 Memories from the Hills around Florence
La Spiaggia di Vicchio
In my high school and college days I used to spend summers in Italy and always booked time with my friend Benji outside Florence in Vicchio Mugello where Giotto was born.
There was also the Bridge of Cimabue by there so all in all it had many millennia of history. There were castles in nearby towns like Scarperia whose ownership I was not privy to but they were beautiful to look at.
Sometimes I was badly in need of a retreat and I asked the village priest Father Casinovi where I could find solitude. He told me about a farm house high above the town with a spectacular view and peace and quiet. It belonged to the family of one of Benji’s employees, a polite young girl named Gina, who was one of the seamstresses working in the women’s apparel business they ran. Father Casinovi arranged everything and as I didn’t drive, I hitched a ride at the end of the work day with Gina up to the farm house where they showed me to my guest room and told me when to come for meals. There really was a world of heavenly quiet up there. Far below I could see the Villa of Benji’s parents and the glint of the sunlight reflecting off their swimming pool and occasionally I could hear a few barks on the wind from their two police dogs named Prince and Raja, who were father and son.
The only daily disturbance was late in the afternoon when they did hog calling to get the pigs to come and take their supper. I can still hear that strange sound that pigs make which we call squealing but it sounds like some kind of scream in reverse like they are sucking air in instead of out.
Usually after my breakfast I would have them pack me a simple lunch of cheese and bread and I would go hiking up the mountainside which was quite thick with trees and blackberry brambles rich in fruit as big as table grapes. I would watch the farmer plowing his fields with a brace of white oxen in a timeless scene. I would sit on the hillside day dreaming and watching a trail of ants. It was then that I discovered how much ants rely on scent rather than sight. For no apparent reason I picked up a large black ant and popped it into my mouth with the intention of eating it to see if indeed they tasted sour from the formic acid they contain. Changing my mind I spit her back out. As her colleagues came upon her, they immediately attacked her because the smell of my saliva masked her identity from her siblings. It was shocking albeit on a microcosmic scale. I believe it was Aristotle who thought that people were reborn as ants…
After walking and lolling about like this on the mountain side for several days, one afternoon as the shadows grew long on their way into evening, I suddenly began to discern that what had looked like green bumps and mounds in the terrain were actually the outlines of walls and rooms. I was amazed and later when I asked Benji about this he said that there was an Etruscan Necropolis up there which had never been excavated and evidently I had found it.
These pleasant Halcyon days came to an abrupt end on Sunday morning when a squad of sportsmen arrived for a skeet shooting competition over the duck pond in front of the farm house and I was rudely awakened by the sound of their shot gun blasts.
Sometimes a group of us, Benji’s friends, his sister and cousins would go to a swimming hole in the middle of a field and spend the afternoon diving into it off a short wooden pier. It might have been a quarry at some time. One time I cut my foot on some broken glass while wading in the muddy water and I remember Benji’s sister washing out my cut with a bottle of expensive perfume from her purse on the side of the jetty.
As I recall it was not far from a country restaurant run by a very jovial Russian expatriate named Danio. He was quite the character as he charged more for the water than for the wine. He would say: “Why drink water when you can drink wine?” The first thing he would do when he met you for the first time was to slap you on the back and say: “Let’s have a drink!” as he poured out a couple of shots of Scotch. I seem to recall that his French ex-wife and his current girl friend would get into fights and make his life miserable.
Anyway I once asked Benji how on earth this crazy Russian had ended up in the hills outside Florence. He told me that at one time he had been a shipping magnate with a large fleet of merchant vessels but that during WWII, the Soviets had expropriated the entire fleet and left him with nothing and so he had somehow ended up here and started this restaurant. He had a very handsome and rustic looking profile with a steel grey short beard too as I recall.
