Brian H. Appleton
03-19-2008, 10:15 AM
In Memory of Tom and Mary Roberts
When my family lived in Tirrenia, a beach resort between Livorno and Marina Di Pisa in the 1960’s, my father was inclined in summer to drive to Grassina outside Florence on Saturdays and spend the day playing golf at Golf Ugolino.
This course was named after the infamous Conte Ugolino who after instigating trouble between the Gwelfs and the Gibellines found himself imprisoned in a tower and left to starve with his sons and his nephews. Dante Alighieri perpetrated the rumor in one of his poems that the count had cannibalized his own children to prolongue his own life. An Italian forensic archeologist exhumed his skeleton last year and ran some tests which indicated that no zinc had been deposited on his rib bones ostensibly indicating that he had not eaten protein before his demise, so the Count’s reputation was vindicated 700 years later. I'm sure a fact which gives great comfort to any of Ugolino's descendants out there. I actually know one who emigrated to BC Canada to escape the past and slightly modified her name.
At any rate my father upon one of his golf outings there at Golf Ugolino, struck up a conversation with a New Englander named Tom, also playing there, who turned out to be a retired chemist from Rhode Island and who had bought a beautiful Farm with villa near by where he lived with his wife Mary, just the two of them alone...their children being all grown and living in England.
Soon they invited us all to their farm and in a short time; we began to spend many, many Saturdays with them. While Tom and my father golfed, Mary, my mother and brother and I would spend pleasant days having tea and playing Wist and eventually Bridge. It was Mary who taught me to play Bridge when I was about ten. She also had a magnificent rose garden and I recall two large white ceramic Mazocchi of German Shepard dogs in the front of the house after a long drive up a majestic cypress lined private roadway.
To the left of the rose garden was a vegetable garden and I can remember picking straw basket fulls of Fava beans and Bacelli in their season while watching the dancing butterflys in the rays of sunlight and ducking the large deep purple bumble bees.
Every spring Tom would take me into the barn to show me the new born calves. In Tuscany the oxen have short horns unlike their Southern Italian cousins. The interesting thing about the calves was if they were born black they would grow up to be white and if they were born white they would grow up to be black. One time their tenant farmer Gigi gave me a male and female pair of Guinea Pigs which I brought home to my menagerie in our garden at Villa Pina in Tirrenia and they spawned many generations of children over the years. I remember that in every successive litter there was always one that looked just like its father, same coloration and pinto pattern. The Italians actually roasted and ate Guinea Pigs and raised them for food rather than as pets but I could never bring myself to eat something I had named.
Often I would go on long walks by myself on their farm and listen to the swallows wheeling overhead and go to the edge of a hill and look out over the peaceful valley far below and discern villages and a faint sound of church bells in the far distance. The peace of God dwelled in that valley and I could sit for long stretches just looking out at it and watching the cottony clouds billowing past in the pale blue sky above.
Tom and Mary always bought expensive presents for me like battery operated robots or trucks with rotating searchlights on the back of them for Christmas and for my birthday.They would come to visit with us in Tirrenia and in the summer spend the day at the beach with us. They became like grandparents to me.
I remember their villa was filled with American colonial antique furniture in dark wood and with brass eagle crests. It seemed rather incongruous in Tuscany but there it was. Their library was filled with leather bound books and the smell of Mahogany. Mary had somehow managed to convince herself that she was an illegitimate descendant of Louis XIV, The Sun King and my father tending to be a bit theatrical himself ate it up. My father loved to take a book of Lord Byron’s poems from their book shelf and read out loud to Mary, which was my signal to go out into the garden and look for those skinks with tiny vestigial legs which made them look like little snakes. They were very fast and hard to catch in the grass. I believe they are called glass lizards. They had tiny smooth scales and shown in the sun like burnished gold and silver and if you handled them too roughly their tails would break off and wiggle like crazy intended to distract you while the owner got away. A new tail would eventually grow back in a few months but never quite as long or sharp as the original and usually a darker shade.
I’m not sure when those Halycon days of my childhood ended but one day Tom came to visit us in Roslyn, Virginia at a chain restaurant at the top of one of those tinted glass office towers overlooking the Potomac and told us Mary had passed away and he had sold the farm to his tenant farmer Gigi at a generous discount and gone back to Rhode Island to live with his aged sister.
Years later I happened to be in Grassina and passed by the former villa and Gigi had knocked it down and build modern subdivisions. The only evidence that Tom and Mary had ever lived there was a little marble plaque still cemented to the original brick gate post and wall which had remained at the property line, which I discovered upon brushing aside the ivy and there engraved in the stone in letters about half an inch high read “Tom and Mary Roberts”
When my family lived in Tirrenia, a beach resort between Livorno and Marina Di Pisa in the 1960’s, my father was inclined in summer to drive to Grassina outside Florence on Saturdays and spend the day playing golf at Golf Ugolino.
