Dolci di Love

The first Sunday of the following July, Lily woke up and pulled back the curtain in her apartment. It was another beautiful day in Montevedova—all the better for being the inaugural feast day of Santa Ana di Chisa.

The huge festa had been months in the planning and there was much to do, as it was an amorucci-focused affair and there was a lot of amorucci still to be made.

First, though, Lily did what she’d done every single morning for the past four months. She tiptoed over to the crib in the corner of the room and peeked in to see if her son was awake. This ritual, which seemed as ingrained in her now as blinking or breathing, never failed to fill her with the simple bliss of being content, of being lucky, of being exactly where she wanted to be. It was a perfect way to start the day.

Matteo—named for the Italian neighbor of Daniel’s childhood—was awake, lying happily on his back, his big brown eyes scrunching up with delight at the sight of his mother, his fat arms reaching for her, fingers wriggling.

She picked him up, kissed the chubby bracelets of his wrists, his dimpled knees, his soft brown cheeks then held him in the air and blew a raspberry into the warm sponge of his fat little belly. He squealed with delight, his bare legs jiggling for joy. It was a sound Lily could not get enough of.

“Will you turn that thing down,” Daniel grumbled from the bed, sitting up to see his wife and child silhouetted against the window, early morning Tuscany shaking itself gracefully awake behind them.

The baby turned to him and held his fat arms out in his direction, wriggling his fingers and squealing some more. Lily then delivered him to Daniel’s arms for his morning cuddle.

“I’ll feed him,” she said. “Then I’m due at the pasticceria so could you watch him till the next feeding time and then bring him over?”

“What do you say, Matteo?” Daniel asked the baby. “Shall we do man stuff while the old lady’s in the kitchen?” Matteo waved everything he had, which they both took to mean yes.

Lily watched her husband and son nestle down together among the pillows. He was such a natural, loving, hands-on father it took her breath away every day. He took her breath away.

Not that it had been easy—she suspected that forgiveness never was—but they had managed over the past year to put so much behind them that it was once more what lay in front of them that mattered.

She had gone back to New York only once, in her first trimester, to see Rose, have a checkup with her gynecologist, resign from Heigelmann’s, and collect a few things from the apartment.

Tuscany was her lucky charm, Montevedova now her home. Her job was being a mother, making amorucci, and helping Daniel establish his new business exporting table wines back to the States.

She could not imagine being happier, being more loved or in love. It brought gooseflesh to her skin, tears to her eyes, and a contentment to her heart that she had thought was lost forever.

“No, you don’t.” Daniel smiled. “Now go to work. Matty and I have got a lot of talking about NASCAR and strip joints to get through.”

As Lily walked from their new apartment to the pasticceria, the Santa Ana di Chisa banners flying from windows above her snapped gently in the warm summer breeze.

“So who exactly is Santa Ana di Chisa?” she had asked Violetta one day when she was rolling out a batch of candied orange and pine nut amorucci. “I keep hearing her name.”

“Yes, I am asking the same thing,” said Fiorella, another elderly but sprightly villager who had moved into Lily’s old upstairs room by then, and who spoke excellent English.

“This could be tricky,” the widow Ciacci said in Italian to Luciana. She had become a regular fixture at the open window, the amorucci being far more agreeable to her taste now that it was less likely to be on fire.

“We have a league of them here in Montevedova,” Violetta said carefully. “And there are perhaps other leagues in other towns. We meet and we fix things and we talk.”

“There isn’t one when we first start to look,” answered Violetta. “There is Santa Anne for sewing but no one for darning. Santa Catherina di Genoa look good for some time, but we lose her when we find out Genoa claim to invent pesto and everybody know pesto starts here in 1927, but nobody like it so they don’t make a fuss.”

“There is one widow in our league,” Violetta obliged, “now passed away, who think Santa Rita di Cascia is good, but then we find out only reason is because Santa Rita di Cascia has stigmata, a wound on her head that smells very bad, so she become a recluse until near her death, when it smells of cinnamon rolls.”

“Some problem?” hooted Fiorella. “Ooooh, I get it. I get it and I love it!” She jumped around the kitchen like the little frog she was.

