Wake up and smell the bread

The first thing Nicola did when I arrived in Camaiore was to take me to Monteggiori. After Monteggiori, Casoli. After Casoli, Santa Lucia, then Metato. 

Anyone who knows the area knows they are the real jewels, far more authentic, relaxed, and I daresay beautiful, than the more famed Viareggio, the striped umbrella-lined beaches of Lido di Camaiore, or the overrated Forte dei Marmi, which all sit below on the Versilia plain. 

Tiny, off-the-beaten-track villages with locals who look at you - at least initially - from underneath their eyebrows. Ordinarily, the have one restaurant or one bar (meaning cafe) but not both, and in the case of Casoli, even a little general store, you could be forgiven for wanting to keep them and their sweeping views of the Tyrrhenian Sea all to yourself. On a clear day, you could see Gorgona and Elba off the coast. 

I felt in love instantly: it wasn’t a difficult sell.

Wandering through Monteggiori, a medieval hilltop village with a population of little more than 100 people, I placed my hand on a cool stone wall, as if trying to convince myself it was all real. Nicola turned around to look at me, and with my mouth hanging open, all I could muster was: ‘It smells like flowers!’ He just smiled. I guess his plan was working.

I learned to navigate change and seasons through fragrance. 

At language school in Lucca, we talked about the difference between ‘odore’ (odor), and ‘puzzare’ (to stink!) As often happened, that key unlocked another linguistic door and a little lightbulb turned on. From that moment I heard the word and its derivatives everywhere, and mostly from my mother-in-law, Carmela Or maybe it was just that I heard her speak the most - at least in Italian.

It was late May, the jasmine was blooming everywhere, and it did smell like flowers, at every turn. Even as we wove our way up the mountains on the scooter, me as rookie passenger holding on tight with eyes squeezed closed, all I could smell was jasmine. As the jasmine faded, the summer storms gathered pace and the scent of huge rain droplets hitting the earth permeated the air. We lived next door to a bakery: I could hear the bakers through the night as they chatted and whistled and sang along to their radio. 

And I could smell the bread that from 7am the next morning I could jump over the fence and buy: a brutto di Camaiore (a strong bread that came in white or integrale (wholemeal), a pain paillasse, favoured by Carmela, focaccia, Nicola’s favourite, or for a few wonderful and short weeks a year, schiacciata all’uva: a sweet grape focaccia, showered in sugar. Schiacciare means ‘to squash or crush’; ‘uva’ means grape: the result is yes, a type of squashed juicy sweet focaccia. You have to be early on Saturdays to get that one. But my longstanding favourite was the simple pane integrale, a long fermented, salty, wholemeal. The traditional pane toscano has no salt. My favourite theory on why is that the Pisans, traditional rivals of Florentines, blocked salt shipments. The Florentines steadfastly kept baking, minus salt. Another theory is that Tuscan food is traditionally pretty heavy on the seasoning already, so the bread is kept plain. That strikes a chord with me too, having watched the horror on the faces of retreat guests at Yoga in Italy as 80-year-old cook Maria Angela would throw near handfuls of salt into dishes as she presented her cooking classes (with the exception of pesto, which she rightly deemed salty enough with just the cheeses). 

At the retreat, too, I was guided by the scent of the rosemary, which we often went to pick from the neighbours’ garden, to put on the cecina, a typical Tuscan chickpea bread which guests received poolside as an aperitivo on their first night at the villa. 

At home in the morning, I cherished the smell of dark, strong coffee, straight from the moka into tiny fire-engine red espresso cups I bought from the only homewares store in town, with a wedding gift voucher. On Saturdays, the smell of fresh vegetables and the ‘odori’ (literally, smelly things - herbs!) which you’d get a big bunch of, gratis, with your vegie purchase. In autumn, chestnuts roasting on the main street at festivals. 

When I married, it was the scent of Chanel No. 5 I carried with me: unknown to Carmela, who had given it to me as a gift on my first day in town, it was the scent worn by my mother and grandmother. 

When I arrived in Tuscany for the first time, as a 16-year-old, it was the gritty, dirty, smoky smell of railway station Santa Maria Novella that grabbed me: after the noise did. 

The mountains, too, I would learn in my nearly three years in Camaiore, had their own scent and their own secrets: like the wild garlic that groww prolifically for a few weeks each year, with its own smell; the dirt when rain fell, the tiny wildflowers of May and June, the dust that would get up your nose, once you’d climbed higher than about 800 or 900m. This was especially prescient in the last climb to Monte Matanna in late summer, where you emerge from rainforest-like jungle into clear sky, silver sunflowers that always made it feel like a moonscape, more tiny flowers of all persuasions and colours, and the sound of cow bells in the distance. Like a Tuscan Sound of Music scene. 

And when you reached Matanna, the stink of animals. Animals, and cheese. More cheese than you could ever eat. We went there just after we were married, a little room with a mountain view and a simple bed, hiking during the days and returning at night to another variation of wild boar and a gigantic plate of cheese. 

Scent is memory; it is visceral. The smell of food tied to family and culture, of the skin of tiny babies, of making love, of fresh bread, flowers, of vanilla, warm summer nights, of soap in the shower, of rain. It anchors us, helps us make sense of the world. The scent of a scent can transport us to a person or a place long-buried in memory.

So when I lost my sense of smell after a virus in 2019, I felt cast adrift. I lost my sense of taste, too, although that has returned a little. The world did - does - feel muted. Sometimes I think I can smell petrol while I’m filling the car, or coffee, while I’m making it. After a course of antibiotics it returned, albeit for a week, and I cried at the smell of lavender, of fresh espresso. When I don’t realise the toast is burning, that’s just annoying. But not being able to smell onions frying off, or my cakes as they bake in the oven is a little sad.

Until it returns, if and when it does, I content myself with the memory of scent, and the visuals that accompany those memories. And they are joyously plentiful.