slow by d o u g l a s g ay e t o nlife in a tuscan town

I n t r o d u c t I o n b y A l I c e w A t e r s p r e f A c e b y c A r l o p e t r I n I

“These photographs are rich and undeniably authentic, and could only have been made by someone with the deep sensitivity and understanding that goes beyond the boundaries of nations and languages, and represents the principles at the heart of the Slow Food movement.” —Carlo Petrini, Founder of the Slow Food movement

exploring the narrative boundaries of still photography propelled artist Douglas Gayeton on a remarkable journey of discovery into the heart of hidden Tuscany. His magical

portraits of rural Italians celebrate the rich cultural traditions associated with the simple everyday pleasures of growing, selling, preparing, and eating food. Gayeton provides an absorbing first person account of his transformative immersion in this rarely glimpsed world, offering an intimacy that carries us deeper into the images. With an anecdotal charm reminiscent of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and the visual vitality of Peter Beard’s collage journals, Slow’s interplay of pictures and words conveys a thrilling sense of narrative that transcends the page and transports you halfway around the globe.

Gayeton’s imaginative and interactive photographs are layered with handwritten notes, anecdotes, recipes, quotes, historical facts and sayings that cleverly bring context and color to the subject of each sepia toned image and draw us deeper into this romantic and rustic world. You will fall in love with the region’s kaleidoscope of charming local characters: the mushroom hunters and sheep farmers, the winemakers and fisherman, the bakers and butchers whose lives are profoundly bound to the rhythms of nature and inherently exemplify the popular principles that define Slow Food, an international movement dedicated to preserving local food traditions and honoring local farmers and producers.

Each photograph is titled with a traditional Italian saying and its English translation (e.g. Meglio Spendere Soldi Dal Macellaio Che

Dal Farmacista: “Better to spend money at the butcher than the pharmacist”). The rich use of language intertwines the literal with the figurative, resulting in a photographic approach critics have dubbed the “flat film.” It is a riveting story told in a riveting way: each image is actually comprised of multiple photographs taken over a period of time, ranging anywhere from ten minutes to several hours. With this process, Gayeton has managed to introduce the concept of time, both compressed and exploded, into his photographs. The result is exhilarating, and marvelously complemented by Gayeton’s compelling personal tale.

DouGlaS GaYETon is a multimedia artist who has created award-winning work at the boundaries of traditional and converging media for national Geographic, PBS, Warner Brothers and Sony. Recent documentary projects include Lost In Italy, a series Gayeton created and directed for Fine living network, and Molotov Alva for HBo. Gayeton is also co-owner of laloos Goat’s Milk Ice Cream in Petaluma, California, where he lives on a farm with his wife, laura, and their daughter, Tuilerie.

alICE WaTERS is an internationally renowned chef and the co-owner of Chez Panisse, the restaurant where she helped define California cuisine. a passionate advocate of cooking with locally grown and seasonal ingredients, Waters has written several books on the subject, including The Art of Simple Food (Clarkson Potter), and Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea (Chronicle Books). She is the Founder of Slow Food nation, President of the Chez Panisse Foundation, and an International Governor of Slow Food International.

CaRlo PETRInI is the founder of the Slow Food movement and author of several books on the subject, including Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair (Rizzoli). He is the Founder of the university of Gastronomic Sciences, and President of Slow Food International.

slowlife in a tuscan townp h o t o g r A p h s A n d t e x t b y d o u g l A s g Ay e t o n

I n t r o d u c t I o n b y A l I c e w A t e r sp r e f A c e b y c A r l o p e t r I n I

front Cover: Giuseppina’s Hands.baCk Cover: Conosco I Miei Polli [I Know My Chickens].

