Lisa Brennan-Jobs : Essays: Tuscan Holiday
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Published in Vogue, February 2008
We met on the wide sidewalk of the Via Cavour where it intersects the Piazza del Duomo. Marco was a friend of a friend. I’d just arrived in Florence. As I reached out to shake his hand, a voice in my head, low and calm, said, You’re going to date him, but you’re not going to marry him. I’d never heard voices before, and I couldn’t imagine a reason for such an admonition on a weightless Italian afternoon. I was 24. He was good-looking in jeans and a blue collared shirt with a button undone, tan and a little gray at the temples. He was slim, and he spoke clear English warmed by an Italian lilt—perhaps I would date him, I thought—and he smiled, and his warm brown eyes sparkled, and we shook.
I had arrived on a one-way ticket with savings from the banking job I’d quit a month before. A man I knew, a jet-setter, had introduced me to two kind and well-connected Italian women before I arrived. I planned to stay and learn the language. I’d dreamed of going to Italy and living there and most of all of belonging. When I was in elementary school, I watched Cinema Paradiso 22 times and memorized the dialogue. In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza. Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated. There was tradition and camaraderie, and all of it seemed more fulfilling than what I’d had growing up in Palo Alto, California. Italy was where the soul went to find calm and love, and I wanted to hold the best of it in the palm of my hand.
Soon after we met, Marco took me to summer dances in crumbling candlelit villas, and to a lopsided castle built on the cliffs over the Tyrrhenian Sea. He introduced me to his friends, many of whom belonged to families of old Florentine society whose children had been friends for centuries. They all ran family companies, were kind and chivalrous, knew how to sail, ski, and speak English and French, kissed the hands of married women, and had their initials embroidered on the lower right side of their collared shirts. I had never seen such abundance and luck all gathered together. Their lives seemed to follow a pattern, like rooms in old villas with wallpaper that matches the curtains that match the bedspreads.
We went to baptisms and art openings, to a Mozart concert in a small, candlelit church in Gstaad. We skied on the slopes of Cortina, where the rose-quartz mountains glow pink. We sat in the front row at a turn in the track at the Palio di Siena, where the spindle-legged horses passed full tilt in a furious, muddy cloud and I lost my breath. We went to parties. Men wore tailored suits, tight and loose in the right places, and flocks of women in gowns reflecting the warm light wore diamonds handed down from their mothers or grandmothers, old stones against new skin. The talk—varied, buoyant—flitted to the next subject just when it touched ground, like a half-filled helium balloon. In summer, lucciole sparked in olive groves. We ate with silver. Everyone did. What was the point of saving it? For what? If at first I worried that each party would be the last, the most exquisite, I soon understood that there was no scarcity of beauty; this was Marco’s life. I had landed inside Cinema Paradiso, but it was better, and it was real.
In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone. We didn’t have many things, but she is warm and we were happy. We moved a lot. We rented. My father was rich and renowned and later, as I got to know him, went on vacations with him, and then lived with him for a few years, I saw another, more glamorous world. The two sides didn’t mix, and I missed one when I had the other.
Marco was twelve years older than I was, charming and sincere. The boy was still inside the man, joyful and mischievous. His laugh filled up the room. His hands looked good on the steering wheel. I was petite, irreverent, and eager to please. We brainstormed about how to salvage his ailing family company, and I helped him try to mend his rocky relationship with his father. A few weeks after we met, we drove through Fiesole at dusk, and he parked off the road near a grassy hill and a few villas in the distance with lit windows. He said later that he had meant to park at a vista where the hillside fell away and Florence was spread out below, golden in a bowl of purple hills, but he had been too impatient to find the right spot. He dove across the seat to kiss me. I remember feeling as if he needed me, as if I were a kind of salvation, and I was confused. Wasn’t I the one being rescued?
In one scene in Cinema Paradiso, the main character, Toto, wishes he could skip ahead in time to a different season, as if his life were made of film: Fade out boring, lonely summer, cut to winter. I’d felt the same way: fade out California, cut to Italy. Toto had wished for it, but I’d done it. I was willing to stay forever, to cut my life above the root.
