The view from our room, which looks down on time-shaped olive groves, three lakes nestled like freshwater pearls in the landscape, and a ruin that makes the vineyards near the village of Ronti seem noble and necessary, appears as an untroubled dream that one mountain had of many others, as though time itself could come to rest in these valleys.
Since Sandra has never seen an olive tree, we walk the precipitous road that winds its way from the palazzo to the village. Halfway down the mountain, we hear a car coming from behind at warp speed. I turn to Sandra and say, “I haven’t told you about Italian drivers yet, have I?”
“Better do it quick,” she says, and suddenly the small car is over the blind ridge that separates us. Sandra and I hug an outcropping of rock. The driver sees us and squeals to a dramatic stop. The woman who brought our breakfast that morning, Piera Menardi, leaps out of the car: “Oh, Mister Johnny and Miss Sarah will not like that I have killed two of our guests. This is for sure.”
Earlier that morning, I observed a scene that made me fall madly in love with the richly good-humored Piera. To get a recalcitrant worker to help her with some heavy lifting, she pulled out a picture of herself in a bikini on an Adriatic beach in 1967. She showed him the picture. It is almost a pleasure to be run off the road by such a woman thirty-two years later, her beauty still a pleasant, inmost thing.
Piera drives off, imperiling every living creature she encounters, and we descend toward the olive groves and approach a marvelous ruin of a farming village where remnants of tobacco-curing sheds remind us both of our own roots in the Deep South. I gaze at olive trees hundreds of years old, loving the silver-headed shimmer of their wind-tossed branches, and think, What is more beautiful or useful than an olive tree? What is prettier than a bowl of green olives or the molten green of the first pressing of extra virgin olive oil looking, in cut-glass cruets, like liquid jade? For a souvenir of our honeymoon, we take a single small branch as both memento and pledge to each other, then walk back to the hotel, perched above us like a bird of prey the color of fire.
The next day, the hotel’s chef, Patrizio Cesarini, offers to give us a tour of his hometown, Città di Castello. As we board the chef’s little Fiat, I tell Sandra that she is lucky she has relatives who are native to Talladega, Alabama, where one of the most famous NASCAR racetracks is located, for she is about to feel like a NASCAR racer herself.
Then Patrizio is off, careening down the mountain at such a precipitous rate it makes Piera look like a high school driving instructor. We travel at cheetahlike speeds even through small medieval alleyways. When he hits the autostrada, it simply feels like space travel. When we reach Patrizio’s hometown, Sandra, ashen and shaken, says that she thinks she has never traveled at such speed, even in an airplane. I say, “He was slow. Wait until we ride with a Calabrian. They get faster as you move south in Italy.”
Patrizio now walks us languorously through the ancient, hidden-away parts of his town, leading the way in a happy bracelet of “cíaos,” for he knows almost everyone he passes. When I ask him to tell us the differences, if there are any, between Umbrians and Tuscans, he answers cheerfully, “It is very easy. We are the best. They are the worst,” admirably summing up why we are at the tail end of the bloodiest, most chillingly fratricidal century in the history of mankind.
Once we reach the market, Patrizio moves through it like a perfumer gathering wildflowers in a bee-struck field. Sandra moves through it with the astonished, mouthwatering appreciation of a rookie in the folkways of Italy.
At an outdoor salumeria, Patrizio orders prosciutto for the meal that night. “See the motion,” he tells us as a young man cuts razor-thin slices from the top of the cured ham. “That is called ‘playing the violin.’ It is very difficult to master. I have mastered it.” The young man lifts a piece of meat in the air to let us see the sunlight flow through it like some odd and flawless merger of paper and flesh.
We wander from stall to stall, the food so fresh that the smell of the earth itself is the strongest, most assertive odor in the marketplace until we pass the store that specializes in the sale of local white truffles. The odor of truffles is as distinctive as the giveaway scent of marijuana. It enlarges the air around itself and gives you some idea of what a tree must smell like to itself. I have never quite forgiven American forests for their shameless inability to produce truffles. When I see Patrizio enter the shop and purchase a small, knobby truffle for that night’s pasta, I want to kiss him on the lips but hesitate for fear the gesture may be misinterpreted.
