Market Day in Cortona: a memory

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Saturday: Market day in Cortona

Panino di porchetta, poco grasso, con la crosta, per favore!

We would take the little red Cinquecento, the smallest and humblest of our automobiles, to do our weekly stocking up, bread, wine, cheese, fruit and vegetables, a proper Tuscan bistecca for dinner that night, and to complete the shopping tour, panini di porchetta, fennel- and garlic-fragrant slices off a golden-crusted roast pig piled into crisp buns (“poco grasso, con la crosta, not much fat, lots of crunchy skin, please”) to take home for lunch. Summer or winter, Cortona’s market always seemed jammed with a press of locals and tourists alike. It was not just a day for shopping but a day for seeing people, for connecting, for making plans to get together or to get work done, or just to enjoy the feel of an old, old Tuscan town still teeming with life. Henry James, that great tour guide, called Cortona “the most sturdily ancient of Italian towns.” Despite many changes, it still is.

Parking by the Porta Colonia, we entered the town on foot, passing beneath the high arch of the gate with its huge, roughly carved foundation stones, called cyclopean because they might have been put in place by the Cyclops back in the days when Etruscans were in charge here. Attached to the gate are tall, stout, portone, wooden doors that now stand permanently open but were once closed at sundown to prevent unauthorized folk from penetrating Cortona’s sanctuary. Passing under the arch, I wonder when those doors were last closed against marauders, thieves, invaders, evil doers; so far no one has been able to tell me.

Just inside the gate, in a little square with a small, nonfunctioning fountain, there was at one time a man who sold. . . what, exactly? It reminded me of a summer yard sale on the coast of Maine, a jumble of goods from clothing to old plates and coffee sets, tarnished silver trays, terracotta pots, cooking gear dented and scarred from frequent use, paperback books and fumetti, the comics beloved by Italians, ancient farm tools that might be spiffed up with a honing blade, griddles and fireplace equipment lacking a piece or two. Whatever.

One morning Sara clutched my arm. “Mummy, mummy!”

“What is it, darling?”

“White satin wedding slippers, slightly yellowed with age!”

Where on earth had she heard, or more likely read, such a phrase? But there they were in the pile of stuff, agonizingly high heels, impossibly pointed toes. And indeed the satin, worn in places, was yellowed with age.

“Do you really want them?”

Eyes glistening, she nodded.

So we added them to the shopping basket.

Then it was up via Dardano, pausing to greet Angiolino at his trattoria and make a plan, maybe instead of porchetta sandwiches, to stop here for lunch. His wife’s fegatelli, roasted chunks of pork liver, flavored with wild fennel and wrapped in caul fat, are mythologically delicious. And for the children there would be pasta al pomodoro with Graziella’s garlicky tomato sauce and grated cheese on top. Semplice ma genuino, everyone agreed about this amiable hole-in-the-wall of a restaurant, simple but authentic, the real thing.

And then there’s this intriguing sight, nearby on via Dardano:

Truth to tell, Cortona, ancient as it is, doesn’t have much in the way of medieval vestiges but this is one, and it reminds me of the many marketplaces I’ve visited in Turkey and Syria where you still see these medieval shop fronts, with stone benches aligning the entrance for display of the goods within, whether spices, or carpets, or gold earrings and bangles, or dried herbs, or leather and copper crafts. It’s just another Cortona house front now, but I have seen façades like this in the souqs of Aleppo and Gaziantep, and still in use as shops too, selling the same items over the years, over the generations.

At the crest of the hill, as we start to descend along via Dardano to the market, we salute Fernanda at the butcher shop over which she presides while in a back room, her husband—and, in years to come, their son--breaks up huge sides of beef and pork, delivered daily, carving them into steaks and chops, stew meat,

macinato (ground meat for ragùs and bistecche americane, aka hamburgers), and stracotto for Sunday lunch. This is what we would call in America carefully curated meat, almost all of it rigorously local, purely because that’s what the market demands. Few of her customers would be interested in pork imported from Hungary or beef from Spain. All that will change in the years ahead as locally sourced meat becomes more and more expensive; still, there will always be those who demand only that. “Una bistecca, due dita,” we order, a Chianina steak cut two fingers thick, to be picked up on our return.

Chianina veal, raised by farmers This meat is in danger of extinction Appreciate it!

Fernanda grew up in our mountain community and moved to town to marry the butcher. This reminds me of the connections between the town and the rural communities that surround it, connections fostered and exemplified (and strengthened, I would add) by food. The town needs the food the countryside provides, the countryside needs the market the town offers.

I remember another illustration of that, the great fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of The Effects of Good Government, where town and country work together for the benefit of all; outside the city walls, the grain is harvested while sacks of it are brought into town, along with a pig for slaughter—notably one of the Cinta Senese breed, still prized to this day, seven centuries later. In so much of today’s world that connection, that link, has been broken, to the detriment of our food and our culture, as Caroline Steele has pointed out in Sitopia, a fine study of the problems that have evolved. I don’t want to suggest that Cortona represented an ideal, yet the link, though tenuous, was still maintained in part by contadini who relied on the town market to sell their surpluses, whether foraged greens and wild mushrooms or farm products like hams and salumi, cheeses, and garden produce, much of it on display in the market this morning.

