Cetona in fog

And so it is Christmas, in Cetona. So unexpected for me, and such a gift.

I look out the window and the cloistering fog that has been settling on the piazza for the past several days has finally lifted tonight. I see the flickering lights of Christmas decorations, the Christmas tree in the piazza, the lights up on the Rocca. People are going to midnight Mass, arriving on foot and cars, coming out of the three bars on the piazza, and running up the steps to San Michele Arcangelo, to sing and pray. I had not seen so many people in Cetona since I got here. The little stage on which my life evolved for so long still runs as it did, and watching now gives me a profound sense of joy. It is simple, yet so full, for me.

It is hard to explain what a gift it is to be here, in this little hometown of mine. So much space and time have been between me and this, it is impossible to describe the missing. The deep lack of. The distance one cannot physically fill by sand or land or planks. For so many years, missing, my friends, my places, my landscape.

I have cultivated the art, the gift, of gratitude for some years, brought into my life most poignantly by my yoga practice and the good souls at Jivamukti Yoga in Charleston, whose community has changed my life. I knew gratitude before, I think, in my heart, but my yoga practice has made me put my mind into it consciously, teaching me exactly how to honor it and cultivate it in a way that your every day, your every hour, changes all for the better. And so now I feel absolutely and completely grateful for being here, and I feel it, fully. And I need nothing else.

Everywhere I turn I see a face I know, someone who says Ciaoooo, and kisses me on the cheek. Everywhere I turn is landscape I have longed for. My eyes and ears are hungry, my spirit hungry, my every sense completely alive.  I look at the faces and I want to kiss them all because I did not kiss them enough in the past. I want to hear everybody’s story, I want to hear everything I have missed. I want to hug them or look at them because I did not look enough, I did not pay attention. I want to see every kid I knew in middle school and know what they are doing, how they are. I want to see my old teachers and thank them, and I want to hug my old lovers simply because we loved each other. I relish every moment I can live today exactly the way I am for what I have in my heart today. I look down and see my vein pulsing, and I am here. Here.

Last night I went to a Christmas concert played by the band of Le Piazze, a fraction or frazione of Cetona, a separate town in the same municipality. La banda, as it is called, used to be something people scoffed at, a country assembly of wind instruments and drums played by older guys. Now it is a vibrant little musical group populated mostly by talented kids, young people, and conducted by a devoted and talented musician. Rachele, the 12-year-old daughter of my friend Cinzia, plays in the band, so I wanted to go. I was impressed by their spirit and performance. Most importantly, as most everything here now, it was a beautiful thing for me.

I had not been in Italy in any place in any public occasion to hear the Italian national anthem for so, so many years, and that was the beginning of a long set of emotional songs for me. I grew up with the Italian anthem, not the American one, and I had allegiance to this red, white and green flag, no other. There was a moment of disbelief for me that I was actually in this little church, with this band, and this anthem playing. Then the band played Morricone and Handel and Bach, a series of beautiful music for the holidays, and it was lovely, but what hit me the most was John Lennon’s Happy Christmas. I asked Cinzia for a Kleenex and I had to work hard to not weep. I love the United States, and I love the American spirit. It is the reflection of an important and large part of my being, my entrepreneurialism, my positivism, my way of looking at the world with a generous eye. My way of not wanting anyone to tell me what to do, yet my civic spirit, my citizenship of the world. That is all my American side, and nothing reminds one of the American spirit like rock.

But sitting in this little church in Cetona, well, I know that this is still the place where I belong. I looked at the ceiling and the freschi and the little ladies sitting in the pews around me, little ladies I have known by name or by face since I was a little girl. Little ladies who brought me up here, in this village. And that, the combination of those two things, was more than I could bear in sheer gratitude, in sheer, pure joy. I cried and I smiled all together, because I am so happy, so profoundly happy to be here, and yet to be there, too, in heart.

