By Samuel Hilt, Welcome to the Renaissance

Tuscany is a place that people fall in love with. You sense right away that there is something here that you’ve been missing in your daily life back home, and you can’t seem to get enough of it. You realize that the vacation will be much too short, and you quickly start scheming about how you are going to get back here again. Soon.  

Some of what is wonderfully distinctive about Tuscany strikes you immediately: the stonework that carries the weight of the past and proclaims its presence; the hillsides like patchwork quilts, elegant weaves of olive grove, vineyard, pasture land, hill town and forest; the painting and statuary of a golden age that still survives in cities, towns, and even tiny villages in greater profusion than you can possibly take in.   

Siena Cathedral

We came for the first time in 1991. Like migratory creatures, we’ve come back every summer through the years since, packing up kids and strollers, laptops and folders. We’ve slowly mastered Italian and established a parallel life in a little village where we live for about three months a year. 

As we’ve gone back and forth between the worlds, other subtler differences have slowly come into focus through the continual play of shifting perspectives. These are things that you don’t notice when you first visit and travel to see the sites.  And they are things that the Italians won’t tell you about because, like the air we breath, they are invisible and taken entirely for granted. 

Foremost among these is the degree to which shared convention binds and shapes people’s lives. Particularly in relation to food, Tuscany still functions very much like a traditional society with vital traditions alongside of strong taboos. Things are done at certain times and in certain ways; no one particularly lauds nor regrets these ground rules, they simply observe them. 

In our part of Italy, near Siena, people have lunch at 1 p.m. and dinner at about 8 p.m. There’s a little leeway with starting lunch a few minutes early or dinner a bit later. But, by and large, everybody from pierced-lip teenagers to tottering elders eats at these times. If you walk through the village at 1:30 on a summer afternoon when the shutters are closed but the windows are open, you hear lively conversation and the scraping of spoons on plates from every kitchen window. At that time, and for the next couple of hours, no one is outside. An elderly women who is hard of hearing has her television set turned up rather loud, but apart from her the streets are empty and silent.   

In the city of Siena, we’ve watched hungry tourists at 7 p.m. trying to find a restaurant that opens before 8. Certain restaurateurs, having sized up the situation correctly, have posted menus which inform their gentle clientele that dinner service begins at 7:30.  Thus they catch the early birds who get to sit and drink water restlessly at their tables until the food begins to arrive – after 8 p.m., of course.   

Further south in Italy people eat even later. But they are no less ritualistic in their observance of proper mealtimes. To most people here, the notion of a restaurant that serves “breakfast all day long” would be stranger than a flying pig. 

In addition to broadly shared mealtimes, convention also embraces the ways in which food is prepared. Unlike French cuisine, with its intricacy and intellectual complexity, Tuscan dishes are based on the use of very few ingredients, simply combined.  What makes the food wonderful is the freshness and quality of the ingredients, their careful balancing of flavors, and the perfect timing with which they are prepared and served. The menus that you see in restaurants throughout Tuscany are virtually interchangeable: mixed crostini, gnocchi with pesto, tortellini in broth, grilled sausage, torta della nonna. People generally patronize a particular locale because they prefer the way they make their favorite, familiar foods. 

The conventionality of cuisine very much resembles the carefully honored conventions in Tuscan religious art. Nearly every Annunciation has an angel on the left and the Madonna on the right, and a barrier separating their two realms which the angel must somehow cross. The artist’s ingenuity, like the chef’s, lies in taking the familiar elements and creating a variation on the theme, one that honors the tradition while bringing a special flavor to it. In the light of this discipline and restraint, one begins to appreciate T.S. Eliot’s description of radical originality as the hallmark of a second-rate mind. 

When we come back to California and go out to eat, we chuckle as we read the menus in our native language where each entree description has at least one or two words that we’ve never seen before.  As the name implies, our own Nouvelle Cuisine caters to our insatiable appetite for novelty.   

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During one of our first seasons in Tuscany, we ate panzanella at a friend’s house and asked how it was made. We were given a careful summary of the basic ingredients and how they should be put together, along with the explanation that this was a traditional peasant dish. With the help of some diced up tomatoes, sauteed onions, and a bit of parsley, dried out bread could be recycled and still provide a tasty meal.   

Shortly afterwards my wife soaked our collection of bread crusts, sauteed some onions and garlic, threw in the other ingredients and made a delicious panzanella. The next day, as we sat in the piazza, she shared the news of her success.  Everyone was interested to hear the details of how she made it.  They followed along blow by blow, nodding and smiling, until she mentioned the garlic.   

“Garlic?” they asked in disbelief. “You put in garlic?”  

“Yes, I did.” she confessed somewhat taken aback. “Is there a problem with putting in garlic?” 

But everyone just laughed and shook their heads.  “You don’t put garlic in a panzanella!”  We tried to explore the whys and wherefores, but it was a fruitless endeavor. They seemed to be vaguely amused about being pressed for an explanation, the way we might feel when our two year old asks why she shouldn’t use her sleeve for a tissue or put her feet up on the table. “It’s just not done.” 

Cappuccino after dinner was another one of the local taboos we violated regularly until a friend quietly took us aside one day. She asked how we could possibly want to have such a heavy milk drink after a big meal. Coming from the land of Starbucks where people order grande vanilla lattes or venti frappuccinos whenever they damn well please, I was a bit incredulous. After that we began to notice that people mainly drank cappuccinos in the morning, and no one, absolutely no one, ever drank them after dinner or late in the day. No one except the foreign tourists.    

You could challenge the logic behind this rejection of cappuccino after dinner by pointing to the rich creamy desserts like tiramisu or panna cotta that Italians certainly do eat after dinner.  But that would be to miss the point. The reason no one drinks cappuccino after dinner is really because “It’s just not done”. 

***** 

When we compare and contrast the cultures, we realize that, as Americans, we very much like to make up the rules as we go. We aspire to define our own style and follow our own inner guidance systems, and we’ve learned to be generally disdainful of social conformity in matters large and small. 

Many of our images of the human collective, particularly out in the West, have been appropriated from herding and ranching practices. The cowboy and his horse are the solitary ones who have the intelligence and the upper hand. The sheep and the cattle huddle close together, look to each other for cues, and wind up in the slaughterhouse. We’ve learned which side to identify with in this contest between the individual and the collective. And since the horse is our ally in this quest, we could never imagine eating horses. “It’s just not done.” Our rituals support individualism and initiative just as other cultural practices strengthen the sense of being an integral part of the collective.   

Instead of seeing them as sheep or cattle, I prefer to imagine the Tuscans as shorebirds. Though they could fly off whenever they choose, they take comfort in one another’s presence. They enjoy being part of one flock, facing the world in a shared stance. After our seasons in Tuscany, when we return to the States, we poignantly feel the ruggedness of our individualism. We’re on our own here, for better and for worse, in ways that are still unknown and unimagined in the villages of Tuscany.