I have started writing a new book. It's called The Farmhouse and The Sea: A Thousand Days in Tuscany. Here is the rough draft of the Preface:

PREFACE

            I dropped out of college after my sophomore year. There was no particular crisis – no single thing I can point my finger at – to explain why. But I had a boyfriend and, even though we didn’t love or even really like each other very much by that point, we were both in love with the idea of escape – of getting out, going away, setting off on an adventure into the unknown, of flight.

            So at the end of the school year, we got a cheap flight from Boston to Rome and in Rome we boarded a train going north towards Florence, believing somehow that those ancient stone streets and bell towers and Renaissance domes could save us.

            But on the train we were taken up by two older and wiser people – Canadian ex-pats who heard us speaking English to each other and took pity on us – who said, “If you want to live cheaply among Tuscan beauty, with old stone houses and olive groves and red poppies blooming in summer fields, you don’t want to try to live in Florence with no money, where you will end up stuck in some Mussolini-modern apartment block in an anonymous suburb. You want to go to a town called San Rocco. And this train stops there.”

            So when the train stopped at San Rocco, we got off and then wandered into a bar across the road from the train station.

            This was many years ago, in the days before cell phones or the internet or the idea that you needed to know what you were doing before you did it.

            The bar was called Bar Salvatore. There was a corkboard on the wall with community notices and so we tacked up a little note (written in English because it was also the days before language apps) saying that we were looking for a house to rent.

            Then a nice young woman in the bar took more pity on us and took us home with her for the night because, not having known that morning that we would be in San Rocco that evening, we had no place to stay. This was in the days when you could go home with a stranger from a bar without worry or fear.

            The next day, on the cork board in the bar, there was a note for us, also in English, saying that a man named Michele had a house available to rent up in the hills, in a village called Trespolo dei Merli, and that he would pick us up from Bar Salvatore that afternoon at 3:00 to take us there in his car.

            That is how I first came to know Trespolo, up in the Tuscan hills, and San Rocco, the town below it. After a while, the so-called boyfriend left, but I stayed on, living in Michele’s tiny house with its red-tiled roof and marble kitchen sink and fig tree growing just outside the front door. Because the hills come straight up out of the sea the on the western edge of Tuscany, I had a sweeping view of the Mediterranean from my back door and, on clear days, of the sprinkling of islands off shore.

            Only a few hundred people lived in Trespolo in those days and they were far outnumbered by the goats that most people kept a small herd of, which wandered freely among the olive groves that terraced the hillside down to San Rocco. Taking the path down to town, among the poppies and the lavender and the wild garlic, I would sometimes come across a congregation of goats placidly bleating while a shepherd dog tried to nudge them to the side of the path.

            I lived there for a year before I ran out of money (my rent for Michele’s little house was the equivalent of only 35 American dollars a month and I could eat well and cheaply and drink the rough new wine with the old men in the Bar Salvatore for the equivalent of pennies). So after a year, I went back to the US and dropped back into college and generally tried to behave myself and lead a responsible and productive life going forward.

            I became, eventually, a professor at a little college in Colorado; I owned a house; I had children and a husband and a dog and a Subaru. In spite of the Subaru and the faculty meetings, it was a good life and I was mostly very happy in it. But time gallops forward in such a headlong rush. The children grew up and moved away, making their own lives. Our dog got very old and peacefully passed away one winter day. And my husband Jonathan and I, with our gray hairs and thickening waistlines, began to grow restless with our jobs and with endlessly shoveling the icy sidewalk in front of our house and with the tragic state of American politics and we began to look at each other and say, “What if we went away? Before it’s too late, what if we went away and made a new life together one more time?”

            It was a crazy idea, of course – rash and romantic. Only fools or simpletons would behave in such a reckless manner. This is the story of how we did it.

