By
Sally Sontheimer
Monte Amiata. 1738 meters. The highest mountain in Tuscany. I was thinking
how to describe it to you and a picture came into my mind. It is on the first
page of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. There is a
drawing of a boa constrictor who has swallowed an elephant. All the grown
ups the young Exupéry shows the drawing to think it looks like an old crumpled
hat. This is how the Monte Amiata looks. It is a very, very old mountain sitting
all by itself out on the horizon. It had a radical youth it was once a volcano
but it blew so long ago that its peak is humble now. It has no hard edges;
nothing in this landscape does. I sit mesmerized under the portico in my lawn
chair, moment after moment, hour after hour, day after day watching it. In
the early days of my time in Italy when my nerves were frazzled by all the
adjustments I had to make, its gentle presence calmed me. Now it takes me
to that place inside myself where all is quiet and these thoughts of mine
can come to me clear and free.
Here is how I tell the weather: A good day is when I can see the Monte Amiata
clearly on the horizon. A bad day is when I can’t. It doesn’t matter whether
it is summer or winter.
Sometimes it is very, very clear and I can see the villages on the slope of
the mountain, the roof tiles a patch of orange among the green. At sunset
on clear days, there is something halfway down the slope on the right a
metal roof or some such structure which reflects the sun like a mirror.
One day, I’d like to know what that is.
Other days, I cannot see the mountain at all. There is either a heavy haze
or clouds block my way. In between these two extremes there are gradations
of clarity and obscurity that I observe very carefully when I wake up and
look out the bathroom window. This will tell me what kind of day it is going
to be.
What is a clear day, I ask myself as I write? I sit and look out to the sun
hitting the brick walls of the monastery making them glow that golden rose
color which I have only found here and I realize that a clear day is defined
by light unblocked, unhampered by dust and dirt or fog. It is light that shoots
free from the sun and like an arrow flies straight and swift towards its target,
the immovable objects we see before us. I love these clear days because my
eyes follow this unimpeded path, dragging my mind and thoughts with them,
and I feel very, very free.
The clearest days of all come in winter when the tramontana the
wind that comes from between the mountains blows down from the north. The
tramontana is the most powerful of winds, capable of miracles. ‘Look,
you can see all the way to Radicofoni,’ Lucio said one winter morning as we
took a break from our gardening chores. Seeing Radicofoni a village with
a famous rocca, or tower, to the left of the Amiata is the ultimate,
the clearest of clear days. A signal day, the one we are always waiting for.
I stared at this mountain for years before I ever walked its slopes. There
never seemed to be time for anything else in those early days except driving
up from Rome, working in the garden, watering the plants. Then on a hot summer
morning when Andrea was two, I looked up from where I was sitting in my usual
place and said to Lucio ‘take me there’.
‘It’s a long drive. It’ll take at least an hour and a half just to get there.’
‘I don’t care. I have to go.’
So we loaded Andrea into the car and went.
The lower slopes are covered with farms full of olives and vines and the familiar
vegetation of the Mediterranean pines, broom plants with yellow flowers
and the black green of leccio trees slightly grayed by the dust of
summer. As we started to climb, my heart started to lighten. At six hundred
meters we hit the chestnut forests, not horse chestnuts like the one in the
garden, but real chestnuts, the ones that don’t exist on the North American
continent anymore. I told Lucio yet again that story, how all the chestnuts
were destroyed by the Japanese chestnut blight that hit the Great Deciduous
Forest of the East Coast in 1906. Mixed in with the chestnuts were other hardwood
trees with white trunks and delicate leaves. I know these trunks, I said to
myself. I know these leaves. These are beeches, I exclaimed. At one thousand
meters we were totally surrounded by them. We had entered a beech wood forest.
I had seen them in Italy only once before in the woods above the Lago di Vico.
I knew they were here but down in the Mediterranean lowlands they are such
a rare sight that I felt that excitement again. The air was growing cooler
as we climbed and, pleasure beyond pleasure, I could smell the forest in the
air. Then as we wound further up the road I saw another familiar leaf. Five
points. The Canadian flag. I want to scream. Maples. There are maples up here!
Lucio drives and Andrea sleeps in his car seat and I am no longer in Italy.
This can’t be Italy, this is too familiar to be Italy. These are the leaves
of the American forest. I am transported across the ocean, and I walk in my
mind in the woods that I fell in love with on my first trip to Washington,
DC when I was fourteen.
‘Why didn’t you bring me here before?’ I ask Lucio. I was always doing that
to him, accusing him of negligence for not taking me to places he must know
I would love, places that would make me feel, even for a moment, that Italy
and I were not so at odds.
‘Stop. Stop the car. I have to get out and walk.’
Lucio finds a place to park at the beginning of a trail. I open the back door
and wake Andrea from his nap. He is cranky and refuses to walk so Lucio picks
him up and puts him on his shoulders to stop the whinging. I want them both
to hush up. In fact, I want them both to go away and leave me in peace to
feel the forest. I want the total silence of my feet feeling the path and
my mind listening to the trees talking to each other. I want to blend with
them, become part of the confraternity, and feel for as long as it would last,
that feeling that I can only call being at home.
Anywhere I go in the surroundings of Siena, I look out for the Monte Amiata.
It is my homing device, giving coordinates for my internal compass, righting
me when I feel disoriented, knowing that it lies south, southwest from the
portico, is full of beech trees and birds that sing.
In ancient times, it was called Mons ad Meata, the mountain at Meata,
which over the years and slurred by a thousand tongues became truncated into
Monte Amiata. If it weren’t for that ‘i’ in the second word, it would spell
‘amata’, the past tense of ‘amare’, to love. In my mind, I have already dropped
that ‘i’. It is my Monte Amata, my beloved mountain.
:: Listening under the portico :: The
kitchen angels :: ‘I only eat pigs I know’
:: My beloved mountain ::
