There is a little house on the corner of the road from Pergine to Pieve that I had been quietly in love with for weeks. You know the kind: a cypress alley so perfectly Tuscan it looks drawn, leading to a stone house set in a sea of vines. I slowed down every time I passed it. I had even stopped once, a few days earlier, to check the frames and the light, and found nobody: no car, no voices, shutters closed. An empty house with a beautiful driveway, I decided. Perfect.
That weekend my client Ola was coming to stay, and I thought: this is the place. So we drove there for golden hour, when the sun does that thing it only does here, pouring itself sideways across the fields and turning every cypress into a candle. We unpacked, I set up, I pressed record. Ten minutes in, a pick-up turned into the alley.
In it, an elderly man. I walked over with my most polite Italian and asked whether we might film a little, because, honestly, the place was too beautiful not to. He smiled and said of course, of course, please, you are welcome. I assumed he was the man who looked after the garden. The house, after all, was empty.
A few minutes later a small dog came bounding down the drive, followed by the man from the pick-up and his wife. Which is how we learned that the house was not empty at all, and that we were, in fact, standing in the garden of Silvano and Marcella.
They did not mind. They were delighted. They were the kind of delighted that makes you feel you had been expected. Before we could explain ourselves properly, Silvano said: come, I want to show you something.
The room of cups
He led us into a narrow little room, and I stopped in the doorway. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall: trophies. Cups, medals, plaques, ribbons, the whole thing glinting like a chapel. Silvano ran marathons. He ran a great deal, in fact. He once won a hundred-kilometre race, seven hours on his feet, and he told us this the way you might mention having once fixed a fence.
He started running at thirty-three. His father did not approve, at first. Later, Silvano said, his father was very proud of him and of everything he had done. He said it simply, looking at the cups, and I understood that this was the sentence the whole room was for.
Marcella, not to be outdone, told us she had worked for Prada. On the socks, she added, and laughed. Then they walked us through the garden, which Silvano tends entirely by himself: the roses, the vegetables, the clipped hedges, the vines running off toward the hill. He came back a moment later with cold drinks and waved us to the table under the trees.
I taught them how to raise a toast in Polish. There was a lot of laughing and a lot of very determined, very wrong pronunciation. And I remember thinking, with my whole heart: what wonderful people. I want to sit here with you and talk until it is dark.
And at the very same time, a smaller, more practical voice in my head was saying: guys, this is lovely, but my sun is setting.
Ola, thankfully, was enchanted. We looked at each other and agreed, without needing to say it, that this had been better than ten sunsets. We sat a while longer under their oak, the quercia, fifty years old, which they love for the shade it throws in the afternoon. Silvano had recently strung little lights through its branches, so in the evening, he said, it is romantic. It was.
Since I was spending so much time in this valley, I thought, why not do the sensible thing. We swapped phone numbers. I wanted to come back with Kuba.
Ice cream, Prosecco and a house full of paintings
A week later, on the Saturday evening when the whole of Europe was cooking under a heatwave, they invited us for ice cream under the quercia. The welcome was the same: wide open, all smiles, as if a week were nothing. Silvano had had a haircut, so I admired his new look, which pleased him enormously. Then he took Kuba to see the cups. All of them.
Meanwhile Marcella said, quietly, "I have a hobby too. I paint." And she took us through the house as if through a gallery, because that is what it was: a painting of hers on every wall. Tuscan landscapes, mostly, the ones she sees from her own windows. She showed us photographs of her work on stones and on wood, and the hand-painted wooden baubles she had made for last Christmas. She told me she would paint me a Tuscan sunset. I am holding her to it.
Then we sat under the oak. We opened the Prosecco we had brought. Silvano poured Kuba a glass of Mirto, the myrtle liqueur, and it turned out that some things really are universal: the homemade digestif, produced with ceremony, that you are not allowed to refuse. They were fascinated by our photos from last winter in Poland. Snow like that they had simply never seen.
It was a wonderful evening. We did not understand every word, of course. But context is generous, and hands help, and a table under a tree does most of the talking for you. I am proud of us: two hours of conversation with locals, in their garden, in their language, and it flowed.
We gave them a Torcik Wedlowski from Poland, the wafer cake with the chocolate on top. I wonder what they will make of it.
Agnes