Memoir set in Orvieto, Umbria (lei e buono come pane*)

22nd April 2015

The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi, memoir set in Orvieto, Umbria.

Author Marlena de Blasi has written several books. Her iconic memoir of her time in Venice – A Thousand Days in Venice –  has been the go-to book for experiencing The Lagoon City in written form. Now she has moved location and turned her hand, via Tuscany, to the flavour of Umbria and has settled in Orvieto.

This is a bringing together of the lives of four women through the pen and presence of author Marlena de Blasi.  Hewn from the rich dark soil of Umbria, whose roots are inimitably linked to the rolling and ever present past, each woman brings her individual history to life over the cooking hearth, as together they create rich, succulent and flavoursome dishes to whet the reader’s appetite (the reader will go away craving the food described… guaranteed!). As a reader it can be a challenge looking in on this group, absorbing the ambience and imagining the culinary creations that rise from the pages of the book – the desire to join them is so very strong. Whether it is preparing pigs’ testicles or cooking pasta in red wine, there is something for everyone to have their tastebuds tickled. Wild asparagus, otherwise known as Luppoli hops, has an incredibly delicate flavour… join in the Vendemmia and harvest the grapes… or climb the olive trees during the Raccolta, the gathering of the olives at the end of the year…

Some of the recipes incidentally are given at the back of the book.

The book is divided into sizeable portions as each woman elaborates on her individual heritage. It explores the ‘individual and collective pasts of these women”. Miranda, Ninnucia, Paolina and Gilda immerse themselves in the food preparation as each brings her story to life and the reader is truly an observer of intimate culinary and emotional sharing.

Miranda has been the leading light in the regular dinner gatherings, but feels it is time to hand over to someone new, someone who can bring innovative flair to the proceedings. Ninnucia talks about her history and the Mafiosi background – it was in Calabria, in Acquapendente di Sopra with her mother-in-law Cosima that she learned her way through life. She describes how her Grandmother would saw her way through the substantial bread, Pagnotta, cutting it into sizeable chunks, almost reflecting the structure of the book – four sections equate to the four women. And Paolina loses both her parents at a young age, and Niccolò – a friend of her mother – sires children with her but doesn’t commit in terms of marriage. How does she cope with this in traditional Italy? Gilda, last but not least sheds light on her own story.

It is a very readable book, detailing life in Italy, a life that may elude the visitor on a brief visit. The author has an easy style and her use of middle European shorthand – buss (kiss), auto (car), testament (will) feels natural in her prose and really adds flavour to the narrative; in the hands of a lesser author it might, however, have felt like an affectation.

The Duomo in Orvieto

The setting is essentially Orvieto, less than 90 minutes from Rome, which sits on top of tufo, volcanic stone. The city is virtually car free, and is crowned by a beautiful Duomo, which at sunset is lyrically described as “a glittering wedding cake awaiting a bride”. I share some of my photos taken on a recent visit to Orvieto.

The Umbrian Thursday night Supper Club will inspire you to visit this beautiful area of Italy. It has incentivised me to be more creative in my cooking and add flavour with bunches of fresh herbs and colour. Enjoy!

Tina for the TripFiction Team.

Marlena was kind enough to answer some of our questions:

TF: Your love of the ‘real’ Italy is manifest in your writing. In which area of the country does your heart lie?

MDB: I feel at home and in peace — if for different motives — in every region of the peninsula (save the Alto Adige which was and always will be Austria no matter the spoils of wars and the re-drawing of political boundaries) and yet it’s in the backstreets — le calle — of Venezia at twilight on any evening or, better, when only the tapping of my boots, the goldoliers’ Arab-sounding warning cry to other boats and the once-in-a-while snarl of a half-feral cat rip through the dark February mists.

TF: Your husband Fernando is from Venice, I believe, how has he adjusted to life in Umbria? There must things he misses?

Typical pottery from Orvieto

MDB: It was Fernando — lamenting the lost Venice of his childhood — who longed to leave the place and I who left kicking and screaming. The years we spent in Tuscany before settling (a relative term for me) here in Umbria provided him with the startling contrast for which he longed. All these years later, he’s still constantly being asked how he could bear to live away from Venice and his response is unfailingly Wolfe-ian. Venice is no longer….why would I want to live in Disneyland….Venice sold her soul to tourism.

