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in Florence, the need to prepare dinner is obviated by a phone call. It is our friend Paolo Fiume, who invites us to drive with him to the tortellini and wild boar festival in Ronta.
    And so it is that we find ourselves, two hours later, sitting outdoors among the feasting citizens of Ronta (which locality, if you are curious to look it up on a map, you will find near Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello hills). The atmosphere is one of jocularity verging into violence. Colorfully decked-out women run back and forth, bearing meat on plastic plates; their husbands fill old water bottles with acrid-tasting wine; their sons and daughters don’t help at all, they just scream and sing and eat. And eat.
    Of the Italians, the English writer Edith Templeton wrote in The Surprise of Cremona: “I cannot make them out; they seem to be so much happier than the other nations I know” This was in the years just after the Second World War, when the country was going down the toilet. Now it is going down the toilet again—in Florence, just a few months back, a bomb ripped a hole in the history of art—and still the funghi porcini festivals
and pignoli (pine nut) festivals continue. “We are happy for no reason at all,” Mrs. Templeton’s friend tells her, “and it is a very pleasant state to be in. Now, what is it you want to know?”
    What do I want to know? Just that: how to be happy for no reason.
    Meanwhile a boy of alarming beauty alights from a long table near ours, a table populated exclusively by boys of alarming beauty. “Dov’e vai?” one of his friends calls to him. “A vomitare!” he answers cheerfully, and disappears into the night.

10
    I LVO AND DELIA, with their son Fosco, had lived on the farm next to ours for most of their lives. During the Second World War, Ilvo had left for a time: he had fought in Sicily, where he met several Americans, then spent a couple of years in a British prisoner-of-war camp near Banbury. Otherwise they had been here and were by and large self-sufficient.
    Every winter they killed a pig, which gave them enough meat not only to stock their freezer but also to make prosciutto, sausages, mazzafegato (so called not because it is made from liver but because it is so fatty that it “kills the liver” of the person who eats it) and pancetta. Each spring they planted an extensive orto (kitchen garden): carrots, potatoes, celery (the aromatic leaves of which were its particular glory), onions, garlic, basil, red and yellow and in some cases lilac-colored little peppers, and parsley. (According to Rosaria, the only doctor in Semproniano, women used to eat parsley in large quantities when they wanted to abort.) In the spring, Ilvo walked up and down the dirt road on which our houses were located, looking for stalks of wild asparagus, pencil thin and so delicate they needed barely to be cooked. (Hunting for wild asparagus was a community activity in March: driving along, you’d see people of all ages and
kinds scanning the roadside, reaching into the underbrush—the prudent among them with gloved hands. March was also the month when the vipers emerged. Should Ilvo share some of his wild asparagus with us, we’d make a carbonara using eggs from Delia’s chickens, grana padano, pancetta) and the wild asparagus.
    The sheep that Ilvo and Fosco tended produced enough manure to fertilize their olive trees, which gave them plenty of oil, as well as their orto and flower garden. From the sheep’s milk, Delia made pecorino and fresh ricotta. Their surplus milk they sold. Each year, just before Easter, a big truck chugged down our road to theirbarn, where Ilvo waited for it along with a dozen trussed lambs, which the truck then carried away to the city. In the fields, Fosco planted—depending on the season—hay, wheat, sunflowers, or favette , a feed for bestiame (farm animals).
    Only on Thursday—market day—would Fosco