In the far-off days when my four children were grown but hadn't yet acquired families of their own, we'd rent or borrow a Christmas house in Provence or Catalunya - and, one memorable year just before the turn of the century, we borrowed a village house in an unfashionable corner of Tuscany's northern mountains. The owners, New Englanders, never visited in winter, making central heating or working fireplaces unnecessary. So I packed the car with blankets, hot-water bottles, fisherman's socks and thick woolly jumpers. For the rest, as was our custom, we'd go native.
Our destination, the village of Sommocolonia high in the Garfagnana, a steep Alpine valley bordered by chestnut woods, that climbs to the quarries of Carrera, where Michelangelo chose the marble for his statue of David, and - more recently - quarries marble bathtubs for Russian oligarchs. Along the road, the only sign of human presence is miniature Christmas cribs in little grottoes set up at intervals, each with its twinkling lantern. In the village at sunset, we arrive just in time for the twice-weekly mobile shop that does the rounds of the little villages. We stock up gratefully on wood-oven bread, new season's olive oil, local prosciutto (chestnuts mean pigs), and the sharp red wine of the valley's vineyards.
Few of the houses are occupied in winter - the working population is elsewhere - and those that are signal their presence with a decorated Christmas tree just outside the door. Meanwhile the keeper of the keys to all foreign-owned properties, nonna Maria (grandmother being an honorary title) has already been alerted to our arrival via the mysterious grapevine that exists in all village communities. The house on the corner of the main square, stonebuilt and wooden-shuttered, looks forbidding and unlit. Nonna Maria's key-keeping clearly doesn't include housekeeping. "Ecco," she announces - a phrase that roughly translates as "here you go" but carries undertones of a wish to leave the crazy foreigners to their own devices.
We settle in as best we can. There are just three days left to fill the larder before everything closes for the twelve-day holiday. Everywhere in Italy shuts down from Christmas to Epiphany, which is when all good children in the Garfagana (and elsewhere, if things remain as they were) receive their presents from La Befana, the Epiphany witch, who rides around on her broomstick on the Eve, rewarding the good and scaring the daylights out of the bad.
Next day, the rest of the family (and friends) arrive, duvets are distributed, candles lit, wine uncorked and a log-fed heating-stove is belching hot air laced with soot into the hallway and up through an open smoke-hole in the roof. There are now ten of us in the house, and we have just two days left to fill the larder before the holidays. Nonna Maria - warming a little to the presence of young folk in the household - stops by to give us warning of tomorrow's market in Castelnuovo, an hour up the valley towards Carrera where we'll be able to purchase everything necesssary for La Vigilia, the fasting supper of the Eve. Meanwhile the young folk might like to admire the Presepio, miniature nativity scene, that’s just been put in place in the church.
We may not know it as strangers to the region, continues nonna Maria, but Christmas is not as important as Easter. Even so everyone, including the communists of which there are many in the mountains, respects the traditions of La Vigilia by eating bitter cardoons and baccala, salt-fish that everyone is obliged to eat on fast-days, and attending Mass in the church at midnight. Communist views are common in the Garfagna, where people didn't appreciate being told what to do by Mussolini or Hitler or the capitalists in Rome or anyone else who holds opposing views on paying taxes and decides who may or may not run their foraging pigs in the chestnut forest.
We're on the road early next morning. By ten o'clock, the market at Castelnuovo is bustling. Much of the produce is clearly local - roots, unblanched celery and fennel, brassicas of all shapes and sizes, cabbage, shiny wet walnuts still in their green casings, hazelnuts ready-roasted in their shells, bundles of mountain herbs. Imported luxuries such as Hawaiian pineapples, Sicilian tomatoes, oranges from Morocco, boxes of dried figs from Turkey are on sale alongside crates of kite-shaped salt-cod, baccala - best bought ready-soaked, advises the seller, if needed in for La Vigilia.
In the mountains of the Garfagana above the olive-tree line, farming households traditionally kept a milk-cow and made their own butter and cheese - some still do, as evidenced by the queue for thick slabs of creamy white butter cut from the block. Wood-oven bread, available in two-kilo loaves, is round and deep-crusted and salt-free, as is usual in Tuscany, so that the crumb dries out without going mouldy. Which accounts for the importance of leftover bread-dishes such as ribollita, a soup-stew made with the broth from the boiling pot (beef-rib and flank, advises the butcher).
But the star of the show, big white bundles of what looks like furry-leaved celery tied up with string, is selling like hot cakes. Cardoons are among the most challenging of vegetables. To prepare, advises the queue, trim, scrape, chop and cook in water for a very long time till soft, then sauce with a béchamel, no cheese. And over there, the giant dandelion leaves labelled cicoria, are also eaten as a bitter penance on fast-days, but are advisable for digestive reasons if stirred into a bean-pot when expecting company. Tuscans are known (not in a good way) by sophisticated Milanese and Venetian rice-eaters as mangia-fagioli, bean-eaters.
On our return, nonna Maria, curious to know how her visitors have provisioned themselves for La Vigilia, rejects the Sicilian tomatoes as unsuitable for a meatfree fast-day (too red), approves the cardoons (with the proviso that the leafy heart must be nicked out and all the spiky little leaves removed), and inspects our ready-soaked baccala without enthusiasm. For herself, la nonna prefers smoked salmon imported from Scotland - why wouldn't you when you can?
For the rest of the story and what happens up the Garfagnana on Christmas Day - well - you'll just have to join my merry gang of paid subscribers....
Beautifully written, Elisabath. I've just discovered from reading F. Marian Mcneill that the in Scotland, the period from Nativity to Epiphany was called the Daft days
Just love your illustrations!