Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

48. Thanksgiving Tacchino Arrosto, Elvis in Sequins

Nearing the three-month mark away from home, the students are notably homesick. They miss certain beloved foods more than they do their homes, families, jobs, or (according to some of the girls) boring boyfriends. Bagels, tacos, refried beans, hot wings, and doughnuts are high on their “if I could only have . . .” list. And now that Thanksgiving is only days away, they are beginning to talk in longing tones. Sitting on the terrace of the Scuola Dante Alighieri, waiting for Joe one day, I hear them talking: “I’ve been thinking about my mother’s stuffing, with pecans and onions and celery . . .” “And cranberry sauce. How do you think we lived this long without cranberry sauce?” “Pumpkin pie, whipped cream . . .” “Turkey and gravy . . .” “Those soft little rolls with poppy seeds on them.” “I’ll die if I don’t have Thanksgiving dinner.” Nicoletta puts her ingenuity to work and reports back that she’s discovered a restaurant newly opened on Via Maffia, owned by an Italian 251 48 Thanksgiving Tacchino Arrosto, Elvis in Sequins and his American wife. The place, now called Le Scuderie Bistro, was once used as the stables (scuderie) for the monastery of Santo Spirito. Traveling merchants left their horses there while doing trade in Firenze. The menu Nicoletta shows us features an Englishman dressed in formal hunting clothes, his hound running beside him as they gallop after the fleeing fox. The menu advertises “happy hours” daily at the wine bar, and a wood-burning pizza oven that produces twenty varieties of pizza, covaccini, and calzoni. The owner has promised Nicoletta that his American-born wife will have traditional Thanksgiving recipes faxed from the United States and that they will arrange an Americanstyle , all-the-trimmings Thanksgiving dinner for our students. It won’t be cheap, Nicoletta warns us, but the students—who are already living on student loans and emergency funds wired by their parents—have shown no particular resistance to expensive entertainments . Most weekends (while we stay in Florence), they fly off to Greece or Spain or Morocco, being of the generation that takes what it can and worries later (if at all). On Thanksgiving night, the temperature falls close to freezing, and a bitter wind is blowing. I dress myself in two skirts, three sweaters, and my down coat. I wrap a wool scarf around my head. We take the #14 bus to the station and stumble in the direction of Via Maffia by trial and error. The city seems to be arranged in triangular blocks, with streets intersecting one another (absent of logic), thwarting our plan to travel “as the crow flies”—in a straight line. We cross the Arno (of which Mark Twain said, “They call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines . They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade”). The Arno surely seems a river tonight, swollen high by recent rains, careening downward from the hills and making a waterfall over the sudden drop of one of the low dams that crosses it. Being lost has made us late; when we find the dark and narrow alley that Joe thinks will lead us to Via Maffia, we rush along, heads bowed into the wind, running over the rough road. Merrill Joan Gerber 252 Somehow my foot hits a rock or a hole or an iron peg, and I feel myself take flight, upward and then down, head first, so that I am aware of the flagstones aiming themselves upward toward my eyes. In a maneuver so fast, so powerful, and so extraordinary, my husband, by the sheer will of his Superman’s arm, brings me up short of the pavement by half an inch. My eyes see it happen, they are open and ready to receive rocks in them, ready to be blinded—and then I am saved. We both stop, astonished at this feat of his strength and my salvation . We try to understand what happened, how it happened, but all we know is one thing: I didn’t crack open my head when I should have, given all the laws of nature and physics. That I didn’t fall seems a true miracle. My belief is strengthened by the notion that, if a miracle is bound to happen, there’s no better...