It is a pleasure to watch a Southern farm girl wander about an Italian food market, surrounded by the abundance taken from the countryside. I follow as Patrizio and Sandra inspect great albino-faced cauliflowers, eggplant displays that look like a rack of bowling balls, porcini mushrooms the size of kittens, the cool anise-smelling fennels that always look like failed cacti to me, and the mounds of huge, brilliantly yellow peppers that make their space look like the entrance to a gold mine. Blood oranges from Sicily are sliced open to reveal exactly what shade of dripping scarlet is inside. When I reach to taste a sprig of mint, a fierce old Italian woman, who probably was part of the crowd that murdered Mussolini, slaps my hand firmly and wags a gnarled finger at me. Her finger looks truffly which somehow pleases me.
Sandra tastes grapes, arugula, oregano, spring onions, plum tomatoes, each time turning to me and shaking her head. I do not have to ask what she is thinking. It is this: Food tastes better in Italy than anywhere else in the world.
As we leave this deep-throated market, its musk a nosegay of aromas, we pause at the fishmonger’s, where Patrizio studies a tank of slithering freshwater eels netted that same morning from Lake Trasimeno. More amazing still, the woman behind the counter prods one of the oceangoing crustaceans that the Italians call canocchie, tasty creatures that appear to be a cross between a shrimp and a praying mantis. She prods it again, and it moves—in landlocked Umbria, it moves. Among Italians, the love of freshness is a form of both spontaneity and discipline.
But bold Patrizio is in a hurry now, and he marches us past an ancient tower that is made of stacked stone with no cement at all. It is called the Torre Rotonda and is the pride of Città di Castello. Patrizio tells me that he feels as if he owns the tower. He does now, but Sandra and I know that the Torre Rotonda will wait him out and one day reclaim its title from Patrizio. We “ciao” our way back through the old city, then rocket our way back into the green hills of Umbria for what will be a fantastic meal. My wife, in utter terror, does not open her eyes a single time on the trip back to the hotel.
Over the next few days, Sandra and I drift through hill towns we had never heard of. In the lentil-happy town of Monterchi, Italy reaches up, striking quick as an adder, and grabs us by the throat. In what looks like a minor chapel serving a monastery across the street, we encounter Piero della Francesca’s breathtaking painting Madonna del Parto, the famous “Pregnant Madonna.” I had read about it in art history books but could not believe such a masterpiece had not been relocated to one of the grander Italian cities. It is the most serene portrait of Mary I have ever seen, granting new meaning to the very idea of serenity. Its discovery, in the tomb of a nobleman a long time after its rendering, has brought pride and joy and many art lovers to this town. Six hundred years later, the painting still shimmers with the genius of the artist. As I stand before it, I think of what it must have been like to be a man of genius, godstruck in his native Umbria, painting a portrait of the woman he considered the mother of God, carrying that God inside her. This is what art should be.
“This,” I say to my wife, “is your honeymoon gift.”
From our hotel, we walk along the Etruscan ridge to an exquisite hill town called Monte Santa Maria Tiberina and try to put the unstressed, unpurchasable beauty of this place into words. Both of us are novelists and believe that words can do anything. The stones from which the town’s houses are built have had their color bled out from them by time itself. Sandra says tha
t the town is so lovely, its residents should be allowed to make only music boxes or perfume bottles. When it begins to rain, we seek shelter in Oscari, the only bar or store in town. Oscari himself, a man of grace and elegance, serves us cappuccino. Preparing it, he looks like a priest at Mass. There are pictures of his son, a soccer star, on the walls; the taste of that cappuccino—perfetto. That taste is Italy in a cup, my honeymoon in a cup, at Oscari in a hill town in the rain.
