Tag: limoni

Waxy skin wins it. A bowl of lemons recalls a perfect still life by a Dutch master. Years ago, when blue and white crockery bowls perched on the counter in the kitchen of my Seattle rental house, I bought bags of lemons at the grocery and dumped them into a bowl where they propelled me through dark winter days like a dozen yellow suns. Lemons as a bouquet, and cheaper too. I had no money then. Lemons cheaper than flowers.

When I lived in Spain, all winter and spring I ordered manzanillo dozens of times before I realized it was chamomile tea. O the joys of unknown terms for the familiar! In every bar in the old town of Santiago they served manzanillo in the same thick crockery, the tag fluttering lazily outward, a thin slice of lemon clinging to the saucer’s rim. How the Spanish love tea with lemon! To brighten it up, my English friends said, even though every English friend I ever had took their builder’s tea with a generous splash of whole milk and a spoonful of sugar. I squeezed my lemon dutifully into the cup of manzanillo and sipped it on those endless gray days when the woolen clouds hugged the over-the-top Baroque steeples of the cathedral. After I discovered that manzanillo was chamomile, I liked it less. Now I can’t stand the dusty gutterings. Even a fresh lemon slice fails to sufficiently brighten the scent of Miss Havisham’s moldering attic.

I was further confused because manzanilla is also a fortified wine stored in a wooden cask in the basement bar that I frequented with that rogue Coco. My general confusion may have been due to Coco’s overwhelming emotional company. The dry white manzanilla is a kind of sherry, a dry white wine made from palomino grapes, aged under a layer of yeast called veil de flor. I was certain that there was to be no wedding for me and that smiling sailor, a captain’s son.

Lemon lovers, head to Sorrento! They fetishize the fruit there beyond all reason. Lemons on tea towels, ceramic spoon holders, festooning plates and garlanding trivets and wreaths, tall narrow bottles of limoncello creating a miniature cityscape in every tourist shop and trap. Ceramic lemons, wooden lemons, lemon lemons. They roll through the town squares, collect under benches, hang like Christmas ornaments from ubiquitous, richly-leaved trees. The town lives for lemons with nary a pucker.

Did a misstep with limoncello as a student put you off it? Try the limoncello of Sorrento, served in a diminutive frosted glass, the bottle crusted with ice from the freezer. Tip the elixir into your modest cup. Don’t be offended by the small portion. The punch more than makes up for the size: astringent, sunny, positively Mediterranean. Your jaw tenses, expecting to hit a seed or two. But no. It’s solar energy and citrus goodness, summer and heat captured and chilled, warming your innards with its seaside imprint. The bottle, now slowly defrosting, has been generously left on your table, should you wish to have another, or another. One wonders if Cicero kept limoncello to his recipe on his southern estate, deep in an ice grotto of his own design. One hopes so.

 
Le clementine

The clementines begin to arrive from Sicily toward the end of November, perfectly packed into crates facing out from trucks framed by steel bars at the sides. Clementines have been sold this way on the roadside in Italy for centuries.

Smaller than navel oranges, ovoid in shape, with dark green leaves left attached by the stem to vouch for their recent plucking. Sunshine in the palm, a burst of fresh to slice through the socked-in valley of the Arno that stays stubbornly gray all winter long. The days of endless Tuscan sun are promptly followed by soaked gray days of dark.

I tuck a clementina into my bag before leaving the house each morning, anticipating with pleasure my modest midday snack. To peel and divide a clementine in winter is to undertake a citrus dissection, biting the crescent in half, the cool liquid filling your mouth, mopping it clean with astringent and cloying pulp.

Taste the southern rays, close your eyes and smell the dust of Agrigento’s temples, the salt air blowing north from the African coast to a shore known down the course of history. The tiny beads of the orange burst between your teeth, reminding you there is hope even in the darkest days, that summer appears in winter in this spritely form, rolling and cheery, game and full of laughter.

 
Il tuono, or, Under the Tuscan Thunder

Rain pours down tipped from barrels. Cold and driving. Thunder shakes the window panes. Tuscans never tell tourists that the flip side of summer Tuscan sun is winter Tuscan thunder. If they said so, tourists would just laugh.

But believe me: it rains, and rains, and rains.

The Arno valley stays socked in, muffled with grey clouds and fog and mist and a cloud ceiling at eight hundred feet above the ground. Days you know the sun would be shining above those clouds if you were on an airplane, which you haven’t been for over a year. You remember the ascent, the dinging bells, the recorded voice of the flight attendant, the shifting and creaking of contents in the overhead cabins. You imagine those minutes that you must have experienced at least two hundred, three hundred, even more times in your life. The activities that put you in a privileged echelon, and yet they kept coming, kept happening, kept presenting themselves, carbon footprint and contrails be damned. Pack, fly, land. Pack, fly, land. Over and over, in every decade. Frequent flyer miles and an encyclopedic knowledge of airline hubs and routes. Long international holidays purchased with miles. Calendar time marked by your last voyage. And for what? What was there, what were you chasing, in those distant, unknown destinations?

In Florence, the city is winter sparsely populated with day trippers and angry short-timers, the flagrant displays of overt culture shock. A round-faced Englishman complaining in the farmacia for having been charged eighteen euros for a cappuccino in centro. Can you believe it? he hollered, flushing. The pharmacist clucking and shrugging in her white coat, her eyeliner immaculate. Sì, signore, she could believe it.

Trudging platoons of daytripping cruise passengers just in from Livorno plug into their headphones with the live feed, the guide in front speaking amusing English. Hoards of tourist zombies who spent little and noticed even less. Who can blame the guide? Those jobs are so secure, so well-paid, so coveted that the Italians who secure one were guaranteed stability and a handsome stipendio.

The drunk/hungover/both backpackers, sunburned in Piazza della Repubblica, on Calimala and Calzaiuoli, checking their cells for Tinder pings or waiting for a drop. One day a blonde young woman, tinged pink and incoherent, slouched against a building, her right breast slipped out of her spaghetti-strap sundress, a nipple’s petal exposed while a crowd gathered to leer at her and offer false help.

The street drummer who thumped his collection of empty plastic drums, the bluegrass band in their fetching seersucker suits, the young man in the straw boater playing his homemade bass, the melodramatic violinist clad in green velvet who seemed in daily danger of poking out a tourist eye while sawing a too-vigorous bow.

You hunker down in Tuscany again for winter, the cold season of time at home, the towns once thronged with tourists now mostly emptied out.

I’ll tell you a secret about what happens after those torrents fall in sheets from the sky. If you’re lucky, when the clouds break and the blue sky reappears, the concave flagstones hold puddles like tide pools minus the marine life, silvered, mercurial, shimmering and glittering in the oblique light.

Cast your gaze downward for the greatest magic. Rippling reflections mirror the views above, and the Duomo, the Battistero, the onion lanterns of the Palazzo Strozzi and the fortress of the Palazzo Pitti and a hundred other landmarks flit through the lenses of a collective urban dream. Photographers gather to find the best one, the image of the image, peering through long lenses or phones.

Whimsical images more fleeting: a child crying and holding a huge red balloon; the still gilded carousel holding court in the center of Piazza della Repubblica. Eventually, after a half day or more, the puddles grudgingly surrender to the humid air. The stone buildings seem now less than the conjured dreams floating in a million glittering mirrors scattered silently throughout every piazza in Florence.