Yes, there is a Wine Museum in Italy. It’s a sort of curatorial outcropping of what the Italians call agriturismo, and it is to be found in a small, clean, neat town in Umbria called Torgiano, which we assume is pronounced with dulcet tenderness as “Tor-jee-an-o,” the syllables seeping out in a trickle, but which one local – responding to our request for directions – pronounces fiercely with a much more economical “tor-jon-o.” He makes it sound like a medieval weapon or torture device.
Torgiano is located not too far to the south of Perugia, where we are staying at the Hotel Brufani. But the traffic circle leading out of Perugia is so cluttered with meaningless signs pointing to obscure towns that I believe it takes us at least six hours to get there. It is, in fact, late in the day when we park in an otherwise empty lot on the edge of the place. The light is a soft pigeony gray that offsets very nicely the simple, dignified war-memorial in an adjacent leafy little park. Torgiano, as I said, is neat, clean and proper, despite its age, although Aldo keeps muttering, “I’m gettin’ them di Chirico creeps.”
“Well,” I ask, “isn’t that better than being back in the States and getting the Andrew Wyeth willies or something?”
Yet Torgiano does have a certain di Chirico stillness to it: the tall tower with the clock tells time even though the place is so empty there seems to be no one to tell time to other than some old men leaning against buildings and a few women with children. They are all waiting for the daylight to end, I suppose. The stillness has a sense, too, of Antonioni and his slow tracking shots across the piazza at nap time.
However, that this is a carefully manicured little community probably has less to do with di Chirico or Antonioni than the influence of the Lungarotti family and their winery outside town. Their business began back in the early ’60s, and now they have a hotel in Torgiano, and a restaurant, and they created and run the museum. There’s also an olive oil museum.
We are the only visitors to the museum: It’s less than an hour to closing, we are told by the woman at the ticket booth. She has tall, complicated blond hair and makes me think of Monica Vitti in a character role.
One traipses in and out of a series of salons that are densely but sensibly organized with everything from the basic equipment that has gone into pressing grapes since before the industrial age onto decorative pieces, and wine labels, and chalices, and cups, and a centuries-old ceramic bust of Pope Clement cradling a bunch of ripe grapes as if he had just been given a kitten. It would be cute if Clement also didn’t look tipsy.
Aldo and I are not bowled over, really, but that probably wouldn’t happen anyway unless the museum galleries led into a shaded courtyard and Monica Vitti reappeared with a pleasant bottle of Lungarotti wine, perhaps the Rubesco, its trademark DOC wine.
We leave Torgiano and drive back toward Perugia. Ancient stone towns, Assisi included, dot the hills, and vistas along the way open up onto grape vines. And yet, despite this gentle lesson in agriturismo, what Aldo and I will most remember is a slight nagging chill — that we somehow stumbled onto a pedestrian tour mapped out by the Edward Hopper of Italy.
