Julia. Camille. Susan. All settled in well and happily after a week. The three bought down duvets at Ikea and replaced Grazia’s heirloom coverlets. They brought home wineglasses, new shower curtains, spatulas, bath mats, and a soft dog bed for Archie. They forgot to look for towels better than the skimpy new ones in their bathrooms. No one wanted to go back to Ikea’s vast parking lot and endless aisles. Camille found it annoying to be there at all, though Gianni insisted it was the only place to stock up on practical items. Camille thought it was depressing that someone could furnish an entire apartment in an afternoon and have a pleasant place with absolutely no dimension at all.
At the Saturday antique market, Susan found romantic crystal sconces—twenty euros!—for her bedside. Camille spotted a brass library lamp with sufficient wattage. Julia moved a marble pedestal lamp from the back hall chest to her room. Julia chose place mats in town and Camille selected a couple of soft throws for reading by the fire. Susan began to keep flowers on the kitchen table and on the broad stone sill in a living room window. They equipped each bath with a small space heater to take off the morning chill. The villa’s thermostat must be pre-programmed but they haven’t yet figured out how to override the settings. Heat goes off totally at midnight and back on at six, not fast enough to warm up the house by the time they get up.
Wi-Fi works better than at home in North Carolina, but somehow the phones, with new chips Gianni bought, have low signals. Only messages marked TIM come through.
“Who is this Tim who keeps calling?” Camille wonders.
“We don’t know any Tim,” Julia agrees. When Gianni explains that TIM is not a strange man but Telecom Italia Mobile, they startle him as they whoop with laughter, get caught up with it, and can’t stop. Uncontrolled laughter, the kind that hurts, catapults them to the next stage, the one where they fully realize how little they know and how much they want to find out.
The delivery of the blue Cinquecento feels like a milestone. Wheels. Grazia adds the car price and insurance to their lease and retains the ownership papers. “This way it’s yours; I hold it for you until you are residents,” she explains. The women don’t fully understand but go with it. Though the backseat requires contortion, the front is roomy. Being the smallest, Julia isn’t happy about her fate to fold into the rear. Susan already has admired the Italian driving skills and is anxious to practice. As soon as Gianni and his cousin deliver the car, she takes off. “Where are you going?” Camille calls out to her.
“I’ll try to find that nursery we passed. Hyacinths and crocuses would look pretty along the drive. I wonder if anemones will grow. I’ve never had luck with them.” She grinds the gears, backs into the turnaround, and shoots up the hill. She opens the ragtop just as Luisa did in all kinds of weather.
Julia studies her new cookbook, The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well, a classic by Pellegrino Artusi. Since it was published in 1891, she thought it would be only a launching pad for her, the recipes antiquated and calling for many ingredients no longer available. From her publishing job, she’s familiar with metric measures in the kitchen, but they by no means are second nature as are ounces and cups. He’s casual anyway about measuring. Pugno, she reads, a handful. Quanto basto. Just enough. Nice! As she laboriously translates recipes for ragù, risotto, ravioli, she realizes how much of the traditional cuisine carries over intact. Except nowhere does she find a recipe for pasta; Artusi assumed everyone knows that. She bought a Lorenza de’ Medici cookbook, too, and tags every other page. So simple, the ricotta crostini, even the osso bucco. Julia hits on the idea of keeping a good log of what she cooks. Then she wonders if she could tie her cooking adventures to her learning of Italian. She has a flash—a book published by Mulberry Press! Learning Italian. Oh, brilliant. This would double the fun of learning both. About everything served at the table, there must a story, an anecdote, something to learn, and obviously, new words.
