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Overview
Brimming with life and kissed by romance, The Lady in the Palazzo perfectly captures the essence of a singular place and offers up a feast—and the recipes to prepare it!—for readers of all stripes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565126480 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2008 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 338 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
An American chef and food and wine journalist, Marlena de Blasi has written five memoirs, a novel, and two books about the regional foods of Italy. She lives with her husband in the Umbrian hilltown of Orvieto. Her work has been translated into twenty-six languages.
Hometown:
Orvieto, a hilltown in UmbriaPlace of Birth:
Schenectady, New YorkEducation:
B.A., State University of New York at Albany; graduate studies in political science, New York UniversityRead an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Life Lived Well Moves Backward
The sausages had been roasted in the baker's oven earlier in the day. Now, plumped and crisp and still in their shallow metal pans, they warm over the embers of a charcoal burner, the scent of them rousing hunger and perfuming the piazza. Nearby, on another table, there sits a large kettle over a gas burner filled with what must be gallons and gallons of local red wine. Whole oranges pricked with cloves float about in the purply depths of it, and a woman in a fur hat with a cardigan over her pinafore stands on a stepladder and stirs the wine with a long wooden spoon. Nearly everyone who passes by tells her the same thing: "Don't let it boil, Mariuccia. Per carità, non farla bollire. For pity's sake, don't let it boil."
Mariuccia goes jealously about the business of her infusion, all the while talking easily across the piazza to the polenta man, whose copper cauldron, black and battered, hangs, by virtue of a wrought iron stand, over a pile of red-and-white ashes smoldering in a small circle of stones. A long white apron wraps his jeans, and only a U2 T-shirt keeps him against the late-January afternoon, the thin cotton of it straining across his chest as he whips his savory pap with a broomstick, moving it always in the same direction. Stirring polenta counterclockwise is to flirt with calamity. Any Umbrian will assure you of that.
"Polenta incatenata stasera," he tells Mariuccia. Polenta in chains tonight. He points to a great bowl of white beans, which he'll fold into the cornmeal when it's thickened and smooth. Some fanciful eye in one past century or another must have thought that white beans running through the thick yellow pudding looked like a chain. How a thing happened matters less to an Umbrian than that the thing is preserved, and so "polenta in chains" the dish will always be.
One side of the piazza is enclosed by a stone wall in which there is a low wooden door. Through the door and down half a flight of steep steps is a grotto, a large cave that has been transformed into a village kitchen, complete with generator and lights. A slab of marble resting on trestles serves as a worktable, covered now in a storm of flour. Oil bubbles in two deep pans set over a wood-fired stove. Tonight the kitchen is the scene of the mixing and rolling and frying of bread dough, all of it performed by women upholstered in the local uniform of flowered pinafore and shawl or sweater, accessorized for winter with stocking cap or woolen kerchief. These women live a few meters from the piazza, some of them inside apartments in the palazzi that sit directly on the square. But rather than cook alone — each one in her own place — they prefer to gather in the cave to prepare for village feasts or to save a windfall of fruit, a bounty of tomatoes, to set their cheeses to age and the wine-washed haunches of their pigs to dry. And one senses that the kitchen serves some other, more sympathetic purpose, as a club or a bar or a card room does for their men. Two of the women enter the kitchen now, sharing the weight of a sack of flour; two others exit, each one holding her half of a wooden wine case filled with just-fried flats of bread. Tortucce, they are called. A moment later, another woman exits the cave kitchen, her bread-piled wooden case balanced quaintly on her head. Swinging her prosperous hips through the crowd, an old blue sweater falling open, uncloaking Junoesque bosoms, soft and brown and bursting over the confines of her dress, she raises cries of joy. One man bites the side of his finger, a gesture of desire, of admiration.
"Ciao, bellezza. Ciao, Miranda bella mia. Ciao beauty, ciao Miranda my lovely," shout the men.
Miranda sets her load of bread down near the sausages, and then, to spur their collective amusement, she lifts one of the smaller men off his feet, promising him a death by grilling if he doesn't behave. Miranda is nearly seventy, and the man she taunts is past eighty. Both will tell you that they are younger now that they are older, that a life lived well moves backward. Like the only way to stir polenta, this is another Umbrian truth. Truth number two.
