In Maremma. David Leavitt
Table of Contents
Opposite: Looking North from Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)
Traversando la Maremma Toscana
Dolce paese, onde portai conforme
l’abito fiero e lo sdegnoso canto
e il petto ov’odio e amor mai non s’addorme,
pur ti riveggo, e il cuor mi balza intanto.
Ben riconosco in te le usate forme
con gli occhi incerti fra ‘l sorriso e il pianto,
e in quelle seguo de’ miei sogni l’orme
erranti dietro il giovenile incanto.
Oh, quel che amai, quel che sognai, fu invano,
e sempre corsi, e mai non giunsi il fine:
e dimani cadrò. Ma di lontano
pace dicono al cuor le tue colline
con le nebbie sfumanti e il verde piano
ridente ne le piogge mattutine.
Giosuè Carducci
Rime Nuove, XVI
Crossing the Tuscan Maremma
Sweet land, from whence I derive
My habit of pride and my scornful song
And this bosom where hate and love are never appeased,
When I return to you, my heart leaps after so long.
I rediscover your familiar forms,
And through uncertain eyes, through smiles and tears,
Follow the errant tracks of dreams
That lead to my youthful enchantment with you.
Oh, what I loved, what I dreamed was in vain,
After so much wandering, I never reached the end,
And tomorrow I’ll die. But from afar
Your hills fill my heart with hope,
Steaming with mist and the green plains
Lovely in the morning rains.
Giosuè Carducci
Rime Nuove, XVI (Trans. Elena Giustarini)
1
WE FIRST SAW Podere Fiume, or “River Farm,” on a cold and rainy afternoon in January 1997. (Some people called the place Podere Bolseto because of the località in which it lay.) The plain two-story house had been built in the 1950s as part of the Ente Maremma program to stimulate the economy of Southern Tuscany. No one had lived in it for more than twenty years. The downstairs consisted entirely of animal stalls, in the largest of which (the one that would become our living room) there were concrete feeding troughs it would take three weeks to demolish. A crumbling outdoor staircase led to the apartment upstairs—four rooms tiled in terrazzo. In the big kitchen there was a Zoppas wood-burning stove barely tall enough for a child to cook at, a 1950s cabinet-and-counter unit in yellow and blue Formica—this latter empty save for a drinking glass from a long-past promotion for Acqua Panna bottled water—and a carved stone sink.
Three doors opened off this kitchen. One led into a green bedroom with a print of a nondescript Madonna hanging on the north wall, one into a pink bedroom that reminded a friend of ours of Pompeii, and the third into a biscuit-colored bedroom that contained a coarse straw bed and a stuffed wading bird. There was also a minute bathroom. No closets. Doves had built nests between the windows and the boiled-spinach-green shutters.
The Old Kitchen, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)
The house sat on the crest of a softly proportioned hill, on about two acres of land, one acre of which was given over