This morning, Camille sets up a place to paint in the room opposite hers. By rearranging the daybeds and cane chairs, she clears a spacious corner where she shoves a desk under the window. Gianni is bringing a rectangle of wood two feet longer than the desk. He’ll help her cover it in canvas and place it over a layer of felt on top of the desk. This will protect the tooled leather insert as well as give her a good work surface. She longs for the light of the glass-fronted limonaia, but that will have to wait until spring. She plans to start with still lifes, maybe à la Giorgio Morandi. She’s found a book on him in one of the bookcases, along with a two-volume set on the history of frescoes and a stack of paperback art books on Tiziano, Pontormo, Sassetta, and Bronzino. She could, she realizes, study just that bundle all year. Pontormo’s favorite color, and hers, an icy apricot. He favored mauve, ash, washed-out blue, but also aqua and plum. Bronzino, such stark clarity; Tiziano, those heartbreaking, immortal faces; Sassetta—how he cleverly worked landscapes into the backgrounds of the religious subject matter. She pores over the Morandi paintings. Bottles, bowls, pitchers, essential shapes pared into abstraction. Even his landscapes were all about volume. If she painted as many repeats as he did of the same chalky-colored cylinders she’d go crazy. Same with Cézanne and those endless Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes.
Start simply. Three kumquats on a blue plate. Even that isn’t simple, not if you want to capture in paint the essence of kumquats, something like that scented mist they emit from the skin when zested. On a small table raided from the pantry, she arranges her supplies. When will she pick up a brush, uncap a tube of zinc white, and begin?
Julia leaves a note on the kitchen table: Walking into town and will stay through lunch. She tucks her camera and her thick five-subject notebook into her bag. Off to see the wizard, she used to say to Lizzie. Alive somewhere, Lizzie. Probably fuzzy and sick and full of blame. Wade. Four in the morning in Savannah and where does he lay his head? No, no, not now, she said to the surging memory of his solid, comforting presence in the bed beside her, his even-breathing self. She forced his silhouette onto a view of blue hills whose undulations resembled the contours of a sleeping man under rumpled sheets.
A stooped woman in one of those print housedresses, or are they some kind of wraparound apron, straddles a ditch and parts the weeds. Julia looks at the weedy plants piled on newspaper at her feet. “Buon giorno,” she calls, startling the woman. “Mangia questa insalata?” You eat this salad? she manages.
“Sì, la nostra insalata del campo.” Our field lettuces, but Julia understands nothing after that. The woman holds up a curly handful she’s just cut, then tosses it onto the paper. From her basket, she takes a porcini mushroom as large as a fried egg and offers it to Julia. Crudo is part of what she says. Raw. Only parmigiano and oil. Julia gets this. She’s exhilarated to have her first conversation in Italian.
“Sono Julia,” I’m Julia. She extends her hand. “Abito…” She couldn’t think of what to say after “I live” so she pointed behind her. “Villa Assunta.”
“La casa di Luisa,” the woman says. Her smile reveals gaps where incisors should be. “Sono Patrizia.” She points to a square smudge of house down below in the valley. Julia assumes she’s saying that they’re neighbors.
“Grazie, Patrizia, ciao.” She does not yet know that one doesn’t just say ciao to someone you’ve just met.
“Arriverderla,” Patrizia responds formally.
Julia folds a tissue around the prize porcini and carefully places it in her bag. A raw salad of shaved porcini sprinkled with olive oil and parmigiano. How simple can food get?
In town, she stares at stone crests above doors, slashes of light down the alleyway streets, the row of slender marble columns on a long balcony, a glimpse of a frescoed ceiling in an upstairs apartment, a boy who stepped out of a Piero della Francesca painting. (If she stays a dozen years, she still will see something new every time she enters San Rocco.) She reads all the posted menus and takes a few notes—ribollita, pollo al diavolo, stinco di manzo, zolfini. The Trattoria Danzetti’s door flies open and she sees a chef eating his early lunch with the staff. She would like to join them. A waiter steps outside to smoke. At the pastry shop she admires the woven tops of the fruit crostatas, like Annetta’s. What a skill with dough, although she didn’t like them very much. Such a difference—American pies are piled with sweetened fruit whereas these favorites are just a rather thin layer of fruit jam. She selects some raisin pastries for tomorrow’s breakfast, then at Anna’s buys artichokes just arrived from Sicily.