On occasion of this holiday I am grateful for many more things than I could list here: Hot water, heat, my eyesight, hearing, my feet, my health, my mind, my heart. Cinzia, Lucia, Fabiola. Every face I know here. Maria. Pippo. Giuliano, Nilo. Mauro Cardetti. Marisa. The streets of my town, the apartment where I live, every kindness that is shown to me every day, from a loaned car to a bought coffee to an invitation to dinner to a bottle of olive oil or wine, to Dario making me pieces of wood I can paint on. I am grateful for the moms of my friends who cross the street to hug me and give me the best hugs and hold me a minute longer, to hold me and pinch my cheeks. The talks with long-lost friends over a dinner table, and the talks with people I had not dignified with a conversation in years. They are kind to remember me, and kind to dignify me now. The hellos and hugs I receive, the love that I feel surrounds me in ways big and small every day here. I am grateful for all the inspiration I have, and the paints I paint with and the pen I write with. I am grateful for the fog I had missed, and even the cold. The climbs through the steep muddy hills that jolt my heart back to life. And every instant of this landscape I get to see, this glorious landscape, which on most days knocks me to my knees.

So, on occasion of this Christmas I need no gifts. To everyone who supported this venture of mine, who helped me get here, and who loves me from afar and gives me fundamental encouragement, this was the biggest gift I could ever have imagined. Thank you. And just know, I am home, indeed.

Merry Christmas to all, with a full and glad heart.

Sybil Fix©2013

Cappella Votiva

Today I needed to run some errands and get out into the countryside, so I called Mauro Cardetti, our family mechanic for years, to see if I could borrow a car for a little while.

—Certo! he said. Sure! I walked down to his shop and he awaited me with a dusty little red Twingo, a car that looks a lot like a boxer, the dog. I walked around his shop checking out the vast collection of posters of naked women while he ordered his grandson to check the oil. He mumbled as he put air in the tires.

When they finished he turned to me.

—Non e` una Ferrari— he said, opening the door for me and smiling —ma va. It’s not a Ferrari, but it works. I love Mauro.

The countryside today was miraculous, beyond words. To cry for. The sky was crystalline blue all the way to infinity, and I set out for Le Piazze. I will never be able to find the right words to describe the tapestry of colors and textures of this landscape. Interestingly, watching the undulations and slopes of the land here I think more and more frequently of analogies involving water, of the earth rolling like huge oceanic waves. Today every tree, every hill, field, patch of grass, branch of olive tree, shone distinctly, tersely. The colors were spectacular, moving more toward the dark yellows now, and the grapevines are turning deep red.

I stopped to buy some wine, and while Alessandro was preparing my case, a girl I had not seen in thirty years walked into the cantina. Her name is Lucia and when we first moved here she lived in Patargnone, a little borgo in the country, nothing more than a little group of clustered houses up on the hill, where we lived while our house was being restored. Her father and my mother, an odd combination now that I think of it, took turns carpooling us into town. I don’t think he trusted my mom the first few times, but he got used to it. Lucia looks just like her mother did then, with jet black hair and black eyes, rosy cheeks, a little pudgy, with a sweet girl-like smile, the same one she had as a little girl. We exchanged news for a few minutes—she has an 18-year-old son and an agriturismo up on the mountain.

—Vieni a trovarmi!!— she said. Come see me, and waved.

From Le Piazze I drove to Fighine, a hamlet surrounding a castle high up on Monte Cetona. I had not been there in decades—I have been there perhaps only twice in my lifetime and never in weather like today. At every turn as I rose up the mountain on this curvy road another distant set of scenery opened before me, another little town on the horizon, another set of hills, farther and farther away, until I could see mountains I had never seen from here, their highest peaks pink and topped by snow. To my side Monte Cetona sat like a big giant, its shoulders and back rolling in sliding slopes densely vegetated, thick with dark trees and bathed in sunlight, opening, as you descend, to fields of olive trees and rows and rows of grapevines. When you get up to the height of Fighine, the top of the mountain, la cima—the top, as it is called here—bristly with pines and other mountainous trees, stands almost to your side, like you could wave open your left arm and hit the cross with the backside of your hand. It is right there, and magnificent.

I was disappointed to learn that Fighine is entirely privately owned and there is no access to the castle or for that matter any lookout. Carlo Baglioni’s workers are up there restoring another portion of the town, which is my only hope of seeing it. No, signora, they said, there is no place to look. I am momentarily outraged by the private ownership of castles, but then I laugh thinking that they always have been private. I see two guys doing yard work inside the castle gate and I walk towards them. They turn off their machines. So’ Inglesi, they tell me. The owners are English. Umph, I say. We laugh. Beati loro! Lucky them.

