A Long Table Under the Trees

The long stretch of summer lunches calls for a long tavola. Now that the kitchen is finished, we need a table outdoors, the longer the better, because inevitably the abundance at the weekly market incites me to buy too much and because inevitably guests gather -- friends from home, a relative's friends from somewhere who thought they'd say hello since they were in the area, and new friends, sometimes with friends of theirs. Add another handful of pasta to the boiling pot, add a plate, a tumbler, find another chair. The table and the kitchen can oblige.

I have considered my table, its ideals as well as its dimensions. If I were a child, I would want to lift up to the tablecloth and crawl under the unending table, into the flaxen light where I could crouch and listen to the loud laughs, clinks and grown-up talk, hear over and over "Salute" and "Cin-cin" traveling around chairs, stare at kneecaps and walking shoes and flowered skirts hiked up to catch a breeze, the table steady under its weight of food. Such a table should accommodate the wanderings of a large dog. At the end, you need room for an enormous vase of all the flowers in bloom at the moment. The width should allow platters to meander from hand to hand down the center, stopping where they will, and numerous water and wine bottles to accumulate over the hours. You need room for a bowl of cool water to dip the grapes and pears into, a little covered dish to keep the bugs off the Gorgonzola (dolce as opposed to the piccante type, which is for cooking) and caciotta, a local soft cheese. No one cares if olive pits are flung into the distance. The best wardrobe for such a table runs to pale linens, blue checks, pink and green plaid, not dead white, which takes in too much glare. If the table is long enough, everything can be brought out at once, and no one has to run back and forth to the kitchen. Then the table is set for primary pleasure: lingering meals, under the trees at noon. The open air confers an ease, a relaxation and freedom. You're your own guest, which is the way summer ought to be.

In the delicious stupor that sets in after the last pear is halved, the last crust scoops up the last crumbles of Gorgonzola, and the last drop empties into the glass, you can ruminate, if you are inclined that way, on your participation in the great collective unconscious. You are doing what everyone else in Italy is doing, millions of backsides being shined by chairs at millions of tables. Over each table, a miniature swarm of gnats is gathering. There are exceptions, of course. Parking attendants, waiters, cooks -- and thousands of tourists, many of whom made the mistake of eating two wedges of great sausage pizza at eleven and now have no inclination to eat anything. Instead, they wander under the unbearable sun, peeking through metal grates covering shop windows, pushing at the massive doors of locked churches, sitting on the sides of fountains while squinting into minuscule guidebooks. Give it up! I've done the same thing. Then, later, it's hard to deny the luscious melone ice cream cone at seven, when the air is still hot and your sandals have rubbed your heels raw. Those weak ones (mea culpa) who succumb possibly will have another wedge, artichoke this time, on the way to the hotel; then, when Italy begins eating at nine, the foreign stomach doesn't even mumble. That happens much later, when all the good restaurants are full.

The rhythm of Tuscan dining may throw us off but after a long lunch outside, one concept is clear -- siesta. The logic of a three-hour fall through the crack of the day makes perfect sense. Best to pick up that Piero della Francesca book, wander upstairs and give in to it.

I know I want a wooden table. When I was growing up, my father had dinners for his men friends and a few employees on Fridays. Our cook, Willie Bell, and my mother spread a long white table under a pecan tree in our yard with fried chicken cooked right there on our brick barbecue, potato salad, biscuits, iced tea, pound cake, and bottles of gin and Southern Comfort. The noon meal often lasted most of the day, sometimes ending with the swaying men, arm-in-arm singing "Darktown Strutter's Ball" and "I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech" slowly as if on a tape that warped in the sun.

From the very first weeks we lived in the house, we used the abandoned worktable, a crude prototype of the table I imagined us eventually setting under the line of five tigli trees. At a market stall, I bought tablecloths, long to keep splinters from digging into our knees. With napkins to match, a jar of poppies, Queen Anne's lace, and blue bachelor's buttons on the table, our yellow plates from the COOP, we served forth, mainly to each other.

My idea of heaven is a two-hour lunch with Ed. I believe he must have been Italian in another life. He has begun to gesture and wave his hands, which I've never seen him do. He likes to cook at home but simply throws himself into it here. For a lunch he prepares, he gathers parmigiano, fresh mozzarella, some pecorino from the mountains, red peppers, just-picked lettuces, the local salami with fennel, loaves of pane con sale (the bread that isn't strictly traditional here since it has salt), prosciutto, a glorious bag of tomatoes. For dessert, peaches, plums, and, my favorite, a local watermelon called minne di monaca, nun's tits. He piles the bread board with our cheeses, salami, peppers, and on our plates arranges our first course, the classic caprese: sliced tomatoes, basil, mozzarella and a drizzle of oil.

In the tigli shade, we're protected from the midday heat. The cicadas yammer in the trees, that deeply heart-of-summer sound. The tomatoes are so intense we go silent as we taste them. Ed opens a celebratory bottle of prosecco and we settle down to recap the saga of buying and restoring the house. Oddly, we now omit the complications and panic; we've begun the selection process, the same one that ensures the continuance of the human race: forgetting the labor. Ed starts drawing up plans for a bread oven. We dream on about other projects. The sun through the flowering trees bathes us in gold-sifted light. "This isn't real; we've wandered into a Fellini film," I say.

