Today my day was marred by clouds of heavy doubt about my writing and my painting as well as troublesome and pesky questions about my future. To shake it off I decided to take a walk to Sarteano, a town about 5K uphill from Cetona.

A little medieval hill town much like Cetona but with a big camping clientele, far more sprawl, and a more industrious, less insular population, Sarteano has long been home to many friends  and (ex)-boyfriends of mine, and indeed there were months in my teens where I spent more awake time in Sarteano than in Cetona. The two towns have a long history of acerbic rivalry, and up through our adolescence, various groups of guys from each of the towns would fight each other over girlfriends and other matters like they were stuck in the Dark Ages. This used to happen particularly at night and particularly in dancing venues like La Bussola, in Chianciano, where we went dancing on weekends. They would line up against opposing walls, staring at each other, and something would spark, like, who threw a cigarette butt my way, or who looked at me cross. Or someone would walk straight up to someone’s face and punch him, accusing him of something lame like looking at him wrong. M’ha guardato male. Che cazzo vole? He looked at me wrong. What the fuck does he want? That would get them going, maybe starting with two, then more would join the fray and finally it would be a huge pile of guys punching on each other while we girls ran off and eventually home. Yes, much to my embarrassment, some of those people I dated, and much like me, I am sure they have changed.

In any case, the road to Sarteano is well-travelled for me, though strangely I have not been there since I have been back on this trip, in part, I guess, because I am on foot. Today I decided to make good on that.

The countryside between Cetona and Sarteano is some of the most beautiful in the area, an expanse of terraces of moss green grass and olive trees that opens wider and wider the farther up you climb. The road consists of a hairpin curve after another, and as you turn them one at a time you look back behind you to see Cetona grow smaller and smaller and the countryside in between more and more verdant and gorgeous.

On my way up I passed several houses that were playgrounds to me when I was little and homes to good friends of my parents. My friends Flavia and Arabella lived with their parents, Anna and Decimo, on the bottom floor of a big villa owned by a British colonel. Story goes that Decimo met the Colonel, whose name now escapes me, in Rome, when he was a starving little boy, at Liberation, after WWII. The Colonel rescued him from poverty and Decimo went on to work for him, When we met them he was caretaker of his property, together with two Malaysians who mostly cooked for him. I think the Colonel had met them in Malaysia and brought them back with him to England. In any case, Flavia, Arabella, and I spent years’ worth of afternoons playing together on the Colonel’s property, having fun, eating dinners of pasta malesiana together with our parents, and growing, slowly. The Colonel is now dead, and I peered through the edges of the imposing gate that now protects his old home—I don’t know who the owners are—trying to revive an old memory of the house; then I walked to the gate of a house just slightly uphill that belonged to the Colonel’s sister, Nika, and her husband, Sir Jack. Nika and Jack were some of my parents’ best friends—they spent summers in Cetona and holidays, then finally retired there. And like so many others, are now gone. I am constantly reminded these days, as I have been through the years, but particularly now, of how much I miss the friends of my parents, some of whom grew to be closer to me in time than to them. I miss them all very much, and more pointedly here, their ghosts alive and calling and waving from these hills and houses.

On my way up to the road to Sarteano I also passed several old abandoned farmhouses, a few right off the road, a few others a little way off amidst overgrown and abandoned fields. I always find myself following the little roads with my eyes to see the old houses and to imagine the possibilities—to dream, to imagine what might be, what I would do with them. It is my private yarn to do so ever since my parents sold our house in Cetona in the early nineties, a victim of divorce. It is accurate to say that it was the most devastating loss of my life, the most heartbreaking event. The first summer I returned home to this town where I actually no longer had a home, at the age of 26, I was sick with crazy pain, as if I had been yanked up by the roots or by my umbilical cord and laid out naked on the pavement in front of a door that I could no longer unlock. It took me years to recover, if I have, and I will always, I guess, dream of having a home, a house of mine, here, though I realize that certainly nothing would ever be the same about that, either. So I look, I imagine, then I go on.