Edited by Katrina FriedDesigned by Gregory Wakabayashi

176 pages, 11" x 13" (landscape)100 sepia toned tritone images, 8 gatefoldsacetate jacket & 3 acetate tip-ins printed with text from

underlying imagesIncludes approximately 20 authentic Tuscan recipesHardcover, $50.00 ($62.00 Can)ISBn: 978-1-59962-072-5on sale: September 2009

PHoToGRaPHY/FooD

Published by Welcome Books®

an imprint of Welcome Enterprises, Inc.6 West 18th Streetnew York, nY 10011tel: 212.989.3200fax: 212.989.3205www.welcomebooks.com

To place orders in the u.S., please contact your local Random House sales representative, or call Random House customer service, toll-free: (800) 733-3000. Eastern and Central accounts: Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. –5:00 p.m. (EST); Western accounts: Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. –6:00 p.m. (EST)

To place orders in Canada, contact your local Random House sales representative, or call (888) 523-9292, Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (EST).

Copyright © 2009 Welcome Enterprises, Inc.Photographs and text copyright © 2009 by Douglas Gayeton

This is an uncorrected proof.

Printed in China

To learn more about Slow and see a preview of the book, please visit: www.welcomebooks.com/slow

This book began wiTh a single phoTograph Taken over a Typical Tuscan lunch in Pistoia, Italy, one January afternoon. Like most people, I owned a camera, and as a filmmaker, I had more than a passing interest in photography. I liked the immediacy of photographs, but they also left too much out. What my eyes saw was always grander than any lens could cap-ture. Its deficiency mainly had to do with the concept of time. Films were stories based on sequences of events—an arc, with beginning, middle, and end set tumbling through time; photographs were frozen instants, capturing no more than what could be seen in the blink of an eye. How could I introduce the presence of time, of an emerging and evolving story comprised of not one, but many moments, into a single photograph?

During the years Ombretta and I were together in Italy, her family made me the designated photographer of every celebration or shared

event, so they were used to seeing a camera in my hands. But when we gathered on this particular day, I didn’t take one or two pictures…I took nearly a thousand. The more I photographed, the less they seemed to notice. It was as if my camera became invisible. Afterwards I studied dozens of images of Ombretta’s mother and father, of their children and grandchildren, all collected around that dinner table. I compared gestures and expressions, searching for the precise moment that de-fined who each of them were, not only alone, but in relationship to one another. It was a giant puzzle, one that when finally assembled became a single snapshot of an entire afternoon spent together. It essentially collapsed time into what appeared to be a single moment—but one that never actually happened.

I t ’ s C a r ava g g I o ’ s F a u l t o r t I m e ( W hy I C o m p r e s s e d a t h o u s a n d p h o t o g r a p h s I n t o a s I n g l e m o m e n t )

Sunrise at Paolo’s. View over Pistoia.

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The True sTarT of my slow food educaTion came one spring when I met Daria. She was the cook at a Villa Celle, an estate outside Pistoia that featured one of the largest environmental art collections in Europe. She taught me how to find insalata di campo, not your typical five-dollar bag of mesclun but instead wild salads picked in the nearby hills, mostly in olive groves where pesticides still were not used. When selecting plants

she was always careful to pull up the entire root. She used it along with the leaves. The results were earthy, nutty, brimming with life.

I returned to the Villa often that spring. One afternoon, Daria’s husband revealed the family’s most prized possession, kept in the cel-lar behind boxes of old magazines: a coppa [ceramic urn] filled with vinegar. The secret was at the bottom. A deep crimson mudlike substance called la

madre. Over two hundred years old, this prized heirloom had been passed from one generation to the next. The madre functioned as a “starter”. Wine was continually added to the coppa. It reacted with the madre, resulting in an endless supply of table vinegar. All attempts to secure enough of their madre to start my own vinegar were respectfully rebuked until the day I showed up with a pho-tograph I’d taken of Daria. They proudly pinned it to the wall, handed me an empty jar, and led me down to the cellar.

p u t t I n g L A M A D R E I n a J a r

La madre is added to wine to make vinegar.

