Ice Box End Tables
Wanderways Tuscany – Walking in Tuscany
Julian Frullania
WANDERWAYS TOSCANO
http://www.tuscanwanderways.com
For the woodcutter Beppe
who taught the ancient art of stretching the truth Tuscan.
CHAPTER TWO – Beppe leg
Wonderful images are the hills of Florence before calling in the eyes of the traveler;
one of his fantasies forests ancient villas and churches must be based on a field in honor of
ancient pagan gods of the earth.
It was the morning the force on the end of July, when it was proposed to find the woodcutter Beppe, the Genius Loci, again. We have chosen the unexplored trails Season ontani village, having a rough course to Monte Cerea where we expect to see Beppe in oak, viola and stone house atop the hill.
We passed a castle, towerhouse, villages, and at the end of a section of outlying huts and cottages, beyond the house of a colonic contadino, the sub-capita land of count, as its name suggests. We walked along the dusty road Caianello hamlet, suggesting a Roman origin.
We stopped a hollow-cheeked peasant no definable age, who meet by chance as he walked to the local coffee shop in their finery on Saturday afternoon, and explains, with an extension of Tuscany commendable, that the honor of the founding of the village would be attached to a founder unknown, older than the Romans, but not in truth describe Moses or Mars. Beppe said sooner or later be found somewhere in Monte Cerea if we look hard enough.
Broken branches and soft, fluffy sheets stacked along the Erca winter and spring floods made our way up treacherous and punish. In the grove where he had filled the bottles with the Anchise contadino few days ago we find the dark green collar of a shirt straw wine bottle stick to a decent outside the same small pool. On the bank beside the stream lay the body a big man, fast asleep, his legs spread widely across the floor, the back of his head on a backpack of course material.
"Beppe" chorus, "Good day!"
The woodcutter instantly awoke, his eyebrows arched high in the wake sharp.
Without a glance or a greeting, sat down, reached into his backpack, pulled out a bottle and put it to his lips to drink. His long white beard moved from side to side while stirring the water around the mouth. He gargled with the head tilted back, he turned to one side and the water gushed out on the floor. He immediately extended his thick arm hairy towards the wine bottle, the current rose and drank with joy.
"Actum est! One drink of red wine restoration a clean mouth first thing in the morning! One of my many barbarous extravagance, "he said." I've been sleeping here since dusk yesterday. In summer just sometimes I have no desire to return home on foot to the summit of Mount Cerea when I have to be in town again the next day. Here, have a drink! "
He took us to a path of spring where a swarm of bees buzzing full Virgilio around us. As he drank and splashed his face and neck cold water, we had a few minutes to contemplate a nearby sanctuary desolate Madonna and Child, chubby cherub face looked down at us with humility as a sham offer a prayer for travelers carrying a long way back and go.
Beppe gesturing with his stump. "In days past, well, let's say a few years ago, a place of worship as the corporal and spiritual offering refreshments and a meeting point of trivia where you could talk to contadino a lumberjack or a loaf of bread under his arm, an onion in his hand and neck of a bottle of wine little glimpse into his pocket. Come! we are waiting Down in the village.
Before arriving at our marble table under the awning low, yellow and white stripes in front of the bar in the square Gino della Chiesa in ontani, Beppe had cupped his hands and cried more or less in the direction of the bar.
"Gino, did not see us walking through the square? Do I have to Hee-Haw as a donkey draw your attention? Exit the service of that great number of pigs on the banks of the city there and we have wine, bread, ham and a piece of cheese that our pastors Bernardo and Guido him. And be flexible! "
"Why are you so disrespectful to Gino?" Challenge, as we all sat down next to Beppe orders.
"You see," continued Beppe, leaving aside our question, "the two brothers make the best cheese of the track! Repeated His call for service. "Gino! I'll show you, lard bucket!"
