Dolci di Love

Violetta and Luciana shuffled sideways out of their cramped living quarters and through the swinging door into the adjoining bakeshop like a pair of crippled crabs.

Their family, the Ferrettis, had been making and selling their famous cantucci since well before the sisters were born nearly a hundred years earlier, and very little had changed in all that time.

Their cantucci—a mouthwateringly delicious Italian cookie that could be dipped in sweet wine, dunked in coffee, or eaten for no particular reason at any time of the day or night—was made strictly to the traditional family recipe. They used only the finest flour, the best sugar, the freshest eggs, the plumpest hazelnuts, and their secret ingredient: Ferretti fingers to hand shape the morsels into the perfect bite-size mouthfuls. The Ferretti cantucci may have been a little plain to look at, but all the love and history that went into each tiny crumb made it taste like a beacon of artisan integrity, and after all these years it still enjoyed the best reputation in Tuscany.

This was something to which the sisters clung fiercely, not just because it was their birthright but because the Borsolini brothers down the hill were now selling cantucci too.

They didn’t make it themselves, they brought it in from Milano, and it tasted like cacca according to Violetta. But the vast Borsolini, which now extended much further than the original brothers, did a roaring trade in their store selling truckloads of this commercial confection in a variety of different flavors and colors. Green cherry and white chocolate? Crystallized ginger and pistachio? Black forest? The Borsolini cantucci might have looked dazzling, but it had all the artisan integrity of an iPod. Worse, one of the younger sons had quite a flair for window dressing and displayed the family’s multi-colored wares with significant drama, changing it at least once a week.

The Ferretti sisters did their best to ignore this, continuing to make their authentic Tuscan morning, afternoon, or evening treat by hand, themselves, although in small, and getting smaller, amounts.

Their store’s single marble counter bore a sparse collection of large fluted glass bowls inside of which were heaped piles of their homemade cookies. They had no confirmed-bachelor offspring to throw together any eye-catching displays: Their window had an empty table and a single chair in it.

On this particular morning, the morning of the ache but not the itch, Violetta pushed one of the fluted bowls aside as she leaned on the counter to catch her breath. The sisters were running late but getting anywhere seemed to take twice as long these days. Even bending over to pick up a tea towel could take half an hour if the shoulders, hips, and knees refused to line up and cooperate. Sometimes, a tea towel just had to stay on the ground until someone with better-oiled parts visited and could more easily return it to its rightful position.

They laughed, a noise which, at their age, generally sounded a lot like two desert animals fighting over a squeaky toy, but today Violetta’s chortle hit a feeble note.

She felt her age and she was scared, yes, there it was, scared, of what lay around the corner. Ageing was not for the fainthearted. It hurt and it took a lot of time and in the end what did you get? A hole in the ground and a headstone if you were lucky. And there was still so much to be done!

The two sisters immediately started hissing like busted steam pipes as Luciana flapped her apron at the surprised tourists while Violetta shook her head and, muttering angrily into her chest, hobbled over to the giant Danes and gave them a shove back in the direction of the door they had just come through.

They pretty quickly got the idea and stumbled back out onto the street where they stood for a moment, stunned, while Violetta continued to shoo them away through the glass door as though sick to death of large, good-looking, blond people trying to buy cantucci, of all things, in a cantucci shop, of all places, in their lovely hilltop town of Montevedova. Ridicolo!

“I don’t think so! We don’t want our cantucci to be as easy to come by as that Borsolini cacca. As long as people want to buy it and we don’t let them, we have the upper hand.”

She checked that the sign still said OPEN, turned the lock so no one else could get in, then the two of them shuffled over to a set of dusty shelves at the back of the store.

With quite some effort, they pushed and pulled at one of the shoulder-height ledges until finally the whole thing slid away, revealing a hidden stairwell behind the wall.