TF: You have a beautiful style of writing – have you always had a penchant for the written word and how did you first come to get published?

MDB: When I lived in America, I worked for more than a decade as a journalist (enogastronomy, travel…France and Italy my ‘beat’) and took on the ghost-writing of cookbooks for fancy chefs when I could. Both pursuits inevitably left me in a sort of coitus interruptus. I could never say all I wanted to say. Someone was always censoring, always saying I must calm all that passion.

The Duomo

An editor in a small private publishing house in Rocklin, California — just north of Sacramento, where I was living at the time and working as food editor of Sacramento Magazine — once sent me a note saying that if I ever wanted to write a book, she would publish it. No parameters, no guidance. Just open arms. I didn’t realize at the time just how rare an invitation was hers. Time passed, pages fluttered and, years later after Fernando and I had been married for a year or so and I was still gazing at the great white space where my work life had once been, I found myself ripping through a box of old papers looking for this editor’s card. Certain she’d never remember me and less her overture, she proved me wrong on both counts. I wrote Regional Foods of Northern Italy for her. The second volume about the regions of the south was published quickly thereafter by Viking just after we’d left Venice for Tuscany. My editor there was also a splendid one. It was during a telephone call (from a wall pay-phone in the village of Cetona) just after she and I had finished work on that volume when she said, and so, what will you do next? I told her that I was working on a memoir. That it was nearly finished. A two-part and very bold lie. She asked me to send along whatever I had thus far. Would you mind if I called you back a bit later? I sat at bar Sport there in Cetona and on three sheets of paper begged from the estate agent across the way, I began to write what would become A Thousand Days in Venice. Not an hour later I called my editor at Viking. May I read something to you? When I finished, there was silence. Zero. Dawn? Dawn? Have I lost you?

Send me the rest. Either she didn’t like what I’d read at all or she liked it very much. Click. The book wrote itself. I’ve always believed that. The words came so fast, so relentlessly that I could barely keep up with them. I sent the finished manuscript to Viking eleven days later. (footnote: the manuscript was subsequently declined by Viking during a merger, a resultant changing of the guard and a re-tooling of the ‘tone’ of the publisher’s list. Enter, Algonquin of Chapel Hill)

TF: The characters you portray in The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club are often what we might call ‘salt of the earth’. They are stoic women who just get on with life. Do you feel you are an observer or do you count yourself amongst them – or perhaps a bit of both?

MDB: I would agree with the ‘salt of the earth’ description but I’m not so certain that ‘stoic’ fits them, they being more complicated creatures than pure stoicism intends. I would say that, as wildly diverse as they were in character, it was moral strength, dignity, courage which the women had in common. (one may not agree as in, for instance, the case of Paolina….but there in lies an opportunity for a most interesting exploration about the definition of morality) Every well-lived life wants these far more than it wants some notion of success or, as Miranda would say, of ‘triumph’. It was only when I came to live here in Umbria and began frequenting these (and other) rural women that I began to feel a kinship, a sense of family, that my long-lived lone-wolf character was chipped away. So, no, not an observer or not only that but surely I am ‘of them’.

TF: Do you come from a family where cooking and a fresh variety of ingredients have been part of the fabric? In other words, where did you discover you love of cooking?

MDB: No, nothing of gastronomic inspiration from family. I would have to write a whole other book if I were to answer your questions fully. Some early awakenings are hidden in the text of the single novel I’ve written. Amandine.

In any case, by now I can hardly recall a time when cooking and baking were not absolutely central to life.

TF: You currently live in Orvieto – there is nothing more stunning than coming from the Via del Duomo and seeing the cathedral in all its splendour. A fabulous vista. What are your top tips for visitors to the area and especially Orvieto?

The soaring West facade, Duomo

MDB: Bless you for your words about the Duomo. I’ve lived 31 metres away for 16 years and still its unspeakable beauty astounds. I think that Miranda’s response to the leaving sun as it splashes across the Duomo as seen from across the valley is among my favorite in the book.

Thank you so much to Marlena for taking the time to respond. You can find Marlena’s books on this link.

(*She is as great as bread)

Do drop by and connect with the Team at TripFiction via social media: Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest and when we have some interesting photos we can sometimes be found over on Instagram too.

Subscribe to future blog posts