The Reluctant Tuscan Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - Il Piccolo Rustico

  Chapter 2 - Cambione

  Chapter 3 - Stranieri in Paradise

  Chapter 4 - Castagne

  Chapter 5 - All in the Famiglia

  Chapter 6 - In Bocca al Lupo

  Chapter 7 - The Comeback Kid

  Chapter 8 - Giornalista

  Chapter 9 - Il Sindaco

  Chapter 10 - Trapassato Prossimo

  Chapter 11 - Il Dipartimento d’Autorizzazione della Licenza Edilizia

  Chapter 12 - L’Avvocato

  Chapter 13 - Un Giro

  Chapter 14 - L’Estate

  Chapter 15 - La Prova

  Chapter 16 - Il Sentiero

  Chapter 17 - Tito Tughi’s Auto Mundo

  Chapter 18 - Archeologia

  Chapter 19 - Omertà

  Chapter 20 - Zum Zug

  Chapter 21 - Zizzania

  Chapter 22 - Fiesole

  Chapter 23 - Carabinieri

  Chapter 24 - Ospedale

  Chapter 25 - Misericordia

  Chapter 26 - La Festa della Liberazione

  Chapter 27 - Ferragosto

  Chapter 28 - Ritorno Subito

  Chapter 29 - Cinghiale

  Chapter 30 - Cittapazza

  Chapter 31 - Fare una Bella Figura

  Chapter 32 - Il Raccolto

  Chapter 33 - Cavallomania

  Chapter 34 - Lo Sciopero

  Chapter 35 - Tanti Auguri

  Chapter 36 - La Luna di Miele

  Praise for The Reluctant Tuscan

  “. . . a midlife adventure involving the repair of a house and a marriage, and a lighter view of Italy that suffers no snob appeal . . . disarmingly funny.”

  —The Arizona Republic

  “Doran’s brutally funny accounts . . . are enough to keep readers hooked until the last page.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Moving to Italy has many delights and many pitfalls—Phil Doran’s charmingly laconic memoir gives us both, with the delights winning out as they undoubtedly do. Bravo!”

  —Charles Nicholl, author of Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind

  “Tuscany’s gain is Hollywood’s loss. Just when you thought everything had been said about Italy, along comes Phil Doran with his hilarious take on how he was dragged kicking and screaming into paradise.”

  —Lila Garrett, Emmy and Writer’s Guild Award-winning writer, producer, and director

  “The Reluctant Tuscan is the sort of travel narrative that is both hilariously funny and informative, comic and poignant, savory and sweet. Think Frances Mayes and Dave Barry, sprinkle with parmesan and olive oil, and you’ll soon know the irresistible quality dancing on Doran’s page.”

  —Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, author of Pen on Fire

  A TV producer for more than twenty-five years, Phil Doran worked as a writer-producer for such shows as Sanford and Son, Too Close for Comfort, and Who’s the Boss?; as a writer for The Wonder Years; as well as writing episodes of The Bob Newhart Show and writing for variety-show stars Tim Conway, the Smothers Brothers, and Tony Orlando. He received an Emmy nomination, a Humanitas Award, and the Population Institute Award for his work on All in the Family. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife divide their time between Tuscany and their home in California.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Phil Doran All rights reserved

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-11768-2

  1. Tuscany (Italy)—Description and travel. 2. Tuscany (Italy)—Social life and customs.

  3. Doran, Phil—Homes and haunts—Italy—Tuscany. I. Title.

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  The events in this story are true. I have, however, taken the liberty of changing the names of some of the places and all of the people to ensure their privacy. If this kind of thing bothers you, I urge you to keep reading and when you are finished, please allow me one question:

  Did you have a good time, honey?

  P.D.

  Somewhere in Tuscany

  APRIL 2005

  To Betty, who gave me

  the greatest gift of all

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks to Lauren Marino, Hilary Terrell, Betsy

  Amster, and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett for editing,

  facilitating, agenting, and mentoring this book.

  Grazie mille.

  1

  Il Piccolo Rustico

  I had a machete in my hand and I was thinking about using it on Henry David Thoreau. You know, that guy they made you read in school who popularized the notion that we should find solace in nature. Maybe I was doing this all wrong, but I had been hacking my way through nature all morning and all I had to show for it were blisters, sweat, and a shooting pain up my arm. I didn’t think I was having a heart attack, but if I were, it would have been more amusing than dealing with a hill covered in underbrush so thick it made this little corner of Tuscany look like a Brazilian rain forest.

