The little house I was living in last August is an old Tuscan farmhouse on a grassy terrace planted in grapevines and olives on a hillside not far from the medieval walled town of Cortona. It overlooks a plain where teams of white oxen (or rather cows, for cows produce salable calves) plow through fields where the corn and wheat stubble has been cleared by the simple old expedient of burning it off. The cows’ size and whiteness is amazing, and so are their big, melting eyes; no wonder Homer called Juno the cow-eyed goddess.
The four-room house was converted for modern, though modest, living by making a few windows in the yellowish grey walls, putting in the usual amenities, and scooping out the attached stone bake-oven to make a little room which holds just one bed and a chair. It isn’t one of the big, fortresslike farms of the region, which are often grouped around a tower. The tower habit must be a carryover from Florence, for the earlier inhabitants of that city always included a tower in their palazzi in which to retire during their constant quarrels. One such farm, half a mile away, is the nearest neighbor, with great, sloping haystacks in a court yard where geese, ducks, and chickens scratch for the wheat that had been threshed earlier. The farmer’s wife provided chickens; the storebought chickens of America had made me forget what free-ranging birds taste like, when dribbled with olive oil, for a crisp skin, and then roasted with little branches of rosemary tucked between their legs and wings. The man who invented factorybred chickens will have to explain his crime to his Maker and take his just punishment.
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