Macelleria. Butcher shop. She steps in and gasps. An enormous cow stripped of hide hangs from a chain in the ceiling. A paper towel on the floor catches the last drops of blood. A small crowd seems to be admiring the haunches. Covering her mouth and nose, discreetly she hopes, she turns to the glass cases. As she catches the butcher’s eye he laughs and winks, recognizing immediately the American’s squeamish reaction to his prize from the Chianina beef auction. Julia bites her lip and tries not to turn away from the lolling head of a rooster and his flopping red comb. She manages to order three thick veal chops. At the doll-house-sized grocery, she stocks up on supplies and asks for delivery. They can take home her veal, her prized porcini, and pastries, too. Dinner is shaping up nicely. But it’s time for lunch now and she returns to Stefano’s trattoria.
An American man stands by a table of six women. Stefano pours wine as the American explains the varietal to upturned faces. Everyone tastes. Stefano seats Julia at the next table and recommends the ribollita his aunt is serving forth today. “A soup that gives you the energy to climb Mount Amiata. And let me introduce your fellow countryman. He is Chris Burns and these are his ladies on the tour of food and wine. He brings them always to my crazy father’s trattoria to taste la cucina casalinga, the home cooking. Chris, this signora is La Julia. She has come to live here.” They begin to chat, everyone half turned in their seats. They’re from Northern California, traveling for two weeks with Chris, a winemaker who takes special clients on in-depth tasting trips twice a year. San Rocco is one of their stops because of the local syrah and because Chris and Stefano struck up a friendship at a wine fair a couple of years ago.
“I don’t want to interrupt your tasting. Great to meet you!” She reaches for her notebook, ready for a lovely solitary lunch.
“Don’t eat alone, pull your chair over here,” Chris says. “Stefano can shift us over.” She does. She sits between Lucy, who owns pizza restaurants in Marin, and Alicia, who, with her husband, owns a chain of San Francisco wine stores. Stefano brings out chicken liver crostini and a platter of fried porcini. Chris pours her a glass of what they’re tasting. “This is juicy.” He holds a big gulp in his mouth and rotates his head in circles. “Only one year in oak.” Julia thinks he’ll go on about how the wine was produced, but he says instead, “Reminds me of the purple velvet dress my high school girlfriend wore to the prom. Just luscious. Nothing has ever been more luscious than that dress until now.” The women laugh.
Julia takes a long taste and says, “Well! It reminds me of a bowl of hot grapes in the sun when I first kissed my college boyfriend!” They all touch glasses just as the one o’clock bell strikes. She tells them what Paolino taught her about the nanny-goat bell. Her soup arrives with their potato and speck ravioli that Chris has paired with the wine. He spears one of his onto her bread plate.
They talk food. Just in from Florence, they have many recommendations, so many that Julia grabs her notebook. “I am dying to get to Florence,” she tells them. Then she shares the story, in brief, of how she and two friends upturned their lives and came here to learn Italian, eat, explore, and figure out what shape the future should take. Chris listens intently.
Julia thinks, He’s cute. Cute? Is she reverting to the high school proms? But he is attractive, not in an obvious tall-golden-god way like Wade, but full of life.
He insists that she share their braised quail with juniper berries. He hops up to open his second offering, a one hundred percent sangiovese. “Blood of Jove, that’s what sangiovese means. The Roman god. Yes, that old. Back down to the most ancient roots. The Tuscans have preferred this wine since then.” She notices his hands, too. Well formed, nails cut straight, and a firm grip on the bottle.
He pauses every other bite to say, “Oh, this is good. This is so good.” His blunt-cut tawny brown hair keeps falling across his forehead. His face seems sculpted, all angles that complement each other. Ears—why am I noticing his ears? Usually they’re ugly and primitive—but he has such neat ones, small cockle shells against his head.
“I’m a southern girl,” she says, “and I know quail. I was raised on smothered quail. And this is the best I’ve ever tasted.”
Stefano is passing around the platter. “Three hours in the slow oven. Until they are almost but not quite falling apart. And you have the juniper, olives, thyme, and for goodness, the vin santo.”