“Are you ready?” Violetta asked. Luciana nodded and they started their descent, resting on each of three separate landings, then working their way along a narrow passage until they found themselves outside a large wooden door upon which Violetta performed a complicated knock before pushing it open.

The two old ladies stepped into the warm, welcoming lamplit comfort of a large cozy room. Medieval tapestries hung from the dark oak walls, half-restored frescoes lurking beneath them, while at the far end of the room three lava lamps glooped and burped inside the enormous open fireplace. A table beneath one of the frescoes, remarkable only in that everyone in it—even the lambs and donkeys—had red hair, bore a carafe of sweet vin santo and a dozen small crystal glasses.

The sisters had initially started the League to fill the void left by the deaths of their twin husbands, Salvatore and Silvio, killed far from home in East Africa during World War II.

As they mourned the men they had adored, they filled hole after hole in the toes and heels of various socks, and within a few months had attracted dozens of other widowed members.

At that stage, the surviving men of Montevedova tried to muscle in on the action, turning up to meetings to get pie-eyed on grappa and telling long-winded stories about things they probably had not done on the battlefields.

This made the widows sad that the men they had lost had been such good sorts while the men that were left behind were such a pain in the rear. They disbanded the open league, annexed the basement beneath the cathedral while the parish was briefly between priests, and re-formed the secret league.

They also decided that darning hose was perhaps a tiny bit boring and not worth having a league for, but that the pursuit of true love—the likes of which they had all been lucky enough to have and still treasured—was far more philanthropic. In other words, they decided to mend hearts instead of socks.

When Violetta’s nose tingled, Luciana’s toe throbbed, and orange blossom perfume filled the air, it meant a new calzino rotto—secret code for a broken heart—was about to come their way. The trick was to identify the calzino rotto as soon as possible and get mending.

The widows believed in love with all their hearts, and no one more than Violetta, but in recent years it seemed that happy endings were harder to come by and added to this, League numbers—thanks to natural attrition—had dwindled to an even dozen.

Modern technology helped plug the gaps to a certain extent. As soon as the tingling and throbbing and perfuming took place, Luciana would wave a scarf out their bedroom window, catching the attention of the widow Ciacci who lived across the lane and had a cell phone. She was then in charge of informing the other widows who still had appropriate use of eyes and fingers that a special meeting was to take place right away. This saved ageing bodies from scuttling up and down the steep streets of Montevedova knocking on doors and hissing at windows, which had once been the way it was done. With the League’s average age hovering somewhere perilously close to ninety-two, this was no longer feasible.

On this occasion, most of the widows were already gathered by the time the sisters arrived, having entered through the other secret door behind the baptismal font in the church behind the pasticceria. Eight were sitting up in straight-backed wooden chairs in their favored semicircle, while the ninth—the widow Rossellini—slept peacefully, drooling slightly from the half smile she had been wearing when she had nodded off.

“Where’s the widow Del Grasso?” Violetta asked. Experience had taught her that complications arose when instructions were issued while a League member was absent. Only half the ears in the League worked at the best of times, two-thirds of the eyes were faulty, and it could not be said that remembering things was anybody’s strongest point. They achieved their best results when they were all together and could ask the widow next to them what had just been said and what they should do about it.

“Widow Mazzetti, can you be in charge of bringing her up to speed later on?” Violetta asked. The widow Mazzetti nodded vigorously. She was something of a Goody Two-shoes and loved a chore.

“As for the rest of you, today is the day, so those of you who can see, keep your eyes open, those of you who can hear, keep your ears open, and those of you who are asleep, stay as you are.”

“Any activity leading to the identification of a likely calzino candidate should be reported to either Widow Ciacci up here or—Widow Ercolani, are you on duty at the tourist office downtown?” asked Violetta. “Good. Or to Widow Ercolani down there. Widow Pacini will be stationed in the doorway of her alimentare between the two. Everyone else, everywhere else, please maintain your usual spots in your own doorways and let’s pray to Santa Ana di Chisa that the day goes smoothly.”