  Of course the land was only part of the problem, because at the top of this hill sat a three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse we had just bought. Perhaps house was too grand a word to describe this crumbling heap of rubble. In fact, the dwelling was so insignificant, it didn’t even have an address. Folks around here simply jerked their thumbs in its direction and referred to it as il piccolo rustico. An apt description, because it was certainly rustic and definitely small. Just the perfect size for its current occupants, the scorpions and the spiders.

  I gathered up my tools and began the long trudge uphill. When I had started, the morning sun was slanti
ng low through the olive trees, casting gnarled shadows across the hill. But as the day grew warm, a low, silvery-white haze descended over the countryside. The Tuscans call this il sfumato, which comes from the Italian word for smoke. And as my wife, Nancy, pointed out to me at the Uffizi Gallery, artists as far back as the Renaissance have been suffusing their canvases with its pearly glow.

  I gazed out, realizing how integral il sfumato had become to my very perception of Tuscany. It made me feel as if I was looking at life through a fine linen bandage that blurred the edges, softened the colors, and cloaked the undercurrents of intrigue that threatened to engulf us.

  My feet crunched on a floor of pyracantha berries and I stooped to pick a weed. I stuck it between my teeth in a jaunty Huck Finn pose that greatly belied how I felt. We had invested most of our savings in this house, but in our attempts to make it livable we had managed to alienate our neighbors, infuriate the local government, and generally outrage the normally serene citizens of this fair land.

  So much fuss over such a crummy little house. Stone walls splitting apart where ancient mortar had decayed into dust. Wood beams so riddled with wormholes, they looked like they had been peppered with birdshot. A wide crack running up one of the exterior walls had caused part of the roof to cave in and stove over. There was no electricity, water, or gas, and only the vaguest rumor of a septic tank buried somewhere. Even if everything ran smoothly, we could finance a lunar probe for what it was going to cost to restore this place.

  I stopped to breathe in a dizzying mixture of rotting humus and wild jasmine and thought about the chain of events that had brought me here, and how this run-down, neglected little house in Tuscany had become a metaphor for my life. Call it a late-life crisis, but in my mid-fifties I had turned my back on my career and on a way of life that had sustained me for the previous three decades. In the process of forging a life here, I struggled to rediscover myself, my wife, and our life together.

  And like many improbable adventures, it all began with a phone call.

  “Guess what?”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “I bought a house,” Nancy said.

  “You what?” I gripped the receiver in astonishment. “Where?”

  “Here. In Italy.”

  I rolled my eyes and whimpered.

  “I think we could really be happy here.”

  “I’m happy here,” I said. “And how could you buy a house without me even seeing it?”

  “I had to move fast. But you’ll see it now. How soon can you get here?”

  “I’m going to fly all the way from L.A. just because—”

  “Yeah, come on, get over here.”

  “I’m still working on this goddamn script,” I mumbled as I peeled the foil off a roll of Tums with my teeth. “And then pilot season starts in a couple of—”

  “Dai!” she said, which is how Italians say, “Come on.” She’d been working there so long, she had started to think in their language. “Just come take a look. If you don’t like it we can always.” She ended her sentence there.

  “Always what?”

  “Forget it, you’re going to love it.”

  She launched into all the reasons why I was going to love it, and my eyes glazed over. I found myself watching the sun drop behind the Santa Monica Mountains. I’ve always wondered about people who could stare endlessly at sunsets and roaring fireplaces. For me, they were pointless because you knew that both were going to end in cold and darkness.

  “The house is over three hundred years old!” she said, as if that were a good thing. “It sits on a hillful of olive trees with a magnificent view of the village of Cambione.”

  “And that’s something I want to look at?”

  “The view is to die.”

  “What about the house? Is that to die too?”

  “I won’t lie, it needs a little work.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “But the construction’s pretty basic. Except for putting in the road.”

  “You bought a house on a hill that doesn’t have a road?”

  “That’s why we got it so cheap,” she said triumphantly.

  “Let me see if I got this,” I said. “In the long history of Tuscany, which has been occupied by the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Visigoths, the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, the Nazis, and now the baby boomers, no one has ever thought to run a road up to this house?”

  “We’ll put one in.”

  “We are talking about Italy, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” she said defensively.

  “Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Relax, honey. There’s always a way.”

  The sun had dropped behind the mountains and I sat in darkness.

