Living in a Foreign Language (14 page)

Except that I was in pain. I understood that. My legs felt like they were moving through mud. But I persevered—for Jill, for my sex life, for the long run. Whatever.

“Scendere!”
called out Daniele as he headed his girls downhill. They all resumed talking and giggling to each other now that the pedaling was easier. That was the main difference in an Italian spin class. They never stopped talking, gossiping, trading recipes, flirting. It was a social scene more than a workout.

After fifteen minutes, my legs seemed to lighten. I raised the speed of the machine and the grade so that I could start to break a serious sweat. The TV was now showing an
MTV-type show with horrendous Italian pop music blaring out at me. But the beat was helpful. It moved me along.

Another quarter of an hour passed and I was flying. I got heated up enough that I actually had to peel off the cashmere sweater; this is an advanced workout for me. I actually felt . . . what's the word? I actually felt good. I made a mental note to be sure not to tell Jill, otherwise I would be committed for at least nine more sessions. But yes, this felt definitely good. I was alive! I felt strong. I could visualize the little pustules of plaque dislodging themselves from my artery walls. My heart was pounding steadily like the wonderful, trustworthy machine that it is. Oops. Don't say that. Don't curse yourself. Or there'll be an ambulance pulling up before you can say, “Jack LaLanne.” But damn, I did feel good. And I felt something else, too. A familiar yearning feeling deep inside, bubbling up to the surface. I felt . . . what was that feeling? Oh, yeah. Hunger.

So what would it be? The seafood at Il Pescatore? Or that wild boar pasta in Pettino?

M
ARIANE IS
JoJo's
MOTHER
. When she visited Umbria a few years ago, JoJo introduced her to George, an American who had just moved to Umbria from Florence, where he had been running a wine-importing business. One thing led to another and—under JoJo's careful prodding—they were married a couple of years later at the Franciscan monastery high up on Monteluco. It pays to have a good agent for a daughter.

“George courted me with letters every day when I went back to New York, quoting Kant and Proust and all that. That didn't work with me,” Mariane told me one day. “I'm just a girl who ran away to join the circus when I was fifteen.”

But George pursued and a few months later invited her to fly back to Italy for a vacation.

“He told me he wanted to take me to see the wild almond blossoms in Sicily. Well, that sounded like a bit of all right.”

So Mariane flew off to Sicily with just a few things
thrown in a suitcase because George had assured her it would be quite warm.

“It was fifty degrees—that's Fahrenheit—and no wild almond blossoms to be seen anywhere. But not very long after that we moved in together.”

Mariane is George's fourth wife.

“And last,” she added.

George started out publishing his family's newspaper in New Jersey. In a short time, he built a virtual empire, with more than twenty-five newspapers all over the country. At thirty he retired. He was an avid pilot, so he flew a plane over to East Africa and eventually started Wings for Progress, an airline that served previously unreachable communities in Kenya. Then he was off to Istanbul for five years. For journalism, he said.

“More like a journa
list
,” added Mariane. “He was in fast pursuit of his second wife, I believe. Or third.”

George got around.

Mariane is no slouch either. She left home as a teenager to be an actress at the Birmingham Rep, where she worked alongside Peter Brook in his very first professional job. She met Duncan Ross, her first husband—and JoJo's father—and eventually the two of them ran the Old Vic Theater School in Bristol. Then they emigrated to the States and ended up in Seattle, where Duncan—known as Bill—became the artistic director of the Seattle Rep. After his death, she bounced back and forth in various jobs between Seattle and New York—until that fateful visit to her daughter in Umbria, where she met George.

We had them over to the Rustico for dinner one night and they brought us a gift, a book of photography George had published on the Piano Grande, the vast glacial plain that
lies six thousand feet above sea level at the foot of Monte Vettore. George, who knows a thing or two, enthralled us over dinner with stories and information about this otherworldly plain and about Castelluccio, the tiny hill town which is its one outpost of civilization. Mariane insisted that the only way to fully appreciate this remarkable area was to see it with her and George, so we made a plan for the following week.

On Wednesday, Jill, Caroline and I drove up to Bazzano, where they live. Bazzano—like many of the towns in the area—is split in two. There's Bazzano Superiore high up on the mountain, and Bazzano Inferiore below. It could give you a complex. After a tour of their exquisite house, we loaded up the car—George, it seems, never travels without a cooler filled with bottles of chilled Prosecco (the cooler plugs into the cigarette lighter of his SUV)—and set off over the mountain and down into the Valnerina.