He got up, went to the source behind us, and cupped his hands full with cold water, drank, splashed his beard and the back of his neck and wiped with a huge green and yellow scarf. He took a cigar box of polished silver shirt pocket, opened the lid carefully chose a full body cigar Toscanello, struck a match along the right side and raise the bar directly strutting, pushing through arrogantly by bank employees and a group of elegant ladies of the city who were chatting and drinking coffee at the counter.
Beppe was placed directly in front of Gino and stopped immediately with an intense gaze.
"A glass of wine, and without delay! "
Gino interrupted his service, had a glass of wine from the shelf, which polished to an exceptional degree of brightness, full of local wine and placed it on the counter.
An accident of applause came from the loggers in the tables in the corner. The disgust was manifested on the faces of the city.
"Now I have your attention?" I told Gino as he left the counter and walked to our table.
Beppe looked at him as he filled fun outside glasses. "Well done, Gino, well done my dear friend. That our Virgin and Child of the Snows have mercy on your soul and give you peace! You better sit here today and not in my private corner of the table in the bar. I see your house is already full of garbage that the city office. Now you can go! "
Gino can not answer. As he had arrived, so meekly returned to his place behind the counter ready to resume its impeccable service.
The woodcutter now turned to us. "The best way to tell a story, I think, is put into it, with the intervention of one's personality, but without ostentation. Technically speaking, Boccaccio was kept out of his Decameron, but Dante in the first person walking through hell to paradise. Supporters established truths and lies in the paradoxes venial irreconcilable accelerate a living and feed the imagination. "
We nodded in a friendly manner.
He spoke again with the brilliant, stress melodious Tuscan today only by villagers in remote rural areas.
"Now tell me again. What is it? What do you to write ugly little black notebooks that time? "
While this dramatic composition between Gino Beppe and is acted on the counter, we had already seen a thin boy with curly hair as a teenager carefully walked towards our table, her eyes full of wonder as he followed every movement made by the great woodsman. Now he was standing at our disposal.
"That's it"! Beppe shouted: "In primis et omnia ante, draw up a chair and sit here in front of me and hear a man talking! If you want to become a stalwart and skilful woodsman like me, you have to learn to work the hardness your system. You get up early in the morning, you go into the woods and start cutting and pounding all day until the knees that hit land. "
Beppe drumming forward to the marble countertop with the stump of his left index finger chopped-off. "Well, are you listening carefully?"
"Yes, signore."
"You see," he continued, looking at the hard-eyed young set, "I live on top of the hill of Monte Cerea. Where lives and who are you? "
"Grazie, sir," my name is Geremia Ventari, my Father's name …
"Yes, yes, I know, Anchise, and your mother is funny Anastasia.
The usual buzzing swarm of loggers and their wives had already drawn up their chairs around our small table willing to spend your Saturday afternoon with the last story of Tuscany inflated. From the vibrant characters in the company around us, Boccaccio could have taken any of his seven women and three men. And many of their stories too.
Beppe move. There excogitated his foreword, meanwhile, and now waiting for the right moment of silence to fall as a whole.
'Well, you see, "he began, glancing at their faces agile around to make eye contact, is a known and indisputable fact, my dear Geremia, I live up there in the top of our pater familias, Monte Waxy in Beppe Bastion, a term for my home embellished oak and stone.
A free download of laughter came from the loggers.
"That old box of potatoes without windows to the ground with ropes tied to not blow during storms," broke in one of the companies.
Beppe took a long pull on his cigar and blew Toscanello a thick stream of smoke with bad smell in his direction stunning.
"Up there on Mount Cere, Geremia my dear, I say, it's so steep and dangerous that I have to tie my chickens to an oak tree to avoid falling off the hill. "
"Yes, I understand, "said the young man with a trembling voice, fearing it was too bold." I can sit at the table? "
"And that not all, my boy, "he went on Beppe" in the heroic and faithful implementation of my duty as a lumberjack ontani, I have to use my brain power too! Want a dramatic example? "
Geremia not know what to expect. "Yes, signore," he ventured.
