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about siesta, written before the first millennium turned. He’s lying relaxed in sultry summer, one shutter closed, the other ajar,

‘‘the half-light shy girls need,’’ he wrote, ‘‘to hide their hesita-tion.’’ He goes on to grab the dress, which didn’t hide much.

Well, everything is always new under the sun. Then, as now, a quick wash in the bidet and back to work.

What a marvelous concept. For three hours in the middle of the day, you are invited to your own interests and desires. In the good part of the day, too, not just the evening after an eight- or nine-hour day slogging away.

Inside the high-roomed, shuttered house, it’s completely silent. Even the cicadas have quit. Peaceful, dreamy afternoon.

Partly for the pleasure of my feet sliding on soothing cotto floors, I walk from room to room. The classic look—I’ve seen it eleven times before and now I see it again in the new living room: dark beams, white brick ceiling, white walls, waxy brick floors. To my eye, the rugged textures and the strong color contrasts of the typical Tuscan house create the most welcoming rooms of any architectural style I know. Fresh and serene in summer, they look secure and cozy in winter. Tropical houses with bamboo ceilings and shuttered walls that open to catch every breeze, and the adobe houses of the Southwest, with their banquettes and fireplaces that are rounded like the curves of the human body, impart the same connected sense: I could live here. The architecture seems natural, as if these houses grew out of the land and were easily shaped by the human hand. In Italian, a coat of paint or wax is a mano, a hand of that substance. Before the plastering started, I noticed Fabio’s initials scratched in a patch of wet cement. The Poles, I remembered, wrote POLONIA at the base of the stone wall. I wonder if archaeologists find many reminders of the anonymous hands behind enduring work. On the wall of the prehistoric Pech Merle cave in France, I was stunned to see handprints, like ones children make in kindergarten, above the spotted horses. The actual ‘‘signature’’ of the preliterate artist outlined in blood, soot, S O L L E O N E

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ashes! When the great tombs of Egypt were opened, the footprints of the last person out before the entrances were sealed remained in the sand: the last work finished, a day’s work over.

A butterfly, trapped inside, bats and bats the shutter but does not find the way out. As I fall asleep, the fan drones, a shimmer-ing head looking left and right.

i l o v e t h e h e a t . i l o v e t h e e x c e s s i v e i n s i s t e n c e . s o m e t h i n g in me says yes. Maybe it’s only that I grew up in the South, but it feels like a basic yes, devolving back to those old fossil heads of the first people who came into being under a big sun.

The landscape appears cool although it’s cooking. The terraces aren’t bleached this year, as they sometimes are. Our view to the Apennines is green and forested. In someone’s swimming pool at the bottom of the valley, I see a little stick figure jump in.

Since we’re up high, nights cool off to a lovely softness. In late afternoon, heaps and piles of clouds cross over, their shadows roving across the green hills. Tonight the Perseids shower, it’s San Lorenzo’s night of the shooting stars—cause for a celebratory dinner. We’ve seen them before and we know the gasps, our quick pointing a second too late, the bright cascade of a meteor, so momentary, so long expired. The garlic soup, chosen over Boethius, is chilling in the fridge. Lemon and Basil Chicken, an accidental discovery, and a terra-cotta dish of Gratin Dauphinois, an old Julia Child potato favorite I’ve made for years, are ready to cook. I have enough ripe pears to peel and slice and improvise a mascarpone custard for them to bake into. I scrub the bird droppings off the yellow table, spread the cloth I made over the winter from leftover fabric I used for the wicker on my Palo Alto patio fifteen years ago. I spent days on the double welting around the cushion for the chaise longue. I could walk out of that dining 286

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room door right now, fluff those cushions, tell the dog ‘‘Down,’’

walk into the yard filled with kumquat and loquat, mock orange and olive. Or could I? Everything stays. What chance, when I bought that yellow-flowered bolt at Calico Corners, to think it would end up on a table in Italy, with me in a new life.