Chris is delighted that he mentions vin santo. One of the great ones is made nearby and he plans to offer it with the fig and walnut tart for dessert. Just a taste. There is much to do this afternoon.
A few kilometers out in the country, Susan sees a sign for Borgo Santa Caterina. Since all roads are intriguing, she turns down a stone-wall-lined lane barely wide enough for the Cinquecento. If she meets a car, someone must back up. She follows a sign pointing down an unpaved road. Soon she curves into a pebble drive lined with massive lemon trees in pots. Surely one of the Medicis lived here. Flat and unadorned, the peachy stucco façade of the immense villa must be half a city block long. A discreet sign: HOTEL SANTA CATERINA. Curious to see inside, she stops for lunch.
This has to be the seat of an aristocratic family from the 1300s—massive chestnut madie and armadi line a vast room whose windows are swagged and draped in crimson brocade, the walls hung with tapestries and brooding paintings of robust half-naked women, putti, and horses. A slender Italian—what a shiny gray suit—leads her into a dining room with arched glass doors along one side of a former limonaia. The place could be nowhere but Italy. Shiny suit comes over and offers a glass of prosecco. Luca, he introduces himself. Susan sees that the suit isn’t really mafioso; it’s beautifully cut and topstitched, obviously bespoke. She likes the pocket handkerchief of orange silk.
One bite of the pasta with duck sauce and even a novice knows an Italian is in the kitchen. She declines a secondo and asks for a salad. Susan looks out at the garden, where roses trained on iron hoops along a wall frame views of distant volcanos and the broad valley. A few yellow buds still bloom. Is that Mermaid? Such a vigorous climber, thorns sharp enough for Christ’s crown, with flat flowers the color of lemon juice. She’s fascinated by the lack of grass in Italian gardens; it’s such a staple in southern yards. And there are no foundation plants; the building firmly meets the ground where a narrow sidewalk rings the house. Marciapiedi, Luca explains. March of feet? Drainage away from the building, she supposes.
After lunch, Luca opens a door and gestures to the garden, pool, and spa. “The hotel is my domain; all this belongs to the inspiration of my wife, Gilda. You may find her in the spa or the cooking school right beyond.”
“You’re the owner? My compliments! It’s a fantasy of Italy here. Do I have to wake up?” He comments that tourist season is ending and is she traveling alone? Susan tells him about Villa Assunta, which he knows, having gone to school with Grazia.
“Please, bring your friends. You are always welcome. Take a look around. My family has been here from many centuries. We would like to escape and go to Brazil or some islands but we must stay always.”
Susan laughs. “You know the grass is always greener,” she says, but he looks puzzled. Maybe because there’s no grass.
Eva and Caroline will love this when they visit, especially the thermal pool paved with shiny tessellated mosaic. They’d be sparkling all over. She could pass on the red-wine bath in a copper tub and the hot gel massage tables, but even in late October, the outdoor pool that you wade into gradually, as into a pond, looks inviting. She almost sees Eva in her raspberry bikini and Caroline in a bright cover-up, hiding her extra ten, well maybe twenty, pounds, as they step into the water.
She buttons her jacket against a wicked wind shooting through the olive grove. Sprung from everything known, she thought. How shocking to be out in the world on my own. Even sprung from the dragging heaviness of Aaron, who seemed not as dead now. More of a companionable memory. She could think now of how Aaron would love the duck. He’d use the word unctuous. He’d want to buy the girls bracelets and shoes in San Rocco. He’d want to walk all the labyrinthine streets at night. He was no longer the confused face looking at her with accusing eyes. He was all his ages again, from the long-haired protester against Vietnam to the terrified new father leaning over Eva as she was bundled up and taken from the orphanage to the taxi, to the suave business owner cinching a contract.
How strange that we are feeling this comfortable, she muses. As though we just stepped in a boat and found the current moving us gently along.