Right before reaching the town of Sarteano, the road levels off onto a straight stretch that has become the Sarteano Auto Mile. I turned around and headed back to Cetona the way I came, looking down, as I walked, onto Cetona and the valley, now in a warm afternoon light. On my way I was lucky to pass Il Vallone as someone, a caretaker I guess, was coming out of the gate in a car. The Vallone is a stunning villa the color of the purest golden ochre that sits perched on a clearing overlooking Cetona and, below, the valley all the way to the autostrada and beyond. Its position gives it an unhindered view of the countryside and, conversely, gives travelers an unimpeded view of the house, which in late afternoon catches the glorious golden sunlight transforming it into a burst of flaming yellow atop cascading emerald green terraces. In the afternoon the house can be seen for miles. When I was growing up the Vallone belonged to a gay couple (which at the time was somewhat of a deal but not much) who were in my parents’ larger social circle, but I have not been on the property in years, and now that I paint I wanted to see the house’s color up-close in the afternoon light. As the caretaker or maid pulled away in her car, I approached to look down the driveway and the gate stayed open. Wondering whether I would get in trouble, I ventured down the driveway and when I got to the house I called out to see if anyone was there. A caretaker, a man, came out of a shed and asked if he knew me. I explained that I wanted to take a picture of the house, and he was delighted. He told me what had happened to the house in the intervening years—he has worked there for nearly twenty—down to today; the current owner, an elderly British woman who is recently widowed, wants to sell it again. The house badly needs a coat of paint, and new shutters. He walked me to the gate as the sun reached its lowest point before tucking behind Monte Cetona, and we stood for a minute in the warm sunlight. The house was like an apricot on fire, and the green grass like sparkling emeralds.

It was the kind of sensory joy that can uplift even the most troubled, and certainly can suffice to disperse existential questions the answers to which we simply do not have. Sometimes I don’t know is good enough.

Sybil Fix©2014

On a recent evening I drove to Le Piazze to buy some wine from a local winemaker, la Cantina Gentili.

Le Piazze is a frazione of Cetona, a separate town in the same municipality, eight or so kilometers away by a curvy and narrow road. It has been cold and rainy here, and indeed, it was pouring and windy. I considered choosing a different day to make the drive, but I wanted a break from writing. My friends are working, and I like to set out by myself and go places.

I had not been to Le Piazze in a long time—and indeed, I have not been in Cetona at this time of year in many, many years. I have missed the turning of the leaves, the wintery rain, the smell of firewood, the dark drives. Living in tropical Charleston now, used to the sultry heat and a closet nearly devoid of winter clothes, it has been easy for me to say to myself that I don’t like the cold, that Cetona in winter is miserable and lonely, that I don’t miss that. It closes the door on a time of discomfort, perhaps; indeed our house was damp and unpleasant in winter, and I don’t miss that. But at some level, as I have discovered in the past few weeks, it is not true.

It was nearly dark when I set out from Cetona, but not entirely. I could make out the outline of the countryside around me as I drove the winding, curvy road, and I could make out the hills and the cypress trees on the farther horizon. Rising above me, Monte Cetona was covered in dark clouds, and around me trees were blowing.

Some old song came on, some Italian pop song. I was driving carefully, studying the road, when a peaceful feeling settled over me. I realized how familiar the road was, how it still is. How I know the cut of each curve, where to upshift and downshift, where the curve might throw you off. I suddenly remembered how, when I first came to the States for college, at night when I was homesick I would lie in bed and drive the road to Le Piazze in my mind, rounding each curve carefully, recalling exactly its degree of ascent or descent, shifting as the car did, or the bus, as if the road right there in my mind could take me back home from New Haven to Cetona. I did the same for the road that goes from Cetona to Montepulciano, which I traveled for five years every day by bus to go to the liceo. Lying in bed I would revisit the bus stops, who got on or off where, on which curve, revisiting their faces, their names. I remembered the image of a similar road in the dark, from Sarteano to Cetona, lit by the headlights, in the winter, in the rain, when an old boyfriend would drive me home, in the early evening, so I could make curfew and finish my homework. He drove a little forest green Mini and you felt like you were sitting directly on the ground.

