Jonathan and I blew into Firenze today -- hoping for one last visit before the summer tourist season roils in. That horse, however, turned out to be already out of the bag. We threaded our way carefully through crowds and I felt sorry for the people who only get to see lovely, stony, serene Firenze all filled up this way. I began to feel guilty, even, that we were there. We, after all, were just parts of their crowds -- they who perhaps only had Firenze this one time in their lives. 

So we visited a few of our best friends in the Uffizi (via the joy of our annual pass that means we don't pay and we don't wait in line -- which now feels like cheating somehow. Although one of the big selling points of the pass is that you don't have to stand in line, but just go right in whenever you want, there has never before actually been a line to cut to the head of -- until today.) 

Then we went over to Zecchi, the lovely art supply store on a tiny side street near the Duomo. After drooling over the jars of powdered pigments for all these months, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy some.

The staff at Zecchi are very kind and very helpful and patient, explaining things to me and helping me choose colors. They even took the time to specially make me a little jar of cadmium yellow because there were only big ones in stock. They let me try all the brushes to see which ones I liked best. Everyone so jovial.

But there was a woman in there, who started shouting at one of the other salesmen, the head clerk, I think. She was being just awful to him -- rude and demeaning and preemptory -- because she couldn't get the wifi to work on her phone. He was trying to tell her how to connect to the store wifi and she wouldn't even let him talk -- she kept interrupting him, wouldn't listen to what he was trying to tell her, but was just berating him because she couldn't check her email in the store to find her supply list of the things she needed to buy for an art course she was taking for a week.

It was horrible. Jonathan and I were in an agony of mortification, because of course she was speaking English and, although it was hard to tell because of her anger, she sounded American to me. I was paralyzed with embarrassment for my whole native country.

She stormed out and in the silence that followed her exit, Jonathan and I just stood there, feeling so much shame. I apologized in my best (very broken) Italian to the men working there for all Americans. They were, of course, lovely. "There is no problem with Americans," the head clerk said to us. "There is just a problem with her." We all commiserated together. Then we turned our attentions to more pleasant topics -- the different types of spolvero paper and their various uses. Nice men so happy to share their extensive knowledge of art materials with us.

And then, lo and behold, she was back! She had her list. She wanted to shop. So the head clerk she had been berating helped her with all her purchases, subdued, but correct and perfectly civil. She paid (rather rudely). She left. 

We stood frozen as she made her way out of the shop -- the three men who worked there and Jonathan and I, no one moving or saying a word. I had my back to the door, but I could see the head clerk's eyes as he watched her leave, watched the door close behind her, watched her walk off. Then his body relaxed. "It's OK," he said to me. "She's Irish."

We all laughed. 

They gave us a 10% discount on our entire purchase, for no particular reason -- maybe just for not being her. 

 

I had this history teacher, Mr. Baker, in high school -- in the fabulous Arkansas public school system where I learned many things (e.g., that it's bad to be smart and how to play dumb. Also, kickball.) One day I said something in Mr. Baker's class that I had read in a book and I remember even now, decades later, the contempt dripping from his voice when he responded to me, "You don't get your ideas from books, do you?" I could have committed no impropriety more distasteful. (Mr. Baker later served several terms as the very popular mayor of my home town.)

Yesterday, I noticed that the wisteria outside the kitchen is putting out flower buds. Every day now, something new blooms. It's not quite April yet, but flower pots that have seemed empty and dormant all winter long are now sprouting shoots and even a few early flowers from long-hidden bulbs. The grass is filled with daisies and violets. Trees that I don't recognize are flowering. The Signora tells us that some of them are cherry trees. And Mimmo tells Jonathan, in their many talks together about their shared passion, that we should expect the olive trees to flower any time now.

The air has been very clear lately so that for three days running we have been able to see the coast of France from the living room windows. Why it is so especially exciting to us to see the coast of France rather than, say, our usual view of the sunset and the ocean and the ships heading in and out of the sea lanes towards the harbor at La Spezia, is unclear. But somehow it is.

The birds are riotous lately and I have been stuffing myself with fresh peas. Suddenly today the forsythia is covered in yellow flowers. I probably originally got the idea to move away to Italy, to a place with wisteria and sunshine on the shores of the Mediterranean, from reading about it in books. 

Fuck you, Mr. Baker.

 

Apparently, the country with the most McDonald's franchises in Europe is France. Those people are savages.