My apostille is enjoying a leisurely transcontinental journey on its way to becoming (knock wood) the final document in my immigration folder. The DHL "overnight" service from here to Washington lasted a week and took in visits to New York City, Cincinnati, and Baltimore along the way before finally landing in Washington. My fabulous brother then took it to the US State Department where we learned that "5 to 7 business days" means "2 weeks," which was close enough for government work, I guess. Then we waited tensely for two weeks to see if the dipshit in the White House would completely destroy the US government in the next, apparently, 5 to 7 business days. 

But Mango Mussolini didn't completely ruin everything (yet) and so my brother went back to the State Department last Tuesday, retrieved the document and sent it (FedEx this time) directly to the translator in Lucca, who is on high alert for it. So far on its return journey, it has enjoyed trips to Memphis TN and Paris, France ("Package in Paris. I'm a little jealous," my brother texts). But it is now in Bologna*, where we ourselves could drive to get it if necessary. It is supposed to be delivered today (Thursday) and the translator has promised that if it arrives no later than tomorrow, she will translate it right away and take it to the judge to swear to its authenticity on Monday. Jonathan and I will then drive to Lucca to get it from her and take it immediately straight to our attorney with a cool 24 hours to spare to get it into the electronic system (which, let us remember, was completely down with a technical glitch the first time we tried to get into it.) Fingers crossed!

In the meantime, spring has burst out with all jubilation here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. On Tuesday, the actual Mardi Gras, after several weeks of celebrating Carnevale, we went for a big final tordelli lunch at the pub. We waited out in the sunshine on the terrace for it to start, all of us chatting together of this and that, spread out among the tables and chairs like song birds in the branches of a tree. Ugo had shaved off half of his beard as a joke for Renata and there was some talk of getting every man in the village to follow suit, but (unlike Ugo) the rest of them (including Jonathan) are big wusses when it comes to their facial hair.

*The GPS on our Italian phones inexplicably speaks American and pronounces Bologna as "Baloney." Sometimes when we're going to Viareggio, we go a bit out of our way just to hear the GPS tell us to "turn left on Via Baloney." We think this is hysterical. We are a simple people.

The wild boar has continued his nightly rampages in our olive grove. Various illegal solutions have been proposed by our friends at the pub who assure us that we can bribe the police to look the other way. The bribe is wild boar meat.

Apropos of that, we were invited to a hog slaughtering (which was absolutely meant as an act of kindness and inclusion, although it may not seem that way at first glance.) At least, we think we were invited to a hog slaughtering. Our translation skills can still be sometimes rather shaky in new situations with new vocabulary. We are often unsure if what we think we heard is at all what was intended. When we first arrived in Italy, for example, I thought that I was being invited to a lesbian orgy, but it turned out to be a breast self-exam clinic. In my defense, the pictures on the invitation were ambiguous.

The lovely Renata is back for a very brief visit. We saw her last night and will see her tonight again at the Sunday night Giro di Pizza at the pub. Because of her, everyone smiles and laughs a lot more. It is like a piece of early spring sunshine has arrived. 

 

Here in the last dregs of winter, we are celebrating Carnevale with dancing and drinking and masquerades and parading through the streets. The upshot of this is that the car and the house and the pockets of my winter coat all have little sprinklings of confetti in them.

We went to the big parade in Viareggio two Saturdays ago and to the little one in Pietrasanta last Sunday and to Ireland in between, first stopping in Pisa to see a Hokusai show at the Palazzo Blu, which is a museum now, but once was the house where Byron lived by the river. My favorite piece was a painting on silk called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon." I would like to live my life in such a way that my biography could also be called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon."

Ireland was windy and wild and romantic, if you can still feel romance after eating so much fried fish and chips. We went briefly insane at Aillwee and bought kilo after kilo of Irish cheese that we have now in the refrigerator.

I almost had a nervous breakdown driving the microscopic almost-but-not-quite-as-wide-as-one-car roads that were nevertheless two way streets among the encroaching hedgerows in Western Ireland on our way to the Cliffs of Moher and then on to Galway. I has assumed the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road skills that I picked up living for a year in the Cook Islands 20 years ago would come back to me. It is always entertaining to discover that you have assumed incorrectly while driving at high speeds through a mirror-image roundabout.

