introduction
Many years ago, I made my first voyage to Italy to study art in the Eternal City and thereafter returned time and again as a tourist. In short order: I met a man, got married at Rome City Hall on Michelangelo's magnificent Campidoglio during an electricity and bus strike, bought a tiny house in Umbria, worked in Deruta painting ceramics, met a group of artists from the Academia di Belle Arte of Perugia, danced at every festa in the region with any guy who asked, bought and renovated a big old farmhouse, lived the good life and got divorced. Picking up the pieces and fast forward, I found I could not live without this Italian part of my soul and I resolved to remake my life there on my own terms. I choose to leave my beloved Umbria for the attractions of a warmer climate close to the sea: Puglia.
I have just begun my discovery of this culturally rich region called the Salento, southern Puglia, the deep heel of the boot. I invite you to share these discoveries with me and a voyage off the beaten track. Mary |
background
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ART & FOOD
As an artist I was deeply affected by the diverse experiences I have had in Italy. My first time there was as a student at Tyler School of Art. I had a studio that overlooked the Tiber, nice digs. I remember the simple trattorias (da Nino, Via Flamminia) the transvestite hookers on the nearby bridge, changing money on the black market, group excursions with classmates to ancient Etruscan sites, Porta Portese market when it was teeming with wonderful finds, Italian men who would not leave us alone and followed us on their motorinos, the overwhelming and transportive piazzas, architecture and art, the light. My entire family (5 siblings and parents) joined me and we toured around Lazio, Umbria and Tuscany. I remember one trip vividly driving over miles and miles of hilly country to Orvieto until suddenly the trees separated like a curtain and there in the valley, the light striking the gold and mirrored mosaic bits of the cathedral! Magical. This was not only an artistic awaking for me, but a culinary one as well. I developed an obsession with Penne Arrabiata and enjoyed the characteristic flavors of Saltimbocca alla Romana, Ossobucco, polenta, Mille Foglie, Monte Bianco, Creme Cara mel,pizza al taglia con cipolle, and other dishes, many now out of favor. I learned how to eat fruit with a knife and fork. Make a nice lunch on a rosetta roll. We went to Tazza d'Oro for granita di cafe and to San Eustacio for the best espresso. We were blessed with a stipend for our dining needs, since we were all housed in pensione and without kitchens, what a gift! Upon my return Mom gifted me my first cookbook on Roman cooking: I followed my favorite recipes to the letter I wanted so badly to recreate those sharply delineated flavors. Some years of restaurant work followed which supplemented my meager teaching salary and gave me a foundation in food service experience: I started in the pantry, prepping salad, seafood, making dressings and appetizers, learned about cheese, learned how to properly cook and love fish and cultivate true cooking skills, all thanks to Neal Stein's The Fish Market in Philadelphia. The artist in me, the traveler in me, the restaurant worker and perhaps the hedonist, all contributed to make me the cook I am today....but it all began with a yearning for the flavors of my first foreign experience and later on, for the enriching experience of conviviality: feeding and serving is loving after all. After that, there was no keeping me away, and I made time and saved money to continue my travels there. I dragged friends and boyfriends, traveling to Sicily, Venice, to Rome and Florence again and again, always enlarging my experiences. My language studies dragged on and it took years to acquire some fluency. On one of those impulsive trips to visit a good friend whose husband had been transferred to Rome with his company, I met my husband, there as a visiting guest artist at the American Academy. One of our first conversations was how we both wanted to buy a house in Italy. The next summer we were married there. That summer we were "gifted" a month long stay at his Milan gallerist's vacation home in Santa Maria de Leuca in lieu of a cancelled solo show promised to him. We turned this mortifying, typically Italian experience (important things promised, reneged upon at the last minute...) to our benefit. They gave us the use of an old Citroen and we drove that thing from Milan straight to the tip of the heel, with frequent stops to stick a hose into the ever over heating radiator. Our route wove the small coastal towns together like a string of beautiful pearls: Castel del Monte, Barletta, Trani, Molfetta, Bari, Ruvo, Alberobello, Lecce and down down to the tip of the heel. This was my introduction to Puglia. TRULLI VACATION That home near Salve was wonderful: remote, two semi conical trulli structures and a pool in-between. Outdoor kitchen, beds and tables, that was it. No locks. Theft was common so furnishings were never lux there. Geraniums grew in tangled hedges, the sun was hot, the air shrill with cicadas...the cooper red earth was blanketed with crackling dry tomato plants pulled down under the weight of bundles of those tiny tasty jewels. The olive trees each twisted into their own exotic shape, fenced with lava rock, an austere landscape. The small towns, with their barren treeless streets and flat unadorned facades, came alive at night, often with luminary lights during religious festivals when the residents emptied into the streets. It was here that I made friends with a small ceramic bottega in Tricase, Fatto al Mano, run by Agostino Branca (Via Tempio, 73039 Tricase LE, Italy). If you go, there is a plate of mine I painted then, high up on a shelf, enlivened with a drawing of a goat. Agostino has an open door policy, anyone who wanders in can sit down and work the clay or paint some bisque, adult or child alike. He introduced us to Fernando Baglivo antique dealer and chronic (in a good way) misanthrope. We ate purple carrots, fava puree with bitter greens and drank the newly rediscovered local