The Next Day

The next day, Sally and I went to look at properties with a real estate agent named Anne Marie. Over the better part of an afternoon, she showed us a dirt floored garage that reeked of gas and oil, a roofless caved-in grain mill, and a small farm house abandoned by the amateurs who'd recklessly half-restored it. The garage went for $300,000, the farmhouse for $600,000, the mill was claustrophobically attached to occupied apartments. None came with any land, let alone the olive trees and vines essential to the dream. By the time any one of these dismal properties was fixed up it would cost a million dollars or more.

It was depressing and it was clear: "location, location, location" had driven the price of Tuscany well over our budget. That evening over dinner we reluctantly agreed we'd simply have to remain perpetual visitors.

But all that night I lay awake, haunted by the abandoned property Momo had shown us. The rogue peach and grape leaves I'd seen thrust above the smothering vines like the hands of drowning swimmers, they'd been waving at me. They needed a lifeguard. They needed pruning. The next morning I woke with my heart racing, convinced I could heal that broken piece of land, reclaim it from the wilderness and make it our dream retreat.

"Sally," I said over coffee, "we need to go back for a closer look."

Momo

While staying at Villore that summer, Sally and I wondered for the first time aloud whether it was possible to have our own little piece of the wild Crete Senesi, our favorite part of Tuscany. On a whim, Sally asked Villore groundskeeper, Momo Brubeck (the first American to live full-time in the area), whether he knew of a any fixer-uppers that might fit our unrealistically tiny budget. This is Momo.This is what he showed us.

And this was Sally's response: "Nah."

The Arabian Connection

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been in Laguna Beach, California, working with my friends Greg MacGillivray (Director) and Steve Judson (Editor) at MacGillivray Freeman Films, where we are finishing Arabia, the 3D IMAX feature that will be released in theaters this February, 2010. Needless to say, it is another link in the chain to my Tuscan dream.

In July 2006, I was returning from a 10-day scout in Saudi Arabia, to Rome where I would meet Sally before another relaxing and productive stay at Podere Villore. It just happened that Mark Strand (American Poet Laureate and one of my favorite foodie friends), was in Rome at the same time. He invited us to join him for dinner at the home of Patrizia Cavalli (the Italian Poet Laureate) for a delicious meal featuring an amazing stinco (ox shin slow-cooked in wine all day) and more than one bottle of--what else?--red wine. When Patrizia proudly served the wine, she asked if anybody at the table happened to know it. By happy coincidence, I did. It was Il Bosco, created by my friend Massimo Alessandro at his vineyard in Manzano, near Cortona. Here we are among his award winning Syrah vines during a visit. Ciao Massimo!

Cougar!

They don't have anything like this in Tuscany, so this may seem like a diversion. But before Sally and I decided to make our second home in Italy, we had to make a road trip out to the Great American West – 14,000 miles to be exact, 18 states in all. We were looking for a beautiful piece of desert on which to build a dream retreat in one of the other regions we love.

With my 1993 Ford Explorer packed to the gills, we rambled all over, camping most nights and eating fresh caught trout, wild mushrooms and foraged greens. We are especially fond of southern Utah and the arid Four Corners area. At the end of one long day's drive, we stopped at the remote campsite overlooking renowned Cathedral Valley in Capitol Reef State Park where Sally wanted to photograph at dawn. It was dusk and we'd just eaten dinner when the incident occurred. To read one of the closest recorded cougar encounters without injury, just follow this link to the official mountain lion report and report with pictures.

Aqueduct

Those ambitious ancients really knew how to multitask.

This is the Pont Julien in southern France, built 2000 years ago. During a picnic Sally and I took there in 2002, I began to sketch out the character of a young Roman architect who’d fallen in love with the architectural detail known as the semicircular arch.

During a visit to the Pont du Gard aqueduct in nearby Nimes, the highest stone arcade the Romans ever built, I realized my architect was also the historically forgotten hydraulic engineer who designed and built it. In an apartment in Rome, and at Villore during the summer and autumn of 2003, I began to flesh my engineer out in words. His name was Hiero Anasus (Hiero the Duck). The son of freed Greek slaves, he was a Roman citizen at the time of Caesar Augustus when the Pont du Gard was probably built. In about a year I’d written the first draft the novel I'm now polishing as AQUARIUS. But I left one thing out of the story -- politics.

Then came the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush. I knew the book had to be politically substantial. I did my homework and learned that a two-party system was at least partly responsible for bringing the Roman republic down, among other things. To express my deep disappointment in my countrymen, and to illustrate what happens when too much power is handed to one man, I refocused the story. And that is how my ancient hydraulic engineer became a Tribune of the People at the moment democracy died in ancient Rome.

Fishing in Tuscany

There isn't any, really. Not where we go. I just needed a hook.

After seeing a show of Sally's photos in Montalcino, Russell Wilkinson and Eileen Guggenheim (who run the New York Academy of Art where Eric Fischl mentors) were inspired to call and tell Sally how much they liked her work, which inspired Sally to invite them to dinner, where I was inspired to invite Russell fishing, which led us to bob around in my little 17-foot Boston Whaler in the Atlantic off Montauk, where we hooked sharks longer than the boat (and let them go), which gave us the subject for one of the tales that now gets told at the table of Podere Villore, the villa Russell bought near Montalcino the same week he saw Sally's photos, in Tuscany, where we've returned many times ever since Russell offered to let me use his guest house as a writing retreat while Sally taught her photo workshop during the scorching summer of 2003.

Roman Daze

Despite appearances to the contrary, this is not Roberto Benigni.

When Eric received a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 1997 (still pre helmet law), he and April invited Sally and me to spend Thanksgiving week there. We had a fantastic time in la citta' eterna.