Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

26. The Five-Hundred-Year-Old Farmhouse

A friend of my friend from California calls and invites me to her fivehundred -year-old farmhouse on Mount Morello, high up in the hills northwest of Firenze. Cornelia, an Englishwoman who met her Italian husband at Oxford, has lived for thirty years in Florence, where her husband is a professor at the University. She herself is a writer and art critic. She promises that one day she will take me for coffee in her favorite bar on Borgo San Jacopo and that from there we will go to the reading room of the British Institute Library on Lungarno Guicciardini , where I can sit in the reading room and watch the Arno flow past. She tells me that she and her husband have lived in the historic house I am about to visit for only six years, but all the years before they dreamed of buying such a place. She picks me up in her little car in front of the Grande Mondo Ristorante Cinese on Via Aretina. She warns me to buckle up. Driving in Italy seems to be a contest, much like the bumper-car ride I passed one day in the park near the Bellariva swimming pool. There is much honking , cutting off of other cars, edging-in-front-of, short stops, and a general sense of frantic busy-ness: drivers are constantly shifting gears, slamming on brakes, and swerving suddenly. Cornelia asks whether I would like her to take the country route. 111 26 The Five-Hundred-Year-Old Farmhouse When I agree, she guides her little car through the rapids of Florentine traffic till she turns off on a narrow, cavernous street that becomes a steep mountain road. Within minutes, we are at the crest of a great downward slide: a green vista lies before us, a country scene of olive trees and yellow flowers and stone walls that hug the edge of the road. Cornelia apologizes for having to honk her horn constantly, but it is a safety necessity, honking wherever the road curves, wherever a narrow road exits from an olive grove, wherever the pebbled driveway of a house intersects the main roadway. The air is dotted with the staccato beeps of cars. The drivers all honk, but no one slows down. As Cornelia takes a sharp curve, we are suddenly confronted with a car coming our way—on a roadway wide enough for only one to pass. Cornelia brakes, begins a long backing-up, manages to clear the stone wall by half an inch as she pulls as close to the side as possible while the other car squeaks by. As she continues on, she points out to me the shops in Piazza Niccolò da Tolentino. The baker delivers fresh bread up the mountain every morning; the grocer drops off cartons of bottled water. The butcher will bring a roast, a chicken, a ham, and wonderful sausages. After climbing the road ten minutes longer, she slows and parks on a dirt area—I hear the tires scrape and feel them bounce over small rocks. “Here we are,” she says, with pride and pleasure in her voice. I look about for her villa, her palazzo, her country mansion, and what I see is a tiny little house, the kind a child would draw: two windows up, two windows down, a door, a little step, and a chimney. Her youngest of three boys, Marlowe, is at home, a six-foot-tall teenager who talks with perfect British pronunciation. Cornelia tells me they speak only English in their home, whereas, out in the public world, they speak only Italian. “We live in two worlds here,” she confesses. The whole of the downstairs of the house is visible from where I stand in the entry: in front of me is a worn stone staircase, to my left is a small room, to my right is the main room of the house, living and dining rooms in one. Cornelia points out the original stone hearth, where Merrill Joan Gerber 112 food was cooked five hundred years ago and up to the present until they broke through a wall to what is now the kitchen. The room, no wider than four feet, used to be a dog kennel. Cornelia explains: “It is illegal to carve this opening in the wall, there are strict rules about any changes being made in these historical buildings. You can’t...