"Now, like all know, is the lex scripta ontani not that Gino Bar in the corner seat of the long wooden table near the door is perpetually reserved for Beppe woodcutter. That's me. When I enter the bar without meaning any idiot occupying the seat is an obligation to defend at a time. Now I realized when I went there for a moment that does not boast, architect aspect type, private sitting in my seat at the corner of my desk. Now you just saw Beppe intellectual capital. "
Beppe dramatically exaggerated limp while approached his table. The man sitting in the corner was busy reading his newspaper, not realizing the danger at hand.
Gino left his service and remained motionless, waiting for problems. The eyes of everyone in the bar is now fixed apprehensively at the two men.
"You see, sir," said Beppe to man behind the newspaper, in exercise of his best authoritative voice, "is my leg, you know, my bad leg."
The man lowered his newspaper and looked puzzled.
- "My leg of age," Beppe continued to mock, "you see, happened during the war as a child small. I was helping my poor mother in the fields when a German bomb exploded near us and … shrapnel, you know, I maimed for life. It's my leg, which see. "
"Oh, sorry," said the man, standing at attention ", I apologize. Not please take my seat. I'm going out now. "
Beppe sat in his private corner of wild laughter and applause from his fellow loggers.
Gino moved the lips, but stopped just short of a smile.
The big man winked at Geremia who was now standing on the threshold. The boy's face was polished with pride.
Beppe stood up, took her hand Geremia, and rejoined us. He filled the three glasses of wine on the table and once again put on the bar masterful voice, ordering the bread, wine, prosciutto, cheese and more vessels. Given this, the loggers and their wives huddled even closer to our roundtable. Gino appeared instantly on the door and dreams approached us with a selection of local products.
"Are you writing all these things to down? "He asked." Well, do you have something to say? "
We looked at each other, and then Geremia, and shook his head. "For please go ahead, Beppe. "
The face of the man of the woods to put on your skin darker. His voice became sarcastic Bible and drummed the table at a constant rate, with his wound, the irritation of the child who blinked to the rhythm of the beats. Everyone expected the next jet Tuscanism swollen.
"You see, Geremia," advocated the big man, "as the word says, a man can not stand under an olive tree and wait to eat ripe figs, or standing in a storm and open his mouth to a rain of wine. Now I understand that this is not easy to understand for a boy like you, but his father knows all things. If you want to be an accomplished woodsman like me, this understanding of nature is essential. Now tell me, what are you doing in the city today, where are Anchise and Anastasia?
Geremia looked at him shyly. "My father has gone to the restaurant with some chickens and eggs, as we have come."
"And your mother?"
"My mother and my brother and sister are sitting on the low wall behind the church. My mother says there are more commercial operations there. She says that people who never attend church are embarrassed to be seen by Don Armando and reach the square turn to the back of the church. This morning, eight chickens to sell. I have to go far to help them. "
Beppe stood up and everyone followed suit. It disperses the assembly of loggers and townspeople who had come to hear him speak and threw a handful of coins into the empty wine glass, repeating the child name to himself, "Geremia, Geremia."
He privately disclosed to us that he was on his way back up the slope to the small group of houses abandoned, Borghetto, where an old monk, Guntelmo, lives alone in solitude parish.
"I'll tell him about you two," he said, the poor old man soul would be very happy to meet you. I will ask my friend Bruno to come too, and invite this guy Geremia. Can you come tomorrow afternoon? "
We nodded.
He picked up his bag of cloth and then saw him cross the square towards the church where the local priest, Don Armando, leaned head to that floor, was watering a row of pots outside the door of the church with a long plastic hose.
Beppe could not avoid provocation. "Do not spoil the flowers, my brother Reverend, with the water board pee pagan," he chuckled. "Use your saintly patience and wait until rainwater that supernatural is reduced directly from paradise!
The priest looked at him for a moment in pious resignation and turned his thoughts his frustrated pots.
Like Gino, Don Armando had never found the courage to challenge Beppe since time began.
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