And so Sant'Antonio's birthday supper is ready. The saint is the patron of this Umbrian village, and his presence and image are as familiar to these people as an endearing uncle. They live as at ease with the hallowed as they do with one another, both relationships being mysteries which need no solution. And I begin to think that this must be Umbrian truth number three.
All the cooks come out from the cave kitchen now, wiping hands on aprons, buttoning sweaters and wrapping shawls more tightly, joining in among the hundred or so people milling about the place in greeting and expectation. The few, like us, who've come from neighboring villages in both Umbria and Tuscany are welcomed as guests, taken here and there about the piazza to meet the others. The air is charged. It's nearly time. There is suspense even in the light. As though old red satin had been stretched too tightly across the sky, the leaving sun pokes through the frays in it, causing a great hot splendor over the pageant, freezing it for a moment and surely forever, like the squeeze of some antiquated camera or the strokes of a gold-dipped brush. The crowd seems made of children waiting for the doors to open upon a party. A church full of people looking for the bride. They wait for their saint and the fire that will honor him. But it's colder now without the sun, and the waiting begins to feel too long.
Rescue comes from the back of the square. Three men stride forward with fagots of twigs in their fists, holding them high like unsheathed swords. They are three generations of a family — a man flanked by his son and his father. Each of them is named Antonio. From the other direction, a small, bareheaded and purple-robed man appears and, brandishing a burning torch, walks, smiling, toward the trio of Antonios. He is the bishop. Like altar boys, the men kneel on the cobbles of the pavement before him. The bishop kisses the tops of their bent heads, lights each of their fagots with the flame of his, and in a move swift, balletic like discus throwers in a sandy field, all four men heave their flames onto a great pyramid of wood. Trenchers of oak, split and drenched in benzine, piled one atop another; it is a totem, primitive and dreadful, that they set alight. Sixty feet high it is, but higher still it seems, the flames licking now, gasping in a rampage up and over the oily black skin of the wood. The crowd sways in a primal thrall and, save a sacrificial lamb or a pale-skinned virgin, the ritual flames are barely removed from those of the ancients. In a single brazen voice, they are a pagan tribe saying psalms in the red smoke of Saint Anthony's fire. They are reminding themselves and one another how small we all are in the scheme of the world. And this is Umbrian truth number four.
"Ti piacciono, heh? You like them?" asks the baker of a man who is shamelessly ravishing of a lush, dripping package made of sausage and fried bread. "Le ho arrostite io," says the baker. I roasted them.
"Ma, io le ho preparate. But they were made by me," says the butcher.
"Ma, guardate, ragazzi, sono io che ho ammazzato il maiale. But, look, my fellows, it was I who killed the pig," said the farmer, whose boast causes a volley of backslaps and a reckless clinking of glasses.
Like a reliquary in a shrine, there is a wheel of cheese set on a white-draped table and flanked by candles. Pecorino ignorante, someone calls it. Ignorant pecorino. It is ewe's-milk cheese made the old way, which means it was made by "ignoring" the State's new-fangled sanitary laws. Bootleg pecorino it is, made by a shepherd the way cheese was meant to be made, says the shepherd who made it, tapping at the form with his knuckles, looking for a natural crack. Like a sculptor seeking acquaintance with a stone.
Why does one always expect a shepherd to be of a certain age, toothless and swathed in skins, a peaked hat pulled low on his brow? This one is perhaps thirty, with eyes green and liquid as just-pressed oil set wide in his heart-shaped face. With his creamy turtleneck sweater and a fine pair of boots, he is a sixth-generation sheep farmer and cheese maker who lives with his family in an eighteenth-century stone house surrounded by the moors and meadows where his herds graze. He rides a Harley but leaves it in a shed on the edges of his land so as not to disturb his sheep. His cheese — this one a tobacco-leaf-wrapped three-kilo form that has been aged for two years in an heirloom terra-cotta urn — falls into bronze crumbles as he breaks its crust with a pallet knife and a small hammer. People wait in line for the cheese, each one holding a paper cup of black honey. One claims his piece and, before biting into it, drags the cheese through the honey, eats it then as though it were the only food in the world. Ignorant cheese, indeed.