“Who knows!” roared Fiorella, refusing to speak English. “Chi sa for who knows. Violetta, you are the cat’s pajamas. You made up the League’s patron saint!”

“What are you saying?” Lily wanted to know. She was learning the language but this was beyond her. “I can’t understand you.”

And so it was decided that the feast day of Santa Ana di Chisa would be celebrated on the first Sunday in July and that as it was the Ferrettis’ idea, amorucci would be the patron dolci.

Half an hour after kissing her baby good-bye on the day of the inaugural festa, Lily was kissing her sister hello outside the pasticceria.

“I just can’t get used to everything being so goddamned beautiful,” Rose said. “Even Al is looking pretty good these days. Who knew? I thought we were beyond that.”

“He’s working on the gondola with Alessandro,” Rose answered. “I have a horrible feeling we may end up with one of those things in the yard back in Connecticut.”

“Well, at least you’re nearer to water,” Lily said, giving her sister a hug. “Thank you so much for being here, Rose. All of you.”

“Are you kidding me? A summer vacation in Tuscany? I admit, at first I didn’t want to bring the family with me, but with every passing day, I swear, those kids are more adorable and Al a little less past his sell-by date. There must be something in the air.”

“Oh, no, I bow to your undisputed superiority in the kitchen,” Rose said, with a smile. “I’m going to take a walk in the Italian sunshine with only a large pastry for company if you don’t mind.”

Lily’s happy heart swelled even more when she walked into the kitchen and saw the production line of children gathered around the old refectory table.

Jack and Harry were arguing with each other, as usual, but also competing for the attention of Francesca, who was instead in the thrall of Emily and Charlotte, who in turn were besotted by the extremely beautiful Ernesto.

Violetta, Luciana, and Fiorella sat in the corner of the room, gossiping in Italian, something that, with Lily at the helm of the pasticceria, they now had a lot more time for.

The Ferretti sisters were in extremely good humor. They’d started a fund, so Violetta told her, with the increasingly healthy profits from the pasticceria and so were both taking expensive medication for their arthritis, which made them far more limber. Violetta in particular had a new spring in her step thanks to the added advantage of a stent in her heart, which had, unbeknownst to her, been giving her chest trouble for quite some years. They both had new dentures.

There were many meetings down the secret stairs Lily wasn’t supposed to know about to plan where else this health fund should be spent, and she had noticed that a lot of the old women she often found huddling around the fluted bowls in the pasticceria now bore new white teeth and more than a couple had hearing aids.

The sisters, Fiorella, and a handful of other old darners were now in such good health, so Lily had been told, that they were planning a trip to Cremona to broaden their horizons. It was the birthplace of Stradivari, and now that they could hear better, they particularly liked violin music.

Jack, at eleven, had been skeptical about the whole business of baking to begin with but actually liked the scientific part of getting the right combination of ingredients and producing the right result, and he was good at organizing the other children to do things for him.

Harry had a thing for knives and so liked chopping, although he had to be watched, and the twins would do pretty much what Jack told them to, unless they were busy fussing over Ernesto, who had no interest in what was going on at all but just loved being fussed over.

Francesca made it clear that she was in charge of the cookie cutter, but as the production line rolled out, she allowed her “cousins” all to have a turn.

For the next couple of hours, Lily wrangled the gang of children as they mixed, baked, cooled, sliced, baked, cut, and tasted so that when Daniel arrived with Matteo, the last of the amorucci was ready to be packed up and carried to the piazza for the festa.

She and her husband then tottered up the hill, laden with boxes and surrounded by the excitable children, arriving in the square to find it transformed into a humming marketplace built around a heart-shaped table already bearing dozens of fluted bowls, each one piled high with amorucci. The table had been Carlotta’s idea, and she was there decorating it. She had quite an artistic eye, as it turned out, and had left the Borsolini brothers for good to nanny Francesca and Ernesto and help out in the pasticceria.

