I don’t ask if this house was occupied by Nazis. ‘‘What about the partisans?’’

‘‘Everywhere,’’ he says, gesturing. ‘‘Even thirteen-year-old boys—killed while picking strawberries or tending sheep. Shot.

Mines everywhere.’’ He does not continue. Abruptly, he says his mother died at ninety-three a few years ago. ‘‘No more torta della nonna. ’’ He is in a wry mood today. After I squash several pinoli flat with a stone, he shows me how to hit so that the shell releases the nut whole. I tell him my father is dead, my mother confined since a major stroke. He says he is now alone. I don’t dare ask about wife, children. I have known him two summers and this is the first personal information we have exchanged. We gather the cones into a paper bag and when he leaves he says, ‘‘Ciao.’’

Regardless what I’ve learned in language classes, among adults in rural Tuscany ciao is not tossed about. Arrivederla or, more familiarly, arrivederci are the usual good-byes. A little shift has occurred.

After half an hour of banging pine nuts, I have about four tablespoons. My hands are sticky and black. No wonder the two-T H E W I L D O R C H A R D

65

ounce cellophane bags at home are so expensive. I have in mind that I will make one of those ubiquitous torta della nonnas, which seem sometimes to be the beginning and end of Italian desserts.

The French and American variety of desserts is simply not of interest in the local cuisine. I’m convinced you have to have been raised on most Italian sweets to appreciate them; generally, their cakes and pastries are too dry for my palate. Torta della nonna, fruit tarts, perhaps a tiramisu (a dessert I loathe)—that’s it, except in expensive restaurants. Most pastry shops and many bars serve this grandmother’s torte. Though they can be pleasing, sometimes they taste as though intonaco, plaster, is one of the ingredients. No wonder Italians order fruit for dessert. Even gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably good anymore. Though many advertise that the gelato is their own, they neglect to say it’s sometimes made with envelopes of powdered mix. When you find the real peach or strawberry gelato, it’s unforgettable. Fortunately, fruit submerged in bowls of cool water seems perfect at the end of a summer dinner, especially with the local pecorino, Gorgonzola, or a wedge of parmigiano.

Translating grams into cups as best I can, I copy a recipe from a cookbook. Hundreds of versions of torta della nonna exist. I like the kind with polenta in the cake and a thin layer of filling in the middle. I don’t mind the extra hour to pound open the pine nuts that at home I would have pulled from the freezer. First, I make a thick custard with two egg yolks, 1/3 cup flour, 2 cups milk, and 1/2 cup sugar. This makes too much, for my purposes, so I pour two servings into bowls to eat later. While the custard cools, I make the dough: 1–1/2 cups polenta, 1–1/2 cups flour, 1/3 cup sugar, 1–1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 4 oz. butter cut into the dry ingredients, one whole egg plus one yolk stirred in. I halve the dough and spread one part in a pie pan, cover with custard, then roll out the other half of the dough and cover the custard, crimping the edges of the dough together. I sprinkle a handful of toasted pine nuts on top and bake at 350˚ for twenty-five minutes.

66

U N D E R

T H E

T U S C A N

S U N

Soon the kitchen fills with a promising aroma. When it smells done, I place the golden torta on the kitchen windowsill and dial Signor Martini’s number. ‘‘My torta della nonna is ready,’’ I tell him.

When he arrives I brew a pot of espresso, then cut him a large piece. With the first forkful, he gets a dreamy look in his eyes.

‘‘Perfetto’’ is his verdict.

b e s i d e s t h e n u t s , t h e o r i g i n a l n o n n a p l a n n e d m o r e o f an Eden here. What’s left: three kinds of plums (the plump Santa Rosa type are called locally coscia di monaca, nun’s thigh), figs, apples, apricots, one cherry (half dead), apples, and several kinds of pears. Those ripening now are small green-going-to-russet, with a crisp sweetness. Her gnarly apples—I’d love to know what varieties they are—may not be salvageable, but they’re now putting forth dwarfish fruit that looks like the before pictures in ads for insect sprays. Many of the trees must be volunteers; they’re too young to have been alive when someone lived here, and often they’re in odd places. Since four plums are directly below a line of ten on a terrace, they obviously sprang from fallen fruit.

I’m sure she gathered wild fennel, dried the yellow flowers, and tossed the still-green bunches onto the fire when she grilled meat. We uncover grapes buried in the brush along the edges of the terraces. Some aggressive ones still send out long tangles of stems. Tiny bunches are forming. Along the terraces like a strange graveyard, the ancient grape stones are still in place—knee-high stones shaped like headstones, with a hole for an iron rod. The rod extends beyond the edge of the terrace, thereby giving the grower more space. Ed strings wire from rod to rod and lifts the grapes up to train them along the wire. We’re amazed to realize that the whole place used to be a vineyard.

T H E W I L D O R C H A R D

67

At the huge enoteca in Siena, a government-sponsored tasting room where wines from all over Italy are displayed and poured, the waiter told us that most Italian vineyards are less than five acres, about our size. Many small growers join local cooperatives in producing various kinds of wine, including vino da tavola, table wine. As we hoe weeds around the vines, naturally, we begin to think of a year 2000 Bramasole Gamay or Chianti. The uncovered grapes explain the heaps of bottles we inherited. They may yield the rough-and-ready red served in pitchers in all the local restaurants. Or perhaps the flinty Grechetto, a lemon white wine of this area. Ah, yes, this land was waiting for us. Or we for it.

Nonna’s most essential, elemental ingredient surely was olive oil. Her woodstove was fired with the prunings; she dipped her bread in a plate of oil for toast, she doused her soups and pasta sauces with her lovely green oil. Cloth sacks of olives hung in the chimney to smoke over the winter. Even her soap was made from oil and the ashes from her fireplace. Her husband or his employee spent weeks tending the olive terraces. The old lore was to prune so that a bird could fly through the main branches without brushing its wings against the leaves. He had to know exactly when to pick. The trees can’t be wet or the olives will mildew before you can get them to the mill. To prepare olives to eat, all the bitter glucoside must be leached out by curing them in salt or soaking them in lye or brine. Besides the practical, a host of enduring superstitions determine the best moment to pick or plant; the moon has bad days and good. Vergil, a long time ago, observed farmers’ beliefs: Choose the seventeenth day after the full moon to plant, avoid the fifth. He also advises scything at night, when dew softens the stubble. I’m afraid Ed might veer off a terrace if he tried that.

Of our olives, some are paradigms—ancient, twisted, gnarled.

Many are clusters of young shoots that sprang up in a circle around damaged trunks. In this benign crescent of hillside, it’s hard to imagine the temperature dropping to minus six degrees, as 68

U N D E R

T H E

T U S C A N

S U N