
I thought it was just a house everyone knew. One day in town I spotted a postcard of the Etruscan wall. It was identified as being in “the locality Bramasole.” I discovered the name of the land is much older than my house. Possibly “Bramasole” connects to the ancient purpose of this site, the lost temple where people like me came when they were yearning for the sun.