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while i reTurned To pieTrasanTa ofTen, osTensibly To shooT still lifes in Cervietti’s attic, what I really came for was the mandatory stop at Colonnata in the nearby foothills to buy lardo, a Tuscan delicacy made from the fatback of local pigs that was salted, rubbed with herbs, then aged for six months in vats of solid Carrara marble. Its flavor was buttery, and when placed on schiacciata [flat bread] fresh from the oven, the lardo turned translucent. One of my greatest Tuscan pleasures derived from inventing reasons to embark upon such culinary-inspired road trips. I visited one Chianti vineyard to buy wine by the case only because it required taking a series of axle-bending strade bianche [literally the while lines on an Italian map meant to signify dirt roads]. I went to one chee-semaker to buy sardo [a pecorino from Sardegna], and another to get wheels of Pistoia pecorino. Some butchers were known for their salami. Others had better prosciutto or coppa. I developed fierce loyalties to the merchants and artisans I frequented, and discovered that knowing where their food came from deeply impacted what I chose to buy and eat.

C u l I n a r y r o a d t r I p s o r F at

Wheels of pecorino cheese made from raw sheep’s milk.

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a few days laTer paTrizio and i seT ouT before dawn for The Town of Rosia, near Siena. Patrizio knew a man who raised cinta senese pigs. The cinta are big eaters and produce lots of fat. Feed is expensive, and when fat went out of style in the eighties, most people stopped raising the pigs. Farmers like Guido still kept a few on their property, and on cold winter mornings like this, a butcher came to do his work. As with nearly every-thing else related to agricultural life, slaughtering an animal at home was heavily regulated, but one of Italy’s charms is that while it’s an incredibly bureaucratic country with a staggering number of laws, most people don’t seem to pay much attention to them. Which is why I was given a rope and told to lead a cinta from its stall, across a paddock and into the barn. It was there I met Domenico and Sabatino, the two butchers. They tied the pig up then took me to a kitchen in the farmhouse. It was six-thirty in

the morning but they needed a few glasses of wine before getting to work. This gave me a chance to tell them what I was doing: Over the next two days, I wanted to document every step in the killing and breaking down of a pig. I said this abstractly, having never actually seen an animal killed before. Five minutes later I had.

As the day came to a close the workbench consisted of three large piles. One for fat scraps. One for meat scraps. And a third for choice cuts of pork. Thick slabs of fatback were neatly stacked at the end of the table. And in the end, nothing was left. The entire pig had been transformed into something else. Even the pig’s skin was cut into greasy strips and tied with string. Villagers would use it later to polish their shoes. Sadly, the concept of using the whole animal was borne out of the economic necessities of another time. None of these considerations apply to today’s generation. Most of them no longer eat coppa, not to mention migliaccio. And so one day this rich culinary knowledge and its attendant culture will disappear forever.

I decompressed in Patrizio’s car while driving back to Pistoia. We passed Siena in a red twilight gone gray then black. Before we reached Certosa my mind was already enveloped in that uncertain darkness; im-ages from the day played out repeatedly in my head. Everything came with a story. Even a slice of meat. The farther you traveled from the source, the more you forgot that. When I got back to my flat I stripped off my clothes in the doorway then spent an hour under a scalding hot showerhead, scrubbing my skin until the water heater finally gave out. As for my boots, I never wore them again.

