Piandellenoce

No one knows the way to Piandellenoce. There’s no sign announcing one’s arrival. On asking where it is, one might hear “a kilometer due south of Milano” and think of the real Milano, the city of millions up in Lombardy, instead of the borgo in Umbria, population less than 50. Piandellenoce (translates “plain of the nuts”) consists of only four houses—population less than 10!-- one of them uninhabited because of damage from the 1997 earthquake. My friends Michelle and Lewis (fast becoming “Michaela and Luigi”) live in “la casa rossa,” the red house, on a bend in the ever-winding road. You can ask a bus driver to take you to Piandellenoce and he’ll look at you like you’re nuts. You can ask him to take you to “la casa rossa” and he can tell you everything you want to know, not only about “Michaela e Luigi,” but about the brother of their surveyor, the man who did their plumbing, the cousin of the aunt of the woman who used to live there.

First, of course, you’ve got to get on the bus. You have to know which bus--the one to Montemartano--because no one knows about Piandellenoce. But even after the pert woman in the tourist office has written down the three times a day the bus leaves from Piazza Vittorio, you have to be savvy in figuring out where the bus will stop. My son and I caught it a month ago in the very place the APT lady told me it would be parked waiting for us in front of the bar. Yesterday I thought I had it down and went to the bar, bought my ticket, and stood there for hours missing the first two of the three buses. I’d ask drivers of other buses did the Montemartano bus stop where I was standing and they’d nod vigorously and say, “si, si, fra dieci minuti.” I’d entrust myself to those ten minutes again and again until finally some dear soul pointed me way across the piazza, across even Piazza Garibaldi, to the unmarked spot where the Montemartano bus whizzes by, stopping only if a knowing soul is standing there flagging it down. I made the 1:50 bus in the nick of time only because another woman was standing there doing the flagging;I’d been expected for pranzo around noon

There are many Italians, for that matter many Americans, who believe Michelle and Lewis are nuts for what they’ve taken on: They are restoring, on their own, an 18-room house that dates back to 1604 and had not even been inhabited for thirty years. The first time they took me out to see it, they warned: “Brace yourself, muster all your imagination.” Imagination was not, however, initially required: the house is situated like Tara on an amazing ledge of land overlooking an endless valley. Standing under the chestnut tree in the garden, one can point out each of several hill towns: Spoleto, Campello, Trevi, Assisi. Shift one’s gaze to the foreground and there’s Montefalco and a castle former prime-minister Berlusconi almost bought. The mountain ranges, the variegated greens in the hills in front of them, the undulating velours and tree-brushy textures—it’s a land-of-counterpane marvel. One stands on the brink of eternity gazing over a sylvan fairytale world. And from the outside, the house seemed—even that first glance— formidable, the façade of a country estate, countless windows staring proudly; a huge, arched, wooden portone, the kind that requires clunky keys on a leaden ring, creeking invitingly. It’s only when I opened the door and the steps crumbled beneath my feet that I began to worry. Every room was a pile of dust and rubble. No ceilings, no floors—the barest bones of a stone house I’d ever chanced upon.

I began to worry all the more when they claimed they would start living in the house in November, once the weather got cold, as soon as they found someone to wire at least one room with electricity and someone else to figure out a way to bring in running water.

When my son and I went out to the house for pranzo in November, I must say I was astonished. They’d established a multi-purpose room, had built a wood floor, had set up a kitchen of a small refrigerator and two-eyed hotplate. There was a wood-stove burning toastily in a corner and fire-wood to serve eternity stacked against a wall in an outer-room. They’d furnished the room with found objects: a bench that a few pillows converted to a couch, a table Lewis had dismantled, rebuilt and Michelle had refinished. I was most fascinated by the port-a-potty full of chemicals that did unthinkable things with human waste. At this point, they had electricity, but still no water. “You’re living the life of the Box Car Children,” I exclaimed. I’ve had that fantasy, since I was six, of finding a box car in the woods, and a pink cracked cup in the dump, and living off found things, without money forever. Of course, the house was a good deal larger than a box car and had required and still requires more money than anyone cares to think about, but still it had that wondrously cozy feeling of simply having happened.

There was even more serendipity. Since May, Daniela and I had been spending a lot of time with an elderly, spry, witty, delightful Danish woman named Bente. Bente now lives in Spoleto, but I’d heard stories of her married years to a Spoletino on his family estate, way out in the country. I’d assumed that she’d moved to town after her husband's death, because the house and isolation and commute became too much for her. How odd to discover, when I was out to lunch with her shortly after the November visit to Piandellenoce, that her house had been the one (still is; she’s never sold it) right next door to Michelle and Lewis’, the one that had been nearly devastated by the earthquake, one of the four stone houses in that impossible-to-find paese on the road to Montemartano. Once the connection was made, Bente stirred up even more magic. We all dined out together several times, a “found family.” Reports came in from Michelle and Lewis about their adventures in the neighborhood and surrounding villages. They knew everyone; everyone knew them—they were harvesting olives, learning to cut stringhozzi; neighbors brought them eggs and traditional desserts. You’d think they had lived there for years, generations.

When I struck out on my hapless bus-adventure yesterday, it seemed years--rather than weeks--had passed since I'd last been there. Michelle reassured me that it didn’t matter at all my being so late: in the time it had taken me to get there, Lewis had built a thick door and mounted it on hinges in a stairwell. The evolution of the place was astonishing: The foyer was now a library, a wall of bookshelves filled with books. The room with the wood stove now had a fancy oven, a cushy couch, pictures on the walls, music. Up the crumbly stairs is a real working shower and toilet and lavatory. They even have a washing machine. The wood stove us still burning mightly. The house is warm, so warm, and Michelle had baked rye bread dense with seeds and made a stringhozzi that would be the envy of the most expert casalinga.

“Nobody can believe we are actually living here. They keep bringing us things, just so they can get a peak and make sure we’re not scruffling around in a chicken coop.”

They are living one room at a time, they say. One room at a time. At the rate they are going, their intended bed-and-breakfast will be operational by summer.