Our Days in Tuscany

by Joseph Harris

We came to Siena from the south, which is the wrong direction if you want an easy introduction to the city. Siena doesn't have a simple entry point. The ancient center was built for foot traffic and horses, not automobiles, and the Sienese have made no particular accommodation for the modern error of arriving by car. There are narrow one-way streets that go nowhere useful, surveillance cameras that record your mistakes, and a general architectural consensus that if you drove in here, that is your problem. I drove in. It was my problem. I got a ticket from a camera I never saw, paid it without much argument, and considered it a fair price for the education.

What Siena offered in exchange was worth it. The Piazza del Campo alone — the great shell-shaped medieval square where they run the Palio twice a year — is one of those places that stops conversation. Not because it's beautiful in a museum sense, but because it is alive and has been alive for seven hundred years, and you can feel the weight of that. The shops around the perimeter sell panforte, the dense spiced confection of the region, and each shop makes its own version, and each version is slightly different, and all of them are good. We ate panforte standing in the street the way it was meant to be eaten.

We also found, tucked into one of those narrow streets off the main square, a market that stopped us both. It was larger than our Mercato — more space, more inventory — but the logic was identical: quality ingredients, local sourcing, a commitment to letting the product speak rather than the packaging. Standing in that shop in Siena, looking at what they had built, we felt something that is hard to name. Confirmation, maybe. The idea that what we are doing on North Franklin Street in Fort Bragg, California is part of a legitimate tradition. That it has antecedents. That we are not making it up.

We got back in the car and headed north toward Florence.

Halfway between Siena and Florence, near Montalcino — where Brunello comes from, where some of the finest wine on the peninsula has been made for centuries — the landscape does something to you. The hills roll in long, gentle curves. Older villas sit exactly where they have always sat, surrounded by vineyards and cypress rows standing at attention against the skyline. From the autostrada, looking west in the late afternoon light, it looks precisely like the posters. Not in a disappointing way — in the way that means the posters were telling the truth. This is what people picture when they think of Italy, and they are picturing a very specific place, and we were in it, and it was as advertised.

Florence came at the end of a long trip — we had moved through Emilia- Romagna, Venice, Umbria before curving back north through Tuscany — and by the time we arrived we had the particular clarity that comes from weeks of sustained immersion. Art history that you studied in college stops being academic in Florence. The Duomo is not a slide in a lecture. Michelangelo's David is not a reproduction. Botticelli is not a name on a textbook. You walk through the Accademia and the Uffizi and suddenly the Renaissance is a fact of geography, something that happened in specific rooms in this specific city, and the Medicis who funded it lived across the river in the Pitti Palace — which the English ear hears a certain way, and the joke writes itself — and the whole machinery of Western art culture becomes local and particular and real.

We had dinner one evening at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio in the window and the river going gold in the last light. I ordered the eggplant parmigiana. It arrived in a different presentation than ours — more architectural, more deliberate — but when I tasted it, the flavors were identical. The same logic, the same balance, the same fundamental understanding of what that dish is supposed to do. I didn't know whether to feel proud or humbled, so I felt both. A young German couple at the table next to us struck up a conversation, the way people do in good restaurants when the food puts everyone in a generous mood, and we talked for a while about nothing in particular and everything that mattered.

The food of Tuscany is, at its foundation, the food of people who didn't have much. The famous bistecca alla fiorentina — thick-cut Chianina beef, aged properly, cooked over wood coals — is the exception, the celebration food, the food of the prosperous few. The actual cuisine of the region is built on bread. Tuscan bread is made without salt, which strikes Americans as an error until you understand that it isn't. The saltless loaf is designed to go stale gracefully, to absorb rather than compete, to become the base of something rather than the point of something. Pappa al pomodoro is that bread dissolved into summer tomatoes. Ribollita is that bread giving body to a bean and vegetable soup that gets better every time you reheat it. The pappardelle on tonight's menu carries that same regional logic into pasta: wide ribbons that hold weight, earthy mushroom ragù that took all day to become what it is, a dish that tastes like it was made by people who knew how to make something from something else.

The Peposo Notturno is the oldest story on the table tonight. Legend holds it was the food of the furnace workers who built Brunelleschi's dome — the men who fired the kilns that made the brick that built the structure that still defines the Florence skyline. They would set their pots at the edge of the furnace before dawn and eat what was ready when the work day ended. Beef chuck, black pepper, Chianti. Nothing else that matters. It is a night stew in the most literal sense, and it has been night stew for six hundred years, and it is still the best argument Tuscany makes for the permanence of the peasant kitchen.

We are in Fort Bragg. We are nowhere near the Arno. But the logic is the same, the wine is from the same soil, and the bread — had it been on the table — would have been made without salt.

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