I loved the view driving back down, though, and headed to another little hamlet nearby, Camporsevoli, on an adjacent slope of Monte Cetona, a tiny group of houses surrounding a church and another small castle or fort of some kind, another place I had not visited in decades. The town was deserted—I saw not a person or a cat—but immaculately and recently restored and preserved.

On the outskirts of the village I stopped to take a picture. A man was picking olives in a field below me. He stopped his work and came towards me. He told me a family owns the whole town of Camporsevoli, first the parents, then their children, a brother and a sister. They bought it all—it was all falling apart. They do good work, he said, they keep it in good shape, clean. They are restoring a farmhouse down there, too, he said pointing to a field above. It takes a lot of money to pay the taxes and do all that, he said. Not everybody can do that. I reconsider what I thought about Fighine.

I think back to when Aldo and Anna Lanari owned the Rocca in Cetona, the castle that towers over the town, its signature monument. The Lanaris had just bought the Rocca and, high-mindedly, they decided that they wanted to give the people of Cetona a chance to celebrate the property and see it, so they decided to open it to the public twice a year or something like that. They put out beautiful food and generous drink and let people roam through the carefully manicured hedges and the rose gardens and take in the spectacular view of the countryside and the town below. Town folk came, hoarded the food like they had not eaten for a month, drank all the wine, threw garbage on the paths, and talked trash behind the Lanari’s back for trying to do something nice. Never again, said Anna. Never again.  I can see why castles are private.

While I am talking with the man I notice a tiny chapel set off the road, a little matchbox of a building, stone, surrounded by a simple wooden fence and a metal gate in a patch of brilliant green grass. 1916, it says on a plaque.

I ask him, what is this? It is beautiful.

—E` una cappella votiva, said the man. L’hanno costruita durante la guerra. Ci andavano a pregare per i persi in guerra, i feriti. Ci pregavano. Quando ancora la gente ci credeva. Adesso non tanto. It is a votive chapel. They built it during World War I so people could go there and pray for the lost and disappeared. They prayed there, when people still prayed. When people still believed. Now not so much.

He offered to get the key to the chapel from his mother, and he let me inside. It is lovely, plain but with many little lights, pictures of the Virgin Mary, and plastic flowers. I thought of what it must have been like there during World War I, in the middle of nowhere, high up on the mountain, with no news, no information, praying for a son who has gone, a husband. 1916.

—L’anziani, i giovani l’avranno costruita— the man said. Old people and children must have built it, people who had not gone to war, he said.

—Chissa`. Who knows.

I comment on the weather, the beauty of the day, and the peace. He smiles.

—Eh si, qui e` diverso. Qui se senti passare una macchina e` strano, he said. Yes, here it is different. If you hear a car it is strange.

And that is a world I like.

Sweet Chapel

Sybil Fix©2013

Il Bar Sport a Cetona

Today I came out onto the piazza at lunchtime to have an aperitivo with Fabrizio. He was leaving for his house in Florence and he wanted to say goodbye. Last night we were up late talking and walking through town, and this morning I was exhausted. I figured I could check a few things online while we were at the bar—my internet connection at my apartment is frustratingly haphazard—so I grabbed my laptop as I headed out the door. Bars here are not like American bars, though in the evening it can become somewhat similar; it is a café`, really. The Bar Sport, a fixture in the piazza of Cetona, has been recently restored, it’s clean, it has nice light, good pastries, comfortable round marble tables, and a really nice staff, including Paola, with whom I grew up, though she is a few years younger than me.

Buongiorno, Paola, I say, taking off my sunglasses. Buongiorno, Sibilla, Paola says. Come va? How are you?

She sees my laptop under my arm.

Apri l’ufficio? Are you opening your office? she teases. I come nearly every day to check my email and write at the bar, again, due to my irregular internet connection. I smile, nodding.

So’ stanca morta, I say, to no one in particular. I am dead tired.