Another table is set with nine or ten versions of an olive oil and orange-blossom-scented cake. Each one looks and tastes just a little bit different from the others, according to the hand and the soul of the baker. Most people, surrendering to politeness and greed, taste all of them. Meanwhile, Mariuccia still hovers over her kettle, dosing it with cold wine at the first sign of a gurgle, and Miranda-of-the-Bosoms tells of the miracles of Saint Anthony to a group of children who sob and choke in battle over the rights to a silver balloon.
We'd learned about this festival of Saint Anthony from signs — handwrought in bold, bleeding script — fastened to every lamppost and under every bridge along the lakeside road: Festa Di Sant'Antonio Abate, 17 Gennaio.
"Did you see that sign? It's tonight. Tonight is Sant'Antonio. Would you like to go?" I'd risked the question despite the downturned pitch of my husband's mouth, the bilious tint of his cheeks, the rhythmic slapping of his palms on the steering wheel. We were returning to San Casciano after another day dedicated and lost to the hunt for a house. The next house, as Barlozzo calls it.
Over time, one becomes hardened to the dupe, the dazzle, the genteel hiss of scorn which can be symptoms of the business of buying and selling — or even of the renting — of something as subjective as walls and the space within them. But today was made of mockery. And so when he didn't answer my question about Saint Anthony, I stayed quiet. I understood that he was bent on putting immediate distance between his murderous thoughts and a certain red-bearded agent.
Said agent had taken us to see what he'd called a "country house" in one of the communes that surround the gorgeous hill town of Todi. All the while we were in the auto with Redbeard, he'd rhapsodized about light, about the amazing softness of the light and how it illuminated the house he was taking us to see, no matter the time of day.
"Luminosissima, the lightest of lights," he'd said as we approached the place. And so it was. Unfettered as it was by much of a roof.
"Ah, yes, the roof. It has been arranged for — we are waiting only for the permessi, the permits, from the Comune, the city hall. You know very well that these things are not in our control, but we have been assured that the work can begin within another week. It will be finished in a matter of months."
How many times had we heard the song of the permessi, how many times had our questions and perplexities been crushed by an agent's automatic absolution with his single mention of il Comune?
"But in the meantime, look: there are an additional two rooms in the wine cellar," he'd said, pushing open the rotted door to a fetid cave piled with tools and pots, the dross of better days.
I'd felt suddenly spent, wanting nothing more to do with Redbeard or permessi. And as for the grand concept of il Comune, well ...
"You will admit, signori, that it does provide the dream of all strangers, does it not?" Redbeard had continued. "To live under the Italian sun." He'd said this while plucking at the dried petals of ahortensia bush, even he, now, too tired for the play. Thwarted and silent, he'd driven us back to the center of the town, unwinding a handsome green scarf from his neck as we went. An actor stepping out of costume. But Redbeard had provided only the day's finale. The scenes had begun at eight that morning.
The first stop was to keep an appointment to see un appartamento in affitto, centro storico di Todi; terzo piano di un palazzo prestigioso del settecento, restaurato in modo pittoresco: an apartment for rent in the historic center of Todi; the third floor of a prestigious seventeenth-century palace, restored picturesquely. Apart from the advertisement itself, we'd been besotted just stepping through the portone, the great door, into the courtyard at this address. A long dim hall, a fallow of broken marble — wine and russet columns — strewn everywhere, half supine and lustrous in the powdery light.
Hearts racing, grinning to each other over our luck, we mount shallow steps. Barely touching the velvet cord banister, barely touching the steps themselves, which curve and careen three stories up to an abrupt end in front of a pair of great wooden doors — carved, beveled, corniced, the sheen of them the color of ripe black grapes — I stop to catch my breath. Two brass moors' heads are the doors' knockers. I strike one sharply, three times. I stand back to await entrance to my new home, smoothing my jacket, pulling my hat so it sits just above my eyebrows. Where's Fernando? Huffing, he rounds the final curve as the door is opened by Signor Luca from the estate agency. The bowing and hand shaking take place in front of the door.