If you want to befriend someone in Italy, talk with them about food. It takes us ages now to do our shopping because we discuss (at length) the food with everyone in the shops -- advice, recipes, tips, thoughts, cooking techniques, information, opinions, fervently held yet apocryphal beliefs. Then we come home and gorge ourselves.

Here are some things we have been eating lately, as spring has come to the market:

Agretti: tastes like spinach, looks like grass.

Fresh fava beans (shelled by me): eaten raw with good olive oil, a tiny bit of sea salt, and little pieces of fabulous cheese.

Fresh peas: again, lovingly shelled by hand. Well, maybe not "lovingly."

Jonathan has baked bread today. The sun is out and we can see the waves still left from last night's storm crashing on the beach. Every day, I know that I am profoundly lucky.

Tonight in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. It may seem like just a bunch of old guys singing to an out-ot-tune piano in an out-of-the-way bar, but to me it is paradise.

 

Jonathan mentioned to Mimmo, our trusted gardener, the fur that we had seen by our front gate.

"Wolves?" Mimmo said, instantly. This was rather unnerving seeing as how we had really only been kind of joking about the wolves among ourselves and had not said anything at all about them to Mimmo or anyone else.

"They won't hurt you," he said, all twinkly-eyed. Then he shrugged, "Unless they're hungry."

Of course, he was just kidding. Probably.

 

We went down to the pub last night for a special seafood feast -- "Il Mare visto da Capriglia" -- "The Sea seen from Capriglia." We arrived a little after 8 p.m. -- a bit early for dinner here, but it's good to be a bit early on special nights. The old men were still finishing up their card game, but the tables for dinner were starting to fill up.

Jonathan and I looked at the menu, which seemed unorthodox -- five different appetizers to choose from, but only two first courses, one second course and one dessert. This is not usual. But we are used to being confused as to how things are supposed to work -- it is our comfort zone now. So we were looking at the menu, trying to decode it and decide on appetizers when the realization dawned: this is not the menu from which we would choose -- this is the list of the things that we will be served.

All of it. All eleven courses. As we say in Italy: "Madonna!"

It was delicious. Every mouthful of every course. I think my favorite was the sformato of pureed veggies in a passato of squid ink. I never in a million years would have ordered this. When it was put in front of me, I had great trepidation. But I am, apparently, a woman of reckless daring and courage. And, let's face it, I have put worse things in my mouth than squid ink. Hell, I was practically raised on gas station burritos. So I gave it a whirl. And I'm glad that I did. Daniele may have his faults for all I know, but he shakes a mean squid around the kitchen.

We ate until almost midnight and then strolled home content under the stars. Outside our gate, though, we were disturbed to see a huge amount of fur. Tufts of it all over the grass and stones of our drive, in profusion, brownish gray and thick. We have no idea how it got there, but tufts of fur in great profusion are never a good sign. Something untoward has clearly gone down at the very gates of our home.

We don't know what animal lost these tufts or in what manner this happened. I said to Jonathan that if I had to guess, I would have said that it looked like wolf fur to me, which would explain all the howling that we've heard echoing around the forested canyon walls behind the house for the last couple of days. But, of course, there are no wolves left in Italy, I said.

Au contraire! We looked on our friend the internet and discovered that there are wolves in Italy -- specifically in Tuscany, specifically in the Apuan Alps, which are the hills behind our house.

It turns out that we are smack in the big bad wolf hot spot of Europe. This makes our quiet nighttime stroll down to leave our garbage outside the gate every evening more daring than we had thought it was. Not to mention our midnight wanderings home from the pub, stuffed with eleven courses of seafood and smelling (no doubt) succulent. (And the aroma of squid ink is a penetrating one.) In my wildest imagination of the challenges we might face in moving to Italy, I must admit that being besieged by marauding wolves had never even crossed my mind.

For his birthday, I took Jonathan to Positano on the Amalfi Coast south of Naples for four days. It was, of course, gorgeous. And surprisingly aerobic.

My father's grandfather came to New York from a little village near Positano at the end of the 19th century. He left under what might be called a "cloud," although the more accurate term would be a "plume" -- as in "plume of smoke rising from the smoldering embers of the family home that he burned to the ground in an act of patricidal vengeance." Long story. Obviously. Let's just say that his departure was precipitous and that I didn't spread the details of my family history around while we were in the neighborhood.