I open my laptop and ask Paola for a hot tea. After I pour my tea I realize I need a piece of paper from my other purse, which is in my apartment. I pull my jacket back on and I say, Paola, torno subito. I’ll be right back. I leave my purse and my computer sitting on my table, as one does in Cetona (once I left my purse on an outdoor table at the bar all night, and found it in the morning!).

Non ti preoccupare, l’ufficio lo guardo io!! Paola yells after me, laughing. Don’t worry! I will look after the office!

I come back and settle in to read a few things online, check my bank account, which is dangerously low, and then settle on The New Yorker homepage. I miss The New Yorker. And NPR.

Nilo comes through the common door between the Bar Sport and his restaurant, next door, Ristorante Da Nilo. He runs both the bar and the restaurant; on the floor above is a B&B, La Locanda. He smiles and stops to chat.

Ciao bella, he says, pinching me on the cheek. Nilo is tall, with a dark moustache and rectangular dark-rimmed glasses. He looks a bit like an owl. He is a real Cetonese, born and raised, and he talks Cetonese fast and in a low monotone except when he’s angry; then he sputters and curses and raises his voice, like most Cetonesi do. He has run a bar or a restaurant in Cetona ever since my family started coming here in 1972, when I was seven. He was married to Pia, then, with long, long dark hair and skin the color of porcelain, and their son, Cristiano, was a baby.

Ti ho visto crescere. M’avrai anche pisciato addosso quando t’ho preso in braccio, he says. I saw you grow up. You probably even peed on me sometime when I picked you up. He likes to tell me this; it seems to give him some kind of honor. Seniority, perhaps.

Nilo’s restaurant has always attracted a group of fairly prominent customers, including the president of Italy, other politicians, news people, and some business tycoons who own houses in the area. Hence, Nilo often wears nice dress pants and a sharp button-down shirt under his chef’s apron. Today it’s pale lavender.

Dove sei stata che non t’ho visto questi giorni, he inquires with the curiosity one comes to expect in Cetona. Where have you been that I haven’t seen you the past couple of days? He likes to keep tabs on me, and he is a bit distrusting. The other day I told him I was going to Milan for a few days to meet someone for some potential work. Sei sicura, per lavoro? Eh, ma si, per lavoro. Are you sure you’re going for work? Right, for work.

Nilo sits down at my table for a moment, I ask if he has reservations this weekend, if he is going to be busy. There are no people in Cetona, he says. He says it every day. We talk about how to bring more people to Cetona. Everyone needs more business. We talk about the idea of me bringing small group tours here, an idea I have considered in the past.

It’s one o’clock and I mention that I am tired today, that I feel like I am not eating properly, I feel depleted. He scolds me for my vegetarian diet.

Mica puoi mangia’ solo le verdure Sibilla. Devi mangia’ un po’ di proteine. Sibilla, you cannot eat only vegetables. You have to eat some protein, too.

He gets up and goes back into his restaurant.

Paola says the staff had penne with zucchini and peppers for lunch. Sounds good, I say. Cristiano, now forty, who runs the restaurant with his father, appears in the door between the bar and the restaurant. He is dapper in his waiter’s outfit.

Cristiano, alla Sibilla gliela fai la pasta come s’e` mangiata noi? Ma vuole mangia’ qui. Cristiano, would you make Sibilla the pasta that we had? But she wants to eat here.

Cristiano is of few words. We are out of peppers, but yes. Si. He smiles slightly and disappears.

Twenty minutes later Cristiano brings me a gorgeous plate of pasta—not in a pasta plate, mind you, but on a very large flat plate. The pasta is almost spilling over the edges. Sliced zucchini sautéed with a little tomato, basil and garlic. The sauce clings perfectly to the pasta, with just the right amount of oil, and there is a mound of parmigiano on top. The pasta is nearly falling out of the plate. It is huge and perfectly cooked.

Nilo comes up to the table and chuckles. He puts his hands together like in prayer and says, Ma ora mangi un piatto di pasta cosi?! You’re going to eat a plate of pasta, like that? he asks. He takes in my face, smiles, and pinches my cheek. Bella, he says.

Eh, tanto va’ a correre, la smaltisce! says Paola from behind the counter. She’ll go running later, she’ll run it off!