I found a job working for a small American company, writing research reports. It paid the bills and allowed me to stay. I took Italian lessons at a language school in the center of Florence named after Dante Alighieri.
One day I walked to the architect Brunelleschi’s Cappella dei Pazzi near Santa Croce. There was no one else in the vast, domed room. I sang a note. The inside of the dome was constructed to hold notes for a long time—as if by providence, not physics—and soon after the first note I sang another one, a third above the last, and the two notes joined above me and were sustained, locked together in a buzzing consonance. It was a metaphor, I thought: Here in Italy I was in harmony with myself.
I had always wanted a large, close-knit family, and the Italian families I met stuck together. Marco lived with his mother, Lucrezia (a tall princess of a respected line from Naples with thin, aristocratic ankles), his father, and two sisters, in his own part of a Medici hunting villa on a cypress-lined Tuscan hill. During my first dinner at the family villa, Marco’s father pointed to an old black-and-white print of a property he’d bought in the Veneto a few years earlier. The villa had been in Marco’s mother’s family since the Dark Ages, and then, 30 years ago, it was sold. Now, thanks to the father’s purchase, it was back. This was a family that recovered its possessions.
Lucrezia told me her childhood was like Luchino Visconti’s film Il Gattopardo. Before each trip to a magnificent weekend of festivities in Vienna or Brussels or Paris crowned by a white-tie ball, the maid would pack her bags by counting engagements and selecting outfits for each. Lucrezia had never met the cook or even seen the kitchen—the food just arrived.
When she fell in love with Marco’s father, a Florentine entrepreneur, her father didn’t speak to her for the rest of his life. She wasn’t supposed to marry a commoner. “For the rest of his life?” I asked. “Didn’t you feel sad and try to reconcile with him?” “No,” she said. “That was just the way things were. We respected each other’s choices.”
In the kitchen before dinner the cooks talked to one another in the soured whoosh of a Sicilian dialect. I’d heard about people who had cooks and servants, but I’d never seen them before, except in movies. Americans were known for effervescent, childish curiosity, but in this society naïveté had limited allure. In order to belong, I accepted the servants as if they were commonplace.
During that first dinner Lucrezia asked me when my parents had been divorced; my parents had never married, I corrected her. And then, in the salotto after dinner, when it had come out that I was a vegetarian and also not a Catholic—not even baptized?—and perhaps thinking she’d misheard the first time, or else forgetting, she asked me once more. I forged the date of a divorce; I could not bring myself to announce it again.
That was the catch: I could have my Italy, but only if I wasn’t quite myself. I wanted Italy so much, though, that I didn’t care what I’d have to trade. In fact, I wanted to trade. I wanted Italy to civilize me, to cover over the parts of me I didn’t like.
“They like you because you’re malleable,” my mother said on the phone. Learning manners and customs was the best way for an illegitimate American vegetarian to blend in, and so I embraced them. I lusted for the exact right way, the ballast of perfect etiquette. Such rules look easy because they are absorbed over many years. Though superficial, they flow from a deep pool of culture and belonging. That’s the reason they exist: to keep the classes fixed.
Before sitting down at a dinner table, I would hesitate, my fingertips on the back of the chair, watching the hostess out of the corner of my eye, waiting for her to sit. I was almost always the youngest woman; did that mean I should sit last? I asked Marco. I was not required to wait, he said, not even for the hostess: I could sit down just as soon as I knew my seat. The men waited for the women, and then they sat down, too. From then on I relaxed: I sat when I wanted to. But one evening the local priest made an unexpected visit for dinner, and when I sat down, Marco pulled me up again. He had neglected to explain this one exception. I should not have been seated before a man of God. I was mortified.
I learned to begin eating when served, not to stand when someone entered the room (unless they were very old), not to say piacere (“nice to meet you”), because it was vulgar. I learned to write the address below the midline of an envelope, and not to wear shoes that clacked at the heel, or shiny, sparkly things—anything that tried too hard, or too obviously, to please. I learned how guests were seated at a table, by complicated rules that involved status and rank. I learned that there was status and rank,
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