In Maremma Read Free Page B

on Via Cavour, not far from his studio near Trajan’s Forum, and there he insisted on buying a coffee for each and every friend of his who happened to walk in or whom he might have chanced to encounter and co-opt on the way. Each of his visits—and he made no fewer than five of them a day—cost him a minimum of fifteen thousand lire. So that he would not need to have cash on him always, he kept an account at the bar and settled it once a month. Pepe’s minimum of fifteen thousand lire a day came to two and a quarter million lire a month. Multiplied by twelve, one calculates that Pepe spent fifteen thousand dollars a year on coffee.

    Like all true artisans, Pepe was self-dramatizing. His work, he would say, was not like anyone else’s. Although certain things might look simple, such as the wrought-iron brackets for the curtain rods, they required enormous effort and concentration to make. For this reason, he could hardly be expected to work more than two or three hours a day: only an automaton could work eight or ten hours a day. If lunch was particularly satisfying, perhaps he would be able to put in another half hour’s work during the afternoon. In any case, he must have a short rest first.
    Still, in six months, he managed to complete all our iron work: grates for the downstairs windows, three sets of doors, arched doors for a winter garden, railings for the stairs (a design copied from a terrace on a crumbling building in the Monti neighborhood of Rome), and finally, the curtain brackets and rods. Although Sauro and his assistants, Giampaolo and Fabio, were able to install the window grates and doors, Pepe insisted that he had to come up to install the railing himself.
    We duly set Pepe up at an agriturismo run by Sauro’s cousin, but it would not do for him. Instead he decamped to the Locanda la Pieve, Semproniano’s one hotel, where all of his meals could be—and were—placed on account. (At the agriturismo , only breakfast was provided.) During the three days he was there, he worked a total of eight hours. Because Sauro and his crew put in a good ten hours a day, five (and sometimes six) days a week, they did not quite know what to make of Pepe and his ascots. They concluded that he was simply un personaggio (a character).

5
    M AGINI, THE CARPENTER, was a voluble Roman in his mid-seventies: proud of his work, and justly so, though rather bored after more than a half-century’s labor. For him, food was much more interesting than wood. He was the archetypal paterfamilias and really lived for those occasions when all of his family, unto its furthest ramifications, were gathered at his table. Whenever we saw him about the work he was doing for us—to calculate the proper height for the countertops, or to design a credenza for the kitchen, or to copy an eighteenth-century Venetian bookcase that had secret doors on the sides—it always happened to be just before or just after lunch. While he lacked the urbanity of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he shared her Belgian detective’s attitude toward eating well. In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Poirot reflects, “I am not in tune with the modern world. And I am, in a superior way, a slave as other men are slaves. My work has enslaved me just as their work enslaves them. When the hour of leisure arrives, they have nothing with which to fill their leisure. The retired financier takes up golf, the little merchant puts his bulbs in his garden, me, I eat. But there it is, I come round to it again. One can only eat three times a day . And in between are the gaps.”

    Magini’s shop was on the outskirts of Rome and, like every shop of this sort, had a girlie calendar on the wall. Close by was a canteen where we had lunch with him and Domenico once (September 2.3,1997). The subject of conversation was food. Domenico was saying that according to an article he had just read, fried squid had more cholesterol than