In Maremma
David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell
In his deliciously entertaining 1995 autobiography, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal writes fondly of the Italian apartment where he lived off and on for nearly 30 years. With all his essential merchants and services within a short walk, Vidal recounts discovering a welcome change of lifestyle: "I never had a proper human-scale village life anywhere on earth until I settled into that old Roman street."
Seeking a scale perhaps even more authentically human than that of the compulsively cosmopolitan Vidal, the expatriate American writers David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell in 1997 left their own Roman home for a previously abandoned farmhouse set amidst the "gentle harshness" of the southern Tuscan countryside. In Maremma is a loosely gathered bundle of memoir-essays about their move and about the subsequent rewards of living among friendly neighbors in the sere hills of rural Italy. (It's rewardingly less loose, however, than their disappointing 1996 Italian Pleasures, a hodgepodgy scrapbook of impressions from all over the country.)
Unlike Vidal, who seems to define his Italian life by his endless stream of boldface visitors (Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jackie Kennedy, ad infinitum), Leavitt and Mitchell sink into their surroundings, befriending Pina, the local restauranteur, Alberto, the butcher, and a passel of local laborers and farmers.
One favorite chapter, "Frantoio" provides a lovingly concise look at the local olive harvest and the pressing of olive oil. It's full of the exact sort of fascinating industrial detail that, while decidely less rustic, made Arthur Hailey's books about banks and airports and hotels so enthralling. Of course, the writing here runs inky rings around those potboilers: the town's legendary ancient olive tree is a "green mother, whose milk tastes like pepper."
If you let yourself get past Leavitt and Mitchell's occasional bit of upper-crusty braggadocio about having furniture custom made and ordering specialty fabrics from Colefax & Fowler, the couple's warm evocations of daily life in the Maremma region (the word means marsh, but the landscape is actually rough, scrubby sheepherding terrain) are charming, and the relaxed philosophical musings that emerge from time passed without the sensory bombardment of so-called civilization are poignantly insightful.
The book's highlight, simultaneously sentimental and intellectual, is "Turkey Tetrazzini," an essay that begins by limning Leavitt and Mitchell's secret embarassment at craving all-American PBJ sandwiches and frozen faux-Euro dinners while living in a motherlode of epicurean pleasures. The authors wisely suggest that even the most fortunate expats can never quite reach the divine destinations created by imagination:
"...It was exactly the vague yearning for a Europe we had never seen that the flavor of Stouffer's Turkey Tetrazzini had called up in us when we were children...that World Book daydream of some ur-Italian city in which gondolas sailed down a river lined with Tuscan palaces, the Tower of Pisa bowed before the Bay of Naples and the Coliseum winked in the sunny distance.
When you live abroad, the ordinary and the mysterious trade places...This may be the secret joy and sorrow of expatriate life: by virtue of living in a foreign land, you throw not merely your history but your identity into relief. The past renders up an unsuspected poetry."
