In Maremma Read Free Page A

(“Found in the dining room at Calke Abbey and the library at Kedleston ... and yes,
similar to the Regency scheme in the entrance hall and staircase at Castle Coole”); Sugar Bag Light (“... very like the blue of paper used for lining drawers in the late eighteenth century”). One cannot judge a paint only by its name, however, and in the end we settled on Single Cream. For the trim work, we chose the elegantly concise String (“One of a series of pale, earth-pigment-based colours, which have been in continuous use either as an off-white with brighter colours or as its own colour with a brighter white”).
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    The Master Bedroom, Podere Fiume (Photo by Simon McBride)

    After about three weeks—long weeks indeed, since by this point we had only to have the walls painted before
we could move in—the paint arrived, by truck, from England, and Sauro began applying it. We had vacated our apartment in Rome on March 6 to oblige the new tenant, who was pregnant, and since then we had been leading a peripatetic existence in the expectation that the house would be finished in mid-April. From March 6 to April 9 we had rented a house in Saturnia. Podere Fiume not yet being habitable on the 9th, we went to Verona (April 9 to April 11), the Villa d’Este at Cernobbio (April 11 to April 14), and then to Domenico and Elizabeth’s vacation house in “Beverly Hills” (April 14 to April 24). Since our homelessness owed, at least in part, to Domenico’s overly optimistic estimation, they didn’t charge the exorbitant weekly rate that they usually charged other Americans.
    It was during this stay that Sauro called us to say that he was painting the house and that he wasn’t so sure about the color. “It’s a little on the orange side,” he said. We suggested the color might be less intense once the paint had dried. If it didn’t, we’d drive over, have a look, and go from there.
    The color was not less intense once the paint had dried. As it turned out, Sauro had in fact understated how orange the color actually was. It was the hot orange of certain curries. According to the label on the can, this was not Single Cream but Harissa.
    After that, urgent calls were made, profuse apologies tendered, and a promise extracted from the one Italian in the shipping department at Farrow & Ball that the proper paint would be sped on its way to us that very afternoon. But in the meantime, where were we to live? The day before, Elizabeth had informed us that we would have to clear out of their house that weekend: they were
coming to Beverly Hills and bringing guests. To make matters worse, the May ist holiday was approaching: one of the most traveled holidays of the Italian year, during which hotel rooms are virtually impossible to come by. If push came to shove, we’d have to sleep in our rental car.
    Thence from Beverly Hills to Saturnia (April 24 to May 1); from Saturnia to Paestum (May 1 to May 2.—we were lucky enough to find a hotel); from Paestum to Lecce (May 2. to May 3); from Lecce to Asolo (May 3 to May 6); from Asolo back to Saturnia (May 6 to May 7); and finally, on May 7, to Podere Fiume. All told, we drove more than fourteen hundred miles. Sauro had re-primed the walls and painted them Single Cream. The bedroom closets, however, we left as they were as a tribute to the episode.
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    TMM, Paestum (Photo by DL)

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    O F ALL THE craftsmen who worked on Podere Fiume, the most entertaining was Pepe, the blacksmith. He was a short, chubby, balding, and slightly foppish Roman—he had been known to wear an ascot even while soldering—who always seemed as rumpled and stale as if he had just come off a long-haul flight. In a single sentence he could tell you about the giardino d’inverno (winter garden) he had built for the designer Valentino and lament that he had not had una bella cagarella (a good shit) in ages.
    Pepe was a fixture at a certain bar