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A three-bean salad is perfect throw-together summer fare, and it will keep long enough for people to linger over to the picnic table
And suddenly it is summer. Normally I spend weeks standing on the shoreline of the hottest season, reluctant to change my clothes, habits or the arrangement of things. And then, when I do, I am the person shuffling in, a bare toe here or shaved leg there, wiping six months of dust from the outside chairs and pulling the thermal bag from under the bed, looking at a dress. It is usually early July by the time I locate my sunglasses, or simply give up looking and buy another pair.
But this year, encouraged by my friend Alice and her suggestion of socially distanced time at the sea just north of Rome, I flung myself into the hottest season. We were like pale limbs just out of plaster, or animals blinking on their exit from a dark hibernation cave. After months contained in small spaces in a sleeping city, there was no time to hover over anything – clothes, inhibition, the shoreline – we were in, submerged in the inky cool of the Tyrrhenian sea, flapping and flailing like liberated animals, our skin on cold fire. Cold currents dance and tug in the stretch of coast between Santa Severa and Santa Marinella, and on good days a land breeze blows the water clear enough to see the pebbles wink and sea urchins spike from the seabed. Out of the sea we lay ourselves out on the hot pebbles to dry, bubbles of families under umbrellas dotted the beach doing much the same thing, the unselfconscious ease of a free pebble beach even more apparent after quarantena. Continue reading...