Primitivo and Negroamaro wine. We saw menhir and dolmen and explored the various towns and searched for the "via Tempios" which would indicate the presence of an old Jewish Ghetto of which there were many in this region. Our sojourn there lasted a month. The "gift" car ended up parked on the property of a friend of my husband's villa, an important address on Via Appia Antica, Rome and gave us much trouble when it was left to rot and rust becoming a home for mice and impossible to "demolire" (demolish, or take off the road) the proper legal way, but someone "found a way to do that" embarrassing as that all was for us. Since the ex and I had met on a conversation about wanting to own a home in Italy and it was a dream we fulfilled almost immediately. We drew a 50 kilometer circle around Rome and decided to search within that range, easy access from Rome airport. On the last night of our honeymoon summer we found a little 3 story house in the town of Piedicolle for $23,000. There was no electricity to properly view it. We bought it. We left that week to return to teaching jobs and did not return until the next summer. "...those who have never experienced solitude in a strange and complex place---never arrived in the unknown without credentials, without introductions to the right people, or the wrong ones---have missed an exigent luxury.....have perhaps never felt the full presence of the unfamiliar. It is thus one achieves a slow, indelible intimacy with place, learning to match it's moods with one's own. At such times it is as if a destination had awaited us with nearly human expectation and with an exquisite blend of receptivity and detachment." Shirley Hazard, The Ancient Shore, Dispatches from Naples LIFE IN A TINY TOWN Those first several summers I admit I almost "hide" in that house so terrified was I to be unable to speak Italian. Slowly that changed, the town and it's life was an introduction to the simple life of those people: I watched the women making tomato sauce in the sun, baking bread or sweets in a common oven, killing, plucking and roasting chickens, working their gardens each and every morning and evening, no matter how old they were or how difficult it was to get up and down the hill to their various plots. I can still vividly see each and every face, marked in it's own way, hear their voices, hoarse or shrill, see their well used house dresses, their caps and boots and watch them couple up in the Api or other tiny vehicle. Some, deceased, still hold places in my heart, in particular, Mario who later found us our large country home nearby. Tall, happy, laughing Mario, tainted with with blue/green from years of spraying his fields with copper sulfates, a generous man with no ulterior motives and a lovely retiring wife. I cried when he died. It was also sad when his falling down family house along the road out of town, was sold. As artists he had given us studios there and we often met up for laughs, stories about the past life in the poor rustic kitchen or to pick figs. They knocked it down and put up twin California-Umbrian style villettes, still today strangely out of place on that otherwise lonely road. Upon our return the following summer I was a bit terrified with our townsfolk: all the men sat enmass outside the Bar/Tabaccaio, most of them had missing teeth and for a moment I thought, what have we gotten in to here? Most of the women lined up in their odd chairs at the entrance to the old town. An alimentari shared space with Oscar's bar so most of your pasta, dairy etc was just a short walk away. In those days you could live in the paese and never have to leave because everything came to you. When people did leave, they saved gas by coasting down the hill in neutral. The townspeople lived in creative economy and it was a shock to me when 10 years later I saw those same people buying heaps of prosciutto in the supermarket and I remember the exact year when useless decorative items first appeared at the Upim. There was the kitchen and utensil truck, the fruit and vegetable truck, the frozen food truck, the mattress truck, the fish truck and most importantly, the bread truck: all announced by some tinny sounding microphone. Lunch was never eaten until the bread came and the women lined up on the bench in the parking piazza until it came, then scurried back home. We had lots of invitations then, and even "contracted" a neighbor to cook for us, until her fried rabbit gave us diarrhea, no doubt she was skimping on the oil using something very old. She and her husband became problematic for us, when we left them a set of keys to look after our house, and came home one summer to find a pig being slaughtered in our cantina. A walk down the street in late afternoon, was to encounter the calls to me from the men in their darkened cantinas: "Signora! come! have a drink with us!" Sometimes I did: I gunned down some thick short glass of vino nero heavy with the flavor of the sulfates they cleaned their barrels with. I tried to avoid too much of that. Daria, the wife of a carpenter taught me how to make pasta. She was bright and cheerful, relative to the more overburdened women and maintained an shapely figure under the housedress. When I remarked on that and she said you had to always stay in shape, and always keep moving! Her husband was a superb craftsman with a big workshop housed in several deserted rooms of the castle wall: I could never keep my eyes off the dark stone interiors when I was in there, it was difficult not to wander off on my own into every corner. From that side of town there was a view. A very special view....a view that could heal you. I know I am not the only one to feel that: an American friend came. I took him out on the hill. He just sat down and looked, experienced that view. He sat there absolutely still, not moving, for what seemed like an hour. THE HILL That hill as it begins at your feet, drops softly and quickly down, down, down. The vegetable gardens extend only a fraction of the way, after that, some plots of trees for lumber, after that, the "burrone", aka no mans land, you never went down there or as one of the matriarchs said once with alarm, "The