Part II: Montefioralle

We had been talking about it forever but I suppose nobody really thought we would actually go. Why? Abroad, all these questions would not reside and neither would we – just needed a month to relax and blow off steam, only wander among the ghosts of an ancient city speaking a foreign tongue; pouring libations to our mythical ancestors in the ‘old country’ was really all we needed to know that we actually exist. When after our time was up and we didn’t come back, it came as a big shock to just about everyone in the New York metropolitan area. It shouldn’t have.

It was not all really clear at the beginning even to me, but it went back years, before Jimmy and I had even met to my 20th birthday – I was in Rome for a semester and had been easily picked up by exactly the type of guy you’d expect to pick you up in Italy: young, lithe, big sunglasses, tight red jeans, if a touch slim he still had the words and the accent to make up for the fact that he walked daintily with his friends and addressed grown men as ‘bello’ – ah, Gianni. It was 1994, and Italy and I were still untouched by those universal forces that would later conspire to destroy us both.

Driving through the Tuscan hills on the Feast of All Saints as the sun dipped below the vineyards and ancient Etruscan villages, Gianni wound me higher and higher into the Elysian fields of wine, his Fiat resisting yet seemingly made to buck and grind those turns to Greve, a quiet town, but all considered lively and in a jovial mood. We parked almost inside a dark little bar and rapidly polished off a bottle or two of the popular local table wine that I still believe has alchemical properties. After the bottles were drained – and Gianni had forgotten my name, referring to me only as ‘Beatrice’ (like this: ‘Bee–a–trēē–che!’) – he led me out of the enoteca and had something to show me. I protested at first when he went for his little car, even though I was feeling quite soporific by then, but Gianni laughed, ‘Don’t worry, Beatrice, this is Italy – there is no such thing as drunk driving here’ and under its own power, the Fiat lifted us ever further into the hills to an ancient crumbling place where you could reach up and imbibe the moon.

It was a tiny medieval walled city, but its walls didn’t enclose – it seemed as though all the houses, had been carved from the very same piece of rock, a giant sculpture whittled away over an eternity into a village. The town was but a single structure where spaces had been hewn for people to experience the glorious time between their birth and death. It was dark and infinitely quiet; he whispered as little squares of light began to appear on the sides of the stone walls. Families are enjoying their dinners, laughing and gossiping, babies crying, cats begging for scraps of meat, grandmothers pontificating; the smell of gorgeous juicy steak wafts through and we duck into a doorway to be silent within the damp stone, listening to the night and watching the particles of each other’s breath mingle in the narrow space between. The walls were alive! They heaved their heavy sighs, had remained unchanged over hundreds of years and the laughter emanating from above was ancient.

Outside the city walls – they were not so much walls as precipices that had erupted out of the hilltop – looking down a steep stone staircase into the orchards below, we had left this earth and there was only an old man voice, strange, singing among the fruit.
‘What kind of fruit grows here, Gianni’?
‘…I cannot tell you…’
‘Why?’
‘There is no word for this fruit in English. It is a fruit that only grows here in this paese … delicious.’ (Gianni was a lightweight when it came to the vino.)
We stayed silent, studying the orchards, letting our eyes wind on down the path in its diminishing light. The singing grew louder and very sad; the old man was winding his way up, right up through it, and I understood that that he was singing to us: two young lovers he had seen on the precipice, who must have looked stunning in the glow of the lights.
‘siete bellissimi’. Indeed.