Ed shakes his head. "Fellini is a documentary filmmaker -- I've lost my belief in his genius. There are Fellini scenes everywhere. Remember the brilliant motorcycle that comes around and around in Amarcord? It happens all the time. You're nowhere in a remote village, no one in sight, and suddenly a huge Moto Guzzi streaks by." He peels a peach in one long spiral and just because this was all too pleasant we open a second bottle of prosecco and wile away another hour before we drift into rest and revive our energy for a walk into town to case out the restaurants, stroll along the parterre overlooking the valley, and, hard to contemplate, begin the next meal.

We have called the shy and silent carpenters, Marco and Rudolfo. They seem amused no matter what work they do here. The idea of a painted table seating ten seems to stun them. They're used to chestnut stain. Are we certain? I see them swap a glance with each other. But it will have to be repainted in two years. Too impractical. We've sketched what we want and have the paint sample, too -- primary yellow.

They return four days later with the table, sealed and painted -- a miracle turnaround time anywhere but especially for two as busy as they are. They laugh and say the table will glow in the dark. It does pulsate with color. They haul it to the spot with the broadest view into the valley. In the deep shade, the yellow shines, luring us to come forth from the house with jugs and steaming bowls, baskets of fruit and fresh cheeses wrapped in grape leaves.

Dinner tonight is for an Italian couple, their baby, and compatriot writers. This Italian baby girl, at seven months, chews on piquant olives and looks longingly at the food. Our friends have been amused by our adventures in restoration, safely amused since their houses were restored before workmen disappeared and before the dollar dove. Each knows an astonishing amount about wells, septic systems, gutters, pruning -- minute technical knowledge acquired by years under the roofs of quirky old farmhouses. We're awed by their fluency with Italian, their endless knowledge of the intricacies of telephone bills. Though I imagine conversations about the currents in Italian literature, opera and controversial restorations, we seem to discuss most passionately olive pruning, grease traps, well testing and shutter repair.

The menu: with drinks, bruschette with chopped tomatoes and basil, crostini with a red pepper confit. The first course, gnocchi, not the usual potato but light semolina gnocchi (small servings -- it's rich), followed by veal roasted with garlic and potatoes, then garnished with fried sage. The little green beans, still crisp, warm, with fennel and olives. Just before they arrive, I pick a huge basket of lettuces. At the start of summer, I scattered two envelopes of mixed lettuces as an edging along a flower bed. They were up in a week and in three, bolted the border. Now they're everywhere; it feels odd to be weeding the flower bed and accumulating dinner at the same time. Some look unfamiliar; I hope we're not eating just-sprouting calendula or hollyhocks. The cherries, simmered and cooled, have attracted bees to them all afternoon. One of the tiny hummingbirds made a quick foray into the kitchen, drawn possibly by the scent of the deep red wine syrup.

When they arrive it will be the soft, slow Tuscan twilight, fading after drinks from transparent to golden to evening blue, then, by the end of the first course, into night. Night happens quickly, as though the sun were pulled in one motion under the hill. We light candles in hurricane shades all along the stone wall and on the table. For background music, a hilarious chorus of frogs tunes up. Molte anni fa, many years ago, our friends begin. Their stories weave an Italy around us that we know only through books and films. In the sixties ... In the seventies ... A true paradise. That's why they came -- and stayed. They love it but it's downhill now in comparison to the four armoires from that nutty contessa. How alive the streets of Rome were with people, and remember the theater with the roof that rolled back, how sometimes it would rain? Then the talk shifts to politics. They know everyone. We're all horrified at the car bombing in Sicily. Is there a Mafia here? Our questions are naive. The fascist leaning in recent elections disturbs everyone. Could Italy go back? I tell them about the antique dealer in Monte San Savino. I saw a photo of Mussolini over his shop door and he saw me looking at it. With a big smile he asks if I know who that is. Not knowing if the photo is a campy object or one of veneration, I give him the fascist salute. He goes crazy, thinking I approve. He's all over me, talking about what a bold and bravo man Il Duce was. I want to get out with my strange purchases -- a big gilt cross and the door to a reliquary -- but now the prices come down. He invites me back, wants me to meet his family. Everyone advises me to take full advantage.

I feel immersed here; my "real life" seems remote. Odd that we're all here. We were given one country and we've set ourselves up in another -- they much more radically than we; they defined their lives and work by this place, not that. We feel so much at home, pale and American as we are. We could just stay here, go native. Let my hair grow long, tutor local kids in English, ride a Vespa into town for bread. I imagine Ed on one of those tiny tractors made for terraced land. Imagine him starting a little vineyard. Or we could make tisanes of lemon balm. I look at him but he is pouring wine. I almost feel our strange voices -- English, French, Italian -- spreading out around the house, over the valley. Sound carries on the hills. (Stranieri, foreigners, we're called, but it sounds more dire, more like strangers, an oddly chilling word.) Often we hear parties of invisible neighbors above us. We've shifted an ancient order of things on this hillside, where the tax collector, the police captain and the newsstand owner (our nearest neighbors although we can't see any of them) heard only Italian until we encamped here.