Free A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi Page B

schiacciate with oil, which will be captured in the indentations, and sprinkle over the rosemary and the sea salt, if using. Bake the schiacciate for 20–25 minutes, or until they are deeply golden. Transfer the baked breads from their tins to wire racks to cool. Using a pastry brush, paint the hot, just-baked breads with a few drops of oil.
    Serve warm or at room temperature. Traditionally, rather than being cut into slices, schiacciate are torn and passed around the table, hand to hand.

4

Are You Making a Mattress Stuffed with Rosemary?
    The left. Always the left. A reflection of political sentiment in this part of Tuscany and of the hand Barlozzo uses, skillfully as a maestro before his orchestra, to punctuate his speech.
    “Siamo un pò rossi qui. We’re a little red here,” says Barlozzo one evening as we walk up to the bar for aperitivi.
    His reference is to communism. Red politics took root here after the First World War, when the contadini, the farmers, came home to Tuscany to less than they had when they left it. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots had grown wider and deeper until poverty was savage as plague. People died of hunger just as though the war still raged. The political factions that sprung from that poverty demanded the right to work and eat, not unlike similar factions were doing in Russia. That’s what being red meant here. Still does.
    After the First World War, the state legislated and relegislated, inventing glorious-sounding systems, some of which were even brought to light, functioned, carried relief. But the momentum was too weak, too ill conceived against what remained an essentially medieval serfdom for those who would still work the land. The nobles continued to write contracts with their illiterate farmers declaring that 75, even 80 percent of the yields would be surrendered, the lords knowing full well these portions would keep the farmers hungry. Education for the farmers’ children was forbidden, not only because even the youngest hands could work, but because unstimulated minds insured another generation of servitude. As they’d been doing for seven or eight centuries, in handsome coats cut from rich cloth, riding high in the saddles on their cosseted Crimean hunters, the lords bought more land with their profits. Always more land, without a thought to better tools or the renovation of the houses where their serfs lived with the animals. And so in the short peace that interrupted the two wars, there’d been time only to tinker with reconstruction. But afterward, the leftist factions gathered force.
    The nobles remained noble, but local legislation firmly inspired their reform. The farmers’ shares were increased, the more hideous edges of their squalor eased. Too little, too late; many country people were long gone, having taken flight north, feverish for an encounter with an industrialized misery. Wages that could buy foodand pay rent, if barely, seemed a grand benevolence, and they hardly looked back.
    Sitting on the stone wall in the piazza, a pitcher of wine nearby, we three have been talking politics through the sunset. The duke brings the subject to the present. “There is always happiness in a new set of problems. And because that’s true, there’s another kind of flight going on right here and now in the village.” Curls of smoke wreathe his blond-white head. “The crusade of i progressisti. ”
    The more clamorous of the two distinct San Cascienesi social sects, i progressisti, are chomping to leap into the future, pounding their fists and shrieking basta, calling for progress like another round of gin. In voices more wistful, the other sect, i tradizionalisti, court the rituals, saying that the only true progress waits a few steps back into the past.
    I progressisti who live in the village want to sell their crumbling red-roofed houses, heaped up along the tiny, winding streets. Fernando and I think these houses—defiant, bewitched in an eternal rakish