The Fire Sermon

Winter kept us warm...

The coldest winter that I have spent somewhere was in Castiglione Fiorentino, by far. We were living in a second-story stone apartment that overlooked the Val di Chio, which meant that there was nothing between us and the cold winds whipping up and down the valley. Thanks to Francis Mays runaway hit and the consequent movie Under The Tuscan Sun, set in the neighboring town of Cortona, people have the gravely mistaken image that living in Tuscany means just that, under the sun. However, when winter comes calling in the Tuscan hillside, you better take note. It is cold, bitter cold.

The heating for the apartment was radiant, fueled by gas-filled bombale. These were heavy, heavy metal canisters about three and a half feet high, and weighed a small ton when empty, and slightly more than a small ton when full. There was a man in town who over the course of time became fondly known to me as the bombala man.

During the summer I had to pass his shop every day on my way to the pool at the bottom of the hill. Every day I said, “ciao” and every day he shrugged his shoulders and made a slight unintelligible grunt, and not a friendly one at that. This charade went on for quite some time. He was gruff, immensely pot-bellied, unkempt, usually wearing a “wife-beater” soiled t-shirt, his pants were always unzipped, and he had perhaps two or three remaining usable teeth, “usable” being generous by comparison.

As the summer eventually turned to fall, the weather soon began to turn towards the harbingers of winter as well, the autumn being surprisingly truncated. The Tuscan summer was over without a trace by late September. The evenings became cooler, all of the long overripe figs had all fallen as well as the leaves, and the fig-eating yellow jackets were zooming no more. Winter was indeed coming. The large orange muppet-like cat next door was getting fatter and fatter on the pasta that was put out for him, and the days began to shorten.

Then there was the bad weather as Papa Hemingway once wrote. And, in many ways also, it was a winter of our discontents.

I had only needed to get bombole a handful of times the entire duration of the fall, and I had always asked the people at the school to call someone to bring them. But, it was never the bombala man who delivered them. I didn’t really put two and two together until one day, my usual bombale supplier was not available, and it was getting cold, really cold, so I stood tall, and braved the cold and went to the bombala man. His shop was a menagerie of rusted out bicycles needing repair, piles of oily rags, lots of bombale and every kind of metallic knick-knack that you would imagine filling a small-town Italian repair shop, read junk.

I asked him then if he had bombale, and suddenly the universe that was his toothless mouth opened up in a broad smile and his bloodshot eyes widened with something akin to delight. In an effusive gush of Tuscan dialect, warped and garbled by the lack of teeth, he said something that I never understood, and never really understood him afterwards, but I realized that on that day, I had a new friend. It turned out that there was a rivalry with the other bombola supplier who had usurped the bombola man’s turf, specifically my landlord and all his properties. So, me breaking the ranks and coming over to his side of the line drawn in the sand was monumental. From that day on he became my supplier, perhaps partly out of my fear for slighting him, and partly sentimental for the bond we had forged on that cold, wintry day, as every time that I would pass his shop from then on, I would get an open-armed “CIAO, Professore!” from the bombola man.

However, getting the bombole was another feat altogether. Weighing as much as they did, and considering we lived up a steep flight of stairs and he was in no shape to climb them, even without the bombole on his shoulder, I soon became the porter as well. Problem was, the bombale did not last more than a couple days at this point in the winter because of the inefficiency of the heating system. More often than not, we were wrapped up in multiple layers with hats and gloves on, cracking the ice off of our two frozen cats’ whiskers every now and then, trying to not use up the gas too quickly. It was cold, bitter cold.

But, one of the highlights of this winter was something extremely unique and was one of the occasions in which the cold lost its steeled, bitter grip. It was the presepe vivente, or living nativity. The entire winding, steep hill-top Tuscan town of Castiglione Fiorentino is transformed into a living Biblical tableaux, with stages set up all around the town, complete with livestock in stables and Roman centurions galloping up and down the streets in full armor, tossing “Roman” coins to the children while all the residents of the town wander through the streets, going from station to station, enjoying winter refreshments along the way.

It was a spectacle without spectacle, which is what perhaps made it so fascinating. There were no streaming electric lights nor gaudy decorations, but rather a living, breathing metamorphosis of an entire community into a very magical event. It was not an event with a “destination,” but part of the enchantment was that is was just to wander through casually and to wonder at it all. People from all of the surrounding towns would come in and join with the living procession, relishing the spirit of community without a commercial element, without what has become Christmas for much of the world.

It was a warming feeling, which was good, for the bombale were proving to be a very unreliable source. It was memorable, perhaps more in its subtlety than extravagance. The winter did eventually subside, and spring did surprise us once again, and the memories of the bitter cold, as with all things, in Time, dissipated.