Our hotel was up on the hillside overlooking the town and the cathedral dome and the bay. The view from the bathtub (actually all the rooms, but the bathroom was the most hilarious) was spectacular during the day, but at night, with the lights twinkling on the slope across from us, it was breathtaking -- probably one of the most gorgeous bathtub views in the world. Certainly in my experience.

And the famous Amalfi lemons were going gangbusters. I did not know anything about these beforehand and had to be gently calmed down at my first sight of them. So giant! So yellow! So mutant! But it was important for me, especially, to be calmed because I was actually driving our car at the time of the first sighting of them and even someone inured to the hair-raising Via Capriglia, with its fourteen blind hairpin switchbacks, is hard put to handle the road into Positano. Via Capriglia may be equally narrow and equally twisting, but there aren't giant double-decker tour buses going both ways down it. Truly, the Positanesi must have nerves of steel.

And thighs of steel, too. The streets are mostly steep staircases going precipitously up and down the hillside and, going up, just when you think you are getting to the landing place at the top, you turn the corner only to discover that the "landing" place is actually only a "pausing" place to give you a chance to catch your breath and make your peace with God before continuing on your journey to the heights. I would have done (more) whining about it, but I was shamed by the elderly Positanesi going trippingly about their business like fleet (and very well-dressed) mountain goats. We even saw some construction workers carrying loads of construction material up a stair-street on their backs. Not trippingly, perhaps, but still. Being passed by a guy carrying a 200-pound marble countertop on his back going up five hundred steps has a dampening effects on complaining about the walk.

So we ate tentacles and one of the best pizzas I ever had in my life (roasted winter squash, gorgonzola, bacon and rosemary), drank limoncello and prosecco for Jonathan's birthday, took a bubblebath looking out over the nighttime view, bought four real lemons and a ceramic one, and generally had a lovely time.

But it was good to come back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where the wildflowers are coming out now in profusion and our own bathroom has a view down to the sea that is not to be sniffed at. I sliced our four Amalfi lemons and made candied lemon slices with them for want of anything else to do with so much mutant citrus. Should the apocalypse come now, we can hunker down for months with no fear of scurvy. So that's a relief.

And a giant spider had moved into the kitchen while we were away -- a big, bulbous thing that you know was just filled with blood and guts from its victims. Lots and lots of victims, by the looks of it. Jonathan, emboldened after our recent flirtation with death on the roads of Positano and feeling immortal, captured it and took it far away from the house to release it. But I know now that it is out there lurking somewhere and I know that it is not alone. I'm glad that something is around to keep the insect population at bay, but knowing that the spider and its ilk are near does make putting on a pair of closed-toe shoes more death-defying than would normally be my preference.

 

We thought we had it figured out. We thought we could beat the system. 

But we were wrong. Very, very wrong.

In January, we spent $104 re-mailing the box of books that already been returned to my brother's house in Washington once before. We took this bold step because we thought that this time we would be able to get it. We thought that this time the box would come to our house in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We believed.

We were fools.

It showed up this morning in Washington again, having been returned from the Post Office in Pietrasanta again,  making -- for those of you who are keeping score -- THREE round trip voyages across the Atlantic Ocean for this particular set of books.

At this point, it's just straight-up sadism. Those fuckers in the Pietrasanta Post Office are vicious. They are sick.

This behavior is in very stark contrast to the happenings in the lovely pub here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. This evening, Jonathan and I walked down -- taking the long way in the lilac light of evening because the sea was irresistibly sparkling and the air smelled of violets and mimosa. When we first arrived, there were only three of the old men in the pub and Renata and us and the light was dusky and the fire in the wood-burning stove was smoky and warm. Two giant wheels of cheese has arrived -- 37 kilos each, sitting on the table with the old men. We talked with Renata about Jonathan's upcoming birthday and when she brought out our prosciutto, etc., she had lit a birthday candle on the cheese for him and sang Happy Birthday to You in English.

Later, we walked home through the village holding hands, with a half kilo of the cheese that we took home with us. The sky had changed from violet to hyacinth blue and Jupiter  and Venus hung above the sea. It is not my birthday, but if I had a wish, it would be to have days like today last forever.

One Sunday every month, my drawing teacher, Franco, hosts an open drawing session at one of the pubs down in Pietrasanta. He provides a model -- clothed because, even in Italy, a nude woman standing around in a restaurant would cause unnecessary comment -- and anyone can just go in and draw. Jonathan and I went last Sunday -- me to draw and drink wine, Jonathan to work on his laptop and drink coffee. My friends Elisabetta and Lorenzo from my regular art class were there along with a handful of other people whom I didn't know.

