Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini Read Free Book Online Page A

celery, a fistful of flat-leaf parsley, a sprig or two of rosemary, and—unless it is the dead of winter, when it must be greenhouse-grown, at great expense—several stalks of basil.
    I stood in front of Domenico’s U-shaped stand and wrote down what he was selling that broiling, sunny morning. He never used to carry any of the dozens of fancy or exotic fruit and vegetables some vendors stock—no avocados, mangos, blueberries, or ginger. But the bounty of Italy’s growing season seems endless, and clearly visible in even a simple stand, where produce, piled high in wooden crates, is generally so fresh, bright, clean, and colorful, that it begs to be bought and eaten.
    Three days later (unaware that Warsaw shoppers tended to patronize private farm stands for their fresh produce) I walked into the state-run produce shop not far from our new home in the Polish capital. Cramped, dreary, and grimy, the shop reeked of decaying vegetables, stale cigarette smoke, and ammonia. Two bored clerks did their best to ignore their customers and their surroundings. Most of the meager offerings of vegetables and fruit looked bruised, battered, tired, old. Considering it was still high summer, the offerings seemed so shockingly meager that I began to wonder if I had missed some declaration of war.
    The shop was selling only a handful of items, virtually all of them root vegetables: dirt-encrusted potatoes; stubby, dirt-encrusted carrots; bunch after bunch of muddy beets; dirt-encrusted parsnips, celery root, horseradish, and onions; a few heads of exhausted lettuce; bright red salad radishes, nearly the only dirt-free item on offer; and plastic containers filled with fat cabbages, the only thing in the shop that looked as if it had been picked within recent memory. The fruit, if anything, looked even worse than the vegetables: battered brown-skinned apples, bruised green pears.
    Roman housewives are extraordinarily particular about each ingredient they buy for the family pot. Haranguing the occasional vendor who might try to slip a less-than-perfect tomato into their sack is an art form of elevated nature. Had Roman housewives been transported to Warsaw en masse after the war, I thought, they surely would have staged violent, impromptu revolutions at their local greengrocers and the Communists might have been turned out of power decades earlier.
     
     
     
     
    O ur last night in Rome before the move, our closest friends organized a small, going-away dinner on the Gianicolo, a steep, verdant hill that overlooks the city spread out at its feet. We ate at one of our favorite outdoor restaurants, a large, noisy eatery set under vine-covered terraces whose vast array of antipasti alone was enough for a meal. We ate and drank, ate and talked, ate and laughed, ate and joked. My Greek-American friend, Eleni, was the only one who cried. Married to an Italian and unlikely ever to leave, she wept that she was being abandoned yet again by another peripatetic friend whom she had hoped would stay forever.
    Around midnight, we all walked down the hill and across the Tiber to the Trevi Fountain, the very spot where I so happily started my life in Rome four years earlier. With our backs to Neptune and the leaping cascades of water through which he drives his imaginary chariot, John and I threw the prescribed coins over our left shoulders into the foaming fountain to ensure our return to Rome. Both of us knew the gesture was overkill; there was no question but that we would be back.
     
     
     
     
    W e stepped off our Alitalia flight to Warsaw the next day with suitcases slung over our shoulders and potted herbs in our hands. I carried the rosemary bush that had flavored so many of our Roman meals. John toted a terra-cotta pot of foot-high basil, planted specially that spring and coddled over the summer so that we could bring the taste of our old home to our new one.
    We were still descending the plane’s metal stairway to the tarmac when Warsaw suddenly