LITMIR.BIZ

      Table of Contents

       Title Page

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Copyright Page

      Opposite: Looking North from Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

       Traversando la Maremma Toscana

      Dolce paese, onde portai conforme

      l’abito fiero e lo sdegnoso canto

      e il petto ov’odio e amor mai non s’addorme,

      pur ti riveggo, e il cuor mi balza intanto.

      Ben riconosco in te le usate forme

      con gli occhi incerti fra ‘l sorriso e il pianto,

      e in quelle seguo de’ miei sogni l’orme

      erranti dietro il giovenile incanto.

      Oh, quel che amai, quel che sognai, fu invano,

      e sempre corsi, e mai non giunsi il fine:

      e dimani cadrò. Ma di lontano

      pace dicono al cuor le tue colline

      con le nebbie sfumanti e il verde piano

      ridente ne le piogge mattutine.

      Giosuè Carducci

      Rime Nuove, XVI

       Crossing the Tuscan Maremma

      Sweet land, from whence I derive

      My habit of pride and my scornful song

      And this bosom where hate and love are never appeased,

      When I return to you, my heart leaps after so long.

      I rediscover your familiar forms,

      And through uncertain eyes, through smiles and tears,

      Follow the errant tracks of dreams

      That lead to my youthful enchantment with you.

      Oh, what I loved, what I dreamed was in vain,

      After so much wandering, I never reached the end,

      And tomorrow I’ll die. But from afar

      Your hills fill my heart with hope,

      Steaming with mist and the green plains

      Lovely in the morning rains.

      Giosuè Carducci

      Rime Nuove, XVI (Trans. Elena Giustarini)

      1

      WE FIRST SAW Podere Fiume, or “River Farm,” on a cold and rainy afternoon in January 1997. (Some people called the place Podere Bolseto because of the località in which it lay.) The plain two-story house had been built in the 1950s as part of the Ente Maremma program to stimulate the economy of Southern Tuscany. No one had lived in it for more than twenty years. The downstairs consisted entirely of animal stalls, in the largest of which (the one that would become our living room) there were concrete feeding troughs it would take three weeks to demolish. A crumbling outdoor staircase led to the apartment upstairs—four rooms tiled in terrazzo. In the big kitchen there was a Zoppas wood-burning stove barely tall enough for a child to cook at, a 1950s cabinet-and-counter unit in yellow and blue Formica—this latter empty save for a drinking glass from a long-past promotion for Acqua Panna bottled water—and a carved stone sink.

      Three doors opened off this kitchen. One led into a green bedroom with a print of a nondescript Madonna hanging on the north wall, one into a pink bedroom that reminded a friend of ours of Pompeii, and the third into a biscuit-colored bedroom that contained a coarse straw bed and a stuffed wading bird. There was also a minute bathroom. No closets. Doves had built nests between the windows and the boiled-spinach-green shutters.

      The Old Kitchen, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

      The house sat on the crest of a softly proportioned hill, on about two acres of land, one acre of which was given over

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