Under the Tuscan Sun 20th-Anniversary Edition

I am about to buy a house in a foreign country. A house with the beautiful name of Bramasole. It is tall and square and apricot-colored, rising above a white pebble road on a terraced slab of hillside. *Bramasole*: from *bramare*, to yearn for, and *sole*, sun. Something that yearns for the sun. And yes, I do. The decision feels close to falling in love, which is never whimsical but comes from some deep source. Yet, as I sit in the *notaio's* office, the legalities crash down like rocks. The owner wants us to pass him checks under the table. The dollar is falling. I can't sleep. I am seven thousand miles from home, plunking down my life savings on a whim. Is it a whim? Across the hotel courtyard, a man chants his prayers toward dawn. I jam my toe on the iron bed frame and want to go home. But my partner, Ed, has never wavered. “I was just dreaming of cutting herbs in the garden,” he says, smiling. When we finally walk out of the brutal afternoon heat, we hold nothing but two heavy iron keys longer than my hand. They look nothing like the keys to anything I've ever owned.

We arrive at the house to find it scrubbed clean, a bed delivered to the second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace. The room, with its whitewashed walls and newly waxed floors, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell. In the quiet twilight, we sit on the stone wall and toast each other with tumblers of spicy prosecco. A barn owl flies over so close we hear the whir of its wings. But the house and land are a wild inheritance. Scorpions scurry in the bidet. Spiders build ecosystems in the abandoned stalls. The grounds are an enchanted jungle, overgrown with ivy and thorns. And then the water stops. The well, which the owner swore was fed by the entire Medici water system, is a measly twenty meters deep and almost dry. We are in the third year of a drought. *Poca acqua*, little water. It is a shock, but it is also a beginning. We have a new well drilled, three hundred feet deep, and over the winter, the old one miraculously fills. As we begin to hack away the ivy, we uncover the secrets of the land: stone chutes for channeling rain, a massive carved stone sink buried in the dirt, and finally, a lost natural spring hidden under a stone lid, the clear water striking a wide cleft of white rock.

The restoration begins. We hire Primo Bianchi, a stout man in overalls who looks like one of Santa's workers and who, years ago, helped haul lemon pots into the *limonaia* for the winter. He knows the house. But the work ahead is a monster. A hundred-and-twenty-foot stone wall has tumbled down and must be rebuilt with reinforced concrete. For this, we hire another contractor, who brings three big Polish men who lift hundred-pound stones like watermelons. They speak almost no Italian, but we find a way to communicate through the name of the poet Czeslaw Milosz. They sing as they heave stone, and their voices begin to sound like the way the work of the world should sound. They are meticulous, pointing out the shoddy work of their boss. When the wall is finished, they show us where they have written *POLONIA* in the wet concrete of the foundation.

Inside the house, the work is just as daunting. We are seven thousand miles away when the canals for heating pipes are cut into the walls, leaving jagged wounds and piles of rubble on the floors. A workman scrawls a phone number in felt-tip pen across a newly uncovered fresco in the dining room. When a large boulder is pulled from a wall to create a new doorway, the whole house creaks and the workers run out, fearing a collapse. But slowly, through our own seven-day work weeks of scraping, sanding, and painting, the house begins to breathe again. We scrub away a hideous vinegar varnish to reveal rich chestnut beams. We decalcify the brick floors, then seal them with linseed oil and wax them on our knees until they glow. Each room, as it is finished, pops into place. The empty white spaces, once home to oxen and chickens, become a kitchen, a living room, a study. The house, scrubbed and spacious, feels pure. I sleep like one newly dead and dream of swimming in a clear green river. On the first night, I dreamed the house's secret name was not Bramasole but *Cento Angeli*, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one.