But we survived the hedgerows and the baked beans for breakfast and the incipient scurvy and the pints of Guinness and the wind that made me buy a hat and ended the serviceable life of our umbrella. Besides cheese and hats, we bought books in English and Irish seaweed snacks. We listened to traditional Irish music in a traditional Irish pub and also even managed to see a second Hokusai show in a museum in Dublin.

Our Moldovan cab driver on the way back to the airport our last day in Dublin, having lived for a while in Italy himself, exchanged emails with us so that he could send us info about making our own grappa (we had given a rousingly vivid description of our life here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea). Yesterday, we got this email from him:

Hello Jonathan and Jonathan's wife :),

I hope you had an easy flight back to the Italian community and the big family!

Above all, I want to mention the moment that touched me the most. After you got into the car, you both exchanged a glance and smiled at each other with such deep respect and love. In that instant, I saw that you were truly united and happy as one. I’m so glad I witnessed that.

I hope that one day, when I reach your age, I will experience such a moment with my own wife.
Thank you for the inspiration! 

To this letter, I am attaching the books we discussed about self-distilled spirits.

Update: Three days after paying an eye-watering amount to "overnight" my non-criminal record to my brother in Washington, DC, the tracking number tells us that it is currently sitting, for unknown reasons, in a DHL facility in Cincinnati. I'm fucked.

 

Having passed the Italian language exam, I am now entering into the REAL test of fortitude and skill that will determine if I get Italian citizenship -- the Bureaucracy Challenge. This consists of: filing the appropriate paperwork. We have an immigration attorney who has years of expertise in this process. I have a husband who is an Italian citizen. I have an advanced degree. I have Italian heritage. I have grit and persistence and a real desire to be a part of this country. I may yet be defeated.

So, the last time I was in the US, I got fingerprinted and sent my fingerprints off to the FBI to get a copy of my criminal record -- a piece of paper that says I have no criminal record. You have to do this in the US because the FBI will not accept fingerprints made outside the US. There is a six month deadline for filing this piece of paper along with your citizenship request before it expires and you have to do it all over again. (And the current dipshit in the White House has made a complete mess of the government and is threatening to eliminate the FBI, so it may be that it becomes impossible to get this piece of paper at all going forward.) Mine will expire in just a few weeks.

I also got a copy of my birth certificate and the "Apostille" for it -- which is a piece of paper required by the Italian government when you are submitting official forms from outside Italy. The piece of paper says that the form you are submitting is, in fact, the form that you are submitting. It is literally a piece of paper that says "the attached birth certificate is a birth certificate." It is issued by the same office that issues the birth certificate. OK, Italian government -- you do you.

We then had to have these forms officially translated into Italian by an official translator who translates them and then has to go before a judge in person and swear that her translation is a translation. The judge then gives her another piece of paper that says she swore her translation was a translation. Then we pick up all that up from her in Lucca and take it to our attorney.

I then took the Italian language test for citizenship (which is only offered three times a year) at the next available opportunity. The results were released two months later -- which was 8 days ago. As you know, I was quite surprised to find that I had passed and immediately set up an appointment with our attorney.

At that appointment, the attorney tells us we have a problem because some of the documents say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Fort Smith, Arkansas", and some say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Arkansas" and some say blah blah blah "Arkansas, Fort Smith." So we had to make an appointment with the American Consulate in Firenze to go there to get a piece of paper that says that these three people are all me.

So yesterday, we woke up at 6:45 and drove to Firenze to make it in time for our 10:30 appointment. (We stopped on the way at a Tobacco Store -- yes -- because that is the place that you buy a 16 euro stamp called a Marca da Bollo that will be needed later.) Going into the U.S. Consulate is like going into a war zone. The heavily armed guards search you and confiscate your phone, your keys, a tiny little flashlight that I had in my purse, my umbrella. OK, American government -- you do you. Then I paid $100 (you have to pay in dollars, not euros, because the American Consulate in Firenze is technically in America) for two signatures on this piece of paper. 