I read and write as I eat. Every bite is a source of supreme happiness. Occasionally I glance over at the plate to make sure I still have more left. In addition to the pasta being delicious, I am thrilled, simply and entirely joyous, to be able to eat here by myself, to eat and read here at this little table at the Bar Sport, a place where I have pranced, played, frolicked, sat, drank, smoked, talked, socialized, cried, and laughed since I was a kid. Exactly where I am sitting used to be a jukebox that played sad love songs. The soundtrack of our adolescence—sad love songs.

It is quiet here at lunchtime, except for hushed voices and the clanging of dishes coming from the restaurant. The bar is empty except for an occasional worker stopping in for a coffee. Paola is behind the bar, quietly cleaning up, arranging. I am chagrinned to near the bottom of my plate. I gather the last few penne on my fork, and I finish. I scrape the bottom of the plate and smile to myself.

As I finish eating, Mauro Cardetti, the town’s mechanic, comes in. Actually, I think there is another mechanic in town but who has ever heard of him? In my book there is only one. Mauro sold us and fixed every car my family ever had in Italy; his son Paolo is my age and we went to elementary and middle school together. Mauro has known me for more than forty years. Once I borrowed my mother’s car and literally drove the side of it up a wall. I couldn’t figure out how to back up without damaging the back of the car. I took it to Mauro, crying, and asked if he could fix it so my mother would not notice. He did. He is an angel. Now he is trying to find me a car to drive around here, something cheap. I would trust him with my life, really.

Sibilla, he says, coming up to my table, my plate still sitting there, che ti offro? Prendi qualcosa? Se non prendi niente mi dispiace. What can I offer you? What will you have? If you will have nothing, I will be sorry (literal translation).

The regulars come up from the basement of the restaurant and file into the bar one by one. They are the men, mostly bachelors, who eat at Nilo’s every day, the carabinieri of Cetona, a few local workers who live alone. And Giovannino. As long as I remember, Nilo has always had a solid group of them, mostly older single men. He feeds them well and treats them well, like family. They get a flat price for a primo, a secondo, water and wine. Then they get their espresso at the bar and head back to work.

I consider that maybe I should join them; maybe I should ask Nilo if I can have a special vegetarian deal. At least I would eat properly. And I am so grateful to have this food, to eat here, to be in this place.

Nilo comes through the door from the restaurant. He walks up to my table, leans into me and looks down at my plate.

Ma tutta l’hai mangiata? You ate all of it?

He laughs. And I do, too.

Sybil Fix©2013

Land of the gods

The true hand that holds my heart resides in the countryside around Cetona even more than in the town itself, and walking in the country on dirt roads through this landscape takes me home into my truest being, my purest happiness.

The countryside here is as terraced horizontally as it is vertically, with handkerchiefs of disparate fields patched together like an enormous quilt stretching all the way to the horizon. It’s like the quilt is rolling on the very surface of the ocean, hills cresting so very softly then falling again, fields joining each other seamlessly like a succession of small waves in a harmonious act of supreme perfection, all the way to the sky beyond and above. My eye dances on the waves like a surfer, and here, like a surfer, I find my joy. God could not have made this this beautiful.

It threatened rain today again, after raining for the past several days, and I set out for a walk. The top of Monte Cetona, rising above and to the side of the town like the shoulder of a taller brother, was covered in mist and dark clouds, as it often is at this time of year. But moving away from the mountain the sky opens to a painter’s sketch of angry dark purple slashes layered over with happy swatches of light grey and misty blue and fast moving white clouds clearing the occasional patch of bright blue and sunlight. The fields this time of year are like a seamstress’s most delicate handiwork, with carefully stitched rows of trees with leaves the color of terracotta sown between palettes of greens, interspersed with brown patches, rusty ditches, the occasional bright red leaf, and the white of gravel roads taking off here and there like pieces of soft unraveling ribbon. The occasional tree bursts fire red, each leaf in relief against the green. I pass trees laden with kakis bright as orange Halloween globes or pumpkins hanging from their branches. Below them brown fields lying fallow since the corn harvest weave seamlessly with expanses of bright green grass, strange remnants of summer or a promise of spring. Pine trees, dark and tall, line a dirt road going up a hill to a house; on an adjacent hill, rows and rows of vines are turning yellow and red, ready to lose their leaves for the winter. A sliver of land suddenly catches a ray of sun and shines moss green like an emerald. Olive trees shimmer silvery and lovely, broad and expansive next to rows of narrow black cypress trees saluting on the crest of a hill. A gust of wind brings a flurry of brown leaves to the ground. Soon the trees will be bare.