The house is only two kilometers from town, but it feels like a deep country place. I walk in each morning, memorizing Italian verbs, and watch Cortona come alive. The shopkeeper sweeps the street with a twig broom; the barber lights his first smoke, a tabby sleeping on his lap. At the *frutta e verdura*, Maria Rita greets me with a cascade of laughter. “*Guardi, signora*,” she says, holding up a misshapen carrot or a basket of luscious tomatoes. She knows what bread we like, that we want the *bufala* mozzarella, not the *normale*. In the post office, our letters are hand-canceled with vengeance, whack, whack. We are no longer just the *stranieri*, the foreigners. We are becoming neighbors. We have found a community where people leave keys in their locks and take three hours for siesta, a time to give in to your own interests and desires.

The land awakens, too. The five pine trees lining the driveway drop their cones, and I discover they are full of *pinoli*, pine nuts. I have been stepping on them. The abandoned orchard begins to reveal itself: three kinds of plums, figs, apples, apricots, and pears. Gnarly almond trees and a shady hazelnut droop with their crops. Neglected grapevines, once we clear the brush, show tiny bunches forming. The whole place used to be a vineyard. And the olive trees, one hundred and seventeen of them, some ancient and twisted, some just young shoots, wait to be revived. This wild orchard becomes the heart of my summer kitchen. With such superb ingredients, everything seems easy. Three ingredients are enough for something splendid: spaghetti with diced *pancetta*, cream, and chopped wild arugula; thick tomato slices with basil and mozzarella. The long table under the linden trees fills with friends. We linger for hours, drinking wine as the sun gives way to a sky full of stars, feeling ourselves part of the great collective unconscious, doing what everyone else in Italy is doing.

The sun here is a religious conviction. *Solleone*, the big sun of August, fills the sky. The cicadas provide the soundtrack, a high screech that sounds like someone shaking tambourines made of the small bones of the ear. The heat is invasive, but inside the thick stone walls, the shuttered rooms are cool and silent. I walk barefoot on the soothing *cotto* floors, from my study to the kitchen, feeling the house settle around me. At night, the Perseid meteor shower streaks across the sky - San Lorenzo's night of shooting stars. The days are long, but the summer is short. The first cherries ripen, then peaches, then plums and pears. At the end of August, the blackberries are ready, and I pick them in the morning, my fingers stained rosy. The taste of the sun-warmed berries is the taste of summer itself.

In December, we return for the olive harvest. The air is frosty and clear, and the valley below us surges with fog as thick as mascarpone. We strip the plump, shiny black drupes from the branches, our fingers growing stiff in the cold. At the mill, our olives are weighed, washed, and crushed by three great stone wheels. The oil that emerges is green, cloudy, and profoundly fresh, with a peppery taste of watercress. Our oil! I have never tasted better. We pour it into a bowl and dip in pieces of bread, as people all over Tuscany must be doing.

The seasons turn. The house and I have changed each other. I arrived with the urge to examine my life in another culture, to move beyond what I knew. Here, I have found a place where the landscape and the light give everything a primary outline, where even a red towel on a line becomes saturated with its own redness. I have learned to make haste slowly, to find pleasure in the rhythm of the days. The choice of a place is the choice of something you crave, and I was drawn to the surface of Italy - the food, the language, the art. But the connection that has taken root is deeper, an umbilical cord to something primal and familiar. The house protects the dreamer, and here, I am restored to the basic pleasure of connection to the outdoors, to the seasons, to time itself.

One morning, the phone rings. A lawyer from Baltimore has read something I wrote. She is thinking of buying a cottage on an island, but her friends think she's crazy. “What's the downside?” she asks. I look out at the cypress trees, the olive groves, the distant blue daub of Lake Trasimeno. I think of the waterfall of problems, the financial worries, the sheer labor. And I think of the absolute joy. “There's no downside,” I say. The half-moon is rising above the Medici fortress. I see the bench Ed made for me under an oak tree, a place to sit when the gilded light sifts over the valley. The desire to surprise your own life is a powerful one. Here, under the Tuscan sun, I have found a place in it.