On my drive to Le Piazze I remembered a jacket I owned once, a burgundy jacket, that my parents had bought me for the winter. It was not a great jacket, it was not particularly warm or nice looking, but I liked it, I needed a new jacket, and my parents, who did not have a lot of money, bought it for me. We settled on that jacket as a compromise in a world of expensive leather that my parents could not afford and puffy jackets that were in vogue then but that I did not like. I was proud of my new jacket until I wore it out to the piazza and my then boyfriend, who was five years older than me, wearing his heavy gray leather jacket tied at the waist, smug and superior, said, Ma che giacca e` cotesta? What kind of jacket is that? I felt so sad and inadequate.

Driving on the rainy road back from Le Piazze I remembered when Alessandra and I were best friends, when we were fifteen or sixteen, we would go to the back room of the Bar Cavour to play cards and smoke cigarettes. There was no other place to go when it was cold and rainy and the Bar Sport, which was nicer and much more welcoming, was closed. In Cetona there was no movie theater, no library, nothing. But we found things to do, not all edifying, not all exciting, but they got us through the winter. I read a lot too, and studied, and loved to walk in the woods, but I loved my friends. I adored my friends, and my entire inner world was colored by them and their company. Every moment I could spend with them, whether it was Alessandra at that time, or Francesca later, or Lucia or Fabiola or Patrizia, it was a gift, they were all a gift. I stole my moments away every afternoon after I finished my homework and I walked up our road, Via Sobborgo, no matter what weather, and found my friends. In the rain and the cold Via Sobborgo was dreary and dark, and on weekends, when I stayed out later, I favored a street that went through the town. Every chimney in town bellowed smoke and the smell of firewood pervaded everything. I have missed that smell, and when I occasionally have smelled it in Charleston over the years it has stopped me in my tracks and put me right back on that street through town, the stone walls, and the echo of my steps on the stone pavement.

Later, my last years of the liceo, winter days were spent with my friend Antonella in her clothing store, Mr. Up, now the fruit and vegetable store. It was my refuge, warm and cozy, with good company, laughter, and conversation. Winters were good then. There were weekend nights toward my late teens when we went to the vasche in San Casciano, past Le Piazze, natural springs that pooled hot sulfurous water in these huge baths where the women of the town also did the laundry. In the deep of winter, sometimes with snow on the ground, we would pile in three or four cars, drive to San Casciano, down the steep treacherous road that led to the vasche, strip our clothes off in the freezing cold, shaking, with goose bumps, and climb into the baths and soak, sometimes till dawn. We got out with our skin tingling from the heat and dry off with our clothes—no one ever thought of bringing a towel—pile back into the cars, cigarettes burning, music blaring, and head back to Cetona. It was a favorite winter pastime.

The aversion to winter in Cetona is an adult construct, I have realized. In my heart I have missed winter in Cetona as much as I missed the reawakening of spring and the openness and flowering of summer. Indeed, without the dreariness of winter there is no exhilaration of spring. I realized that in my heart there is a place, deep-seeded and forgotten, to revisit and celebrate the rainy roads, the fields laying fallow or awaiting seed, and the blustery times, the desolation of the piazza in the rain, the feeling of no place to go but right here, the feeling that everything is right here even if it is raining, here in this place, and it is perfect as it is. There is an important and sacred place to notice the quiet, bare beauty of the winter landscape, the sound of the water rushing in the streams, the silence of the fields. All of that is built into my flesh and the programming of my brain as strongly and equally as the blossoming of spring and the lush heat of summer.

And I love it all equally, still.

Sybil Fix©2014