Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes

is also when the priest comes by to bless the house. Everyone does a gigantic cleaning for it. He will bless the eggs then, too.”
    â€œWe did that in Winona,” Ed remembers. “After my mother cleaned the house, she sprinkled holy water on the beds to protect us, then the priest came to bless the house.”
    â€œDid you have your house blessed, Antonio?” He lives alone and his girlfriend refuses to stay there because of the
“confusione.”
He just smiles.
    I never knew Ed slept in a blessed bed. Maybe that explains him.
    Â 
    Easter itself is a peaceful day. In my favorite church, San Cristoforo, a red basket of round buns is passed out to the twenty or so worshipers. Bread of life. The priest blesses and shakes a few drops of holy water over them. One woman brings her own basket of bread for her Easter dinner and asks for blessings on it, too.
    Many who shouldered those figures through the town must be groaning under heating pads. We take pots of pink hydrangeas to Donatella and to Anselmo, and see to our embarrassment that they already have several, as well as mounds of chocolate.
    Families are gathering around long tables and someone—not I—is bringing out the platter of lamb ringed with rosemary. I'm happy not to have cooked all day, happy not to serve forth, happy not to have so many dirty dishes that they must be taken outside and stacked on the wall. Another time,
va bene
. Tonight, we're alone. Because they are so fresh, we have a bowl of peas with plenty of pepper and a hunk of butter melting into them. A lovely first course. A bottle of clean white wine, veal chops, and a salad of wild greens “married,” as the Italians say, to our oil and a little fifty-year-old balsamic, so precious that I sprinkle the elixir onto the lettuces with an eye-dropper.
    Since Ed is Catholic, I expect him to know everything about the liturgical year. “What does ‘Maundy' mean?”
    â€œUm . . . I think mandate comes from the same Latin root.”
    â€œWhat was the mandate on Thursday?”
    â€œTo wash the feet of the poor? Seems like that was it. From Mary Magdalene washing Jesus' feet.”
    â€œRemember that small, intense Piero della Francesca fresco of her with her hair still wet in the Arezzo cathedral? It's as intimate a look at her as his Jesus just rising. Too bad it doesn't hang near his
Resurrection.
”
    â€œMary Magdalene comes to mind when I think about that music in the procession Friday night.”
    â€œWhy?” I'm waiting. Having grown up in a very Polish Catholic church where he served as an altar boy for years, Ed isn't as mystified by rituals as I am.
    â€œWell, the word ‘maudlin' comes to mind—and ‘maudlin' comes from ‘Magdalene.”
    â€œThose cross-bearers from Friday night probably could use some attention to their feet about now.” I think of the displaced women on the road to Sansepolcro. “Were there the same number of prostitutes as there are stations of the cross?”
    Ed shakes his head. “I'm glad Easter is over. Now it can just be spring.”

Following Spring:
The Watery Veneto
    INFATUATED WITH ITALIAN SPRING, WE FOLLOW it north to the Veneto in April. I am returning to Venice, after an absence of twenty-five years. As we drive into the flat, big-sky landscape, I'm reeling through my earlier visits. Slippery, slippery time—the interim slides away; Venice lives close in memory. I am puzzled by the long interval, equally puzzled by the particular allure of Venice. I've read that bees, their stomachs full of nectar, have magnetic forces in their brains which lead them to the hive—I feel that way toward Venice. Flamboyant and decadent, it is still to me a sacred city. I'm a fool for beauty, and its poise on the edge, facing the exotic east, with its back turned to the rest of Europe, adds to the attraction. I had not meant to stay away so long. There's more to the