We have come to our last hill town, and our honeymoon nears its end in a piazza in the gemlike town of Citerna. We have said the things to each other that we needed to say, made all the promises we needed to make. But we stand overlooking a valley with farmhouses and palazzi of infinite age staring coldly back at us. This town seems conceived by waterless Venetians driven out of their city and forced to seek refuge in the hills. The colors of the stones puzzle because age has formed them and we have no equivalent in our American vocabulary to name them, our culture is still so new and shiny. These stones are the color of bruised fruit, I start to say, or the shade of some rough white wine. But another house is darker, an amber bracelet perhaps, and others are the shade of palominos or horseshoe crabs. I catch myself writing in my head again instead of living in the moment of sunset in the Umbrian hills on the last day of the first honeymoon I have ever taken.
In that piazza in Citerna, our honeymoon ended, and our accidental life together had its Umbrian beginning.
FAVA BEANS AND PECORINO • SERVES 4
2 pounds fresh unshelled fava beans (as young as possible) Olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon (or 1 Roasted Lemon, page 51)
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 ounces Pecorino, cut into small pieces (approximately the size of the favas)
1. Shell the beans; you should have about 2 cups. Blanch the beans in a pot of boiling water to loosen their skins, about 1 minute. Drain in a colander. The beans should slip right out of their skins.
2. Transfer the beans to a mixing bowl and drizzle with a little olive oil. Add the lemon juice and toss with salt and pepper to taste. Fold the Pecorino cheese into the fava beans and serve.
PORK AND ROSEMARY RAGÙ My passion for all things Italian began with my two Italian roommates my sophomore year at The Citadel, Bo Marks and Mike Devito. The name Marks inspires no special vision of Italy, but Bo’s immigrant grandparents carried the surname Miercovincici (“mark of the winemakers”) to the gatekeepers on Ellis Island. They entered into Manhattan with the Americanized moniker Marks. Mike Devito considered that this capitulation to the authorities brought great shame to Bo’s family, who should have insisted on the right to keep their Italian name. Through them I would find myself immersed in the lives of two Italian-American families. Bo-Pig and Mike-Swine had learned that none of the other freshmen in “R” company wanted to room with me, so they came to my room after exams to invite me to room with them our sophomore year. They embraced me and called me “paisan.” I had no idea what a paisan was, but I knew I wanted to be one. Of course, Mike-Swine and Bo-Pig were the models for Mark Santoro and Pig Pignetti in my novel The Lords of Discipline.
From the first week of school until the last, Bo-Pig received packages of Italian food from his girlfriend and her family. The ethereal Phyllis Parise came from a family that still remained true to the Old World and the old ways, and their gifts of food were prodigal. In my childhood, my mother had served up Velveeta and whatever cheese came with the frozen macaroni, and, of course, the cheese of cottage. I was ill-prepared for the arrival of Gorgonzola, five or six varieties of goat cheese (I didn’t know there was such a thing as goat cheese; hell, I didn’t know there was such a thing as goat’s milk), provolone, and the divine Parmigiano-Reggiano. There was an inexhaustible supply of hard sausages and pepperonis, cans of tuna drenched in olive oil, anchovies, and packages of Parodi cigars. What amazed me was that these gift packages were meant for “the room,” all of us, and not just Bo-Pig. In the first month, I received a letter from Phyllis thanking me for taking such good care of her fiancé. During the second month, Phyllis’s mother wrote me a letter thanking me for the same thing. Before Christmas, Phyllis’s father wrote me a letter promising to teach me how to make a pizza if I ever got up to his pizza shop in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I had a soft spot for the whole Parise family long before I ever met them.
• MAKES 8 CUPS, ENOUGH FOR 2 TO 3 POUNDS PASTA
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
8 sprigs fresh rosemary
One 3½- to 4-pound pork bone-in rib roast, ribs removed and tied onto a roast
1 red onion, roughly chopped (about 2 cups)
One 35-ounce can whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano
2 pounds pasta (preferably pappardelle), cooked
Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1. In a large skillet over moderate heat, warm the olive oil. Add the garlic and rosemary and sauté until the rosemary needles sizzle and turn crisp and the garlic is golden, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove and reserve.
2. In the same pan, sear the pork in the hot flavored oil, turning it occasionally, until all sides are nicely browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer to a large stockpot and set aside.
