Umbria: The Green Heart of Italy

by Joseph Harris

They call Umbria the green heart of Italy. It is the only region without a coastline, without a border with another country. It has been turned inward for a very long time — on itself, on its hills, on its olives and lentils and truffles and the particular quality of its light. What that produces, after centuries of looking inward, is a people who are completely themselves. Not performing for anyone. Not adjusted for export. Just entirely, quietly, powerfully who they are.

I didn't understand this before we went. I understood it completely by the time we left.

The trip actually started in Emilia-Romagna, at Cibus, the big food show in Parma. When you attend as a buyer, you sign up in advance for appointments. We were looking for small, independent, unusual producers. People whose work would justify a conversation, whose things you could not find anywhere else on the Mendocino Coast. I had chosen a booth in the catalog called Frantoio Bartolomei. An olive oil producer from Montecchio, a stone village twenty kilometers from Orvieto. They had been pressing oil from those hills since 1890. Four generations of the same family, the same groves, the same belief that what comes out of that particular soil and that particular microclimate is something the world should know about.

When we found their booth, it was immediately clear this was their first time at the show. Cibus is a serious operation, even the small family producers tend to arrive with polished displays, professional signage, the full presentation. The Bartolomei booth was two tables and some cardboard cutouts, tucked a little out of the way between all the action. The mother and her niece were there, watching over it with the particular alertness of people who are not entirely sure what is supposed to happen next.

We walked in enthusiastically, and I think that surprised them. We tasted everything. We asked real questions, about the olive varieties, the harvest timing, the difference between their DOP Colli Orvietani blend and the single-varietal Moraiolo. They lit up. Not the way people light up when a sale is coming. The way people light up when someone finally wants to talk about the thing they love most.

Within twenty minutes I wanted to adopt them, and I am fairly certain they wanted to adopt us.

That is the only way I know how to describe it. We talked about family. I talked about our farm and growing grapes on the Mendocino Coast. They talked about their grove, the trees their great-grandparents had planted, the harvest that happens in late fall when the whole family comes back, the oil that comes off the press in those first hours. That particular oil, they told us, lasts only hours before it settles into itself. Green, peppery, almost electric, you can only taste it if you are there, at the press, when it happens. They invited us to come.

What I didn't fully understand at the time was that they run a small bed and breakfast on the property, and they were inviting us the way you invite paying guests. They just never quite said that part. I took it as pure hospitality. Which it also was. Both things were true at once, the genuine warmth and the practical reality, and neither one canceled the other out.

Later, when I understood what had happened, I thought: this is exactly Umbria. The warmth is real. The farm is real. The transaction is real. And all of it coexists without contradiction because these are people who are completely themselves.

We found the same thing everywhere we went.

In Deruta, the pottery town, the shops around the little square are run by the mothers and their daughters, the daughters who are on their way to high school, who have been learning this their whole lives, the way their mothers learned it from their mothers. They don't think of themselves as remarkable. They think the pottery is remarkable. And they are right. The hand-painted volcano tabletops at the little cafes are not there to impress anyone. They are just where you put your coffee.

We went to Gubbio looking for a potter whose work we had sold for years, teapots with the most extraordinary blue glaze I have ever seen, covered in sunflowers, four hundred dollars each because there was no other price that made sense for them. He had died. We were hoping to find that his style was representative of Gubbio, that we could find something like what he had made. We couldn't. His work was his alone.

We wandered the first day feeling the loss of it, enjoying the town the way you enjoy a medieval place that has been quietly existing for eight hundred years and does not particularly need your admiration. Then on the main street we came to a shop that was different from all the others. Every other door was open, every other window a display. This one was closed. The glass was thick with dust. We cleared a small circle with our hands and looked in.

His entire inventory was still there. Teapots. Floor vases. Every form we had ever carried and many more, sitting in the dark exactly as he had left them. There are moments in life that can only be described as magic, not magical, a word that softens things into metaphor, but magic, the real thing, the sensation that you have walked through a door in time and found something that was waiting specifically for you. This was one of those moments.

The inheritance had stalled, the way inheritances do in Italy when things are complicated and the family is scattered. His son was living in Mexico. He wanted a cash sale, in Italy, which creates a specific kind of legal problem. Italy has invoicing requirements designed precisely to prevent cash export of goods like these. We tried to find a way to make it work. We couldn't. We left without the pottery. I am not entirely over it.

After Gubbio we drove to Assisi, because Kathleen's father was named Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, and it seemed wrong to be this close and not go. I will not pretend I went without skepticism. Assisi is one of the most photographed towns in Italy. I have seen the pictures a hundred times. Places that live in photographs the way Assisi does have a way of disappointing you in person, the image has done too much work, set expectations no physical place can meet. Assisi met them. Assisi exceeded them.

You go into Assisi one way and you walk out another person. I don't know how else to say it. The town itself, the pink and white stone, the Basilica, the light, is extraordinary. But it is the quality of the people in it that does something to you. The same humility that runs through all of Umbria is concentrated in Assisi into something that feels almost like a force. You feel it in the shops, in the restaurants, in the way people on the street respond to you. Something in that place opens something in you. We stayed longer than we planned. It was not a decision we made consciously. We simply couldn't leave.

The food of Umbria is made of the same substance as its people. The lentils from Castelluccio — grown on a high plain in the Apennines where the altitude and the mineral soil produce something no other lentil can replicate, are among the finest foods on earth, and they arrive at the table looking like nothing special. The olive oil from the hills around Orvieto occupies what I think of as the Goldilocks position: the oil from northern Umbria is a little too light, from the south a little too thick and assertive, and the oil from the center of the region is exactly right. The black truffles found throughout the hills carry the character of the land more directly, more purely, than anything from the north.

Umbrian food does not try to be more than it is. It tries, with absolute seriousness and complete love, to be exactly what it is. Which turns out to be more than enough.

That is what we are cooking Tuesday night. Food with a heart. Food from a place that never lost its way because it never stopped believing in what it was doing, not for tourism, not for export, not for the approval of anyone outside those green hills. The Bartolomei women at their cardboard booth at Cibus, enthusiastic in the way only people who truly believe in what they are doing can be. The daughters in Deruta painting their family's patterns onto ceramic plates they have been making their whole lives. The potter in Gubbio whose inventory waited for him in the dark long after he was gone.

Umbria is the heart of Italy. Not because anyone decided it should be. Because it simply, stubbornly, and beautifully is.

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