In Maremma. David Leavitt
nectarine, white peach, and three varieties of plum. At the base of the poggio a tree-lined rivulet—dry during the summer months—curved alluringly. (It was because of this rivulet that the house had been named Podere Fiume.)
From upstairs one could see where a famous battle had been fought many centuries ago. One could also see the Monte Argentario peninsula, as well as the “skylines” of the villages of Saturnia and Montemerano, and the town of Manciano. Around us there was pasture land for sheep, farmland which produced hay, wheat, and sunflowers, and a couple of small vineyards. The trees were mostly oaks, pines, and chestnuts. (One of the most beautiful, even moving sights was that of a lone, gnarled, ancient oak in the middle of an expanse of pasture.) The sheep created the illusion of boulders cropping out from the grass. There were few of the cypresses which are the presiding genius of the land around Florence, for the Maremmani associate them with cemeteries.
We had not gone to Italy in 1993 with the idea of restoring any kind of property. In fact, when we went there—to Florence (having lucked out in finding an apartment on Via dei Neri)—we intended to stay for only one year. But that year flowed into another. The third year, with the vigorous encouragement of a journalist friend named Lou Inturrisi, we moved to Rome, where his friend Karen Wolman was renting her apartment on Via San Giovanni in Laterano. (Lou told us that Karen was “the potato-sack heiress,” but that we must pretend we did not know this.) We became friends with Karen’s architect, Domenico Minchilli, and his American wife, Elizabeth, a one-woman industry of books and articles about Italy. Soon, however, we grew tired of living in what an art historian friend called the “beautiful, infernal chaos” that was Rome, and when Lou was murdered (we gave evidence to the carabinieri on the very morning of Princess Diana’s funeral), we decided to look for a quiet place—not in Chiantishire, not in the environs of “Beverly Hills” (an area of Umbria so-called because its first American colonist was the artist Beverly Pepper). In Maremma, we hoped, we would be able to hear our own voices in the safe silence. As the crow flies, Semproniano, our comune, was pretty much midway between Rome and Florence. The closest train stations were in Grosseto and Orvieto. When there was no moon, the night sky was so dark and yet so clear that it seemed as if one could see every star.
Heiliger Hain (Holy Grove) (Etching by Max Suppantschitsch, 1865—1953)
Perhaps because man and beast had lived peacefully together under its roof, Podere Fiume had a good soul as well as good bones. Indeed, as we walked through it that first afternoon, the idea that we would bring the house back to life suddenly seemed natural, even inevitable. Podere Fiume spoke to us from its spirit, not its splendor—there were no frescos beneath the plaster, no Etruscan necropoli in the oliveto (olive grove).
Necropoli Etrusca del Puntone (Seventh Century B.C.), Saturnia (Photo by MM)
As it happened, the owner, a local farmer and bon vivant with the extraordinary name of Loando, had had a stroke a few days earlier and was in the hospital in Pitigliano. We made an offer which, by the end of the day, he had accepted from his bed. To our mild surprise, we jumped the bureaucratic hurdles successfully and more or less gracefully, and on the first day of spring, Podere Fiume legally became ours. We celebrated the occasion, as is the custom, by having lunch with its former owner, our respective notaries, the real estate agent, and Domenico at the restaurant of a small hotel in Poggio Capanne, the proprietors of which some Roman friends affectionately called I Puffi—the Smurfs.
We had come to this part of Italy together for the first time in the autumn of 1993. We needed to get out of Florence for a few days, and we wanted to “take” the famous thermal waters at Saturnia. These sulfuric springs, which gush out of the earth at 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 degrees Fahrenheit), were famous even in Roman times for their curative properties. On windy days the smell of sulfur carries all the way up to the village of Saturnia, said to be the oldest in all of Italy. It was to these springs that injured Roman soldiers were sent to be healed after battle. In the twentieth century, a hotel channeled the waters into a modest series of pools and artificial waterfalls, which in turn flowed down through an old and crumbling stone water mill to form the natural falls known as the Cascate del Gorello.
Roughly speaking, the Maremma corresponds to the province of Grosseto, which occupies the southwest corner of Tuscany. “Maremma” means “marsh;” and for centuries this was exactly what the area was. A few rich, noble families had divided the land among them. The people, poor and accustomed to hardship, were small in stature. Women traveled on donkey back. In fact, our neighbor Ilvo’s younger sister, at the age of nine, had been dragged to her death by a donkey whose lead she had tied around her waist. Alas, such tragic accidents were common. This was, in effect, the Wild West of Italy, home to the butteri (cowboys) who tended herds of horned Maremmana cattle. (Seeing a horse tied in front of a bank or a bar was still not so unusual in our time.) There were also brigands. The painter Caravaggio was murdered in Maremma, at Porto Ercole. Even during the age of the Grand Tour, the twin threats of brigands and malaria dissuaded all but the most adventurous traveler from stopping here. Nor was the Maremma spared anything of Fascism or the Second World War. Bombs destroyed much of Grosseto, the principal city. Teracle, the real estate agent under whose aegis we bought Podere Fiume (Greek, or at least Magna Graecia, names are common here), recalls witnessing, at thirteen, the shooting of an entire family by the Camicie Nere (Black Shirts) because they had given refuge for a few weeks to an English soldier. The father of our friend Brunella was beaten when he refused to sing the Fascist hymn (“Giovinezza”) at school.
Balilla in Marcia (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure, edited by Massimo Gennari)
Things started to change in the 1950s, after the threat of malaria was eradicated, and habitable and arable land was claimed from the newly drained marshes. In addition, the government bought up most of the land from its owners and distributed it among the tenant farmers whose families had been working it for generations. This program not only provided funding for hospitals and schools, but also put up houses for the farmers, more or less identical and cobbled together from stone, brick, and blocks of porous and ever-so-slightly radioactive volcanic rock also used by the Etruscans.
Now the Maremma is relatively prosperous: many an abandoned podere has been converted into an agriturismo (country bed-and-breakfast); vineyards produce sangiovese grapes for Morellino di Scansano. Much of the area has been given over to an enormous national park. Wild boars, roebuck, and chamois abound in the forests; Maremmana sheepdogs—tenaciously loyal, with thick, ivory-colored coats—guard huge flocks on many of the farms. In contrast to Umbria, there is almost no industry; the people still make their living from agriculture. In the summer, when the afternoon temperature regularly reaches a hundred degrees, the older farmers tractor by moonlight. Even after midnight we could hear the cool hum of their machines moving slowly over the fields.
Living there was rather like living between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries: modern inventions made aspects of life easy, but remnants of ancient ways endured. There were village festivals celebrating the gathering of the hay, and religious processions commemorating salvation from the Black Death in the 1400s. Ancient trades that the Industrial Revolution did much to destroy were practiced still. Gods and goddesses that predated Christ were worshipped (though often obliquely). There, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, one burned branches of laurel to invoke the protection of benign deities in the coming year. There, when one moved into a house, one waved branches of myrtle in each room to chase out evil spirits.
2
AFTER WE SETTLED on settling in Maremma and before we found Podere Fiume, we