12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Random House

A PLACE IN TUSCANY

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EARLY MAPS SHOW C. as a walled rectangular town laid out along the line of the ridge, with square towers projecting at every fifty metres and the parish church, la Pieve, at the summit.

All the towns in this area sit on high hills. When the Romans left, and their irrigation systems fell into disuse, the great plain of the Maremma reverted to marshy, malarial country, famous like the Camargue for its horses but fatal to men. Exile to the Maremma was used by the Medici and the later Grand Dukes of Tuscany as a delayed death sentence. The place has remained half wild. Cork woods and wild boar abound; ancient cattle of enormous size, and tough squat cowboys are still to be seen in the dune country towards the mouth of the Ombrone; settlements, most of them going back to Etruscan times, are scattered.

C. was once the most important town in the area and is still the centre of a Comune. Most of its walls survive and the houses are built into them. Their thickness can be gauged by the low tunnel-shaped entries that are still in use on the south-west side, where a line of towers, all perfectly intact, look across the plain to the sea. They have long sloping steps, beamed ceilings, and measure six metres from one level to the next. The last of the towers has been converted to a belfry. All summer an intense, half-witted boy who has constituted himself the town firewatcher sits up there with a walkie-talkie set, scanning the plain for flames.

A vast jigsaw of spaces that fit one into another, the village piles century on century and is still in the process of being made. Built of a mixture of granite boulders and tufa, it is grim in winter, but when the stone is touched with sunlight it mellows to a soft gold. Roofs are flat and projecting, and are of corrugated terracotta, blotched with grey-green or yellow lichen and held down against the wind with stones. Every house has dark-green slatted shutters, long windows with varnished frames and inner shutters of solid white. Under each window are rings for flowerpots and a smaller ring for a flag.

One side of the village faces north-east into the wild country towards Siena. It gets no sun after mid-morning and bears the full blast in winter of the tramontana. The other faces the sea. Protected from chill winds, it gets the sun in winter, the sea breeze at five o’clock every summer evening and on clear days the sea itself is a glowing band between the hills. It appears so suddenly at times, when the late sun strikes it, as to make a flash at the corner of my eye, as I sit working, as if out there somewhere a match had been struck.

At such times the whole plain comes alive in all its detail of fields, pasture, vineyards, olive groves, and the mountains as ridge after ridge of impenetrable macchia.

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