This course was named after the infamous Conte Ugolino who after instigating trouble between the Gwelfs and the Gibellines found himself imprisoned in a tower and left to starve with his sons and his nephews. Dante Alighieri perpetrated the rumor in one of his poems that the count had cannibalized his own children to prolongue his own life. An Italian forensic archeologist exhumed his skeleton last year and ran some tests which indicated that no zinc had been deposited on his rib bones ostensibly indicating that he had not eaten protein before his demise, so the Count’s reputation was vindicated 700 years later. I'm sure a fact which gives great comfort to any of Ugolino's descendants out there. I actually know one who emigrated to BC Canada to escape the past and slightly modified her name.
At any rate my father upon one of his golf outings there at Golf Ugolino, struck up a conversation with a New Englander named Tom, also playing there, who turned out to be a retired chemist from Rhode Island and who had bought a beautiful Farm with villa near by where he lived with his wife Mary, just the two of them alone...their children being all grown and living in England.
Soon they invited us all to their farm and in a short time; we began to spend many, many Saturdays with them. While Tom and my father golfed, Mary, my mother and brother and I would spend pleasant days having tea and playing Wist and eventually Bridge. It was Mary who taught me to play Bridge when I was about ten. She also had a magnificent rose garden and I recall two large white ceramic Mazocchi of German Shepard dogs in the front of the house after a long drive up a majestic cypress lined private roadway.
To the left of the rose garden was a vegetable garden and I can remember picking straw basket fulls of Fava beans and Bacelli in their season while watching the dancing butterflys in the rays of sunlight and ducking the large deep purple bumble bees.
Every spring Tom would take me into the barn to show me the new born calves. In Tuscany the oxen have short horns unlike their Southern Italian cousins. The interesting thing about the calves was if they were born black they would grow up to be white and if they were born white they would grow up to be black. One time their tenant farmer Gigi gave me a male and female pair of Guinea Pigs which I brought home to my menagerie in our garden at Villa Pina in Tirrenia and they spawned many generations of children over the years. I remember that in every successive litter there was always one that looked just like its father, same coloration and pinto pattern. The Italians actually roasted and ate Guinea Pigs and raised them for food rather than as pets but I could never bring myself to eat something I had named.
Often I would go on long walks by myself on their farm and listen to the swallows wheeling overhead and go to the edge of a hill and look out over the peaceful valley far below and discern villages and a faint sound of church bells in the far distance. The peace of God dwelled in that valley and I could sit for long stretches just looking out at it and watching the cottony clouds billowing past in the pale blue sky above.
Tom and Mary always bought expensive presents for me like battery operated robots or trucks with rotating searchlights on the back of them for Christmas and for my birthday.They would come to visit with us in Tirrenia and in the summer spend the day at the beach with us. They became like grandparents to me.
I remember their villa was filled with American colonial antique furniture in dark wood and with brass eagle crests. It seemed rather incongruous in Tuscany but there it was. Their library was filled with leather bound books and the smell of Mahogany. Mary had somehow managed to convince herself that she was an illegitimate descendant of Louis XIV, The Sun King and my father tending to be a bit theatrical himself ate it up. My father loved to take a book of Lord Byron’s poems from their book shelf and read out loud to Mary, which was my signal to go out into the garden and look for those skinks with tiny vestigial legs which made them look like little snakes. They were very fast and hard to catch in the grass. I believe they are called glass lizards. They had tiny smooth scales and shown in the sun like burnished gold and silver and if you handled them too roughly their tails would break off and wiggle like crazy intended to distract you while the owner got away. A new tail would eventually grow back in a few months but never quite as long or sharp as the original and usually a darker shade.
I’m not sure when those Halycon days of my childhood ended but one day Tom came to visit us in Roslyn, Virginia at a chain restaurant at the top of one of those tinted glass office towers overlooking the Potomac and told us Mary had passed away and he had sold the farm to his tenant farmer Gigi at a generous discount and gone back to Rhode Island to live with his aged sister.
Years later I happened to be in Grassina and passed by the former villa and Gigi had knocked it down and build modern subdivisions. The only evidence that Tom and Mary had ever lived there was a little marble plaque still cemented to the original brick gate post and wall which had remained at the property line, which I discovered upon brushing aside the ivy and there engraved in the stone in letters about half an inch high read “Tom and Mary Roberts”