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| Our cargo |
We set off for the small town of Candia
Lomellina where Eduardo and Anna’s daughter, Francesca (Franci) lives. It wasn’t just a
visit, we had a mission: to transport three special French chickens to her
home. If it were December, we would have been singing “Three French hens, two
turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree” as we drove.
Franci keeps
chickens and discovered the hard way—when she forgot to close them into the
coop for the night—that her fenced enclosure for the birds wouldn’t keep out a
determined fox. When we released the chickens into the yard, we made her
promise to shut them into the coop every night.
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| Gauss releases the chickens into the yard |
Eduardo drove us there on the state highways instead of the
autostrade but the chickens didn’t much care
for the many roundabouts on our route. Each time he took a corner or
braked—which was often, this being Italy—there was concerned peeping from the
back of the car.
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| Franci and Alberto's country house with Venetian-style accents |
Franci and her husband, Alberto, live a big old country
house that they are renovating. (Alberto was gone for a few days, getting major dental work done in Zagreb to repair damage from a motorcycle accident.) They are both artists, and the house has a
quirky bohemian feel. It’s a tattered grand dame with high, decorated ceilings
and different patterns of marble flooring in many of the rooms.
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| Franci in her front entry hall. The painted ceiling is original. |
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| Venetian-style arches in the entrance hall/stairway |
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| Alberto's purple studio |
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| Franci and Gauss talk in the dining room while Anna takes five |
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| Master bedroom with a new fireplace |
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| One of the fancy floors, this in a library |
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| A bit of fancy floor in the guest bedroom |
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| The second-floor landing, with wrought iron stairs leading to the attic |
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| The marble-walled main stairway |
The rooms are huge and
have been painted with strong
colors that contrast with the patina of the delicate ceiling art and worn
moldings. Most of the furnishings are simple and modern; we recognized Franci and Alberto's IKEA dining table as the same one that Luca and Toni have in their St. Paul house.
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| Gauss and Franci in the renovated kitchen |
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| Modern fixtures in the upstairs bath |
The kitchen had contemporary cabinetry and the bathroom appeared to
have been recently built with designer fixtures. Avant-garde jazz accordion
music played in the background while we ate, leaving me feeling a bit like I was acting in a
Buñuel movie.
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| Apricot tree in Franci's orchard |
Like those of her parents and her brother Leo, Franci's home is surrounded by flower gardens, fruit trees, and vegetables. She has the
luxury of space for several fruit trees: fig, hawthorne, peach, apricot,
pear, and apple. She took us to a back part of the lot where tomatoes,
eggplant, and peppers were sprouting. I’m jealous of Italy’s moderate climate,
where roses grow all year.
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| Big, healthy roses started with clippings from an abandoned farmstead |
Franci showed us a thriving rose garden she
created by clipping branches from plants in a nearby abandoned cascina (farm
complex) and sticking them into the soil. The plants are now four feet tall and
covered with sweet-smelling blooms. Climbing roses are starting to take hold on
a patio and at the corner of the house.
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| An almost fluorescent red rose in the yard |
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| A beautiful bicolor rose grows at the corner of the house |
We spent some time outside before dinner. As dusk fell, it
was time for the chickens to go into the coop, and somehow the task of rounding
them up fell to Gauss. It’s a long way down from his height of 6’3” to reach a
panicked, squawking chicken, and everyone had a good laugh. As soon as he
deposited the first of his screeching charges into the coop it tried to escape,
so I had to quickly shut the door. We had to repeat the process with the second
and third birds. Sorry, no photos of the operation, I was busy.
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| Franci and Alberto's dog, Blanca, gets acquainted with the chickens. Blanca was happier about the chickens than they were about Blanca. Franci tells us that in the two weeks since the chickens arrived, Blanca has learned to herd them into the coop each night. |
Dinner was simple: bucatelli with tomato sauce from Anna’s
garden, a robust red wine, and locally-produced sausage. We had given Franci the last
of the little New World gifts we had brought, some maple sugar candy and a
small bottle of Iguana Hot Sauce, which she insisted we try on the sausage. She
had made a torta—simple white cake topped with apple butter—which she dusted
with Sichuan peppercorn powder, her latest culinary discovery.
Dinner didn’t wind up until 9:30, and we hit the road about
10, arriving back at Eduardo and Anna’s house about 11:30. We had a
wonderful time but after two weeks I was ready to go home and start eating dinner at what we Americans
consider a normal time. I had trouble falling asleep before midnight when we ate dinner at 8 or 9 pm.
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