Only the threshold rests between the sublime and the "picturesque." Lowered ceilings, perfect plasterboard walls, pimpled milk-glass shades over high-wattage bulbs, and rubber baseboards are the stuff of the salone, all of it clinically strangled, vandalized of every Renaissance architectural and cultural trapping, motif, and sentiment. But surely it will get better, I tell myself. I know that the agent and my husband banter behind me, but I hear nothing save my own peevish growl. I open and then shut one hollow wooden door after another, at first quite slowly, then faster and faster until I've touched them all, until I've seen the butchering, complete. The six bedrooms are postmodern cubes, each an eight-foot square. There are two baths with metal shower cabinets pressed against the Lilliputian facilities of a nursery school loo. The cherry on the cake is a factory-assembled kitchen plumped down in a dark corner behind a half wall of embossed plastic. Dark yellow embossed plastic. Fernando, more polite than I in the face of most horrors, listens to a sheep-eyed Signore Luca reciting the apartment's potentials.
We can rent rooms to foreign students who come to Todi to study the Italian language, he says, or to those who will attend music courses, or to paint and sculpt. Better yet, we can establish some sort of rapporto — euphemism for "kickback" — with the local theater management, who will send us actors and rock stars. Technicians. Do we know how many lighting and sound engineers it takes to put on the humblest of shows? All we'd have to do is to keep our tariffs a thousand lire or two under those of the cheapest hotel and pffft, it's done, he says, brandishing his arms and throwing back his head as though lowering the baton on the Appassionata. That we are searching for an apartment for our personal use, that we have never breathed the tiniest word to him or anyone else about a desire to run a home for traveling cellists has not been considered by Signor Luca.
Out from a yet unnoticed cubicle that opens from a door set flush into one of the bedrooms steps this performance's second banana. He is Adolfo, and together these two are convinced to rent this place. This morning. To us or to any one of the twelve — I've counted them, twelve — other appointments printed in twenty-two point Book Antiqua on a page clipped to Luca's leather agenda. Fernando continues his obliging, feigned interest, his head cocked fetchingly in thought, unresponsive to my fierce pinching of his forearm. The cat and the fox want signatures, deposits, the repeated thumping of their notary's stamp on the at least three hundred pages of state-composed and printed and collated forms, which await only the addition of the renter's personal data. They want all this before lunch.
I take Fernando's lead. I stop the pinching and my not quite sotto voce repetitions of English, French, and Spanish oaths. I cock my head, too. If head cocking will get us out of here faster than whispered oaths, I'll do it. All I want is to escape down those majestic stairs, through that splendid courtyard, and out into the crackling cold of the Umbrian winter. And then I'd like an espresso.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lady in the Palazzo"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Marlena de Blasi.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Part One: The Next House1. A Life Lived Well Moves Backward
2. Truth, Hard and Ho, Has Its Pleasures
3. Once in a While, Let Life Shape Itself
4. Life Is Lived in Epochs
Part Two: Waiting for a Ballroom
5. That’s Umbria Out There
6. Everywhere in Orvieto This Is the Suspicion of Glory
7. Bombastes Is Back in Town
8. Umbria Is Italy Unmingled
9. She Says People Need to Be Together as Much as They Need to Eat
10. Besides, They All Have Something of the Ass about Them, Chou
11. I Preferred One Waltz with a Beauty to a Lifetime with Someone Less Rare
12. Wait until Midnight If You Can
13. Sleep Well and Rise Early to an Exuberance of Bells
14. Most All of Us Abide in Ruins
15. I’d Like to Have Hair the Color of Hot Copper Wires
16. And Be Careful of Edgardo d’Onofrio
17. The Orvietani
18. We’re Going to Live in a Ballroom, Fernando. Isn’t That the Most Wonderful Thing You Ever Heard?
19. Brahms at Eight O’Clock from Across the Vicolo
Part Three: In Via del Duomo
20. Where I Come From, We Invite Our Neighbors and Friends to Supper
21. Black Ties and Party Dresses
22. Would the Lady Be Pleased by a Waltz?
The Feast
Pan-Sautéed Winter Pears with Pecorino and Walnut Focaccia
Umbrichelli with Olivada
Leg of Spiced Pork Slow-Braised in Red Wine with Prunes
Roasted Chestnut Polenta
Brown Sugar Gelato with Caramelized Blood Oranges
Warm Sambuca Fritters
Acknowledgements