Another place we use to go was Ricavi, which was a resort with a swimming pool. Benji would study for his finals while I would swim. I had a pony tail at the time and the life guard said that when I untied it and swam the length of the pool with Benji and Bridiga swimming along behind me that I looked like Christ and his apostles. Well since I was up to my neck in water and not walking on it I don’t understand his confusion.
Benji’s fiancé and I would play Billiardini and every once in awhile he could not resist taking a break from his books and joining in the match. He was an expert at getting the ball to roll along the side wall and then curve into the goal at the last minute which was very difficult to stop. In fact I went on to learn that move from him.
Across the way from there was Machiavelli’s tavern where you could see the original copy of his manuscript “The Prince” in his own handwriting. They served only white Canelli beans in olive oil and large slices of country bread and wine of course. It was great!
Benji was really into car racing as a young man. He had a white Fiat 124 Spyder which he would take up to very high speeds with me on the hair pin curves on the road between Florence and Vicchio which he had completely memorized. One time he had borrowed his mother’s Mini Morris to participate in a race without telling her. You know how in Italy the race track is often just a regular road with people’s houses along the sides, which is cordoned off from the crowd by a rope at best. He was well ahead of the pack when upon rounding a corner there was a young lady standing in the middle of the road yawning and stretching and taking in the morning sunshine. In order to avoid hitting her he had to crash into a retaining wall.
It was bad enough that he had lost the race and smashed up his mom’s car but he had hired a friend to take pictures. The friend had of course taken graphic shots of the crash and upon developing them had send them in a package in the mail to Benji’s house. Benji had taken his mom’s car to the body shop to get it repaired in the iterim and had told her it was just getting new brakes. Of course she opened the package and saw the photos and that was the last time he raced. He had to content himself with being a spectator from then on.
One day we went to see the Circuito Di Mugello which was a hill climb car race. Senator Vedevato’s daughter threw a racing car party at their villa every year which was right on the race track. Although it was an eloquent cocktail party with waiters and everyone dressed to the nines, we could sit along the wall of her garden with our legs dangling over the edge and feel the breeze from the Lamborgini Miura’s as they came flying round the corner and were out of sight in a flash going what seemed like two hundred miles an hour.
I still remember that Benji had invited two tall blonde American girls who kept saying:” This is just like a movie; this is just like a movie!” I kept wishing they would keep quiet as I was trying so hard to be sophisticated at that age and they were embarrassing me.
This was from the same young man who escorted Benji’s fiancé Brigida to a party of the Rotary Club at the Villa Mediceo when Benji himself was not feeling up to going and I was in my Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club phase so I dressed in white pants with a purple jacket with brass buttons and gold epaulettes with my pony tail and walrus mustache. I remember for many days after that the gossipy debutants kept whispering: “Ma perche viola?” “ But why purple?” At 19 I thought that was cool.
So 38 years later while visiting Benji and Brigida who served us a barbeque from the patio of their pent house across from the Duomo, I kept over hearing what sounded like raucus children in a playground drifting up from the street 5 floors down. Finally I asked my hosts if there were a childcare center down there like Gymboree. Benji said:” No it is just drunken American college students.” Again I felt embarrassed for my countrymen.
He went on to say that when they got too loud that he turned a garden hose on them but that the count across the alley also five floors up whose ancestors had lived in that palazzo for 600 years, kept water balloons on the ready for them. One time the count had managed to hit one rowdy right on the head. When this student went to the American consulate to file a complaint and the Counsul General asked for the names of the streets in the intersection where it had taken place, the moment he told her, she had burst out laughing because the count was a friend of hers and she knew from the address that it had been him...
One time when Prince Charles had come to visit Florence, he had asked to be invited into this count's palazzo but the count sent word that whenever he came to London he had never been invited to Buckingham Palace so why should Prince Charles be invited into his home?
Thus I think it is safe to assume that the character of the Florentines is safely intact from the time of the great Benvenuto Cellini until the present.
Last edited by Brian Appleton; 12-24-2007 at 11:14 PM.
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