The Valnerina is a completely different planet from the wide and agricultural Spoleto Valley. It's narrow and steep, its little hill towns seemingly impossible to get to, with no visible roads going in or out. It is also unimaginably beautiful. We drove farther east through Norcia, the Valnerina's largest and most famous town—birthplace of St. Benedict and the pork capital of Italy—and started climbing into the Sibillini Mountains. The mountains and the national park that surrounds them are named after Sybil, the prophetess who legend says was driven out of the underworld and into a cave in this wild remote mountain chain. We could fairly feel her eerie presence as the road became more and more remote and the temperature started dropping. As the car continued climbing we passed a ski lodge and noticed tall striped poles on the side of the road that George said were to measure the depth of the snow in winter.

Mariane and George

As we rounded a final bend in the road, both George and Mariane, normally loquacious, suddenly clammed up—like two little children with a secret they could barely keep. We drove in silence for a few more minutes and when we crested the hill we saw—stretched out below us—the vast expanse of the Piano Grande, fifteen kilometers across, surrounded by the snowcapped Sibillini, dominated by Monte Vettore, in whose crater grow the famous lentils of Castelluccio. It was a landscape from another planet. It was a landing field for spaceships from Mars. No photographs, no book, no stories could have prepared us for the size and scope of the beauty that spread out before us. And, all the way over on the other side of the plain, perched on a hill like a trusty old watchdog, sat tiny, falling-down Castelluccio—population around 150—as it's been sitting there, housing shepherds and lentil farmers, for over a thousand years.

We parked, got out of the car and tried to take it all in.
George opened the first bottle of Prosecco and poured us each a glass as we stood there, gaping.

After a while, we drove down to the flat plain. Distances were deceiving in such an immense space, and it was only when we reached the floor of the valley that things began to come into focus. There were vast flocks of sheep on both sides of the road, pushed by sheepdogs up and down the fields. There were no shepherds to be seen; the dogs knew exactly what to do on their own. Caroline asked if she could approach the dogs and George said that should be no problem, so we stopped the car about halfway across the plain and got out.

Caroline ran right into the middle of the flock—she has an instinct for animals and they for her. Three dogs came to her immediately, sniffing her out, and in no time they were on their backs having their bellies rubbed.

“Someone should take better care of them. They need to be washed and have their coats brushed.”

Mariane explained that these dogs are workers, not pets, but Caroline would have none of it.

“You see how they love to be touched? They want to be cared for like everyone else.”

We all backed away and watched from the road as our stubborn little Korean orphan lay on the ground, giving her own brand of unconditional love to these flea-bitten, mangy, ecstatically happy dogs, in the middle of literally hundreds of bleating sheep, on an endless plain of wildflowers, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It was a sight.

We went for lunch in Castelluccio. Mariane and George are friends with the couple that run the Taverna Castelluccio and we were warmly welcomed and given the table by the window. They filled our glasses from bottles of George's Prosecco and told us what they were cooking that day. Polenta with house-made sausages;
minestra di farro
—a soup made from the speltlike grain that has been growing in this region since ancient times; fresh
tagliarini
with wild mushrooms from the mountains; lentils with sausages; a mixed grill featuring young lamb from the flock we had just been playing with—that was hard to get by Caroline. At least they weren't serving dog. And they strenuously recommended that we try their ricotta cheese, which was so fresh it was still warm, served drizzled with local honey. We got a plate of that to start and nearly ruined our appetite for the rest of lunch. The ricotta—literally “recooked” cheese—had a freshness that connected it in taste and smell to the milk of the animal it had just come from. And the sweet eucalyptus honey made an almost startling contrast. We smeared the cheese on fresh-baked Umbrian saltless bread, spooned the honey on top and washed it down with ice-cold Prosecco. Not a bad start to the meal.

Caroline on the Piano Grande

I had the polenta for my
secondo
, with sausages and tomato sauce—as satisfying a dish as I've ever packed away—and a green salad from the garden. I'm not generally much of a salad eater—I think because most of the greens I've had put before me have been stale and tasteless and had to be tarted up with vinaigrettes or worse to have any taste at all. The surprise is that lettuce—fresh out of the ground—is delicious. It's succulent and sweet and needs—to my taste—just a little good olive oil as a complement. And maybe a sprinkle of salt. Two and half hours later—after getting to know George and Mariane a lot better, and they us—I finished up my meal with espresso: two cups, to keep myself awake after all that good food and wine.

Castelluccio is tiny. And its population is shrinking every year. As in many farm villages in Italy, the young people are drifting off to the cities and the old ways are dying off. George described what it's like there in the dead of winter—buried deep in snow and virtually unapproachable. No wonder its young people are running off. Then, George led us over to a promontory and described what happens to the plain in late June and early July—the spring comes late at these altitudes.

“There's a yellow flower that the locals call
ramacciole
. It's the bloom that precedes the fruit on the lentil plants. In the spring, there are wide swaths of them as far as you can see. And in between the lentils are fields of purple cornflowers alternated with swaths of red poppies. So this whole plain is like an immense, living, growing oil painting—like a fifteen-kilometer-long Rothko.”