A Horse Opera in Umbria
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A HORSE OPERA IN UMBRIA
Merlino reminded me of a lot of Italians I’ve met on my travels to Umbria. He was big and handsome, and he could be engaging and affectionate one minute and aloof the next. He was always impatient, frequently jostling others aside to be near the front of the line.
We were paired up for a five-day, inn-to-inn horse trek from Assisi to the village of Castelluccio di Norcia, high up in the Appenine mountains.
I’m an Arizonan who somehow manages to get to Italy at least once a year. Merlino is a big five-year-old sorrel horse with a white blaze that runs from his forehead to his snout. He lives in a flowery meadow about an hour’s trot from the lost little Umbrian town of Pale.
We were both a bit nervous. I am not an experienced horseman. And when I first saddled him up and rode him around a big corral, he whinnied in fear when I faced him away from his owner, Daniela, who was putting us both through our paces.
“It’s ok,” she said to me in Italian. “He just doesn’t like to be alone.”
It hadn’t rained in months in Umbria, and the locusts were screaming in the humid 90-degree heat at La Malvarina, a country inn just outside of Assisi.
In Italy, an agriturismo is usually a working farm with rooms to let. La Malvarina bottles its own olive oil and has on-site cheese and sausage makers. It also has a killer restaurant (I’m thinking of fried zucchini flowers, fennel salad, roast chicken and ice-cold Umbrian white wine). And the chef offers cooking classes.
The inn sits at the base of Monte Subasio, where, 800-some years ago, St. Francis and his followers spent the summer months in the cool air, with the bonus hope that the higher elevation would afford them a better chance to glimpse the face of God in Heaven.
Heaven is in all things. And at La Malvarina it would be heaven enough just to walk through Assisi and gawk at the Giotto paintings in the Basilica of St. Francis. La Malvarina has a menu of adventure options ranging from day trips into Assisi and inn-to-inn horseback rides to walking and cycling options.
But this time. Claudio Fabrizi, whose family owns La Malvarina, had bigger plans.
In promotional photos for La Malvarina, Claudio, 68, seated in a rocker and leaning on a long cane, looks like a patriarch whose adventures are just memories. But in fact, he’s a strong farmer and a tireless horseman, in addition to being a genial host.
Decades ago, as a younger man, he had ridden from Assisi to Castelluccio, a distance of about 120 kilometers, five to seven hours a day, and he wanted to repeat the feat, this time with witnesses. It started out as a group of nine – locals would join us for segments along the four-day trek. And somehow a group of 13 muleteers from a mule-riding club in Rome had joined us. Their big, long-nosed mounts dwarfed even the largest of the horses, and they never missed a chance to tell anyone about why mules are wonders. They were smarter than horses, they said, more sure-footed and reliable, and I would see over the next few days that when those boys sat on their mules, it was as if the sum of the two creatures was a single being, a mule-faced satyr.
We set out on a late-June morning. The horses danced nervously outside the stables at La Malvarina as Daniela’s husband, Roberto, helped saddle everyone up. He and Daniela owned many of the horses, and they were lending them for the trip. Roberto would be our guide for the entire trip. The inn’s big gentle shepherd dog wove among the horses, and as soon as he plopped down carelessly on the dirt of the corral, a dark horse named Diablo stepped on his tail, perhaps intentionally, sending him off with a sharp yelp.
Merlino wanted to go and it was all I could do to keep him in check. As soon as Roberto pointed his mount down the trail, Merlino jockeyed me up near the front of the procession to be near his master and his stablemates.
We passed through dry grass meadows under olive trees, through hedges, past farms, and within an hour or so we were skirting the medieval walled hilltop village of Spello, clopping along cobblestone streets as drivers stopped their cars to watch and children pointed. Then we darted across the highway and into the woods, climbing up toward the Appenine Mountains.
Sometimes when I am skiing, I’m suddenly struck by a landscape and I realize that there would be no other way to see it except on skis. I had the same sense of wonder there in the Umbrian countryside, out in it, deeper than anything I had ever seen from a train or car window, and without a horse, I could never have gotten that far afield.
The trails often climbed along hillsides, the horses stepping perilously close to the edge in my mind. The trees hung overhead, and at least three times on the first day, my hat was taken from me by the branches, and inevitably, one of the mule guys would pluck it out of the tree and trot it up to me, calling, “Mii-Kol, yore hatttt,” in an affectionately scolding way.
We wound through a field of sunflowers, all of them turned the other way, up hills and through brooks, and then stopped briefly in a village where a shop girl came out of her store with a handful of big gnarled carrots that we broke up and fed to the horses. Then we made a final long climb up to the town of Pale. A horse in a meadow called out, and Merlino whinnied his response, but whether they knew each other, I can’t say.