mother of all serpents lives down there!" (and she was right because I saw that serpent one day and the fragment I saw was as thick as my arm). You could not see the bottom as it seemed to curl back underneath you. Then down there somewhere, the land begins to rise again pushing away from the decline in a long slow series of pastures far far away, dotted with puffs of trees and herds of sheep, like distant ants, grazing. Sometimes the tingle of their bells. Crowning the hill, the town of Collazzone; a tower, a crust of medieval houses catching the last rays of each days sun. Big cumulous clouds gathered behind, pushed up by the Apennines, hidden from view. The space distance on this particular hill is unlike any other and still today when I am there, it transports me; here, the landscape is a healing thing. PEOPLE Small, lean Marie, scurried about the town in constant motion, pushing a wheelbarrow, cleaning, cooking, her energy never expired, she overburdened herself with work like a penance. Under her care, our tiny street was adorned with greenery in pots along the edges and steps. Her son Egidio was the "junk man". With his truck he collected metal and odd bits which he stored in an open field outside the town, much to the chagrin of the local government. He had been doing agricultural work but then switched to a factory job in the 60s, in the valley. Those jobs all dried up during the Tangentopoli economic crisis and he turned to his present occupation. Most of his front teeth were gone but he was a kind of philosopher and my ex enjoyed talking to him. When one summer my husband "confessed" he was Jewish, Egidio in astonishment remarked: "But , you can't be Jewish, Jews have horns!". Statement of fact. There was an innocence in this and it followed the fact that most of these people did not stray from home: you could point to a town on a far hill and ask if someone had ever been there, and the answer was often no: we have not been to that town, on occasion Perugia and certainly not Rome! And why should they have gone? all life was here, well, until you needed a hospital. Many of those left in the old town, middle age and above, if they had an education at all, had schooling only until the age of 12 or 14 then left to work. Up until 1965 there was no running water; it was transported from a fountain on the hillside by the women and girls of the town. In the case of our town, the system tenant farming prevailed until the mid 60s. The entire town and it's surrounding land was property of one "Padrone" who still at this telling, was the object of much ire on the part of the elderly townspeople who told tales of their suffered under his rule. These included: "He kept a dish of salt on the table in the entry room while you were waiting to meet with him. Woe be the person who took a pinch of salt from that dish to put in his pocket! because they were punished." "My sister at 14 came down with a severe fever. We asked the Padrone to use his cart to take her to the doctor. He refused. My sister died." "The Padrone had binoculars and would watch to make sure we were working in the fields." In the years of 1950-65 laws were passed that gave tenant farmers the right to purchase the land they had worked from the owner, at favorable prices with low cost loans. And so this system that kept Umbria, parts of Tuscany and Le Marche in poverty, changed. There was a family chapel on the property of the Padrone's villa in Piedicolle. When he died, the townspeople blocked his hearse on the way there and forced the family to bury his body in the "common" cemetery. In 1982 the Mezzadria (the system of tenant farming) was officially banned. This part of our town's population are however subject to a fate based outlook on life an example of which, humorous to me, is the expression "Tiriamo avanti!" ("We drag ourselves along!") as a response to "How are you?". We are all doing much better thank you, because now our sons and daughters have better jobs, do "clean work", we enjoy family life with grandparents at home who mind the children and sometimes cook and clean. There is a hospital a little closer and we still eat food that is "genuina" ! (genuine, without chemicals). We are in charge of our destiny, well as far as it goes to the point where the government steps in and taxes us to death! But much better, thank you. In reality Italy suffers greatly from overregulation of every level and a job market that is dead. It is not a meritocracy, one reason why "L'America" still beckons, though standards of living are under attack there too, for different reasons. There was tragedy in this village like everywhere else on earth. But I had never witnessed such events up close, because in New York, you never knew your neighbors. Within a town population of perhaps 250, there were shootings, murder, drug overdose and death due to alcoholism. I could go from house to house up the road and attach to almost every one, a family tragedy. I will not outline these because it would be cruel too do so. We all know the downside of small town life. Everyone knows everyone else's business. When we were not home, the women in their chairs along the entrance to your little street would tell us "Someone called, the phone range 5 times! They did not leave a message." "Oh! so you are home! Where were you? Always "in giro" !" (traveling around i.e. uselessly?). For this I was happy when we left for the "country" not far away. FESTAS One of the few reasons one might leave the paese would be for a festival: every small town in Umbria has it's seasonal festival. At these festivals you can eat well and cheaply, dance for free and meet friends. These are sometimes managed by church groups for the benefit of the church itself or the various town needs. A lot of money was banked at these festivals, for which reason they presented a real threat to the survival of restaurants and were therefore subject to ever changing regulation: in this way, the Provincia also made money on fines or permits. All summer long you could tell where the festivals were not only due to the profusion of billboards advertising these events but also because you could hear