Pat Tompkins
- Italian Strawberries-
Picking fruit is a primal pleasure, delicious and free. If an abundance of summer fruit burdens a friend of a friend with a garden or orchard, I make jam with it -plum, apricot, whatever's available. As an apartment dweller without a garden, I depend on the generosity of those who garden for bags of lemons or pears. In my experience, gardeners are liberal in sharing roses, peppers, and peaches they've grown. Maybe with the bounty of a garden, I'd be more magnanimous. If I ever get to have a garden of my own, I like to think I'd be as generous as the Italian family whose garden I visited more than 25 years ago.
I was a college student in Florence during April and May, studying Renaissance art and cosmology. When I wasn't dealing with Botticelli, Dante, and Galileo, I was coping with the less-lofty new world of contemporary Italy. Our group of 22 students from Midwestern colleges lived at the top of an 83-step walk-up pensione at the intersection of five streets, in the city's centre. In addition to a recalcitrant hot water system and a curtainless shower that flooded the bathroom, I was adjusting to breakfast and dinner at the pensione. Most of the students slept in rather than bother with the breakfast, which consisted, without fail, of cups of yogurt (tutti-frutti was popular), hard, flavourless white rolls, and the only bad coffee in Italy. (I believe the city got its water from the muddy Arno River; whatever the source, the water was also tinting our laundry green.) Cold curls of butter and plastic packets of jam added nothing to what we called pigeon rolls; that's all they were good for‹lobbing at the pigeons so plentiful in the city. I didn't miss the ubiquitous American glass of orange juice, but I was accustomed to more variety. Dinner was a substantial improvement over breakfast: a thin soup, unsalted, chewy bread, and pasta, with minor variations, such as the addition of cooked spinach. Dessert was fruit: baskets of mealy apples and blood oranges, which I'd never eaten before. No one wanted the apples; speed was essential if you hoped to snare an orange.
Coming from California, I was used to more fruits and vegetables, so I often visited Florence's outdoor market, where I bought brown paper cones of raisins. Coming from a college in the middle of Iowa cornfields, I wasn't used to such an urban environment. Florence has an overabundance of beautiful buildings, statues, and other public art, but I don't recall any trees in the heart of the city. The Boboli Gardens across the river offered a highly manicured green retreat, far too formal for my taste. So when we had a field trip one day that included a surprise stop, you could say I was ripe for the opportunity.
Our day excursions by bus generally took us to other Tuscan towns (Siena, San Gimignano, Pisa) to admire their churches and art. On our return from Lucca, our professore, an American of Italian heritage, announced that we would be visiting a family he knew in a small town. We stepped off the bus into a sunny May afternoon. Near the road was a small strawberry patch, maybe 50 feet square, with carefully weeded rows of plants. The ground was the same gold-tinged terra cotta as the Palazzo Strozzi across from our humble pensione. When we met the Italian family; they told us we could help ourselves to their strawberries an instant U-Pik-Em 'n' Eat-Em experience. There may have been some miscommunication; perhaps we were invited only to sample a fragola or two.
Bending and squatting, we plucked the warm, fragrant berries, and plucked and ate and plucked and ate. To the Italians, it must have resembled an attack of a murder of crows, disguised in blue jeans. In short time, we had reduced the strawberry patch to green leaves. This is not surprising when you consider that half our group consisted of insatiable omnivores, a.k.a.19-year-old guys, but all of us were hungry for fresh fruit. Our professore apologized for our voracious behavior, but the Italians seemed to appreciate our enthusiasm for their strawberries. Or perhaps they were simply polite. I don't recall the name of the church we visited in Lucca or, unfortunately, the name of the family whose strawberry patch we wiped out. But I remember those berries. Someday, when I have a garden (and I will) I think that when I invite students to help themselves, I'll limit it to one student at a time.
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Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Paumanok Review, E2K, the Copperfield Review, and the Writer. Her published Civil War stories include "Hearts of Ash," "Dr. Talbot's Cider," and "Living in the Necropolis