Voices rise sudden and happy from a field where men are picking olives. Through the silvery branches I see the nets, red, on the ground, laced across the grass, olives fall purple here and there and gathering together where the lands slopes. Someone talks and laughs. I see chickens in the field below, in the grass, near a little makeshift shed, and I walk down the hill to see if I can pet them. They run away quickly. One is black, she reminds me of Bella. I think of her, how she died just before I left. I think of my other chickens, and my cat, Joe, and my boyfriend Aram. Images run through my head. I feel suddenly sad. I turn back, I climb the hill back onto the road.

The road is muddy. I pass the stream by the old mill; the water pools there and gets quite deep. I think back to when the engine of my motorino would flood out there sometimes when Lucia and I would go for a ride, me insisting that if we rode through fast enough we could make it and come through to the other side. But we would nearly always get stuck, and Lucia and I would laugh and push the motorbike out of the water and up the hill, our shoes and pants soaked. There is a nice bridge there now, and a beautiful house that I once recall was a rubble.

Along the road I notice patches of some kind of tall prickly grasses we picked in middle school to dry and paint for an art project, maybe to give to our mothers. I painted mine silver, maybe, though they are so pretty just as they are, brown. It cheers me to see them, I remember the joy of taking them home, and I would like to pick some, but then I would have to carry them for the rest of my walk. I pass a little stone house along the stream that has been recently restored, like a cabin in the woods; for decades it was a ruin that I would pass running because I thought strange men or creatures might live there at night. Now it is a lovely stone house, and just beyond it a lovely pink house I would love to own.

I pass the edge of the brown field where a farmer, an old man I trusted, once parked his tractor at the edge of a secluded row of trees, the tractor I was riding on for fun as a kid, and molested me. I think of my little jeans and his big hands. I turn away. My eyes skim the gravel and the puddles on the ground. My mind moves away quickly seeking refuge, though it stops just long enough to remember his fat hands and square, thick fingernails, and the blue of his eyes. I wonder if he molested others, maybe his daughters and granddaughters. They never do it just once. I wish he were not dead because I would like to ask him, how, how he did this to a little girl with a brown sweater. Who else did he harm?

I walk faster. I look up the road passed Greta and Pietro’s house, and over the hill. Dark clouds weigh down the sky and the landscape looks like it’s painted a darker shade of green. But as I round the curve the landscape opens to reveal a perfect slice of a hill in full sunlight, like someone thrust a beam of light on it from a theater catwalk above just to please me, to cheer me. I stop and smile. I smile at the humor of life, a moment shady and a moment bright.  The ground is muddy and marked by the tires of a tractor. I hear a tractor, and I turn. A tall blue tractor drives by pulling a cart carrying cases of olives, headed to the mill. I stop to let it go by. The farmer waves; I smile, and I am comforted.

I pass little sheds where farmers keep their tools and their animals; I see patches of white in the grass and realize they are ducks, foraging in an open field. I stop to talk to them. I am now back on the paved road and cars pass me going too fast, unaware, uncaring. I don’t like that about Italy. I pass the place where all these cats live, two or three adult cats with five or six kittens now; they come out running and I shoo them back toward their shed, beyond the fence, so they will not come out onto the busy road where no one will stop for a cat or any other animal for that matter. I don’t like that about Italy, either. I walk up Finoglio, a steep, steep street into town. I turn and walk backwards so I can look out back onto the landscape as I rise. My breathing is labored, the air filling my lungs, brisk though not cold. I make a mental note to pick nettles before it is too late, before it gets too cold, so I can make risotto. Make sure dogs have not peed on them, Luisa said.

The countryside is stunning and familiar like a glove I used to wear. I smell firewood burning everywhere. We used to hate it growing up, the smell of firewood; our clothes smelled like firewood all winter long, always, and we felt unclean. Now it smells true. I don’t care about my clothes.

I breathe.

Sybil Fix©2013