them across the entire valley. The sound of the accordian or a booming base wafted in the updrafts of summer heat, followed by massive firework displays on the final day. Often you could see a line up of these, on the distant hills and we would practice our geography in attempting to name their location as they lite up the night sky. For us on the hill, this was never a disturbing sound except perhaps for the "super festivals" that developed in later years, aimed at young people who left the fields strewn with hypodermic needles. Umbria has a big heroin problem. In the case of our town, this group was deeded a parcel of land perfectly in the center and they slowly developed it, constructing a building that housed a bar, a patio with a dance floor, an apartment that looked over the calcetto field (a short soccer field). Dining tables were placed under a pinetta, small pine tree grove at these times. As everyone said, this Circolo, it's bar and it's festas kept the town alive, because otherwise the young people were just leaving and making lives off the hill in towns where life was more convenient and housing more modern. The calcetto festival of Piedicolle brought life back to the town for two weeks during the late summer. To this day the calcetto festival prevails and has done it's part in "saving the town". The "Circolo" of Piedicolle had a big volunteer crew each summer: each person, their task. There was a head cook and those under her. Everything was cooked on wood in a large covered outdoor grill room. Rolando, whose work it was to cut and sell the oak of the wild bosco (forest) from various locations all over Umbria, supplied the wood. The men set up the field, the women shopped or prepared local produce. Smoke poured from the tin roof of the grill room as the preparations began. Our neighbors manned the "cassa" (cash register) or acted as clean up crew and the children delivered food to the tables. In this way, you got to speak to everyone. The bleachers filled up with fans watching the game. Sometimes there were other types of festivals and there would be music and dancing. The Doctor who usually acted as MC and unofficial mayor of our town, and his talented daughter, had a band, played music and sang on these occasions and this was my favorite part, the music and dancing. The entire town participated. Of late the only change is that the depopulated old town has newly arrived Muslim families, whose children, drawn by the festivities, hang loosely around the fringes. I have watched the women attempt to gently draw them in, but of course, dancing is prohibited to them, not to mention the possible appearance of pork on the menu. In many local towns, the dance floors may be more than one: one for ballo lischio (ballroom dancing) and others for the younger people but the ballo lischio pista (dance floor), included dancers from 3 to 103. Italians seem to have a particular talent for singing and little stage fright: I put this up to the strong oral tradition that exists as part of the Italian educational system. For an Exam, you may be required to stand in front of your teachers and speak and answer questions. You go prepared. In any case, they are not a shy people and there are many talentented voices among them. Karaoke? grandma is singing! Each festival song program contains pop as well as perennial festival favorites as well as tangos, waltzes and polkas. In short, everyone dances. Your car mechanic dances, your plumber dances, the woman who works the deli counter at the supermarket dances, elegant couples who takes lessons whirl away and enthusiastic little children are caught up in the movement and dance. I shocked myself one New Years Eve holiday when visiting friends in Cascia, the Karaoke started up, and I grabbed the mic! I learned something about myself that night, I am a naturally showwoman. I am a microphone hog. I can pick it up as it goes along..... Every kind of couple is there on the dance floor, cleaned up and sparkling, whirling their way through a polka, waltz or mazurka, each and every couple, their own style. Because my ex did not dance, and preferred to sit passively smoking a cigar or in conversation with a local discovering the entire structure of their family tree (ps valuable information) forlorn little men sat until they got the courage up to ask me to dance. For some reason unknown to me I discovered I was blessed with the ability to pick up and follow almost any of these dance styles rapidly. In most cases I accelarated the pace lickity-split, and had these unpartnered gentleman in high heart rate mode in no time. Honestly I felt in some cases they might have a heart attack! of course, they didn't want to stop. Looking back now, I recognize that during these moments, I experienced a profound sense of "rightness", joy, and harmony wrought of social interaction and group celebration. Where as in the US I never had this feeling of love of family, love of the group, simple things, here it pulled my heart strings in a way I could not understand and challenged my jaded urban attitude: family! I had run away from that! Intergenerational parties? no way! I became a soppy sentimental participant and sympathetic witness to the festa culture. MARIO FINDS US A HOUSE We began to talk about finding a larger house outside the paese after a few years of living there. Ostensibly we wanted larger studio space but I had bigger dreams and this was the beginning of a habit I developed that proved effective. Once a "dream" was vocalized, somehow, almost magically, it began to happen. In this case, my dream was a country house with beautiful gardens and a pool. We began to ask around. First there was the big mistake of finding a terrible tiny ruin on the way down the hill to the "burrone" and purchasing it from it's several owners. What exactly were we thinking? It was crazy and the one day we tried to get a wheeled vehicle down there, that got stuck and we knew this had been a mistake. We relisted this property a few years later with an agent, who scammed us, but managed to sell it and we came out a bit ahead. One day after that, Mario passed by my ex during his morning walk, and