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression ‘‘a place in the sun’’ first come from? My rational thought processes cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. I’m here because I climbed out the window at night when I was four.

a l l t h e s u m m e r f r u i t s o f t h e g r e a t m e d i t e r r a n e a n s u n have ripened. Beginning with cherries when I arrive, the summer progresses to yellow peaches. Along the Roman road up Sant’Egidio, we pick handfuls of the most divine fruit of all, the minute wild strawberries that dangle like jewels under their jagged leaves. Then come the white peaches with pale and fragrant flesh. Gelato made of these makes you want to dance. Then the plums, all the varieties—the small round gold, the dusky purple-blue, and the pale green ones larger than golf balls. Grapes start to arrive from farther south. A few ruddy apples, then the first pears ripen. The small green ones couldn’t be ripe but they are, then the globular speckled yellows. In August, the figs just start to plump up, not reaching their peak until September. But, finally, the blackberries, that heart-of-summer fruit, are ripe.

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are wild for them but can’t manage to eat quite all. Picking blackberries—a back-to-basics pleasure—passing over the ones still touched with a hint of red and those that squish to the touch, pulling off only the perfectly ripe ones until my fingers are rosy.

The taste of sun-warmed berries brings me the memory of filling my jar with them in an abandoned cemetery. As a child, I sat down on a heaped mound of dirt, unconsciously eating luscious berries from a plant whose roots intertwined with old bones.

Bees burrow in the pears. Where they’ve fallen, thrushes feast.

Who knows how the wants of our ancestors act out in us? The mellow scents somehow remind me of my mean Grandmother Davis. My father privately called her The Snake. She was blind, with Greek-statue eyes, but I always believed she could see. Her charming husband had lost all the land she inherited from her parents, who owned a big corner of South Georgia. On Sunday rides, she’d always want Mother to drive her by the property she’d lost. She couldn’t see when we got there but she could smell peanut and cotton crops in the humid air. ‘‘All this,’’ she’d mutter, ‘‘all this.’’ I’d look up from my book. The brown earth on either side of the car spread flat to the horizon. From there, who could believe the world is round? I first thought of her when we had the terraces plowed and the upturned earth was ready for planting. Fertile earth, rich as chocolate cake. Big Mama, I thought, biscuit-face, old snake, just look at this dirt, all this.

The heat breaks with a fast rain, a pelting determined rain that soaks the ground then quits—gone, finished. The green landscape smears across the windows. The sun bounces back out but robbed of its terror now. Here, the edge of autumn. What is it? The smell of leaves drying. A sudden shift in the air, a slightly amber cast to the light, then a blue haze hanging over the valley at evening. I would love to see the leaves turn, pick up the hazelnuts and almonds, feel the first frost and build a little olive wood fire to take the chill off the morning. My summer clothes go in the duffle 288

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under the bed. I make a few wreathes of grape vine and twine them with sage, thyme, and oregano, herbs I can use in December. The fennel flowers I’ve been drying on a screen go in a painted tin I found in the house. Perhaps the nonna I’ve grown fond of kept hers here, too.

The man with his coat over his shoulders stops in front of the shrine with his handful of dried yarrow. He brushes out the shrine with the side of his hand. All fall, when I am busy with students, he will walk the white road, perhaps wearing an old knitted sweater, later a scarf around his neck. The man is walking away. I see him stop in the road and look back at the house. I wonder, for the thousandth time, what he is thinking. He sees me at the window, adjusts his coat over his shoulders, and turns toward home.

Scattered books go back to their proper shelves: my house in order. One final blackberry cobbler and I’m gone. A lizard darts in, panics, flees out the door. The thought of the future spins through me. What magnet out there is pulling now? I stack pressed sheets on the armadio shelves. Clearing my desk, I find a list: copper polish, string, call Donatella, plant sunflowers, double hollyhocks. The sun hits the Etruscan wall, turning the locust trees to lace. Two white butterflies are mating in midair. I walk from window to window, taking in the view.

Ben Tornati

(Welcome Back)

o n o u r f i r s t m o r n i n g b a c k i n c o r t o n a , after several months in California, my husband Ed and I walk into town for grocer-

ies. First, I drop off film to be developed at Giorgio and Lina’s photo shop. ‘‘Ben tornati,’’ Giorgio shouts, welcome back.

