In Maremma. David Leavitt
flaw Finally we did see a house that we quite liked. It was one of a row of attached houses built in the thirties, in a tiny borgo just north of Montemerano. (One of these houses belonged to the Toscanini family.) The owner was a Roman real estate agent whose wife, an architect, had restored the small yet high-ceilinged rooms with care, building a reading loft in the bedroom, carving a room for dealing with what Mussolini called “gli elementi della natura” from a thick wall, adding a terrace on the roof. In the living room a new fireplace had been installed—on the model of the one that originally was there, but smaller. In front of the house there was a big garden with a grass lawn (rare in this part of the world), stone paths, roses, and an ancient oak tree.
In reality, this house fit our fantasies better than it did our needs. For example, it had only two bedrooms, which meant that one of us would have to do without a study and work in the living room or at the dining table: not a big deal, but something to consider. The living room was far too small ever to hold a piano. There were no closets. And yet, and yet . . . the view from the terrace was so splendid, did it really matter if there weren’t enough closets? After all, one didn’t buy a house in Italy for the sake of storage space. Both our families had excesses of storage space, and what had they done with it? Stowed away boxes filled with creased sheets of Christmas wrapping paper, fondue sets, Tupperware bowls missing their lids, ancient blenders, and televisions that actually had dials. What need had we of closets?
And so we paid a visit to the real estate agent who had taken us to see the house—his name was Marco Rossi, which in Italy is like being named John Smith—during which we expressed some timid interest, then inquired as to how we might proceed. He smiled, then took out a thickly stuffed file from his desk. Because he liked to be completely up front with his clients, he said, he wanted to make sure that we were aware from the beginning of certain piccoli problemi with the house—nothing serious, no; still, worth knowing about.
He opened the file.
The first “little problem” had to do with the garden. Although it was for sale along with the house, and had the same owners as the house, the patch of land that led from the front door to the gate belonged to someone else. How was this possible? The piece of land in question was about the size of a large sofa. Marco Rossi explained that the land around the house had originally belonged to a widow who had died intestate. As she had eighteen legitimate heirs, the land had been divided into eighteen parcels. Seventeen of the owners had agreed to sell when the real estate agent and his wife had bought the garden, but one had held out. One always holds out . . . Not that it mattered in this case. The owner of the sofa-sized patch was very nice, actually a friend of his, Marco Rossi said, and he had no objections to the owners of the garden trespassing on his land in order to reach it.
Marco Rossi turned another page in his file. “Little problem” two, he said, concerned the cantina (basement). It did not belong to the owners of the house, but to an old woman who lived down the street, and though she would be willing to sell it, she wanted thirty-five million lire (at that time about twenty thousand dollars). The old woman told Marco Rossi to reassure us that if we chose not to buy the cantina, she was certain that someone else would—perhaps even someone in the borgo who would like to convert it into a playroom for their children. Old Italian women often are subtle practitioners of the art of blackmail.
Anything else?
Just one more “little problem”: if we bought the house, we would have to buy it as two separate apartments, the upstairs and the downstairs. This was merely a technicality. As there were two of us, it even could be perceived as an advantage: we could each buy one apartment.
We went back to Rome with photocopies of the documents relating to the three “little problems.” The next day we called Ada, a real estate agent we had met the summer before in San Francisco, where she was vacationing with her girlfriend, Maura. At a restaurant, they had appealed to us for help in translating the menu and then for advice on where they could go to get married. (This was in the days before same-sex marriage was legalized—and then just as quickly illegalized—in California.) Ada invited us to her apartment, where we gave her the photocopies. It took her about ten minutes to get through them. The reason the house was being sold as two apartments, she said, was because the major “renovation”—nothing less than the construction of the staircase linking the two floors—had been done without a permit. The electricity, the plumbing, and the roof terrace had also gone in without permits. In short, the whole house was illegal. If we bought it, and the illegal works were discovered, we could be compelled either to undo them or to pay an exorbitant fee in exchange for a condonno (certificate of approval).
“You could buy that house,” Ada said, “but I wouldn’t. I like to sleep at night.”
So we didn’t.
When we told Domenico about this adventure, he said, “Oh, that’s pretty common. In one house I did, I put in a swimming pool without a permit. When the inspector came, we covered the deck with sheets of sod and said that it was a holding tank for water.”
3
Paestum hurts; it is the only place I know that would move one to tears. A desolate fever-haunted plain with wild shaggy bullocks roaming about in the brush; then lovely mountains; on the other side the sea asleep naked; and near the shore the temple of Neptune, the oldest thing in the world—impressionally at least; older than Greece and Assyria, as old as the oldest Egypt; so solemn and serene and sweet that one burns with shame; what have I done with my life? It hurts and consoles one at once. HARRY BREWSTER SR., from a letter to Ethel Smyth (1893)
NOTHING TELLS YOU more about a people than their homes. In Maremma, the interior ideal was dazzling white walls, shiny granite floors kept mirror-bright thanks to the chamois-bottomed slippers that many casalinghe (housewives) wear indoors, a ceremonial dining room (but rarely a living room), no lamps but bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a mix of inherited rustic furniture with decidedly “modern” pieces that spoke of a remote and faintly unreal urban world. Many homes had only two books: the Holy Bible and the telephone directory. Some, however, had three books: the Holy Bible, the telephone directory, and a hagiography of Silvio Berlusconi that he himself had sent to every Italian household before an election.
Italy has gained general prosperity only since the Second World War. A common phenomenon was to see an old woman dressed in black being driven to the weekly outdoor market by her son in his Jeep Cherokee. The once poor tried to prove their affluence by living among new things, even if they were not so fine as the old ones, yet there was more to it than that: one did not have to look at too many Italian interior-design magazines to see that the country was continuing its long struggle to free itself from an oppressive inheritance. Like most Americans in Italy, we didn’t want to furnish our house in massive, dark furniture any more than most Italians did, but we weren’t prepared to go to the other extreme, the cruel minimalism of Milan design.
To a one, the outstanding artisans who worked on Podere Fiume—Magini the carpenter, Pepe the black_smith, Luca and Pierluigi the marble cutters, Sauro the stonemason, and the Rossis (door and window makers)—were incredulous when we told them that we wanted una casa d’epoca (a house from once upon a time). We wanted rough terra cotta floors, exposed beams, and a pietra serena fireplace. We wanted to construct a future based on our own private notions of comfort and incorporating a factitious past. (Perhaps Americans want old houses because we do not have enough history, whereas Italians want new ones because they have too much of it.) We wanted visitors to take it for granted that Podere Fiume’s origins were medieval, or, if not medieval, then still far in the past.
For some inexplicable reason, many people in Semproniano, kept apprised of our house’s progress by Sauro and his wife, Silvia, were preoccupied about the color we would choose to paint the interior walls. Gigliola, who owned the bakery, urged us to paint them white. “Con bianco non si sbaglia mai” (“You never go wrong with white”), she said. Sauro, too, advised white. Living in the country with a wire-haired fox terrier, however, could any color be less practical?
Podere Fiume from the South (Photo