One of them heard Jonathan and I speaking English to each other and introduced herself to us. She is Canadian, but has lived in Pietrasanta for 20 years and knows Franco and had come to draw. We chatted a bit and then the drawing began. Claudia (one of our regular models from class) was posing at one end of the room where the drawing was going on. Franco was playing his usual soothing drawing music on his phone. The regular pub patrons were going about their business at the other end of the room. Very tranquil.

All of the sudden, the Canadian turned and screamed over her shoulder the foulest stream of Italian invective that I have ever heard in my life (which is saying something.) She was cursing at a man at the other end of the room who apparently (I hadn't notice it because I was concentrating so deeply -- artistically! -- on the exact shape of Claudia's nostrils) had been cursing into his own phone. This had offended the Canadian.

Now in an American bar, there would almost certainly have been an escalation at this point, with louder shouting in return, thrown drinks, and possibly small-arms fire. Elisabetta and I instinctively scooted our chairs closer together to huddle for safety. We are not used to this sort of behavior.

But instead, I witnessed something infinitely scarier. The man walked calmly over to the Canadian woman and said in a low voice (in Italian, of course), leaning over her shoulder as she sat across from me at the table, "You shouldn't talk that way to me -- I'm the Consigliere." Then he walked away. Silence fell.

"What's a Consigliere?" Elisabetta whispered to me.

"I don't know," I said. "You're Italian, not me."

The only Consigliere I know of is Tom Hagan and he left a decapitated racehorse head in a film producer's bed. This guy, if not exactly Tom Hagan, was at least horse-adjacent. Elisabetta and I scooted even closer and concentrated very hard on our drawings. I am betting that Claudia's nostrils have never before been rendered with such exacting precision.

Jonathan and I were happy to go back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where the most heated discussions at our own beloved little pub involve the proper herbs for certain fish. (Some pull hard for sage -- others for tarragon, the Italian word for which is "dragoncello." I stay out of it.) I haven't seen either the Canadian or the Consigliere around town since then. Admittedly, having seen all of the "Godfather" movies (even the substandard third one), I haven't looked very hard for them.

Mostly, though, people in art class are benign and even friendly. (This is one of my drawings from class -- not Claudia.) Besides Elisabetta and Lorenzo, there is my friend Antonio, who is 88 and draws like Egon Schiele, and Mismas, who draws like himself, which is breathtaking even though he is mainly a sculptor, and who gives me encouraging smiles whenever I have made a particularly egregious hash of things. There's Vitzi, who tosses off stylish sketches while discussing how she is studying for her A-Levels. She's taking five, which seems like a lot to me. There are others, but these are my main friends. And then there's my best friend in class, Rocco, who is 21 and who translates for me when I don't understand what is going on (which is a lot of the time.) He taught me the word for "knee" the first time class I attended and "hail" (apropos of the actual weather) last Tuesday. This is what he was working on (I snatched it from his Instagram). When anyone tells him how great it is, he is self-deprecating and blushes.

Running a vacuum-cleaner-related errand in Massa earlier this week, we discovered a big supermarket that had ramen noodles, tortilla chips, and salsa -- none of which are available anywhere in Pietrasanta. I went slightly crazy and now my body salt content is approximately 97 percent. It's strange the things that you find you miss.

Rainstorms have been blowing through here today in waves. In between them, the sky is luminous like pearls and the sea has bands of palest aqua and bottle green. We can see the surf breaking on the beach down at Viareggio.

We skidded down the mountainside into town to buy meat at the butcher and bread at the bakery and fruit and veg at the fruit and veg shop. In case you were wondering what it is like to spend twenty bucks at the tiny little fruit and vegetable store in Pietrasanta: It is like you have won the lottery and the prize is being  paid in produce. I am a glutton for it all, but figure that there are worse things to be addicted to than fresh vegetables. (Full disclosure: I am also addicted to some of that other stuff.)

 

Tonight in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea: A piano has appeared without warning in the pub. Almo brought flowers to Alice. A soccer game was played on the TV. Jonathan and I sat at our usual table -- we are now just part of the furniture, greeted, unnoticed, welcome, belonging, unremarked. Alice gave me a sprig of the flowers. I had a new idea for a book. We came home and had pasta and salad for dinner. I have the hiccups. I think that I am very lucky.