But we have more shopping to do. Down the hill we go and off to the right into Piazza Signorelli, named for Cortona’s most prominent Renaissance painter, Luca Signorelli, whose very great Lamentation Over the Dead Christ hangs in the Diocesan museum across from the Duomo. Piazza Signorelli is the core, the heart, of the weekly market which extends down into Piazza della Repubblica and, in the opposite direction, along via Casali toward the Duomo, the cathedral. We are in the full throes of the market here, with ambling, sauntering, jostling, crisscrossing shoppers, overladen with bags and baskets, stopping for a chat or a coffee with a friend, or haggling with a purveyor, or hefting an artichoke, sniffing a melon, while lost children and dogs search for ways out of the maze, vendors call their wares, and tourists snap bucket-list photos of a Tuscan market--it’s a mob scene but a very friendly mob scene, one filled with the allegria, the good humor, that accompanies Italians whenever there’s food around.

And what food!

What you find in a weekly Tuscan country market is an astonishing array of everything that’s in season and some things (truthfully, very few) that are not. First of all, of course, all the early spring fruits and vegetables from greens like spinach, chard, and bitter puntarelle (to be served Roman style with a pungent anchovy-garlic sauce), to plump, polished fava beans, called bacelli here, to be eaten young and raw with a wedge of fresh pecorino. As the season moves forward, gathering momentum, there will be asparagus both wild (the best) and cultivated, fresh peas, cherries, long skinny green fagiolini di Sant’Anna and flat taccole beans, and tangled masses of spicy, pungent greens foraged from fields and woodlots. Then comes the culminating apex of summer with tomatoes of course (deeply ridged costoluti, and plump, thick-fleshed ox-heart cuor di bue), peppers, and eggplants, with freshly shucked borlotti beans, sweet ripe figs, both green and purple-black, and juicy melons and peaches from the richly irrigated Val di Chiana that spreads below Cortona’s hilltop. By mid-September the soft decline into fall begins with root vegetables, wild porcini mushrooms, squashes, and that Tuscan staple, cavolo nero, a sturdy, tasty kale that is almost ubiquitous in winter dishes. By the time the citrus and winter melons start to arrive from the south, spicy winter greens like brocoletti and rapini (broccoli rabe) will be ready, along with cardoons and fennel and artichokes—and for anyone who thinks an artichoke is just an artichoke, there will be four or five distinctive varieties in any

Tuscan market at any time. Much of this comes from market gardens and farms right here in zona, as they say, but some comes from other parts of Italy. Puglia, about 350 miles away by autostrada in the heel of the boot, is a great market basket of artichokes for the rest of the country, and the Po valley, just 150 miles north, produces all kinds of tree fruits and melons—surely 150 miles counts as almost local.

Then there are the cheeses and salumi, distributed from mobile vans with sides that open to display their wares, modern equivalents of that medieval shop front we passed. This is where we stop for tastes of pecorino in various stages from barely formed milky raviggiolo to creamy young pecorino fresco to pungent wheels so thoroughly aged they crumble at the touch, these last held together sometimes by walnut leaves, sometimes by an antiseptic black goo made from olive lees, sometimes by just plain tomato paste. Sheep’s milk pecorino is a Tuscan farmhouse staple and so are all the cured pork products, salty prosciutto nostrale from the mountains, contrasting with sweeter prosciutto di Parma, and local favorite sausages, fresh or aged but almost always flavored with the seeds or pollen of wild fennel that grows prolifically in the fields and hedgerows hereabouts.

I’ve mentioned wild fennel pollen frequently. It’s a favorite aromatic, ubiquitous in this region. Later, I learn from Dario Cecchini, the most famous butcher in the world (truly, yes, he is), that the fragrance of wild fennel is a distinguishing mark of the cuisine of Arezzo, Cortona’s province. Though he’s not from Cortona, Dario is right.

Beyond that, there is everything else you might be seeking in the Saturday market. Here’s the toilet paper vendor and over there the woman who sells every kind of cleaning liquid or soap you might need, including the special mix for oiling terracotta-tiled floors and a toxic serum to inject in beams riddled with woodworm. There’s a special section of clothing stalls, some with nothing but rolls of cotton and shiny synthetics for measuring out by the meter to fabricate dresses, aprons, shirts and blouses, and others with actual ready-made dresses, aprons, shirts and blouses, and much more, including ladies’ lacey underwear so provocative that it boggles the imagination. There are dramatic falls of tufted, embroidered, and tasseled bedspreads and ornately scalloped and lace-trimmed batiste curtains (“made by imprisoned Chinese intellectuals,” my children years later would claim), table cloths, even oilcloth table cloths, so hard to find in the rest of the world. There are gorgeous silk shawls—the exact same ones I bought at a higher price on Istanbul’s chic Istiklal Caddesi and brought back as exotic Turkish presents for friends. There are kitchenware booths with collections of devious tools you never realized you might need--a mezzaluna, the half-moon chopping knife, various slicers and shapers for various pasta shapes, a clever machine that deftly removes tomato seeds and skins, leaving behind only the fresh pulp. There is a man who makes tall wooden ladders for clambering up in the olive trees at harvest time, and another who offers the woven baskets that