K I l l I n g t h e p I g o r m y s h o e s a r e C a K e d W I t h B l o o d ( a C t u a l ly, I t h r e W t h e m aWay )

A few dAys lAter PAtrizio And i set out before dAwn for the town of Rosia, near Siena. Patrizio knew a man who raised cinta senese pigs. The cinta are big eaters and produce lots of fat. Feed is expensive, and when fat went out of style in the eighties, most people stopped raising the pigs. Farmers like Guido still kept a few on their property, and on cold winter mornings like this, a butcher came to do his work. As with nearly every-thing else related to agricultural life, slaughtering an animal at home was heavily regulated, but one of Italy’s charms is that while it’s an incredibly bureaucratic country with a staggering number of laws, most people don’t seem to pay much attention to them. Which is why I was given a rope and told to lead a cinta from its stall, across a paddock and into the barn. It was there I met Domenico and Sabatino, the two butchers. They tied the pig up then took me to a kitchen in the farmhouse. It was six-thirty in

the morning but they needed a few glasses of wine before getting to work. This gave me a chance to tell them what I was doing: Over the next two days, I wanted to document every step in the killing and breaking down of a pig. I said this abstractly, having never actually seen an animal killed before. Five minutes later I had.

As the day came to a close the workbench consisted of three large piles. One for fat scraps. One for meat scraps. And a third for choice cuts of pork. Thick slabs of fatback were neatly stacked at the end of the table. And in the end, nothing was left. The entire pig had been transformed into something else. Even the pig’s skin was cut into greasy strips and tied with string. Villagers would use it later to polish their shoes. Sadly, the concept of using the whole animal was borne out of the economic necessities of another time. None of these considerations apply to today’s generation. Most of them no longer eat coppa, not to mention migliaccio. And so one day this rich culinary knowledge and its attendant culture will disappear forever.

I decompressed in Patrizio’s car while driving back to Pistoia. We passed Siena in a red twilight gone gray then black. Before we reached Certosa my mind was already enveloped in that uncertain darkness; im-ages from the day played out repeatedly in my head. Everything came with a story. Even a slice of meat. The farther you traveled from the source, the more you forgot that. When I got back to my flat I stripped off my clothes in the doorway then spent an hour under a scalding hot showerhead, scrubbing my skin until the water heater finally gave out. As for my boots, I never wore them again.

K i l l i n g t h e P i g o r M y S h o e S a r e C a K e d w i t h B l o o d ( a C t u a l ly, i t h r e w t h e M away )

8

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my oldesT friend in pisToia, paolo caprilli, lived on a hill a few kilometers from town, in a village called Arcigliano. Paolo had an azienda agricola, which essentially meant he made olive oil and wine, like most families on the surrounding hills. Paolo also had a vegetable gar-den that supplied food to a little restaurant run by his friend, Patrizio. La Bottega del Poggio had only eight tables and no menu. Nor did it have a phone, which was amazing considering the restaurant only prepared enough food for whoever made reservations. Essentially, you had to know Patrizio’s cell phone number to get a table, but even that didn’t insure success because he rarely answered his phone. Fortunately, I knew Paolo, and he often brought me there to eat. The food was exceptional, so good, in fact, that I finally persuaded Patrizio to take me on in his kitchen. Sure, he said. We’ll start in the morning.

And that’s how I ended up working in a Tuscan restaurant. Patrizio never had a set menu. It evolved during the morning as he traveled from butcher to vegetable market to baker. He made note of what was in season and available, and built his menu accordingly. And since he only bought according to the number of reservations he’d taken for dinner that night, the shopping became a complex and potentially risky proposition. At the beginning I stressed over whether we’d run out of food or have too much left. But then much in those early days stressed me, as exemplified by my first night in the kitchen.

Patrizio told me to make pasta for eighteen. That I’d never made pasta before meant nothing to him. In fact, he upped the ante. He decided I’d be making tortelloni [stuffed pasta] instead. I took some flour and poured it

on the marble counter. I had no idea what came next. Simona, a Romanian girl in the kitchen, watched me in silence, then grabbed a bag of semolina, added it to the flour, pulled a basket of eggs from the fridge, cracked five of them over the flour, and started kneading. By the end of the afternoon she’d shown me how to not only work a pasta machine but also prepare the bietola [beet] and ricotta stuffing that went inside. At the end of the afternoon I was the proud maker of eighteen tortelloni, and an extra four,

a r C I g l I a n o o r I s ta r e at a p o t o F B o I l I n g Wat e r ( F o r t W o h o u r s )

just in case. Unfortunately, when Patrizio counted and saw I’d made too many, he got on the phone and invited four friends to dinner.

