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take his parents into Semproniano. The rest of the week, they depended for the staples they did not themselves produce on a brigade of traveling vendors who passed by once or twice a week. These included Rolando, the baker, his truck always stocked with loaves of dry bread, dry jam tarts, and dry marzipan cakes; the Boutique del Pesce, the side of which opened to reveal all manner of fish and shellfish spread out on ice; a grocer offering sausages, cheese, pasta, and dry goods; a tiny old man who sold potatoes out of the trunk of his car; a handsome youth who drove up once every two weeks from Naples with crates of oranges or artichokes; and a Moroccan and his young son whose van was filled with shoes.
    Ilvo and Delia were never less than generous with what they had. If, for instance, we went over to “borrow”
some eggs (their shells were so frail that the merest pressure of a finger broke them) they’d invite us in for a slice of warm crostata and a glass of grappa. (Delia concocted a grappa flavored with coffee beans and the peel of mandarin oranges.) We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, a big room that was cool in summer and warm in winter.
    Delia did all of her cooking on a Zoppas like the one that had been in our house when we bought it. One morning, when we went over to pay Fosco for pruning our olive trees, we found Delia standing at the kitchen table rolling out dough for gnocchi. She asked us to stay for lunch. This surprised us, since Italians, despite their reputation to the contrary, are rarely spontaneous. Though it was hot out, she served not only gnocchi with ragu, in big bowls, but grilled pork chops and slices of fried liver. Then came a salad of cucumbers from her garden. When we complimented her on them, she gave us about twenty—small and fanciful as calligraphy, softer than their supermarket cousins, and run through with a watery pulp of sweet seeds.
    When lunch was over, we asked Delia why she made gnocchi on a Wednesday; after all, the Roman tradition is to eat gnocchi only on Thursdays: giovedì gnocchi, ven-erdì pesce, they say.
    â€œAccidenti!” Delia said, which basically means, “I’ll be damned!” “Here we don’t do that.” Delia had been to Rome perhaps half a dozen times.
    Still, she was in her own way worldly and shrewd. There was not much in world politics that escaped her ken. Thus when the wife of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, appeared on her kitchen television one morning (this was in the middle of the war in
Kosovo), she remarked, “I don’t like that woman. She looks mad.” An editorial in that morning’s International Herald Tribune had said the same thing.
    Delia also had strong opinions about local politics. It was to her that we turned when something of a local nature perplexed or maddened us: for instance, the mosquitoes so tiny they could actually fit through the holes in our window screens. “What are they?” we asked. “How long will they last?”
    â€œOh, the little ones— piccini piccini? We call them cugini.”
    Ilvo smiled. “Now you see what we really think of our cousins;” he said.

11
    S OMETIMES IN THE morning, on the way to Semproniano, we’d encounter a sheep jam. They had a way of appearing when you least expected them, and in the most inconvenient of places: on the other side of a harrowing hairpin turn, say, or on a bridge. We’d hit the brakes. Tolo, agitated by the rich odor of manure and urine, the music of bleats and baas, would start to bark madly, then try to dig his way through the back window. Meanwhile we’d idle. What else can you do when faced with a flock of forty ewes and a ram or two, their backs draped with coils of yellowing wool, like dreadlocks? Sometimes the sheep were alone; more often someone was leading them—an elderly farmer driving an equally elderly three-wheeled Ape (bee) or a woman on a Vespa (wasp). With