where fish wear crowns 257blown glass ashtray on the dresser. We were going out for the whole day
so I left a note to housekeeping, whom I feared would throw them away. I
gave it my best, something like: “Please not to disturb the seminary im-
portants, Thanking You!”
But most of our days were spent in bucolic places where we and our
seeds could all bask in the Tuscan sunshine, surrounded by views too
charming to be believed. The landscape of rural central Italy is nothing
like the celebrated tourist sights of North America: neither the uninhab-
ited wildness of the Grand Tetons, nor the constructed grandeur of the
Manhattan skyline. Tuscany is just farms, like my home county. Its beauty
is a harmonious blend of the natural and the domestic: rolling hills quilted
with yellowy- green vineyard rows running along one contour, silvery-
green circles of olive trees dotting another. The fields of alfalfa, sunfl ow-
ers, and vegetables form a patchwork of shapes in shades of yellow and
green, all set at different angles, with dark triangles of fencerows and
woodlots between them.
The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and cha-
otic. It’s the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the
picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic
one. Couldn’t Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our
cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead
of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love ag-
riculture on postcards?
Tuscans and Umbrians have had a lot more time than we have, of
course, to recognize the end of the frontier when they see it, and make
peace with their place. They were living on and eating from this carefully
honed human landscape more than a thousand years before the Pilgrims
learned to bury a fish head under each corn plant in the New World. They
have chosen to retain in their food one central compelling value: that it’s
fresh from the ground beneath the diners’ feet. The simple pastas still
taste of sunshine and grain; the tomatoes dressed with fruity olive oil cap-
ture the sugars and heat of late summer; the leaf lettuce and red chicory
have the specific mineral tang of their soil; the black kale soup tastes of a
humus-rich garden.