Then we stand in line to get all our confiscated stuff back before we high-tail it to Lucca (the provincial capital) to make it to the office of the Questura, where they will "legalize" the signature we got in Firenze by stamping it with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo that we got in the Tobacco Store earlier and signing it. The office was only open until 1:00 and then not open again until next week, when we will be in Ireland eating nothing but pub food and getting scurvy.

So we sped to Lucca, arriving just after 12:00 and trying to find a parking place in a city famous for not having any parking places. But we finally got one and headed to the Questura, which was all locked up with a big sign on the door saying that yesterday, for no announced reason, they were closed and that if there was some emergency, go to the Prefettura instead, which would also close at 1:00, not to re-open again until next week. So we found the Prefetture on the map, ran there and wandered around trying to find the office that would "legalize" the signatures, but all of the doors seemed to be locked. (These government offices are both grand Renaissance palazzos with stone walls and giant wooden doors that can clearly withstand battering rams and 40-foot ceilings, which means that running up the lovely marble stairs to the third floor is like going up to the tenth floor of a modern building. It doesn't make exploring around to find the right office something to be undertaken lightly.) We finally got into a third-floor hallway by going in a door when someone else came out and we were able to slip in before the door slammed shut and locked behind him. We wandered around some more and finally found the right office. The lady was very nice (everyone is always very nice) and told us to wait in the hall. There was no one else in sight anywhere. 

Then there were lots of paper rustling sounds in her office and other strange noises and she came out and went into another office where we could hear voices arguing for a while. But finally, she came out and gave us the piece of paper with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo on it and a signature. This signature signified that the other signature was a signature.

Then we drove back to Pietrasanta to our attorney's office where we spent an entertaining forty-five minutes trying to log onto the automatic document system that I had previously had to set up an account for, at which point the attorney said, "Why doesn't your criminal record have an Apostille with it?"

The answer is that no one ever told me that I needed an Apostille for the criminal record and I myself had never heard of an Apostille in my first 60 years of being alive on earth and so have no clue when you need one and when you don't. An Apostille seems insane to me.

But now -- immediately -- I need it. I need it before the criminal record expires in a few weeks. And the only place to get it is in Washington, D.C. where I have to present the original piece of paper saying I have no criminal record (a piece of paper that was at that moment with me in Italy) and then wait two weeks and go pick up the piece of paper with the Apostille now attached. Then they will both have to be re-translated by the official translator who will go swear in front of the judge that her translation is a translation and then uploaded into the fun electronic system.

So we went to the DHL pick-up point (which is a computer store on the edge of town) and overnighted the letter to my brother in Washington (and by "overnighted" I mean that it will hopefully arrive someday in the not too distant future). The lady at the computer store had a tremendous amount of difficulty filling out the DHS form because my brother's cell phone has an area code which is not in Washington, D.C. where his address is (because he got the cellphone before he moved to Washington and the DHL system seemed to find this utterly incomprehensible to the point of it being just completely unacceptable), so at one point she kind of handed over the computer to Jonathan and he worked on it a while to try to get it to believe that a sane person would have an address in Washington and a cell phone that he got in Pennsylvania. So we will see if the package ever actually arrives. I doubt it. But if it does, my brother will then take the piece of paper to the U.S. State Department between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. M-F (the only time they are open) and drop it off and then go back to get it in two weeks and send it by DHL directly to the translator in Lucca who will translate, swear, etc.

I emphasize that all that is just the stuff that happened YESTERDAY. I await my next challenges in the So-You-Think-You-Can-Be-Italian sweepstakes with a mixture of awe (at the wonders of the best bureaucratic system in the world) and dread. Today I am resting up and carbo-loading to be prepared.

 

I finally got the results back from my Italian Language Test for Citizenship and it seems, in contrast to all reasonable expectations, that I passed. So we have made an appointment with our immigration attorney and I am now beginning the formal process to become an Italian citizen. This would have shocked all my ancestors who fled from Italy for the bright dream of America, the land of milk and honey. They lived in a very different world.

