Book Review: A Year in the Village of Eternity by Tracey Lawson

London foodie journalist goes native in Italian village? Elberry finds his expectations exceeded by Tracey Lawson’s account of the exceptionally healthy lifestyle of the people of Campodimele…

I feared this might be an “I adore peasant food!”-style book by a London fool with a Tuscan villa. Certainly, the signs were not good. The author is an English journalist. Her book is about Campodimele, a small village in Lazio, midway between Rome and Naples. People here live a long time and in famously good health. It is one of many largely untouched hilltop villages:

Arriving in Campodimele, I did indeed discover the archetypal Italian rural idyll: a cluster of stone houses perched high on a sun-drenched mountain top; narrow, winding streets encircled by turreted medieval walls; an eleventh-century church with a soaring bell tower; and a piazza with a truly breathtaking panorama across the valley below. And, all around me, evidence of what had brought me there – elderly farmers clambering over olive groves; old women mounting ladders to cut grapes from pergola vines; grandmothers striding up steeply stepped alleyways while balancing bundles of kindling on their heads.

Contrary to my grim expectations, the book is intelligent, well-written, and unsentimental. If the people here seem different, this is my experience too. A decade ago I toured Tuscany with a chamber choir; the choir closed each performance with a spiritual; the only place where it was received with anything but affronted Italian silence was in a tiny hilltop village – there, it was taken in the spirit with which it was meant.

Lawson seems to spend most of her time cooking with elderly but hale Italians. I rarely cook, as I’m lazy and inept, but I appreciate good descriptions. Consider her ricotta:

It’s spectacular – the ricotta has risen like a soufflé and billows like a cotton-wool cloud gilded by golden sunlight, bouncing on a spring breeze; if not for the latticework of pastry, it would surely float away. Slowly, it comes to ground and, exhaling its heated breath, sinks and settles, perfectly flat. Cold, it tastes sweet and creamy, the cinnamon more subtle to the tongue than to the nose.

I get the impression that in Campodimele people spend most of their time finding, preparing, and eating food. But then, why not? The book’s title, A Year in the Village of Eternity seems less idle, as one reads. There is a sense in which notions of progress, of earning more and more money, don’t apply. Time manifests not in career or GDP but in the immediate rhythm of the seasons:

You can mark the calendar by the herbs and spices whose smells waft from kitchen windows – a kind of olfactory code by which to measure the months. Coriander signals January and tells you that the salsiccia is hanging to dry; mint means May on the mountain meadows, its sweet perfume exploding underfoot; basil speaks of summer, the first hot days of June, or of one of the hotter months to come. Cinnamon and aniseed are the sign that dolci di Settimana Santa, sweets for Holy Week, are being made. Chocolate is here too, but not until Easter Day, when every uovo di cioccolato, or chocolate egg, must be unwrapped and smashed – a less-than-holy ritual to secure good luck.

I was reminded a little of Eliot’s Four Quartets: fidelity to nature and tradition is a way of escaping the temporal; living wholly in the present, sensitive to season and world, you have eternal life (in a sense, the axle does not move). Thus the oft-quoted maxim in these parts: ogni cosa ha il suo momento, everything has its moment.

This essentially Taoism sense of the right moment requires close cooperation with the world. A city man like Edward Glaeser would perhaps dismiss the villagers as scrofulous mud-encrusted spaghetti-eating inbred bestial peasants living in poverty, because they don’t contribute to Italy’s GDP. But the reality here is otherwise; the geographical isolation seems to have defended Campodimele against economists:

To get here, you have to ditch the car seven kilometres up the mountain road that winds behind Campodimele and walk a few hundred metres along a stone-strewn track until you reach a clearing in the woods. Carry on uphill until the forest floor spews up its chalk rocks and you’re in the heart of the cerreto, the oak grove. The way ahead isn’t clear, but if you stop for a moment and catch the breath of the breeze, you can hear the jangle of the bells, guiding you on.

The bells are worn by the horses, and, as you scramble higher, you find them waiting for you, curious chestnut heads craning from behind trees, ears pricked towards your unfamiliar footsteps. Only once they’ve checked you out do they step into view, and that’s when you see the logs strapped to their sides.

These are the horses that carry the wood that fires the ovens on which the Campodimelani cook much of their food. Without the horses there would be no logs because wheeled vehicles can’t negotiate the terrain. Without the logs there would be no forno a legna in which to bake pizza and bread. No fuochi, the open-hearth fires where pulses simmer to a smoky mustiness. And no brace of crumbled charcoal to grill meat. So in one sense, the raccolta di legna, the wood harvest, is where much of the cooking begins.

This apprehension – that the horses are a part of the human world – is very different to the typical city attitude, in which everything is just a tool, an inert thing, and human activity can be effectively reduced to statistics. Lawson’s book could have been glib, the London fool coming to the village to adore the peasant food and exclaim over how sweet and cute and authentic it all is. But she leaves things as they are. Her acutely detailed descriptions of food are a part of this, as is her habit of giving the Italian first, translation later. If there is a secret to happiness, perhaps one could say it is to take things as they are, to recognise oneself as being part of the world and time, and not be deceived.

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One thought on “Book Review: A Year in the Village of Eternity by Tracey Lawson

  1. wormstir@gmail.com'
    June 19, 2012 at 13:24

    I might be up for this one, I’ve just skipped through another food-porn tome called ‘garlic and sapphires’ by ruth reichl that was rather schmaltzy and would enjoy something to counteract all that literary grease

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