Italy's New 'In' Place

...One of the Italian writers who has had a house nearby for many years was recently named head of the state-run television station, rivers of ink were spilled describing his Umbrian hideaway and the quaint local characters around him...

...The house was built in the 1880s...

...Italian interest in the region ratcheted higher several years ago, after the director of an American university summer program produced a report describing it as a pleasant place...

...We writers who have houses in the region are always talking about doing the Umbria novel...

...LETTER FROM UMBRIA Italy's New 'In' Place By Ruth Ellen Gruber MORRUZZE In the opening sentence of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen famously proclaimed that she "had a farm in Africa, at the foot of theNgong Hills...

...Around that time, too, a local chef began producing a version of Italian nouvelle cuisine that set restaurant reviewers drooling...

...A recent magazine article even referred to it as "Todishire...

...An American writer couple renovated the house in the early 1970s and sold it to some British art historians, from whom I bought it in 1983...

...The friend who gave me the book said I'd like it because the author doesn't go all sentimental about how wonderful life is in the country—and, to be sure, he captures the local color...

...A few Romans and a few foreigners had weekend or vacation homes here—in large part because they liked its remoteness and houses were much cheaper than in, say, Tuscany, whose Chianti district was so overrun with the English that it became known as "Chiantishire...

...It lies half-a-mile down a dirt road, outside a village so inconsequential that it has no shop or even bar, just a piazza, a tiny church, a few houses, and a crumbling castle with a crenellated tower...

...It took me 18 months to get a phone put in, and the telephone man told me I only got it so "quickly" because I put up a fuss...

...As if all that were not enough, a new novel has become the talk of the expatriate circle—and undoubtedly will be translated and make the Italian rounds...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber, a past contributor to the NL, is a writer based in Italy...

...The road Unsworth imagines is very much like mine, and the lead characters of his novel are an amalgam of everyone I know: a retired American couple who fall into the clutches of an unscrupulous builder...

...It is, as you may suspect, a hideaway no longer...

...Summer rents at a few grand villas (with swimming pool, maid service, and a cook on call) go as high as $ 10,000 a week...

...The book was published this spring (Nan Talese/ Doubleday ) and tells the story of the diverse set of people who have places on one of the tiny strade vicinali, the neighborhood roads that are usually little more than dirt or gravel tracks...

...I call him Sisyphus, because he always seems to be pushing an empty wheelbarrow up the hill...

...Actually, on my road, it was the English yuppies who got into the clutches of an unscrupulous builder, and the retired Americans who had the feud with the local contadino...

...Property values have soared, of course, and the skyline reminds me a little bit of downtown Berlin...

...On the two occasions that I have eaten at his establishment, I should caution, the food has not been memorable—though the bill was, and the strained ambience...

...a middle-aged gay couple going through a crisis in their relationship...

...The transformation has been gradual, as more and more foreigners and Italian city dwellers have bought farmhouses, or the ruins of them, for summer places...

...Well, I have a farmhouse in Italy, at the foot of a low mountain in the southern part of Umbria, the hilly landlocked region resembling a misshapen mitten that tourism promoters have come to call "the Green Heart of Italy...

...Like many other tenant farms in the region, it was abandoned in the 1960s when land reforms broke up the big estates...

...These days, a contadino who once lived here resides in the center of the village...

...a solitary German recovering from a nervous breakdown who obsessively clears his property of undergrowth...

...Some are Italian women parked in their own traveling bordellos—RVs and campers...

...On our second visit we were served by waiters in white gloves, and the atmosphere was so stiff that everyone whispered...

...Then one of the leading Italian magazines ran a piece that even included a map showing the locations of (mostly Italian) celebrity homes, like those Hollywood maps indicating where the stars live...

...The contadini lived upstairs, the livestock on the ground floor in the big, arched barn that is now my living room...

...Absent, however, is one of my favorite details: the prostitutes who line the road between Orvieto and Todi...

...This got translated by the excitable Italian media as some sort of divine sanction: "Todi, the most livable city in Europe...

...At the time a surprising number of main roads in the area were still unpaved, and telephone lines were just arriving...

...Called After Hannibal, it was written by Barry Unsworth, a Brit who lives in Umbria (albeit closer to the northern part than to my zone...

...Ten years ago an annual theater and music festival was initiated in the (unrealized) hope that it would rival nearby Spoleto...

...Someone is even converting a home into a sort of pension in our piazza...

...I shuddered to see my own village on it...

...Nowadays our district almost has the feel of a budding Tinseltown...

...Periodically, cloying articles began appearing in the media about the area and the growing number of celebrities who had homes here, with the most attention devoted to the expatriate crew: artists, critics, the actor Ben Gazzara, and the late Time Warner chief Steve Ross, who bought a medieval ruin shortly before he died...

...After Hannibal is set mostly in the area of Umbria where Unsworth's house is located, between Perugia and Lake Trasimeno...

...English yuppies who get into a feud with a local contadino family...

...The first time, we were presented with a "music menu" of available selections, and the owner hovered, not only telling us which utensils to use but eventually confiding attitudes about other Americans that bordered on anti-Semitic...

...My house, where I spend a good part of the year, is part of a stone farmstead once inhabited by contadini (peasant tenant farmers) and their livestock...

...Currently the rentals column in the New York Review of Books is full of Umbria offerings, and people with houses engage in endless discussions of how much a swimming pool would add to the amount of rent that could be asked...

...Still, the Umbria novel, at least for the time being, has been written...

...I didn't find After Hannibal terribly satisfying: The story line is thin to begin with and it peters out pretty rapidly by the end...

...Back then this lovely part of Umbria, sitting in the Tiber Valley between the two ancient hill towns of Orvieto and Todi, was still a fair distance off the beaten track...

...In the evening I frequently run into groups of them taking the train back to Rome from Orvieto...

...an Italian professor whose wife has left him...

...The middle-aged gay couple do not seem to be going through any crisis, but the Italian professor and his wife got a divorce—though who left whom is not clear...

...I recall reading John Mortimer's book about Chiantishire life, Summer Lease, when it was published in 1988.1 felt little sense of identification with its characters or their adventures—until I went to a party at a great villa in Chianti country and found the terrace crowded with people and conversation right out of its pages...

...Others are African women, apparently organized in Rome...

...Cranes and scaffolding dot the various horizons as new roofs are put onto houses and medieval towers are turned into elegant country dwellings...

...They stand passively in the bushes at the side of the road, bundled up in sweaters when it is cold...

...Now, alas, southern Umbria is absolutely and totally "in...

...Animal heat rose: Aside from a fireplace in the main room upstairs, nothing else provided warmth...