So I am looking forward to the bureaucracy of the citizenship process. It should be epic, given the red tape we have encountered so far. Even as I write this, in fact, Jonathan is down in town in class taking driving lessons because, two years in to the process, we have been so soundly defeated by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Italian DMV that it finally seemed that the only option was to just start at the beginning. He is the oldest person in class and the only one, he says, who takes notes.

But to counter-balance the good news, a wild boar got into the garden last week and dug up a huge amount of ground in the olive grove. It is difficult to even photograph because the area is so big. Jonathan is sad that we apparently slept quite peacefully though all the excitement. Jonathan would like to see a wild boar in action. Jonathan is nuts.

But in other pork-related news, Monday and Tuesday were the festival for San Biagio. We went early Monday morning and stopped in to the Duomo to get Jonathan's throat blessed. Our friends at the pub assured us that it was happening all day long. But we were such eager little beavers that we arrived too early and wound up being there right at the beginning of the early morning mass. So we backed out as unobtrusively as possible and instead enjoyed all the booths for the fair. Roast pork sandwiches called "porchetta" are the big thing for the fair and it is never too early around here for roast pork. There were whole pigs laid out everywhere we turned. There were also plenty of roast pig heads arranged to appear so as to be calling out to passersby, proving that the porchetta sellers of Pietrasanta know how to have a good time.

We bought some wild-rose-infused oil and dried citrus slices from our friend Manuela at her booth and then a big bunch of yellow mimosa -- the first I've seen this year -- from a flower seller. Then we went to see the animals that were waiting for the Blessing of the Animals in the piazza by the Uffizi di Commune and the mimosa flowers made me very popular with the horses. 

Barbara assure us that, having missed the official activities at the church, I can bless Jonathan's throat myself up at the house as well as any priest could. Yesterday we blessed it with celebratory champagne because of my language exam results. But it was French champagne, so the blessing may not have taken. We will bless it again with the boys down at the pub with good, cheap local red wine. That will do the trick.

Sometimes, lately, the sea turns burnished orange at sunset and sometimes it is deep ink blue. Last night Jupiter and Venus and Mars were all lined up with the moon in a bright band across the sky and Jonathan and I stood out in the yard to look at them and at our shadows on the drive cast by the moonlight. "Let's always remember this moment," we said to each other.

 

Jonathan had his post-op check-up with the surgeon last Thursday. All looks well. The results of the biopsy are not back yet, but the surgeon was very off-hand about them, telling us that the biopsy is really just a formality and that he sees no signs of anything to worry about. This is a huge relief and the world seems much sunnier as a consequence.

Which is odd because it has been a torrentially rainy week -- so much so that we have had to put towels at the bottoms of all the east-facing doors and windows to soak up the water that is blown in under them by the lashing winds.

In such a situation, it is lovely to take refuge down at the pub where absolutely nothing is going on -- in the most convivial way. Last night there was no dinner being served and Valentina was holding the fort on her own. The boys were playing cards in one corner  while Serena and Mario talked together in the opposite corner. We sat with Nonno and Geppolino and Valerio and watched the news and talked about the excellence of the mutton that Daniele had made for lunch that day, the procedure for the throat blessing at the Duomo tomorrow, how Semina has been out hunting, the cingiale that has obviously come into our olive grove and made his presence known by digging up the ground in a big trench, who is living in Mirio's house now, how Nonno has a secret method (accurate, he says, eight out of ten times) for predicting the sex of an unborn child, the medicinal value of red wine, and other topics of general interest.

We watched the last half of a soccer game between Bergamo and Torino and I was happy to see that one of the players was named Belladonna, emblazoned across the back of his jersey. It ended in a 1-1 tie. Nothing much happened. I drank a hot punch al mandorino against the cold weather. For a little while, the world seemed tranquil and serene. For that space of time, it was impossible to imagine the chaos of the horrible political scene so that the ugliness coming out of the US, like a pestilential miasma, seems very far away.

