The Olimpia Quartet – Uno

Get out your passports and fasten your seat belts, my friends.  Today we are in viaggio to  Italy.  And patienza– patience- will be required as this journey is going to last four posts.  (Did you think you could cross the Atlantic in one?)  But don’t worry.  I’ll do two, then change topics, and then post two more.  I hope you’ll hang in there with me.  I think you’ll find it a trip worth making.  Buon Viaggio!

I learned to cook and eat and live in Florence, Italy.  I was twenty-five years old, separated from my second husband and I had been cooking and eating and living for years.  Or so I thought.

In re the second husband separation scenario:  I came home from Goucher College one December afternoon to find that he had taken all my jewelry, sold my car and had scarpered to parts unknown.  When the shock wore off I moved back to Chicago.

It hadn’t taken long to pack because he had already cleaned out our bank accounts and stolen everything portable- including my dogs, my late grandfather’s watch (the only heirloom he had left my father- who, in turn, had entrusted it to me) frozen food and the pills from the medicine chest.  The house looked like it had been hit by a tornado.  Everything inside of it was destroyed- even the mattresses had been slashed.  He had even taken my typewriter.

On Christmas day the Baltimore police called to tell me that my husband had been shot.

(I found out later that he had gotten himself in serious financial trouble and he had arranged the robbery for the insurance money.  The undesirables he had hired later voted against giving him his share.  So they shot him in the back.

And I found out much later that some of the proceeds were also designated to go to a mistress of longstanding.  Whom he actually “married” in a lavish-though-not-quite-legal ceremony in this very house while I was in Italy.  I discovered this dual betrayal when I accidentally stumbled upon a diary, guest list, and telegrams wishing the groom (him), and the bride (not me) a wonderful wedding and a happy life together.  But these awful revelations were still in the future.  As of Christmas 1974 all I knew is that I was homeless, broke, and destined for singlehood again.)

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” the policemen told me. “He survived.”

“Too bad.  Now I’m actually going to have to spend money to divorce the son of a bitch.”

But not yet.  All I wanted to do was get out of Dodge and luckily I had a girlfriend in that most glorious of getaway spots, Florence.  Barbara lived there with her boyfriend, a famous painter, and she had invited me over many times.  But I had always been too busy or too married to go.  Now I was neither.  So I called her.

“I’m getting a divorce but I’m not depressed,” I assured her in the understatement of the year.  “Can I come visit?”

Barbara’s answer was si and my parents bought me a forty-five day ticket.  Armed with a big suitcase and a little dictionary to augment my high school and college Italian, I flew to Milan.  No sooner had I landed, the entire country shut down.  No planes, buses, trains, porters, cabs, niente.

All my puzzled- and then frantic- questions were answered in one word- “sciopero.”  And that word wasn’t in my little dictionary.  But finally, through pantomime, I got it.  “Sciopero” means “strike,” and no one knew how long it would last.  I hitched a ride to Bologna and sat on my big suitcase for six hours waiting for the trains to start running again.  And finalmente, twenty-six hours after I left Chicago, I staggered up the stairs into Barbara’s apartment located in a medieval tower on the Borgo San Jacopo.

I was ravenous and dead tired.  Alvaro, her boyfriend, fed me some dinner.  (Even in my daze I registered how incredible the food tasted.)  Then I reeled over to the couch in their living room and passed out.  I woke up the next morning and stepped outside.  And a miracle happened.

As I gazed around at my surroundings (I hadn’t seen anything of the city because of my nighttime arrival) I was thunderstruck, not only by its legendary beauty, but by the unshakeable feeling that I had been there before.  This was an absolute certainty that I had just come home.  A torrent of emotion came rushing at me.  In that first moment I knew and understood the city, the people, the culture, far better than I ever had in the entire four years that I had lived in Baltimore.  I can’t explain it.  I just knew I was a long-lost fiorentina.

Still Barbara had to put me wise to life Florentine-style.

The Florentines, fanatically and justifiably proud of their jewel, took enormous interest in painting, eating, and living with elegance.  Firenze was, after all, the home of Leonardo Da Vinci, Dante, the Medici, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Bruneleschi.  This was town that invented the Renaissance.  They have high standards.

I was going to have to be brought up to speed in order to make “la bella figura,” that very Italian concept of presenting a pleasing, and well-behaved image to the Tuscan world. Barbara was not going to let me be maleducata- badly brought up.  (Newbies: Just read my September 16 post “Keeping up with the Kardashians” if you want to see the true meaning of the word “maleducata.”)

I thought I knew the language.  Wrong.  Florence has its own dialect.  Because they revere everything beautiful, they have taken the pure Tuscan that they speak and refined it.  They don’t like the sound that the hard C makes.  It’s brutto, ugly to the ear.  So they’ve abolished it and changed all words that start with hard C to an H.

Barbara had neglected to mention this linguistic quirk my first few days.  I had no idea that harne, hasa, and hosa used to be carne, casa, or cosa.  Life and dialogue became much clearer once I understood this rule.  And in this same spirit of beautification, my new Florentine friends changed my name. They found “Ellen” ugly and hard to pronounce.  And they didn’t think it suited me.  I was rechristened “Olimpia” and I loved it.  It was bellina.*

(*Because Florence is a small city, small is considered bellina – beautiful.  In the rest of Italy, bellisisma might be the right word, but Florentines put the diminutive “ino,” “ina,”or “ini”  on their words to make them even more little and precious- just like Florence.)

I thought I knew how to dress myself.  Wrong again.  Florentines are insanely fashion forward.  Men and women alike cared deeply about the fit of their clothes, the dash of a scarf, the elegance of their jewelry, and, of course, in this leather-mad town, their shoes.  My own shoes were hopelessly gruli– grotesque.  The shoe styles in Florentine shops didn’t even make it to the States until three years after I first saw them there.

And can we talk trucca– makeup?  They loved it.  The more the sexier.  My whole look needed overhauling.  I learned to try on jeans by lying on the dressing room floor while two attendants zipped me in and then propped me into a standing position.  Ecco! A perfect fit.  (A look, when combined with the new makeup, that would have gotten me arrested for solicitation in America.)

Barbara also gave me a crash course in cooking.  She shopped every day for fresh ingredients- a concept then unknown to me.  I watched in amazement as she whipped up a sauce prezzemolo, only parsley, olive oil and garlic, for the pasta.  Not a tomato in sight.  And she told me that in Florence, unlike in Roma, small portions of pasta were the correct thing.  And of course, only as a primo.  In 1975 I had never heard of pasta as a first course.

She taught me never to clink my glass in a toast.  Only the comunisti clinked.  Or the other way around.  Now I’m not sure anymore.  And she told me never, ever to put freshly-grated cheese on any pasta dish that contained mushrooms.  The Florentines were convinced that this combination was poisonous and bad for your liver.  She introduced me to my first fettunta.  That’s a piece of bread toasted in the fireplace, rubbed with a clove of garlic and drizzled with a touch of olive oil.

And she forever changed my thinking about olive oil.  Heretofore it was an alien, greasy substance. Okay, maybe I’d use a little in a Good Seasons salad dressing mix.  But Barbara put a few drops of oil in her hands, rubbed them gently to release the perfume, and instantly I became converted to the religion of “good oil.”  She also introduced me to blood oranges, mortadella, linguini, and porcini.

And Paolo.

To be continued.  See you Thursday.  Ciao!