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wife, meets us on the road in front of their shop with still-warm cuts of pizza bianca wrapped in thick gray paper.Made from bread dough stretched thin, swathed in olive oil, dusted with sea salt then heaved into the oven beside his bread, it bakes in a minute or two. He pulls it out on his old wooden peel, slashes at it with a thin knife, and sets the thing, peel and all, on a table by the door. The whole village wakes to its perfumes. We devour the pizza, the first course of breakfast, during the thirty-meter trek up to the Centrale. Once installed at the bar, our cappuccini—caldissimi e con cacao, very hot and with a sprinkle of bitter chocolate—are set before us, the tray of croissants slid within reach. There will never be a substitute for Pasticceria Maggion’s warm, crisp cornets fat with apricot marmalade with which I’d buttered my hands and chin daily for three years on the Lido. But these will do. And I feel that I will, too. I was mistaken about the adventuress. The mettle, the suppleness. All my parts arrived from Venice to Tuscany, entire. I still savor things. A kiss. A breeze. The trust is still at work here. And just as it happened in Venice, an exciting sense of place rescues me from nostaglia.
    Here, right here, along this road where I gather wild fennel stalks, passed the Roman legions. It is the ancient Via Cassia, now Strada Statale Numero 2, and right here beside it, in this field where we’ve made love and drunk our sunset wine, the Romans surely laid fires among the Etrurian stones and cooked their porridge of farro and slept a cheerless sleep. We seem to be always in a dazzle. We driveto Urbino and say, That house is where Rafaello’s mother was born. In Città della Pieve, we say, That church is where Il Perugino worked. We wander about in Spoleto and say, This is the gate at which Hannibal was stayed by the spoletini tribes. In the woods just beyond our own garden, we say, That band of Sunday stalkers will take two wild boar this morning, practicing the same rites and rituals of medieval hunters.
    In nearly each village and commune and fraction of a borgo, there will be one ruin to redeem its humbleness, one fragment of a wall, one painting, one chapel, one grand church, a tower, a castle, a lone and everlasting umbrella pine defending a georgic hill, a half a meter’s worth of a tenth-century fresco still discernable from among the millennia of transformations surrounding it. Preserved, revered, now it is a bit of frostwork ornamenting a pharmacy, a chocolate maker’s kitchen. Passages, imprints, traces that, like us, ache to be touched and never forgotten.
    We learn a little each day. We stop along every roadside frantoio and taste olive oil until we find one we like enough to fill our twenty-liter spigoted terra-cotta vase, called a giara. At the usage rate of one liter a week, the supply will serve until December, when the new oil will be pressed. We haul the oil vase in through the stable door and set it in a dark, cool corner.
    This is the land of Chianti Geografico. Though the wine here is built from the same grape varietals and with much the same methodology as it is in the Chianti itself, these vines lie outside the designated Chianti regions and must bear a different classification. We set out over the hills, our supply of just-scrubbed and sparkling five-liter bottles clinking about in the trunk, and knock on every vineyard keeper’s door on which there is the invitation degustazione, vino sfuso, tasting, barrel wines. We swirl and sip our way through the afternoons and finally settle on one from Palazzone to be our official house red.
    From Sergio and several other garden farmers, we shop for each day’s vegetables, herbs, fruit. Our egg supply is secured. We buy bread flour in ten-kilo paper sacks, buckwheat and whole wheat flour in two-kilo sacks from the miller in town. We are still deciding who will become our macellaio di fiducia, butcher of confidence, though the tall