The third episode of our podcast is out now. I am working (sporadically) on our taxes. In two weeks, we are going for a few days to Ireland on one of the cheap flights out of Pisa. Next week, Jonathan will be taking driving lessons in a desperate continuation of our never-ending quest for a valid Italian driver's license. The first purple crocuses have started to appear outside.

We are having very romantic winter weather these days -- rough seas and skies like the inside of an oyster shell. But even though the wind is clear and cold and often fierce, hellebore and white daffodils are nevertheless blooming in sheltered little corners all over our garden.

Jonathan is slowly on the mend from his operation and can speak and eat regular food now, but still no word from the doctor about the biopsy results, so we worry. Next weekend is the Festa di San Biagio -- the patron saint of Pietrasanta and also of throats. So there is a Luna Park set up in a usually vacant field at the edge of town and next Monday there will be a Blessing of the Throats in the Duomo. Jonathan snorts dismissively, but I think this is too good an opportunity to pass up and intend to take him and his throat down to town to be blessed. This will doubtless involve some amount of trickery on my part. Or possibly crying.

And we are still working away on our video podcast project -- the second episode dropped today and we already have the third ready to go. Jonathan knows that this is all just procrastination because I am supposed to be working on a new book. So putting together a 50-episode video podcast series to keep from writing one paragraph seems quite reasonable.

We had lunch at the pub on Sunday, sitting at the Tavolo di Marmo with Ugo and Nonno and Alice's mother, Marzia. The secret of Alice's pregnancy is out now and everyone is so happy. Daniele is gently jovial and Alice is serene and beautiful. Marzia is busy encouraging Alice to eat more, while Alice glows happily.

One thing I miss about winter in Colorado Springs is the way the sky turns orange at night in the snow. But I look down on the jeweled plain below us and I am not too sad.

 This seems very unreal to me. But in a nice way. 

The winner will be announced in March.

 

It's been quite a week for us. Monday we released the first episode of our new vodcast, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Theory and Practice of Resistance. It is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xELKX54aKI

We feel like we can't just sit here silently on our hillside while the great wave of fascism swallows the US whole. We only have tiny voices, but we will use them anyway, as best we can. The vodcast is kinda wonky and very homemade, but we hope that what we lack in flash, we make up for in sincerity. And fresh vegetables.

And then Tuesday, we spent ten hours in the hospital while Jonathan had a polyp removed from his vocal cord. We are certainly using the hell out of the fabulous free Italian health care system. Now we wait for the results of the biopsy to come back. So the terrible word "biopsy" hangs in the air here and we stay very close together all the time, as if we are protecting each other from something.

But the good news is that we have discovered the perfect way to make French toast by using leftover pan d'oro from the holidays. Sliced horizontally, it is shaped like a star and it is impossible to be glum while eating stars.

 

It is cold here tonight in Capriglia -- not below freezing, but almost. Nonno was wearing a blue cap knit for him by his mother 40 years ago. We ate pizza together and drank wine and, the whole time, I was aware of his blue knit cap and how I hope that some day long after I am gone, something that I made for them keeps my children warm on a winter night.

 

With the looming tidal wave of fascism all around the world, but especially in the US, we've been feeling pretty low, even here in our forgotten little Eden. So about three weeks ago, I had an idea -- Jonathan and I should put together a video podcast combining our expertise in social movements, collective action, protest, and resistance. I have three decades worth of thinking and teaching about this under my belt. I would have three decades worth of class notes about it except that after paying $30,000 to transport my notes all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, I immediately recycled them once they got here. That was about 48 hours before I had my idea and they suddenly became relevant again. Oh, well.

In any case, we are working away very hard on the episodes -- we have three of them finished now and are working on the next two and putting together a website, etc. The first episode will drop the day of the US presidential inauguration -- for obvious reasons. Then we plan to release one a week for 50 weeks. We are very earnest about this. I emphasize our earnestness and sincerity because our on-camera personalities are sock puppets and that may make us seem un-serious, which we are not. The puppets are named Juanita and Rodney.

Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." She said it right before they deported her.