In Maremma Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside a big fireplace very much like our own. When we told Domenico what we were considering, he cried, “How can you do that?” as if the mere idea of a stove injured him personally. “A country house without a fireplace . . . that would be terrible! I couldn’t imagine my house in winter without a fire going!” We reminded him that in the case of his own house, he was seldom there in the cold months. We, on the other hand, had the whole winter before us, and could hardly spend it in a haze of wood smoke, our throats sore, our eyes burning, the furniture becoming sooty. “But that doesn’t mean you should do something drastic,” he said. “We just have to study the problem . . . ” (In Italy, as everywhere, “study the problem” is synonymous with “put off the solution.”)
    It was apparent that we had to take matters into our own hands. We found a dealer in wood-burning stoves in Grosseto. His shop was full of immense high-tech models, all gleaming chrome and superb efficiency. Mostly he dealt in the sort of small stoves that Sauro, Ilvo, and Delia kept in their kitchens, and in the summer he sold pizza ovens. Nonetheless we asked him about Morsø. “Quello col scoiattolo ! ” (“The one with the squirrel!”) he said, his eyes lighting up like those of the chef at a Chinese restaurant when, to his delight, a customer asks for crispy duck with taro root instead of chow mein. Not only did he know it, the Morso distributor was a friend of his. If we wanted, he could have the stove for us in three days.

    The stove fit perfectly inside the fireplace. Piero’s little device for roasting potatoes went into a drawer somewhere. Something had to be sacrificed.
    â€œA smaller wood-burning stove in the fireplace opening is the owners’ choice for an easy and economical way to heat the room,” Elizabeth wrote in her book.
    Â 

    Fire on a November Afternoon, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

8
    The Italians are adorable but au fond they lack mystery. Life is exquisite in Italy but in the end atrociously boring. The French are occasionally nasty but at least they have depth.
    FREDERIC PROKOSCH,
THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT (1968)
    Â 
    T HE MOST USEFUL thing anyone living in Italy can learn is how to be bored because Italy is the most boring of all European countries: boredom is the nettle among its laurels.
    Sundays are boring days in Italian cities because all the shops are closed (although, poco a poco, this is changing). The summer is boring because all the movie theaters are closed (the American experience of spending a hot afternoon in the dark of a super-airconditioned multiplex is unknown here), and for at least a month (August) everything is closed. (Truly it is like a month of Sundays.) And just how boring after dinner can be was brought home to us by an advertisement we saw one summer in Rome: a dramatic alternative to the ritual of cena, passeggiata, and gelato (dinner, walk, and ice cream) was proposed: cena, passeggiata, and grattacheccha (dinner, walk, and grated ice flavored with syrup; essentially a snow cone). Every February, there
is the obligatory settimana bianca (white week) in the Alps or the Dolomites. Christmas is always spent with i tuoi (relatives) and Easter with chi vuoi (whomever you want). In Rome you eat gnocchi on Thursday and fish on Friday. In all of Italy you can find delicious fried sweets during the Carnival season, but only during the Carnival season. In short, it is not so much the ritualization as what might be called the “habitualization” of Italian life that makes it so boring.
    Â 

    Giuseppe Novello, from Il Signore di Buona Famiglia (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1934): “When even the sour-cherry ice is finished.”

    And yet there one grows to love boredom, even to cultivate it. In a boring country, you find that you are
content more often than happy, since we make our own contentment and