said, " Get it! I want to show you something". That was our introduction to the home we created in nearby Pantalla. Mario had a friend from Terni, a farmer, who had the "problem" of having to sell the home of his brother's elderly wife, the single owner and inhabitant of this rundown farmhouse on an acre of cleared land. She was getting too old to take care of herself anymore but really he was tired of coming up to check on her. Angelina lived in a series of fixed up rooms within this large property, partly modernized in the 70s. When I first saw this house, it depressed me. Barren, it sat on a slow sloping hill, with a pleasant enough view of the valley and immediate neighbors across the dirt road. The entire old part was unoccupied and composed of thin brick walls uneven in texture and not attractive. Many old beams, dark large ground floor spaces, an ex olive press. Only about a forth of the entire 3000 sq feet was renovated. There were old stalls and lean-tos and a single peach tree. One line of grapes. But the price was right. Several weeks later we negotiated to buy at about $85,000. The only way I could make this sound good to myself was the realization that "cubature" in itself had value. Like air rights, it's the ability to build and also expand, based on an old footprint, which was strictly limited in Umbria and Tuscany at that time. I stood there and looked out the window onto the land, utterly without merit or plantings and said to myself, it may not be beautiful now, but I can make it beautiful! In the meantime we could actually move in. I imagined it would take years to slowly renovate this place, but it happened much sooner due to a lucky accident, more on that later. The important thing was it was near our old village and we could afford it. The "atto" (closing) went smoothly however it was clear that the brother in law was seeking to liquidate and lock his sister-in-law away at his home and that was sad, the Judge had stern words but she was there and agreed to the sale. The sale was concluded with a dinner at Angela's brother-in-laws house, in which she handed me a sweet pair of her hand knit angora socks saying "The Signora could use these, I think they will fit." Later I found her ekgs in the house that she left filled with her furniture and other personal belongings. I still have them. The heart of Angelina. FIRST STEPS Our first task was to choose a geometra (engineer: less than an architect, more than a builder, submits all technical drawings and makes sure your project is on target and legal. Also gets competitive bids on work, makes recommendations and interfaces with the all important technical office of the commune, in our case, Todi) for any work we wanted to do. We interviewed two. The first geometra was shocked when Carlo, our second appointment showed up during their interview! oops! you don't do that comparison shopping thing in Italy, god forbid! you choose someone that someone recommends to you no questions asked. I can still remember the exact moment when (I) knew Carlo would be our geometra. He is a short stocky guy, serious and capable: he was standing assessing our house and gesticulating with his arms while balanced with legs in a sturdy V, on a pile of rocks. The image still make me smile. I was very happy many years later that we worked together and he became a friend. Pantalla. An unattractive town, mostly modern, with a string of window and door factories that went bankrupt during Tangentopoli. Nothing to recommend it! The historic center was a sad affair though not without some charm. There were stories that the Red Brigades hid here back in the day and that it was the site of an ancient pagan temple. Our building itself straddled two "communes" (townships) Todi and Collazzone. In fact, there were stories that if you died there, the corpse should exit out the back window (Collazzone) otherwise you pay a tax in Todi. And you know what they say about Pantalla: "O Pantalla! Li, le donne commandano!" (the women are in command there! i.e. dominate the men) Each little town has it's reputation. Although Pantalla was not an address I wanted to go shouting about, Todi certainly was. In fact, just the fact that we were legally situated in Todi, added a heap of value to our property which resided in a little glen called "vocabolo Buda" and therefore that's how we called it: Buda. MEET MARCELLO One could say, that everything we managed to achieve with that property was made possible by a single mistake made by our contractor. Marcello, aka "the mole" because he liked to burrow, had built a huge, completely illegal underground man cave with a full apartment and tons of storage, on a nearby hill. (I was in there more than once, though it was a closely guarded secret. There were no windows.) He was the favored contractor of the Knights of Malta and they had the reputation of modernizing everything that they renovated and therefore, Marcello, no fool, took all the spoils, which he hoarded. He had a reputation of scoffing at every law, bridling under every geometras controls and eventually drove himself pretty much out of business. He was a big personality: there was a passion in there for old materials and beautiful construction, but he was clueless as a human being in so many ways. He treated workers like slaves, verbally abused them and those included two of his two sons who worked with him (the third, most likely gay, stayed at home under the protection of his mother). I had great affection for Marcello but his problematic character was painful to watch. He lost a terrific and very capable Polish worker who later went out on his own. His eldest son had an unrelenting self destructive streak no doubt the result of his father's rantings but he was also clearly unsuited to the work that he did with his father. Back to our good luck and Marcello's mistake. Being poor artists, we began not with a big overall plan and budget but small projects, one at a time, most of them under the radar so to speak, you could do that then. We hired Marcello to do a small project that was to demolish and restructure what was a tractor shed that we wanted to reconstruct solidly as our