Occasionally, owning a second home in a country like Italy is probably nothing more than the result of an excess of funds and an adventurous spirit. But often there’s a deeper story. Life change, rootlessness, grief, joy, a longing to be a part of ancient history. The story of how we came to own Casa Erica is too long for now, but it goes something like: immigration from South Africa to the US (my family’s), a passion for both the learning and teaching of cooking (my mother’s), an equal passion for down-home, back-road, and cheap travel (all of ours), lives and families too scattered, and 9/11.
We find the tiny village of Lubriano, deep in the Calanchi Valley heart of Umbria, in the late nineties. We fall madly in love with the tiny main street, the cranky and cliché old nonnas shelling peas outside their millennium old doors, the fifty-cent coffees and the killer view. We have no thoughts of buying though, because we are still rational people. But then 9/11 happens and my mother, who falls somewhere on the continuum between courageous and crazy leaves her home in Denver to fly to Italy. While in the air on her first leg of the trip the US invades Afghanistan. I track her down in JFK and plead with her to go home. There is a WAR! You should NOT be flying CLOSER to the WAR…MOM! She does one of those “I can’t hear you, this is a terrible line” things and hangs up and flies to Italy. (No surprise, my parents used to pick vacation destinations based on State Department travel advisories, “there won’t be any other tourists there dear!”) And naturally while there…she buys a house. Which would be fine if it was really a house, but it’s a rabbit’s warren of rooms in an ancient monastery. The whole thing sounds bonkers. My Mom is a cook; there is no kitchen. She speaks no Italian and not a soul in town speaks English, Zulu, or Afrikaans, imagine! We LIVE in the US and lead very busy and frugal lives. But NEVER YOU MIND because the deed is done, and my Dad and my husband, as patient and wise in their Yoda-like way, just nod and smile.
The upside is that Italy is then still on the lira (read: everything including property is still cheap), the downside is that, well, we don’t live there. All of our lives are immersed in corporate careers and babies, neither of which fare well out of their natural habitats. But my mother and one of my brothers scour the Internet for cheap tickets and hop on planes to do the grueling restoration whenever they can. God bless them. They make a home. Our whole family goes when we can, but the heavy lifting is done by Mom and brother. A few years later another part of the monastery comes up for sale and my parents buy it. Either because I am immensely spoiled, or because one day the life sucking-ancient-house-maintenance joke will be on me, they call it Casa Erica, or, in the un-Latinate version, Heather’s House.
The uses of each of the rooms within the monastery have been lost to time, so we try to sleuth and dig (literally!) to unearth the secrets of the space. We discover ancient pottery, a smoker chimney built into a now sealed wall, and ceiling frescoes of lemons. From these clues we deduce that Casa Erica was the monastery's kitchen. Amazing. From within these walls came nourishment for those doing God's work. Even now, Lord, may it be so.
It’s a magical dichotomy, crude in its dusty cantinas and lack of modern convenience, yet ethereal in its monastic history and idyllic setting. Dozens, if not hundreds, have now come here, and I doubt there’s one who hasn’t been touched in some way. People love it - we have friends who’ve gotten second jobs just to come back. There are centuries of prayers saturating the two-foot thick stone walls. The Jesuit monks who lived here set the course with their lives of generosity and simple living. Wake up, pray, break bread, read, work, and serve, walk everywhere, lift a glass, laugh and talk, rest, repeat. Life was hard in Europe in the sixteenth century and I’m sure the monks’ jobs were back and heart breaking at times. We toast them often. We are a bunch of former accountants so it doesn’t go unnoticed that the wine we toast with sells at Costco for $22.99 a bottle but down the street at Luigina’s it only sets us back $4. A pizza to sell your soul for is $5 in the pizzeria built into the old olive oil mill. We do rapid calculations of how much wine we need to drink and pizza we need to eat to “pay” for the next plane ticket. Because to be there is to love it, and to be forever destined to yearn for more. Ah, Italy.
