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the store to feel like a museum lesson or an elegant warehouse. I wanted it to evoke the part of my life that I remember from my summers at Villa Cannizzaro, our family’s seventeenth-century stone house in Camaiore, a small town outside of Lucca in Tuscany.
    For more than thirty years, daily life there had been presided over by my father, Giovanni, a painter turned architect turned painter, and Lisetta, my father’s companion. Actually, for most of those years, Lisetta was in charge. Both patrician and energetic, Lisetta is a woman of great culture but blunt. She either loved you—or not.
    They met in the early 1970s when my father was recovering from a heart attack at the hospital in nearby Pietrasanta. Lisetta had also suffered one some months earlier, and they were immediately drawn to each other. I guess you could say that their love grew out of two broken hearts.
    Lisetta is a natural cook with an encyclopedic knowledge of local dishes. Although we had help, she was often in the kitchen skinning a rabbit that someone had been too slow to prepareor speeding up the pasta prep by churning out a few hundred feather-light gnocchi. One of her biggest fans, my dad was always a
buona forchetta
—a “good fork,” or enthusiastic eater.
    Lisetta always has the inside scoop, whether sweaters knit by Missoni’s sample maker or shoes cobbled at Ferragamo’s factory or linen shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons sewn by a sweet signora down the road. Lisetta knows where to source the best pottery in Montelupo, the finest glass in Empoli, the prettiest marble in Vallecchia. She can point you to the best nursery to buy a bougainvillea and the best price on terra-cotta roof tiles. She knows the nondescript storefront behind which to find lambskin suede jackets and the similarly hidden attic from which to source Nepalese cashmere spun in Como. When she is food shopping, local merchants always treat her entrance with a combination of deference and enthusiasm. “Oh, signora!” they say, and then disappear into back rooms to fetch her the freshest Pecorino and the tastiest sausages.
    To Lisetta, paying $150 for a bottle of Ornellaia, the famed super-Tuscan red wine, would be equal parts stupidity and bad taste.
    Instead, we used to buy our wine in bulk from various family friends. One of our favorites was a Rosso di Montalcino from Cortona. During those summers in the 1970s and 1980s, two things were most memorable: the wine tasted good, even to a disinterested kid/teenager/young adult, and the
damigiana
, equivalent to seventy bottles of wine, was a pain in the butt to heft out of our Fiat. The decanting process was also a messy family project. To keep the wine from spoiling, we bottled it ourselves with supplies from the local
agrario
(farm supply store). Usually, my father would spill and imbibe a fair amount of wine trying to prime the siphon, and we would giggle and everyone left the cellar smiling in wine-splotched clothes. Instead of corks, we sealed each bottle with a tablespoon of our olive oil. (Like corks, olive oil keeps the oxygen from entering the bottle.) Oenophiles will gasp, but because of the oil, we always stored the bottles standing up in the cantina. When we were ready to drink, we used another specialized siphon, a glass bottle with two protruding glass straws, to suck off the oil while leaving the wine undisturbed.
    LISETTA’S SPECIAL SALT

    Every time Becky and I leave Cannizzaro to return to New York, Lisetta makes sure we pack some of her herb-infused salt. It’s a simple rub she uses for grilled meats such as bistecca alla fiorentina (the heavenly steak made from Tuscany’s famed Chianina steers) or rosticciana (the Italian version of spare ribs). At home I also use it as an all-purpose infuser of the taste of home, adding it, for example, to osso bucco or broiled lamb chops. Along with just a drop of her red pepper—infused olive oil, it is a staple that has rescued many a bland meal. Incredibly