  2

  Cambione

  Two weeks later I finished the script I’d been working on and sent it to my agent. Rather than stay in L.A. and brood about it and wait for his phone call, I boarded a plane for Italy to brood about a house I didn’t want.

  Dai, Nancy, what are you doing to us? Aren’t we being crushed enough under this jackboot of a house in Brentwood? And now that I’m struggling to find work, why do we need this added pressure? God, this flight is long.

  I felt the plane shudder and looked out the window. We were being buffeted by turbulence over the Alps, but while everyone else saw snowcapped peaks and cottony cumulus, I could only think of the clouds of plaster dust that seemed to follow Nancy wherever she went. My wife is a chronic nest builder with a strange compulsion to find places nobody wants and devote all her energy to making them beautiful. When she sees a house she wants to redo, she gets a look on her face like a fifteen-year-old boy on a topless beach.

  When Nancy and I first started going out twenty years ago, she was working at Universal Studios as a set designer and moonlighting as an interior designer. This meant that she never met a room she didn’t think she could improve. In fact, the night she walked into that party, I thought she was checking me out, while she claims she was thinking about opening up an interior wall and bullnosing all the wainscoting.

  Before she turned up, it was a pretty boring party full of artsy types dressed in black arguing about things like The Future of Bio-morphic Abstractionism. I was in the kitchen watching the guacamole turn brown when I looked up and saw her in the doorway. She was slim and graceful and had a way of standing with one hip cocked like a dancer. She had thick blond hair and playful dark eyes that were almond shaped and made her look slightly Mediterranean. She was pretty and she had such a great smile, I was sure she was an actress, which was not necessarily a good thing because of the policy I had about not dating actresses or any other female impersonators. But when she came over with a corn chip in need of guacamole, we chatted and she told me about her work and how she loved the designing part but hated the bullshit. I told her I felt the same way about writing for TV, which is why I aspired to direct my own features. She had an ambition of her own, to work in Italy as a marble sculptor, which is what she had studied in art school. Little did I realize that night that she would live out her dream, while I was still waiting for mine.

  The plane banked and the sun blazed through my window. I cupped a hand over my eyes and squinted out at a sky that was suddenly clear enough to see all the way up to the stratosphere. Below me lay the city of Pisa, all ochre walls and terra-cotta roofs fanning out like a mantilla around the cathedral in the Piazza del Duomo. The locals called this “the Square of Miracles,” and there is no greater miracle in all of Italy than Pisa’s own symbol, the leaning tower. The plane began its descent into Galileo Airport, and I admired how this Romanesque torre, constructed with all the confidence of the High Middle Ages, leaned thirteen and half feet off the perpendicular, making it look both majestic and improbable at the same time.

  Our plane landed and taxied to a stop. We then had the pleasure of sitting on the hot tarmac for forty-five minutes while the Alitalia ground crew figured out how to open our door. This g
ave me ample time to recall how this whole chapter of our lives had begun.

  About fifteen years earlier, I had been working on a TV show so beset with problems that between the network, the ratings, and the star, we writers never went home. This plunged every writer’s life into a shambles. But instead of screaming and calling a divorce lawyer like the other spouses, Nancy told me that she was going to Italy to carve marble. So she came to this part of Tuscany and bought a block of the white statuario that’s mined from the nearby Carrara Mountains. With the help of the local artigiani, some of whose ancestors had been working the stone since the days of Michelangelo, she sculpted a statue that eventually wound up being shown in a museum in Florence.

  This arrangement worked out well and it became a steady fixture of our lives. Nancy and I would figure out the busiest time of my production schedule and she’d plan her annual trip. Over the years, as she morphed into an Italian, she became gripped by the desire to find us a charming little stone farmhouse where we could one day retire.

  The airplane door finally popped open, and my fellow passengers and I filed out. I claimed my suitcase and presented myself at passport control. When the official asked me the purpose of my visit, I had to fight the urge to tell him that I had come here to murder my wife. I cleared customs and wheeled my suitcase through the gate. Nancy rushed into my arms, and we kissed in the middle of the airport like people did back in the fifties in those movies with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn.

  She guided me out to where she had parked in a taxi zone. As I stuffed my suitcase in the trunk, she asked me how I was doing. I told her I was fine because I didn’t want to talk about how I was living on antacids, suffering anxiety attacks and migraines, and popping Trazadone when I couldn’t sleep, which was often.