Alberto had one of four wine stalls on the square. There were two pecorino stands, four salamis, two cashmeres, three souvenirs, three linens, one air freshener, Mario’s gelati, five fresh pasta, six fruit and vegetable, a tourist office stand, and a temporary Poliziano. The Borsolini brothers had strangely not received any of the information about the festa nor been invited to the planning meetings, and also missing was the parish priest, Father Dominico, who had been called away to Rome for a meeting with the Pope, which for curious reasons never eventuated.

For a couple more hours, Lily worked the stall as locals and tourists helped themselves to the free amorucci piled up in the bowls, then bought packet after packet after packet to take home. Violetta and Luciana would be able to afford bionic limbs on the proceeds of the inaugural Santa Ana di Chisa festa.

Finally, the crowds started drifting off, and looking up across the piazza, Lily forgot her weary legs as she saw her sister and Al standing at Mario’s gelati stand. He too had done a roaring trade: his amorucci-flavored gelato proving more popular even than the triple chocolate. It had been Francesca’s idea to put the outside bits of the cantucci hearts into an ice cream, and commercially speaking, it was an extremely viable prospect.

Rose and Al were leaning into each other, laughing at something Mario was saying and looking far from the pale, rattled creatures who had gotten off the plane clearly not talking to each other a month before.

Harry, Jack, and Francesca were chasing each other around the well, while the twins were playing with Ernesto as Daniel, sitting in the shade with Matteo, chatted to Alessandro. It turned out the two men knew each other before Lily had arrived on the scene, as Alessandro was one of the small wine producers that Daniel was targeting to represent.

They liked each other, which helped when Lily told Alessandro that she was pregnant but staying with her husband. He had been stunned at first but never angry nor possessive of her baby. He agreed to stand back and let Daniel be the child’s father and to have whatever role Lily saw fit in the future.

“I have not made the best of fathers,” he told her, “but I know you will make a wonderful mother.” He was now seeing a beautiful young doctor from Montalcino. And she wasn’t the only one Lily hoped he would see.

“Let’s clear the amorucci off the table and get ready for lunch,” she suggested to Carlotta as she watched the various members of her hotchpotch family congregate in different parts of the piazza. Soon they were all sitting around that giant heart shape eating, drinking, chatting, and laughing as they piled their plates with spaghetti thick with anchovies, caramelized onion, and breadcrumbs; orichiette in a rich bolognese ragu; fettuccine with lemon, hot peppers, and pecorino; fried zucchini flowers stuffed with three different cheeses; eggplant dripping in oil and garlic; and crusty ciabatta bread.

Lily sat between Rose and Daniel, with baby Matteo being passed from lap to lap like the happy fat plaything he was, even sitting at one point in the arms of Eugenia, pale and nervous, but there among them, with her own sister for ballast and her children in good hands. Alessandro sat across the heart from Lily, his girlfriend Angelica on one side of him, confident and strong, lacking the deep-rooted complications of which he was so full. On his other side were two empty seats populated at different times by various children and causing Lily a little anxiety until across the piazza she saw another young woman with a boy of about three shyly approach the rowdy group.

Alessandro stood as his daughter slipped in next to him and pulled her little boy onto her lap. Lily knew he wanted to leave, but she also knew he wouldn’t. He was a decent man. Slowly he sat down and introduced his daughter to his girlfriend. The next time she looked, Massimo was in his lap.

“I know you do,” she said with a smile, and she kissed the top of her baby’s head, thinking for the thousandth time that there was no better smell in all the world.

“Get Al to swap chairs with one of the kids, will you?” she asked Rose, and carrying her plump brown boy on her hip, she walked over to Mario and brought him back to the table, sitting him beside Carlotta, so close that their elbows were touching. They were two shy, stubborn people, but Lily was certain they were made for each other and would, one day, realize it.

“Santa Ana di Chisa willing Daniel will live a long and healthy life,” Violetta said, “but one day that Lily is going to make a hell of a widowed darner.”

“Not that you need to be able to darn,” added Fiorella. “Because it doesn’t really matter how you get rid of the hole, does it? Just that you do.”

“A mended sock certainly lasts a lot longer,” agreed Violetta, handing around a bag of chili pepper and chocolate amorucci. “In fact sometimes the darned bit is stronger than anything else.”