garage and storage. It was picturesque: old terra-cotta "cups" on withered gray beams, an old unattractive baking oven where garbage was burned. This all came down without incident. Marcello brought out his favorite tool, the Bobcat, personally size, and had at the foundation area. We also wanted him to begin to remove earth that, having been turned over from the upper fields, was now about 1 meter high against the back of the longest brick wall (roughly 75 feet long) at the back of our house. However, without telling anyone or speaking to the geometra, our Marcello enthusiastically began to excavate under the very stone/brick foundation of the back of our house. I believe we were on site to check the work when we heard a big cracking noise. I walked onto the hill for a look and lo and behold there are several long cracks opening in this wall with some beams from the ground floor poking out. I was incredulous, Marcello standing, without a word. I immediately phoned the geometra to come get a look at this, but at the same time I calmly reasoned, this was going to get fixed and not by us. And that is how, Marcello, to save his reputation, sat down with Carlo and agreed to rebuild that entire wall. Not only that, he said, he would do this in stone not brick. Not only that, he would lay us a proper foundation, excavate and add gravel, rebar and concrete. At the same time, since it made sense, we negotiated to get an entirely new roof made which we needed anyway, done with old materials which would be tied into the newer well structured front of our house, with steel bands. This was a turning point in my attitude about the house. Over the course of the next months, all that work was completed, and when I saw the new beautiful stone wall, it was like a green light, I knew it was time to throw all our money into the place because there was new value here and no going back. We managed to pick up the pace: we were scrambling to wire bits of dollars over (the old lira at that point) and bit by bit it all came together. A great summer day, was being up a 7 and waiting at the window for the site of a construction truck coming up the dirt road! VOC BUDA My idea for how to maintain our house was to set it up as a self catering holiday home, with an apartment for ourselves and rentals units. This would help pay for the pool and expenses of garden and maintenance. There was plenty of space for this. The old pig stalls were demolished for a small independent cottage that had it's own private patio area nestled next to where the pool would be. We found a great earth mover who sculpted the hillside behind our house. We found another small father and son team to do a lot of beautiful stone walls. We continued with Marcello on the new principle entrance of our house, he added a beautiful typical stair and restored an old arch, which became the new entry to the ground floor kitchen. Sophie Clark a transplanted American did our garden design and we purchased from a large professional firm in Pistoia who did the planting. Creating the pool was pretty thrilling but not without its bumps, suffice it to say, we began the work with one guy, my ex fired him, we got in a law suite because we hired away his Serbian worker to finish the job. My ex acted as his assistant, and we saved money in this way, the pool was gorgeous and we never had problems with it. My idea to do holiday rentals worked well. We kept the large apartment for ourselves and rented Angelina's old apartment to small families and the cottage to couples. You never saw anyone, we only "met" at the pool. It worked off the website I created and managed and the extra income helped us with the increasing upkeep bills. Our new hillside of 250 olive trees gave us oil after 3 years but an olive grove is expensive to maintain and now, difficult to find pruners and harvesting help. I made art here, I expanding the gardens here and continued to beautify. I continued an activity I had begun when we lived in town, which was to collaborate with the ceramic factories of Deruta, a 15 minute drive from us. At first I designed for the tabletop industry but later switched to doing special art projects focused on my personal fine art research. I met many crafts people and used that access to create new and original works. Local artists I met through my ex opened gallery spaces and I exhibited here. We came every summer, based on my academic schedule and often in January although it was so cold we often decamped to warmer climes on inexpensive short flights, such as Sicily or Croatia. I gave big parties each summer cooking for a couple days in preparation. It was my pride and joy to do this. My housekeeper taught me how to fry with confidence. We hosted our old neighbors from Piedicolle and got the "stamp of approval" for what we were doing "down there in that buco Buda" ("that hole"). We had to do that to change attitudes. My proudest moment was a small dinner party with two couples from Cascia (near Norcia, a culinary micro center unique to itself). I had my eye on this large orto (vegetable garden) near our hardware store and one day saw the farmer tending it. I asked him if I could have some zucchini blossoms and he said of course Signora! come back tomorrow and I will prepare some. I scored a huge plastic bag filled and set to task of stuffing and frying. I invented a new stuffing which I made with sautéd diced zucchini, onions and herbs and 3 cheeses, ricotta saltata, mozzarella and cacciota. I made 75 blossoms. The entire 75 were consumed by the Italians with endless compliments before we even got to the main course! My culinary arrival. MARIO FINDS US A HOUSE We began to talk about finding a larger house outside the paese after a few years of living there. Ostensibly we wanted larger studio space but I had bigger dreams and this was the beginning of a habit I developed that proved effective. Once a "dream" was vocalized, somehow, almost magically, it began to happen. In this case, my dream was a country house with beautiful gardens and a pool. We began to ask around. First there was the big mistake of finding a terrible tiny ruin on the way down the hill to the "burrone" and purchasing it from it's several owners. What exactly were we thinking? It was crazy and the one day we tried to get a wheeled vehicle down there, that got stuck and we knew this had been a mistake. We relisted this property a few years later with an agent, who scammed us, but managed to sell it and we came out a bit ahead. One day after that, Mario passes by my ex during his morning walk, and says, " Get it! I want to show you something". That was our introduction to the home we created in nearby Pantalla. Mario had a friend from Terni, a farmer, who had the "problem" of having to sell the home of his brother's elderly wife, the single owner and inhabitant of this rundown farmhouse on an acre of cleared land. She was getting too old to take care of herself anymore but really he was tired of coming up to check on her. Angelina lived in a series of fixed up rooms within this large property, partly modernized in the 70s. When I first saw this house, it depressed me. Barren, it sat on a slow sloping hill, with a pleasant enough view of the valley and immediate neighbors across the dirt road. It sat right on the entry road with an ugly access stair. The entire old part was unoccupied and composed of thin brick walls uneven in texture and not attractive. The best part was the uninhabited ground floor rear, fill with massive old beams, large dark spaces of an old olive press. Only about a forth of the entire 3000 sq feet was renovated. There were old stalls and lean-tos and a single peach tree. One line of grapes. But the price was right. Several weeks later we negotiated to buy at about $85,000. The only way I could make this sound good to myself was the realization that "cubature" in itself had value. Like air rights, it's the ability to build and also expand, based on an old footprint, which was strictly limited in Umbria and Tuscany at that time. I stood there and looked out the window onto the land, utterly without merit or plantings and said to myself, it may not be beautiful now, but I can make it beautiful! In the meantime we could actually move in. I imagined it would take years to slowly renovate this place, but it happened much sooner due to a lucky accident, more on that later. The important thing was it was near our old village and we could afford it. The "atto" (closing) went smoothly however it was clear that the brother in law was seeking to liquidate and lock his sister-in-law away at his home and that was sad, the Judge had stern words but she was there and agreed to the sale. The sale was followed with a dinner at Angelina's brother-in-laws house, in which she handed me a sweet pair of her hand knit angora socks saying "The Signora could use these, I think they will fit." Later I found her ekgs in the house that she left filled with her furniture and other personal belongings. I still have them. The heart of Angelina. FIRST STEPS Our first task was to choose a geometra (engineer: less than an architect, more than a builder, submits all technical drawings and makes sure your project is on target and legal. Also gets competitive bids on work, makes recommendations and interfaces with the all important technical office of the commune, in our case, Todi) for any work we wanted to do. We interviewed two. The first geometra was shocked when Carlo, our second appointment showed up during their interview! oops! you don't do that comparison shopping thing in Italy, god forbid! you choose someone that someone recommends to you no questions asked. I can still remember the exact moment when (I) knew Carlo would be our geometra. He is a short stocky guy, serious and capable: he was standing assessing our house and gesticulating with his arms while balanced with legs in a sturdy V, on a pile of rocks. The image still makes me smile. I was very happy many years later that we chose Carlo and he became a friend. Pantalla. An unattractive town, mostly modern, with a string of window and door factories that went bankrupt during Tangentopoli. Nothing to recommend it! The historic center was a sad affair though not without some charm. There were stories that the Red Brigades hid here back in the day and that it was the site of an ancient pagan temple. Our building itself straddled two "communes" (townships) Todi and Collazzone. In fact, there were stories that if you died there, the corpse should exit out the back window (Collazzone) otherwise you pay a tax in Todi. And you know what they say about Pantalla: "O Pantalla! Li, le donne commandano!" (the women are in command there! i.e. dominate the men) Each little town has it's reputation. Although Pantalla was not an address I wanted to go shouting about, Todi certainly was. In fact, just the fact that we were legally situated in Todi, added a heap of value to our property which resided in a little glen called "vocabolo Buda" and therefore that's how we called it: Buda. MEET MARCELLO One could say, that everything we managed to achieve with that property was made possible by a single mistake made by our contractor. Marcello, aka "the mole", because he liked to burrow, had built a huge, completely illegal underground man cave with a full apartment and tons of storage, on a nearby hill. (I was in there more than once, though it was a closely guarded secret. There were no windows.) He was the favored contractor of the Knights of Malta and they had the reputation of modernizing everything that they renovated and therefore, Marcello, no fool, took all the spoils, which he hoarded. He had a reputation of scoffing at every law, bridling under every geometras controls and eventually drove himself pretty much out of business. He was a big personality: there was a passion in there for old materials and beautiful construction, but he was clueless as a human being in so many ways. He treated workers like slaves, verbally abused them and those included two of his three sons who worked with him (the third, most likely gay, stayed at home under the protection of his mother). I had great affection for Marcello but his problematic character was painful to watch. He lost a terrific and very capable Polish worker who later went out on his own. His eldest son