A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online

young man in Piazze who wears a cleaver slung from his Dolce e Gabbana belt appears to be winning us over. There’s a cooperative in Querce al Pino where other necessaries wait. And for help beyond the table, the local lavanderia is much more than a laundry. The services include dry cleaning and dressmaking; a fabric shop and a knitting factory sit under the same busy roof. The proprietress also sells her famous cordials and tonics, rustic poteens elicited from a still that often purls along beside the steam presser. Her husband isthe village shoemaker, her son the auto mechanic, her son’s wife the hairdresser, and all their enterprises are neatly clustered about the modest square footage of their yard. Thus we have achieved essential maintenance. This is good. This is how I’d wished it would be.
    One morning on our way up to the bar, we catch Barlozzo breakfasting outside the henhouse. We watch as he cracks an egg into his mouth, takes a modest swig from a bottle of red, wipes his mouth with his handkerchief, places the wine back in his sack and is about to head up the hill. We yell to him to wait for us and, once up at the bar, he swallows another wine chaser while we sip cappuccini. He tells us all that milk we drink is going to kill us.
    Dispensing with invitations and acceptances, Barlozzo simply takes on the habit of visiting each afternoon at four. And we take on the habit of waiting for him. Between us, Fernando and I call him il duca, the duke, yet we never use that name with him directly. But in his honor, we’ve christened the house Palazzo Barlozzo, and each time we call it that, his face ruddies like a boy’s. I’m never sure if it’s in pleasure or discomfort.
    Barlozzo and Fernando are easy together, as one might expect Gary Cooper and Peter Sellers to be easy together. Barlozzo instructs Fernando on how to care for the olive seedlings he’d planted a few months earlier when we’d first decided to rent the house. They discuss a vegetable plot, but Barlozzo says most of the land assignedto the house slopes down toward the sheepfolds and that the patch that was his mother’s kitchen garden is where the Luccis put up the ugly cement-block structure they refer to as “the barn.” He says what’s left of the garden is just too small to do much other than plant some flowers. But when Fernando tells him I’ve been begging him to construct a wood-burning oven out there, Barlozzo, the thin set of his Tuscan lips taking on a slight upward pitch, says, “I’ll take you to see a friend of mine in Ponticelli. He’ll cast the canna fumaria e la volta, the chimney and the vault. And there’s plenty of old brick around that we can use to line the oven chamber and to build up a hearth wall all around it. We’ll use clay and sand to insulate and . . .”
    He proceeds, touched, I think, by the fascination he’s causing in Fernando’s eyes. Has my husband found a hero? Like two nine-year-olds, as nine-year-olds once were, they call for paper and pens and sit cross-legged on the floor scratching out primitive designs not so different from the ones an Egyptian might have drawn for the first ovens a few thousand years ago.
    We tell Barlozzo about our hunts for communal ovens all over the north of Italy when I was researching my first cookbook. Our favorites were the communal ovens in some of the smaller villages of the Friuli, ovens that are still lit at midnight each Friday with vine cuttings and huge oak logs so the Saturday bake can begin at dawn. We tell him about the official maestro del forno, the oven master, a manwhose social and political position is second only to the mayor. The oven master maintains the oven and schedules the baking times, which begin at sunrise and end just before supper. Each household has its own crest of sorts to identify its bread—a rough cross, or some configuration of hearts or arrows slashed into the risen loaves just before they’re slid onto the oven floor. And then, so