The actor Michael Tucker and his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, having sent their last child off to college, were vacationing in Italy when they happened upon a small cottage nestled in the Umbrian countryside. The three-hundred-fifty-year-old rustico sat perched on a hill in the verdant Spoleto valley amid an olive grove and fruit trees of every kind. For the Tuckers, it was literally love at first sight, and the couple purchased the house without testing the water pressure or checking for signs of termites. Shedding the vestiges of their American life, Michael and Jill endeavored to learn the language, understand the nuances of Italian culture, and build a home in this new chapter of their lives. Both a celebration of a good marriage and a careful study of the nature of home, Living in a Foreign Language is a gorgeous, organic travelogue written with an epicurean’s delight in detail and a gourmand’s appreciation for all things fine. Driving through Italy, television actors Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry and her young Korean^B assistant are seduced by the stately, relaxed pace of Italian life. Swapping their dream of a house in Provence for an Italian venue, they find a friend's home for sale near Spoleto, and Tucker quickly seals a deal. The delights of Italian food awaken Tucker's latent epicure. His determined compulsion to savor every edible raised on local farms ultimately obliges him to spend some serious hours at the local gym. Returning for a time to their California home, they want to share their love of Italian food by hosting a dinner party, but egocentric American friends can't even gracefully accept this generous invitation, citing a catalog of dietary restrictions and food fears. Foodies will slaver and bristle with envy at the surfeit of pungently fresh truffles that appear at seemingly every meal. Mark Knoblauch Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Living in a Foreign Language A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy By Michael Tucker Atlantic Monthly Press Copyright © 2007 Michael Tucker All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87113-962-7 Chapter One There's a hill covered with olive trees that nestles around our house like the strong, safe lap of an infinitely patient grandfather. We called it a mountain until we hiked up to the top one day and saw the snowcapped Sibillini stretching out across the horizon. No, it's a hill-one of many colline that climb to the east of us and roll out to the north and south, shimmering with silver-green olive leaves as far as you can see. The tiny stone house sits tucked into the side of the hill so that our bedroom window isn't exposed to the early rays of the sun, but that morning I was up with the first soft light in the sky. I had slept the sleep of the sated. Perhaps the three glasses of grappa at the end of dinner had helped a bit with that. Along with the bottomless pitcher of the local red wine that went down so easily with the wood-grilled lamb and the fried potatoes. God, those potatoes. Maybe it was all a dream; I never eat potatoes after a big bowl of pasta. Not in the same meal. Not in real life. The pasta, by the way, had been simple-just noodles in olive oil with about a half-pound of fresh truffles shaved over the top. Truffles pop out of the ground like weeds around here. The sky did a cross-fade from gray to light blue and one by one the birds started to sing. I had nowhere to go for a couple of hours; I just lay there and listened to them. I had flown over two days earlier to close the deal on this farmhouse in the hills of Umbria and I was heading back to California later that afternoon. My inner clock was totally confused at this point, but sleep wasn't really the issue; I could sleep some other time. The Rustico-that's its name-has been standing on this hill looking west out onto the vast and verdant Spoleto valley for over 350 years. "Rustico" means a farm workers' cottage, a place where migrant workers slept when they came every year to harvest the olives. Now it was going to shelter two migrant actors. I went down to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. I sat at the table under the pergola just outside the kitchen door and watched a bird with black and white striped plumage and a smart-ass Woody Woodpecker look on his face squawk and swoop down from the trees, strafe the vegetable garden and then soar up for a couple of laps around the chimney. You could already tell it was going to be a hot day. But inside the Rustico, with its three-foot- thick stone walls-which make it look considerably larger on the outside than it feels inside-it was as cool as a wine cellar. I called Jill in California, where it was nine o'clock the evening before. Totally confusing. I told her all about yesterday's meeting at the notaio 's office, where I signed the papers and passed over the certified checks-one above the table, one below. I told her how the notaio solemnly intoned the whole