had an unrelenting self destructive streak no doubt the result of his father's rantings but he was also clearly unsuited to the work that he did with his father. Back to our good luck and Marcello's mistake. Being poor artists, we began not with a big overall plan and budget but small projects, one at a time, most of them under the radar, in "nero", you could do that then. We hired Marcello to do a small project that was to demolish and restructure what was a tractor shed that we wanted to reconstruct solidly as our garage and storage. It was picturesque: old terra-cotta "cups" on withered gray beams, an old unattractive baking oven where garbage was burned. This all came down without incident. Marcello brought out his favorite tool, the Bobcat, personally size, and had at the foundation area. We also wanted him to begin to remove earth that, having been turned over from the upper fields, was now about 1 meter high against the back of the longest brick wall (roughly 75 feet long) at the back of our house. However, without telling anyone or speaking to the geometra, our Marcello enthusiastically began to excavate under the very stone/brick foundation of the back of our house. I believe we were on site to check the work when we heard a big cracking noise. I scrambled onto the hill for a look and lo and behold there are several long cracks opening in this wall with some beams from the ground floor poking out. I was incredulous, Marcello standing, without a word. I immediately phoned the geometra to come get a look at this, but at the same time I calmly reasoned, this was going to get fixed and not by us. And that is how, Marcello, to save his reputation, sat down with Carlo and agreed to rebuild that entire wall. Not only that, he would do this in stone not brick. Not only that, he would lay us a proper foundation, excavate and add gravel, rebar and concrete. At the same time, since it made sense, we negotiated to get an entirely new roof made which we needed anyway, done with old materials which would be tied into the newer well structured front of our house, with steel bands. This was a turning point in my attitude about the house. Over the course of the next 6 months, all that work was completed, and when I saw the new beautiful stone wall, it was like a green light, I knew it was time to throw all the money we could manage into the place because there was clear value here and no going back. We managed to pick up the pace: we scrambled to wire our dollars over (the old lira at that point) and bit by bit it all came together. A great summer day, was being up at 7 and waiting at the window for the site of a construction truck coming up the dirt road! VOC BUDA My idea for how to maintain our house was to set it up as a self catering holiday home, with an apartment for ourselves and rentals units. This would help pay for the pool and expenses of garden and maintenance. There was plenty of space for this. The old pig stalls were demolished for a small independent cottage that had it's own private patio area nestled next to the pool. We found a capable earth mover who sculpted the hillside behind our house. We found another father and son team to do a lot of beautiful stone walls. We continued with Marcello on the new principle entrance of our house, I designed and he added a typical Umbrian staircase and restored an old arch, which became the new entry to the ground floor kitchen. Sophie Clark a transplanted American, created a beautiful garden design and we purchased from a large professional firm in Pistoia, who did the planting. Creating the pool was pretty thrilling but not without its bumps, suffice it to say, we began the work with one guy, my ex fired him, we got in a law suit because we hired away his Serbian worker to finish the job. My ex acted as his assistant, and we saved money in this way, the pool was gorgeous and we never had problems with it. My idea to do holiday rentals worked well. We kept the large apartment for ourselves and rented Angelina's old apartment to small families and the cottage to couples. You never saw anyone, we only "met" at the pool. It worked off the website I created and managed and the extra income helped us with the increasing upkeep bills. Our new hillside of 250 olive trees gave us oil after 3 years but an olive grove is expensive to maintain and now, difficult to find pruners and harvesting help. I made art here, I expanding the gardens here and continued to beautify. I continued an activity I had begun when we lived in town, which was to collaborate with the ceramic factories of Deruta, a 15 minute drive from us. At first I designed for the tabletop industry but later switched to doing special art projects focused on my personal fine art research. I met many crafts people and used that access to create new and original works. Local artists I met through my ex, opened gallery spaces and I exhibited here. We came every summer, based on my academic schedule and often in January although it was so cold we often decamped to warmer climes on inexpensive short flights, such as Sicily or Croatia. I gave big parties each summer cooking for a couple days in preparation. It was my pride and joy to do this. My housekeeper taught me how to fry with confidence. We hosted our old neighbors from Piedicolle and got the "stamp of approval" for what we were doing "down there in that buco Buda" ("that hole"). We had to do that to change attitudes. My proudest moment was a small dinner party with two couples from Cascia (near Norcia, a culinary micro center unique to itself). I had my eye on this large orto (vegetable garden) near our hardware store and one day saw the farmer tending it. I asked him if I could have some zucchini blossoms and he said of course Signora! come back tomorrow and I will prepare some. I scored a huge plastic bag full and set to task of stuffing and frying. I improvised a new stuffing which I made with sautéd diced zucchini, onions and herbs and 3 cheeses, ricotta saltata, mozzarella and cacciota. I made 75 blossoms. The entire 75 were consumed by the Italians with endless compliments before we even got to the main course! My culinary arrival. |