olive pickers strap around their waists, leaving both hands free to pick. There are several purveyors of farm equipment, the all-purpose mattock called a zappa being foremost, but also sickles and scythes and the Tuscan machete called a runcola. There’s a fish monger, up from the coast, with slabs of salt cod and what seem to be more questionable offerings (but I’m spoiled from years of living on the coast); there are vendors who travel from market to market like nomads with arrays of dayglo-colored candies, nuts, red chili peppers and bundles of oregano dried on the stalks, from the south, and big thick wedges of candied peel. In the fall I take bags of that peel back to the U.S. where it’s so hard to find anything high quality for Christmas cakes. This stuff in the market actually carries the taste and fragrance of lemon or orange or citron.

By this time, we’ve reached the end of the market, down at the far end of Piazza della Repubblica, and it’s time almost to call it a day, or at least a morning, stop at the giornalaio for the Herald-Tribune and maybe La Repubblica or Il Messaggero from Rome, and then head down via Nazionale (Cortonesi call it the Rugapiana because it’s the only flat passage in town) to Bar Banchelli for a restorative coffee and a a pastry—tomato-topped pizzette for the children, a walnut-filled sfogliatina for me.

Now, a word about Banchelli. The importance of this bar-caffè, just off Piazza Garibaldi at the far end of town from where we left our Cinquecento several hours ago, was not just in the warm fragrance of its cappuccino, its exquisite little pastries and tramezzini sandwiches, its two scrupulous bariste, Maria and Clara, but in the fact that it actually had a working telephone, in a discreet booth in a room behind the actual pasticceria itself. Here a person could have a lengthy and fairly private conversation with a boss or a relative, a friend or a lover, in America or England or, for that matter in some less distant place. A person could talk for ten or fifteen minutes as the price was recorded on a meter, and then come out and pay directly to the barista in attendance, without having to stop to buy gettoni, the annoying little metal discs that had to be fed patiently, one by one, into Italian slot telephones, which most public phones in Italy were. This of ourse was before cell phones and before the upgrading of the national telephone network. And before we had a telephone line connecting our house to the network. (We actually had a phone number and a listing in the local directory for many years before we were finally wired in.)

It's hard to believe now, but we didn’t complain, didn’t find that a hardship. We saved our phone calls for Saturday mornings at Bar Banchelli where we had time and space and delicious things to eat and drink alongside. Life was different then.

Now, having thoroughly burdened ourselves with fruits, vegetables, cheeses, salumi, perhaps a can of WD40 or a package of washing-up soap, along with any other flotsam we may have picked up on the way, including those white satin wedding slippers slightly yellowed with age, we leave our collection of baskets and plastic bags under guard at Bar Banchelli and make our way back along the track we’ve followed. Now the market is closing down, the fish monger is dropping his prices minute by minute, and along the Rugapiana the rattle of the saraceni is heard as the metal blinds come down to close shops for lunch. We stop at Molesini, the ample emporium that nails down Piazza della Repubblica, to pick up bread (“con farina macinata a pietra,” made with stone-ground flour, we say) and anything else we’ve forgotten (peanut butter, American style baking powder and French mustard, a few other staples that are unobtainable elsewhere), oh and fresh sheep’s milk ricotta, still warm in its basket and dripping whey, and how about those spinach gnocchi greenly glowing in the deli case?

Then wearily back up the hill, picking up the bistecca at the butcher shop, and down again, through the ancient gate, into the car and we drive all the way around, following the high stone walls that enclose so much of Cortona, and back up to where we can stop the car and run into Banchelli for our purchases and load them up to head for home.

At which point, someone inevitably asks: What’s for lunch?

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You may have noticed that this piece is all over the place in terms of verb tenses—present, past, future, present perfect, present progressive, etc. There’s a reason for that. Because so much has changed over the half century that we’ve been frequenting Cortona and the weekly market, as a family, as individuals, as locals, as tourists, it’s almost impossible to construct a story with a uniform tense throughout. Today, well into the 21^st century, the Saturday market has contracted to about a third of the size it once was. Piazza Signorelli holds mostly Chinese-made dry goods, household and garden equipment, and tools. The few food stalls are congregated along via Casali, ending with Signora Benigni’s array, much of it still from her family gardens near Castiglion Fiorentino but more of it these days from the Mercati Generali, the wholesale market. Piazza della Repubblica has reverted to its weekday function as a bustling meeting point but no longer a spillover from the market. And Molesini, once the keystone that held down that most central piazza, has closed its doors after almost a century, along with Bar Banchelli, both possibly victims of the Covid 19 pandemic that struck all of Italy so harshly. The final blow to our market-day ritual came when the doors closed to the little trattoria that Angiolo Tacconi‘s family had opened back in 1960, where we had spent so many happy lunchtimes, where the food perhaps was never great but it was always good and always genuino, which, in the end, is what counts the most.