As the first guests arrived, Patrizio stuck his head in the kitchen door and told me to put six tortelloni on. Then, as an afterthought, he added that if I’d left any air pockets in them they’d explode in the water and probably burst the others. Since we had �� reservations and only �� tortel-

loni, if even just one broke we’d be short ... and I’d be fired.

I spent the next two hours—when not bussing tables and washing dishes—standing over a boiling pot, easing each tortello into the water. I even placed a large spatula between each one, like a barrier. Somehow I had the idea that if one broke this improvised technique would contain the damage.

Miraculously, I got through dinner without breaking a single tortelloni. I had a job.

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sauro owned a fruiT and vegeTable sTand a shorT walk from my flat. Most mornings, after stopping for an espresso and scanning the lat-est soccer gossip in La Gazzetta Dello Sport, I‘d check in with Sauro. He was the first person to impress upon me the importance of eating local seasonal foods. In December, Sauro had cavalo nero [black cabbage). Janu-ary meant tarocchi [oranges from Sicily]. In early spring, wild salads, and in June, cherries.

Aside from selling vegetables, Sauro offered lots of advice. For in-stance, he maintained—because Sauro had strong beliefs about practical-ly everything—that Tuscan beans could only be cooked in a special glass flask [fagioli al fiasco]. When I failed to find one in town, he insisted I take his. The recipe was simple. Into the flask went two few handfuls of dried beans, enough water to cover them, a generous swirl of olive oil, two gar-lic cloves, fresh sage, and salt. After simmering over a very low flame for a few hours the beans were removed and ready to serve. The origins of the dish date back to the 1�00s, when Tuscans would fill Chianti bottles with beans and water, and leave them to cook overnight snuggled against their fire’s slowly cooling embers. In the morning they ate beans for breakfast.

I wasn’t the only one to benefit from Sauro’s teachings. Even Ma-rio Batali, who did his restaurant apprenticeship a few kilometers north in Granaglione, had written about Sauro’s influence. Whenever Ameri-cans wandered into the shop, Sauro pulled out Batali’s book and flipped through its dog-eared pages until he landed on the one with his picture.

Sauro’s long standing relationships with local farmers meant he always had things first. Tartufi bianchi [white truffles] the size of golf balls from San Miniato; bags of tiny zolfini beans from Pratomagno; boxes of funghi porcini [porcini mushrooms] directly from secret sources in the neighboring hills. Whenever I asked to join his mushroom buying expeditions, Sauro went uncharacteristically silent. This was serious business, and his connections didn’t want publicity. But I was persistent. Finally it was his wife, Assunta, who decried that I had to be taken along. So one early afternoon we set off in his covered truck for La Montagna Pistoiese.

I fungaioli [mushroom hunters] were a strange, solitary breed. To conceal their secret foraging grounds they worked mostly at night, with only the moonlight to guide them. From late August through mid Octo-ber, the hills were filled with Tuscans in search of i porcini. For some, it was a weekend excursion. For others, mainly those with closely-guarded knowledge passed down from their elders, it was an extremely lucrative profession. In two or three months a seasoned fungaio could make more than a typical carpenter working an entire year.

Most fungaioli were paranoid, and went to great lengths to protect their identities from Sauro. He made anonymous deals with middlemen in the backrooms of bars and restaurant kitchens. On this trip we even met the apparent relative of a fungaio at the end of a long dead-end road. While I waited in the car, the mushrooms were weighed, and Sauro made his payment from a wad of Euro notes wrapped with a rubber band.