3. Add the onion to the flavored oil and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned (adding more oil sparingly if the pan is too dry), about 3 minutes. Crush the tomatoes with your hands and add, with their juice, stirring to scrape up any browned bits of pork stuck to the bottom of the pan. Transfer the tomato mixture to the stockpot and bring to a low boil over medium heat. Cover the pot, lower the heat, and simmer until the pork is tender enough to shred (when scraped with a fork), about 2 hours.
4. Cool the pork in the tomato sauce. (The cooled pork roast and sauce can be transferred to a storage container and refrigerated overnight. Wrap and store the garlic and rosemary separately.)
5. Remove the pork from the tomato sauce and reserve. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process half the tomato sauce with the fried garlic cloves and rosemary needles (discarding stalks) until somewhat smooth. Stir the puréed sauce back into the pot with the rest of the tomato sauce. The goal is a sauce with a rough, chunky character.
6. Shred the pork and strip the meat from the bones. Discard the bones. Chop the meat finely by hand, not in a food processor, and stir it into the tomato sauce. Heat and serve over pasta, passing the cheese on the side.
WILD MUSHROOM SAUCE During Easter holiday of my sophomore year at The Citadel, I traveled to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to visit Bo-Pig’s family. They lived in a suite atop the Hotel Greensburg, but we would spend most of our time in Greensburg at the home of the Parise family, where Bo’s charming fiancée, Phyllis, resided. When I walked into the Parise house, my induction as a full-fledged member of the Italian household had taken place without my knowledge. Phyllis hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks, as did her mother, father, and grandparents.
The family led us into the dining room, where a huge celebratory meal was in progress. What I came to love when I lived in Rome, I came to love in the Parise household that Easter week—a freewheeling, rollicking love of family and friends and a great simplicity, yet complete integrity, when it came to the preparation and eating of food. The table glistened with bowls of olives and pickles, and an array of the cheeses was lined up on a sideboard.
The grandfather eyed me with a discriminating and unnerving discernment before pronouncing, “Irlandese.”
“Sì, Irlandesi,” Phyllis said. “Irish.”
The grandfather handed me a bowl of olives and said, “Mangia, Irlandese.” I ate the olive, but the pit surprised me, and after I ate around it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I sat immobilized with every eye in the room observing me. The grandfather lifted a relish plate to my lips and I deposited the pit on the plate to cheers. The grandfather said, “Buono.”
Phyllis nodded, and I said, “Buono.”
He cut me a piece of cheese and sa
id, “Mangia.”
I ate the cheese and said, “Buono.”
He said, “E Italiano. Provolone.”
When the pasta dish arrived at the table, the grandfather said to me, “Pappardelle. No spaghetti. Pappardelle,” opening up the mysteries and the shapes that Italian pasta could assume, all of them glorious.
The whole week was like that, the grandfather leading me on an idyllic voyage through the pronunciation and devouring of splendid food. In the afternoon, Bo and Phyllis would slip away to be alone, and I would go over to her parents’ mom-and-pop pizza shop. Mr. Parise put me into an apron and taught me how to make pizza dough. “It’s easy. You just do it,” he explained.
By the end of the day, they were selling the pizzas I was making from scratch, which pleased me enormously. The Parises brought me out and introduced me to the woman who had purchased my first pizza. In my exuberance, I kissed her hand, thinking it was the Italian way. The woman was Irish, and she looked at me like I was nuts.
• MAKES 6 CUPS, ENOUGH FOR 2 TO 3 POUNDS PASTA
3 ounces dried wild mushrooms (look for an Italian mix, heavy on the porcini and easy on Asian mushrooms like shiitakes, or use just porcini)
4 cups boiling water
½ cup dry vermouth
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound cremini mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon coarse or kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
1 garlic clove, finely minced
One 35-ounce can whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, broken up into small pieces, with their juice
Pinch of sugar
2 pounds pasta (preferably pappardelle), cooked
1. Place the dried wild mushrooms in a bowl and cover with the boiling water. Let soak until softened, at least 30 minutes. Remove the mushrooms with a slotted spoon and strain liquid through a double thickness of cheesecloth, reserving 1½ cups. Mix the reserved liquid with vermouth.