In Maremma Read Free

wild shaggy bullocks roaming about in the brush; then lovely mountains; on the other side the sea asleep naked; and near the shore the temple of Neptune, the oldest thing in the world—impressionally at least; older than Greece and Assyria, as old as the oldest Egypt; so solemn and serene and sweet that one burns with shame; what have I done with my life? It hurts and consoles one at once. HARRY BREWSTER SR., from a letter to Ethel Smyth (1893)
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    N OTHING TELLS YOU more about a people than their homes. In Maremma, the interior ideal was dazzling white walls, shiny granite floors kept mirror-bright thanks to the chamois-bottomed slippers that many casalinghe (housewives) wear indoors, a ceremonial dining room (but rarely a living room), no lamps but bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a mix of inherited rustic furniture with decidedly “modern” pieces that spoke of a remote and faintly unreal urban world. Many homes had only two books: the Holy Bible and the telephone directory. Some, however, had three books: the Holy Bible, the telephone directory, and a hagiography of Silvio Berlusconi that he himself had sent to every Italian household before an election.

    Italy has gained general prosperity only since the Second World War. A common phenomenon was to see an old woman dressed in black being driven to the weekly outdoor market by her son in his Jeep Cherokee. The once poor tried to prove their affluence by living among new things, even if they were not so fine as the old ones, yet there was more to it than that: one did not have to look at too many Italian interior-design magazines to see that the country was continuing its long struggle to free itself from an oppressive inheritance. Like most Americans in Italy, we didn’t want to furnish our house in massive, dark furniture any more than most Italians did, but we weren’t prepared to go to the other extreme, the cruel minimalism of Milan design.
    To a one, the outstanding artisans who worked on Podere Fiume—Magini the carpenter, Pepe the black_smith, Luca and Pierluigi the marble cutters, Sauro the stonemason, and the Rossis (door and window makers)—were incredulous when we told them that we wanted una casa d’epoca (a house from once upon a time). We wanted rough terra cotta floors, exposed beams, and a pietra serena fireplace. We wanted to construct a future based on our own private notions of comfort and incorporating a factitious past. (Perhaps Americans want old houses because we do not have enough history, whereas Italians want new ones because they have too much of it.) We wanted visitors to take it for granted that Podere Fiume’s origins were medieval, or, if not medieval, then still far in the past.
    For some inexplicable reason, many people in Semproniano, kept apprised of our house’s progress by Sauro and his wife, Silvia, were preoccupied about the color we would choose to paint the interior walls. Gigliola, who owned the bakery, urged us to paint them white. “Con bianco non si sbaglia mai” (“You never go wrong with white”), she said. Sauro, too, advised white. Living in the country with a wire-haired fox terrier, however, could any color be less practical?

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    Podere Fiume from the South (Photo by MM)

    From reading interior magazines, we had become familiar with the paints made by the English company Farrow & Ball. The colors not only had memorable names but came with stories, an appealing idea to writers: Calamine (“... colours like this one appeared regularly in country house anterooms and boudoirs from the 1870s on into Edwardian Times”); Charleston Gray (“The Bloomsbury Group used this colour extensively, both in interior decoration and on canvas”); India Yellow (“First available in England in the eighteenth century, this pigment was produced by reducing the bright yellow urine of cows fed on a special diet of mango leaves”); Ointment Pink