It had started to rain, the first in months, and Claudio and the organizers decided to dismount in a field just beyond Pale, drive the horses up the final hour up the trail without riders and drive the humans in a van.
We spent the night in another agriturismo called Borgo LaTorre, an ancient stone building on a hillside in Acqua Santo Stefano, far above the city of Foligno. It smelled of lavender and other flowers that made you understand why the Italian word for “aroma” is profumo. Horses and mules wandered free in the fields, and a young black cat toyed with me as we waited for dinner: prosciutto and salami; farro in a creamy chicken soup; polenta; pasta with pancetta; and white Umbrian wine.
Roberto and Daniela lived within easy walking distance just down the narrow road, and so Merlino had spent the night in his own stall. We walked down and mounted up in the morning, and as we waited to take off, someone noticed a cherry tree bent under ripe fruit and started pulling cherry-bunch branches off the trees. Merlino chomped happily, eating the leaves, the branches, the cherries and the stones, which crunched noisily.
The divas of this horse opera revealed their roles as we climbed higher into Umbria.
Diablo was small and feisty, and fortunately, Renato, his rider, was a skilled horseman, because Diablo would buck and kick. Roberto said that he was just jealous. Once when I was riding next to him, Claudio pointed at his hooves and then at his eye, to warn me. And indeed, several times, I narrowly missed taking a horse shoe to the shins. Merlino seemed not to notice the kicks that would glance off the stirrups.
There was a pinto named Sioux, which the Italians pronounced “See-you,” and he was stand-offish to me. But as soon as he saw an Italian magazine writer on the trip with us, he started flirting with her, showing his teeth and sticking out his tongue like a Lothario on a Neapolitan street corner. They rode together for four days and would be the only ones in the original group to finish the whole trip.
Paolino was small palomino with a wheat-colored mane, who seemed to be in a world of his own.
Merlino was fickle. At times when I stroked his head and neck, he would nuzzle toward me and look at me with sad eyes. But if we had been struggling over which of us was guiding the other, he would look away, like an angry girlfriend. He always wanted to be near the front of the caravan, and once, when we paused in a village, he thought he knew where we’d go next and positioned himself to be in front. Then, the group headed in the other direction, and, despite my attempts to rein him in, he worked his way through the mules like a race driver to be up with his stablemates at the front of the herd.
He did not like the mules, and he would shy toward the side of the trail when they were near, even if the trail dropped precipitously. On the second day, we were snaking down a switch-banking, ramp-like trail, when one of the mules took the direct route straight down the hill, as if he were in four-wheel drive. Merlino was startled and bolted sideways off the ramp, dropping hard and four-footed to the path three feet below with me in the saddle.
But it was lunch time, and he sulked by the side of a meadow as we waited to eat, not even paying attention as one of the muleteers strode over the put on a show. He looked me straight in the eye as his mule started to dance with swooping and comical cross steps and sidesteps.
Lunch was the same as always, the same as breakfast, for that matter: strong prosciutto or pancetta cut from a haunch with a big knife; strong tasting cheese and bread, and stronger coffee, served an inch at a time in small glasses. And dinner was also the same, with a pasta and a salad added, and maybe a piece of grilled meat or sausage, whether in the villages of Preci or Castelvecchio, that night and the next.
The rain had set in hard by then, and those of us who were less experienced riders took the next day off. We had already ridden 50 or 60 kilometers and were not anxious to face the wet. We were high in the mountains and the temperatures had dropped significantly in the past two days as the storms blew through. The muleteers were in their element, however, as were some of the more experienced horsemen and women. And the riderless horses ran free and without saddles or bits or bridles, alongside the caravan like big obedient dogs.
The rest of took the van. Late in the morning, we waited at a country restaurant called Loch Ness (really) where the horse trail crossed the two-lane road at right angles, and after an hour or so, the trekkers arrived, splashing through a little stream by the roadside.
Paolino the palomino was running free, and he seemed to relish the splashing, turning to go back through the stream two or three times, maybe for effect, because he knew how beautiful he was. Then he ran up to me as I stood beside the van and stopped six inches away. We looked at each other face to face. He seemed to ask acknowledgment of something: his beauty, his freedom. I stroked my hand down his face between his big eyes and rubbed him along one side of his neck. He pulled his head away with a snort, shook it sideways, and then strutted back to the stream as the riders headed back on the trail. Then he took his place in the caravan and disappeared into the woods.
