Excerpts: how we write

I was twenty-four the first time I walked through that gate as the man in charge.

The villa stood on the hills above Florence, and it was no ordinary villa: a historic residence the world envied us, owned by one of the great families of Italian finance, people who owned banks and industries and appeared in the newspapers only when they chose to. What I owned was a diploma in agriculture, a discharge from the Carabinieri and the age of a boy. From that day on, the estate's farm answered to me.

To welcome me they sent a retired clerk, a man who had known those fields and those men all his life. He introduced me to the workers one by one and then, in front of everyone, begged them not to play tricks on me. Madness, I thought. I had been through the barracks and the service of the Carabinieri, and here was a man fearing peasants' pranks on my behalf. They introduced themselves, shook my hand and went back to work. No tricks, that day. Only eyes taking my measure.

Because the men I was to lead were almost all my father's age, some older. Men who had known the land before I was born, and who looked at that boy with the question anyone would have asked: what do you think you can teach us?

I did not answer in words. My service in the Carabinieri had taught me something no school teaches: to command is not to raise your voice, it is to be obeyed without having to raise it.

pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of an aqueous solution. The scale runs from 0 to 14: values below 7 indicate an acidic solution, values above 7 an alkaline or basic one, and 7 corresponds to neutrality, that of pure water at room temperature. Each unit of difference on the scale corresponds to a tenfold change in the concentration of the ions responsible for acidity: a product at pH 4 is ten times more acidic than one at pH 5, and a hundred times more acidic than one at pH 6. This logarithmic scale has very practical implications: small variations in pH mean large variations in the environment that micro-organisms have to face.

Why does pH matter so much for food safety? Micro-organisms, like all living things, have a range of pH within which they can survive and grow. Outside that range, the internal chemical reactions necessary for life no longer work properly, and the micro-organism stops growing or dies. The most dangerous foodborne pathogens, such as Clostridium botulinum, cannot survive in environments with a pH below 4.6. That value is the single most important boundary in the safety of fermented foods: below pH 4.6 botulinum can neither grow nor produce its toxin, regardless of any other parameter.

Livorno, 1653. The new city, commissioned by the Medici to serve as a bulwark and refuge for merchants from across the globe, was already a mosaic of languages, colours and smells. The air of the harbour, mingled with the saltiness of the sea, blended with the stench of the stables, the pungent aroma of spices unloaded from Levantine ships and the acrid smell of the tar used to caulk the hulls. The quays were thronged with porters shouting orders, merchants in long robes with ever-watchful eyes, soldiers with halberds guarding the goods, and women trying to sell bread, wine or fruit to the sailors who had just disembarked.

Moving through that crowd was the Martini family. Lorenzo, the father, was a sturdy man, with arms hardened by his work as a porter and a back bent from carrying sacks of salt and barrels of wine. His skin, weathered by the sun and wind, bore witness to a life spent on the quays and, at times, at sea, when he was enlisted as a makeshift sailor. At his side, whenever he could, was his son Carlo, a dark-haired boy with deep-set eyes, who regarded the harbour as an immense theatre where the comedy of the world was staged every day.

This book existed before it was written. It existed in three cardboard boxes kept in a sacristy, in twenty-seven notebooks with mismatched covers, in forty years of typewritten homilies, of letters, of clippings underlined twice. Its author had been writing it every day, without knowing. Only one thing was missing: order.

A man who gathers notes for a lifetime is not disorganised: he is faithful. He returns to the same thoughts every time life sets them before him again, and every time he adds a sheet of paper. Disorder is merely the shape faithfulness takes when there is no time to stop and put things straight.

The work of curation was, first of all, a work of listening. Reading everything, without haste. Recognising the themes that return, and beneath the themes the questions. Choosing, which is the hardest act of all: every page left out was weighed twice. And then giving the whole a structure the author could recognise as his own, because a well-curated book does not have the curator's voice: it has the voice of the man who lived it, in order at last.

Twelve chapters, out of three boxes. The rest rests in the archive, but it is not lost: it is what holds up, invisibly, the pages you are about to read.

Fifty years ago a boy in a borrowed tie and a girl in a home-sewn dress said two yeses in a church that in winter was colder inside than out. They had nothing: a Vespa, one job between them, and that stubbornness which in our family is handed down better than the silverware.

From that day on they did everything together: three house moves, two children, a vegetable garden that never stopped giving tomatoes and advice. Dad still says the secret is to agree with Mum; Mum says the secret is letting him believe it. I say I saw the secret every morning, and it was two espresso cups on the table, side by side, since before I was born.

Raise your glasses: to the next fifty years. To our parents, who taught us love without ever giving us a lesson.