“Ciao, I’m just saying hello.” Susan steps inside the stone building marked La Cucina Santa Caterina. Luca’s wife, Gilda, and an assistant scrub a marble worktable. Broth simmers on the back hob of an eight-burner blue stove. She introduces herself. “I just had a delicious lunch and Luca said I should take a tour.” Gilda, small and slender like Luca, has a narrow face and russet hair combed straight back, giving her the look of a benign fox in a storybook.
“We are just preparing for an American group coming in today.” She gestures to the stack of lamb chops and a mound of tough-looking greens. The assistant slides a tray of focaccia out of the oven. Gilda offers an espresso and Susan is tempted to stay, but surely it would be an imposition. Instead, she asks if the school is open to nonguests.
“We can always arrange something.” Gilda smiles. Yes, Susan thinks, it’s Italy. I’m beginning to understand. That’s the motto.
As Susan searches for her keys, a Mercedes minibus pulls into the parking area and a group of women tumbles out. Julia! She jumps down smiling. “Julia, hey! What on earth?”
“What are you doing here? Susan, these are friends I met at Stefano’s and they invited me to join their cooking class with a superb chef. This is Chris. He’s guiding them to all the best places in Tuscany. This is my friend Susan. We ran away together.”
“You’ll love that cooking school. I met Gilda. It already smells good in there. Shall I come back for you?”
“No, no,” Chris said. “I have to run back into town anyway. Dinner will be later, whatever we cook this afternoon reappears with a lot of good wines to taste. You’re all welcome.”
“Another time, I’d love to but I’ll head home now. My dog, Archie, has been locked inside all day. Bye! Have fun.”
Camille finds the delivered groceries by the door. Julia and Susan are still out exploring while she’s spent the day in her new studio reading art books. Archie looks in, his head tilted. She lets him out twice, but otherwise how luxurious, having a silent day to herself. They’ve been wildly busy making the place theirs, now finally, time just to be there. She’s never lived in a house that has a history longer than her own life multiplied by ten. All the weddings, funerals, tears, orgasms, baptisms, secret encounters, all the churned emotions and cooking smells, private triumphs, and birth cries seeped into the walls. (She hopes Grazia’s father didn’t choke at the kitchen table where she will have her dinner tonight.) The house must rest on bedrock reaching down to water and fire.
In a box under the stairs, she’s found sepia images going back to the beginning of photography. Small men wearing the rough suits they were married and buried in, holding their hats and staring blankly into the future. Brides with drooping bouquets: myopic, pious, dour, but one quite lyrically beautiful leaning on a balustrade. From her spirited look, she must have been in love with the person aiming the camera, but maybe she was just one of those people who looks back at the world with zest. A couple of dead babies, propped up on pillows but with closed eyes, cotton stuffed in their nostrils, and nosegays in their little folded hands. One of a beach party. Must have been World War II era—a long table, men in wife-beater undershirts and women in heavy one-piece bathing suits. Rubberized? All raising their glasses. Smoking cigarettes. One hefty guy in suspenders makes a V with his fingers—horns, the cuckold sign—over another’s head. Grazia’s grandparents must be among them but this party is long over and who remembers? The photograph Camille loves most is of the front door of Villa Assunta. No one interferes with the image. Just the heavy, carved door. Who took it? Half open, and a crack of sunlight angles in like, she mused, a spirit. She toyed with painting something from the photos. She loved seeing them and imagining the life in each. The cracked-open door? How to paint a door? Carefully she packs the box and replaces it on the shelf under the stairs. I don’t want to paint the past. She knows that.
“Julia will be late,” Susan announces, setting down a bag of groceries. “Much to tell. I saw a heaven of a garden. The countryside around here is sublime. You’ve got to turn into a landscape painter! Ha, I may. Not those sappy sunflower fields you see in every gallery. But, you know, the heart of this place. And they’re everywhere—paintings waiting to happen.” She tells Camille about meeting Julia, Chris’s group, the cooking school, and the duck pasta.
“Let’s surprise her and have dinner ready. Not that she’ll be hungry.”
“Maybe she’ll go out with Chris. He’s about her age, maybe younger. You know, it hardly registered, he’s quite attractive, but I think he has one blue eye and one kind of hazel.”