Lina comes from behind the counter and all

four of us exchange the ritual cheek kisses.

Finally, I’ve learned to go to the right, then

left, thereby avoiding head swivels or full-lip

encounters. Lina wastes no time. In the

confusion of other customers and the small

space, I piece together, ‘‘We must go for dinner,’’ ‘‘In the country, but close,’’ and the ultimate praise, ‘‘She cooks like my

mother.’’

Giorgio interrupts. ‘‘Saturday or Sunday?

I prefer Saturday but would make the su-

preme sacrifice.’’ He looks like an older, more mischievous version of Caravaggio’s

Bacchus. He’s the town photographer,

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present at every wedding and festival, and is known to like dancing. Last summer we shared an all-goose feast with him and Lina

—and, of course, about twenty others. Every celebration involves an infinitely expandable table. ‘‘The pasta with duck . . .’’ He shakes his head. ‘‘That duck squawked in the pen in the morning and came to the table at night.’’

‘‘What’s the sacrifice?’’ Ed asks.

‘‘Soccer in Rome.’’

‘‘Then we’ll go Saturday.’’ Ed knows soccer is sacred.

We cross the piazza and run into Alessandra. ‘‘Let’s go for coffee,’’ she says, sweeping us into the bar to catch up on news.

She is newly pregnant and wants to discuss names. As we leave her and head toward the grocery store, we see Cecilia with her English husband and two magical little girls, Carlotta and Camilla.

‘‘Dinner,’’ they say. ‘‘Come when you can. Any night.’’

When we arrive home with our groceries, Beppe, who helps us with the olive trees and the vegetable garden, has left a dozen eggs on the outdoor table. His fresh eggs cause any soufflé to hit the top of the oven. Our friend Guisi has left cenci, ‘‘rags’’ of fried pastry dusted with powdered sugar.

The next day, Giorgio—another Giorgio, who is Ed’s good friend—stops by with a hunk of cinghiale, wild boar. We know well his wife Vittoria’s vinegar marinade and slowly roasted loin.

‘‘Did you murder this poor pig?’’ I tease. He knows I’m horrified that Tuscans shoot and eat songbirds, as well as anything else that moves, including porcupine.

‘‘You like it! So you have the problem.’’ He tells us that his hunting group shot twenty boars this season. Later Beppe comes around again, bringing a rabbit.

And so it goes. One day back, and this is only a part of what happens. The return to Cortona always astounds me. The innate hospitality and generosity of the people visit my life like a miracle.

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o v e r a d e c a d e a g o , i b o u g h t b r a m a s o l e , a g o n e - t o - r u i n house in the Tuscan countryside, and began to spend part of each year there. Slowly, the abandoned olive trees have responded to pruning, plowing, and organic fertilizer. Slowly, the house has awakened from its long slumber and seems itself again, festooned with trailing geraniums and filled with the furniture we have brought in piece by piece from antique markets. Because we loved the restoration process, we have begun another project. Last summer we were picking blackberries with our neighbor Chiara and spotted a stone house where Little Red Ridinghood might have visited Grandmother. We crawled through brambles and found a nine-hundred-year-old structure, so old it had a stone roof. Not long after, we began a historically correct restoration, which drains the coffers but is so exciting. We love the land, especially during the olive harvest every fall, which culminates in a trip to the mill to press our year’s supply of pungent green oil. This September, we bought another grove just below us and acquired 250 more of these magical presences, the olive trees. At the corner of the grove, embedded in a stone wall, Ed spotted a slender marble column. We pulled it out of the wall and saw letters engraved. I scrubbed and found incised a memorial to a young soldier who fell in World War I.

We are now accustomed to such finds; the land has a long memory here, constantly giving us something from the past and constantly renewing for the future. Even the ancient grape vines continue to rebound on Bramasole’s terraced land. Last October, we made wine, with Beppe’s help. Our yield—twelve bottles.

When we opened the first one, we thought twelve probably was more than enough, but we like tasting the flinty, sour wine that comes straight from the dirt on our steeply terraced land. When Riccardo heard of our bad wine, he brought us a hundred new 292

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