As we approached the town of Cutigliano, Sauro slowed his truck, and informed me that our next stop was at the home of his biggest fungaia. I was to stay quiet. As for my camera, it was better left in the truck. A few kilometers later we passed through a small village set against the base of the mountain and stopped at a recently completed home. This was where Imperia lived, in a house entirely paid for by mushrooms.

C o o K I n g Z o L f i n i I n a F l a s K o r a m u s h r o o m t h e s I z e o F a s o C C e r B a l l

Sauro is a fixture in La Sala, Pistoia’s open air food market.

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i firsT moved To florence in The eighTies, and some years laTer met Ombretta and moved to her home town of Pistoia. But my connec-tion to Italy goes back much further. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was born in a village called Camposanto, near Modena. Like many Italian emigres from that region, she settled in San Francisco just after the earth-quake in 1�0�, then went north, where she planted a vineyard with my grandfather in Fulton, a town near the Russian River in Northern Cali-fornia. As a child I spent many Sundays there lunching on homemade pastas and meat sauces that had literally simmered for days. Come harvest time each September we would be in the vineyard, picking grapes.

While my mother had maintained ties with her Spanish aunts and uncles still living in Secadura, a Galician village near Santander, we’d lost all track of the Italians on my father’s side. I had just one photograph of a man we believed was the last remaining member of that family. One morning I resolved to find out what happened to him.

Translated literally, “Camposanto” means holy ground. It’s also a name for a cemetery, which pretty much describes what I found. A flat, utterly desolate area dotted every few kilometers with peasant farms.

I stopped at the first one, found a man working on his tractor, and showed him the photograph. He enthusiastically pointed at a series of houses across the road. Could it be that easy? I knocked on the door. Two elderly women looked at the photograph, nodded gravely, then replied that they had no idea who the people in the picture were.

Over the next two hours I went from house to farm to flower shop to church. People were either convinced they knew the family—or certain they no longer lived in Camposanto. Every lead turned into a dead end.

I stopped at a bar and showed everyone the photo. No luck. Then a man reading a newspaper got up and took the snapshot out of my hands. After studying it carefully he announced that the man’s face indeed

looked familiar. When was the photograph taken? he asked. Maybe forty years

ago, I replied. Oh, then maybe it’s Amato Sala, he decided.Amato lived beside another bar a few kilometers away, but when I

got there everyone agreed that the man in the picture wasn’t him. Amato was nearly eighty and the man in the picture was much younger. I at-tempted to explain that the photograph was old, then just gave up and asked where Amato lived. The entire bar followed me across the road to a modest stone house. Amato opened his door to find a large crowd gathered outside. He looked to be nearly ninety years old and the sight of so many people made him visibly anxious. I showed him the photo and said it was of my great grandmother’s nephew and his wife. While I saw a resemblance, Amato insisted it wasn’t them, and he wouldn’t hear any arguments to the contrary. Besides, he said, my wife has white hair and the woman in this picture has black hair. That the photograph was forty years old, and that her hair could’ve changed in the intervening years, did nothing to change his mind.

The beautiful thing about Italian peasants is that even after cases of mistaken identity, their sense of social grace requires them to offer you a glass of something. Perhaps a slice of salami and bread to go with it. Maybe even some pecorino. Which is exactly what happened. I was in-vited inside and we toasted my quest, which in Amato’s mind was still incomplete. Amato’s wife remained silent, though she did produce a bat-tered cardboard box filled with photographs of his family, as if their sheer volume, and the stories each told would clarify that our lives were abso-lutely not connected.

I learned about people who had died in both wars. Farms owned and lost. Family emigrating to L’America (but not San Francisco). Births, deaths, and even marriages. He held up one photograph, an aunt he’d never met. It was a photograph of my grandmother on her wedding day.

l e t ’ s g o B a C K I n t I m e a F e W y e a r s o r h oW I e n d e d u p I n p I s t o I a o r P o S S o AV E R E U n P o ’ D i P A n E ?

Was this man the last remaining member of the Cattabriga family?

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