The Beneficial Magician, or: On the Naming of Tubers

The wind today comes from the northwest, steady enough to press against you as you walk up via Volta, which is what they call the street, naturally, because the street leads to his house. Number eight. A low building, plaster the color of old teeth, shutters that have been repainted so many times they no longer close properly. There is a plaque. There are always plaques in these towns where something happened once and the town has spent the next two centuries trying to decide whether it was important.

This one reads, if you squint past the lichen: benefico mago. Beneficial magician. Not for the pile, not for the battery, not for the letter to Sir Joseph Banks that rearranged the century. For the potato.

I will say that again because the wind is loud and the sentence may not have carried. Alessandro Volta is remembered in Lazzate not for capturing lightning in a stack of zinc and copper discs but for bringing a tuber home from Savoy.

The year was 1777. Volta was traveling on behalf of Count Firmian, the Habsburg governor of Lombardy, through Switzerland and Alsace and the valleys south of Mont Blanc, ostensibly studying the gases that rose from marshes and the behavior of electrical fluid in different atmospheres. In a village called Aiguebelle, which sits in the crease where the Arc valley narrows before Modane, he watched peasants pulling from the earth a root that he recognized as Solanum tuberosum but had never seen cultivated on this scale, with this seriousness, as a thing people ate not because they had nothing else but because it sustained them. He took some. He brought them here, to this low house on this street now named after him, and he planted them in the orchard behind the building, and he told the farmers of Lazzate that they should grow this thing, that the soil here, which is sandy and acid and drains fast because the moraines left it loose ten thousand years ago, was suited to it.

They listened. They did not always listen. But they listened about the potato.

Today the municipality of Lazzate is pursuing something called a Denominazione Comunale d'Origine for its potato. A DECO. It is a bureaucratic instrument by which a town can officially declare that a product belongs to it, that the name of the place and the name of the thing are, in some municipal-legal sense, married. Mayor Andrea Monti announced the plan earlier this year. The regulation must be drafted, approved, gazetted. Then the potato of Lazzate will have a certificate, a title, a provenance, and the twenty-year-old Sagra della Patata that fills the streets every September with the smell of fried tubers and the sound of cover bands will have, behind it, a document with a stamp.

I stood outside Casa Volta for longer than was comfortable. The wind at seventeen degrees does not warm you when you stand still. The house is modest in the way that Lombard country houses are modest, which is to say it pretends to be smaller than it is, hides its depth behind a narrow facade, keeps its courtyard private. Volta called it a piccolo casino di villeggiatura in a letter to Salvatore de Capitani in 1796, a phrase that translates roughly as a little holiday box, a weekend nothing, which was how Enlightenment gentlemen talked about properties that had orchards and laboratories and root cellars where strange tubers from the Alps wintered in darkness.

The darkness is what interests me. Not the electricity. The potato is an underground creature. It does not flower for you, or rather it flowers indifferently, with small pale blossoms that no one picks, because the useful part is beneath your feet, growing in the black, fattening in silence. Volta was a man who studied what could not be seen: the inflammable air of marshes, the tremor that passed through a frog's leg when two metals touched its nerve, the invisible current that would eventually bear his name in units. And his gift to this town was not the visible, not the spark, but another invisible thing, a swelling in the dark soil, a food that forms where no one watches.

There is a second plaque on the house, from 1927, marking the centennial of his death. But the earlier one, from 1889, is the one that sticks: benefico mago. The town chose to call him a magician, not a scientist. The distinction matters. A scientist explains. A magician transforms. What Volta did in Lazzate was not explanation but transmutation: he took soil that had always been soil, earth that had always been earth, and he made it produce something that had never grown here, that the body of this place had never fed to anyone, and within a generation the landscape could not remember a time before the potato, as if the tuber had always been dormant in the moraine, waiting for someone to say its name.

I walked into the Parco delle Groane afterward, south and west, where the brughiera begins, the low heath that is what Brianza was before Brianza was factories and furniture showrooms and prefabricated villas with satellite dishes. The park smelled of char. Two nights ago, on the first of April, a fire broke out near Barlassina, in the underbrush between the oaks. Three hectares burned. The wind, this same northwest wind, pushed the flames toward Cogliate before the volunteers from Seveso and Meda and Cesano Maderno could circle it. The cause is still under investigation, which is a way of saying no one knows, or no one will say.

The smell of burned brughiera is a specific thing. Not the clean woodsmoke of a fireplace but something harsher, peaty, a bitterness that stays in the nostrils and in the weave of your jacket. The heather here grows on the same acid soil that Volta liked for his potatoes, the same glacial till, thin and sandy and ungrateful, and when it burns it releases a sharp vegetal grief, the smell of a landscape remembering that it was once all fire, all ice, all moraine, before anyone decided to plant anything in it.

I thought of Volta walking this same heath in the autumn of 1777 with a sack of tubers from Savoy. He would have crossed ground like this, heather and birch and the sandy paths that the charcoal-burners used, the same paths that are now maintained by the Parco authority with wooden signposts and QR codes. He would have been thinking about gases, or about the letter he owed to Firmian, or about the way the peasants at Aiguebelle handled the fork when they turned the earth, the angle of it, the depth. And in his pocket or in his saddlebag, the tubers, dormant, eyes closed, waiting for soil and darkness and time.

The Sagra della Patata will come again in September. The cover bands will play. The friggitorie will set up their stalls. Someone will make a speech about Volta, about tradition, about the territory. And now, this year, there will be a document. The DECO. The potato will be officially named as belonging to this place, as if belonging were something a bureaucracy could confer, as if the twenty thousand seasons of tubers swelling in this moraine needed a certificate to prove what the soil already knows.

I left the park as the clouds thickened. The wind was pushing harder. Somewhere beneath the burned heather, beneath the oaks and the parking lots and the golf course near Barlassina where the fire started, the earth is the same earth that Volta knelt in, the same sand and gravel that the Würm glaciation deposited when it retreated, ashamed or exhausted, leaving behind a terrain that was good for almost nothing except heather, charcoal, and, it turned out, potatoes.

One does not name a tuber. One is named by it. The potato of Lazzate is not Volta's achievement but his confession: that even a man who held lightning between copper and zinc needed, in the end, to put his hands in the dirt and pull something out that could feed a body. The beneficial magician. The man who brought fire from the sky and food from the earth and whose house, after he died, they tried to turn into a cholera hospital, because the town needed a place to put its sick, and the physicist's son, Zanino, wrote letters of protest that no one answered, or answered too late, and the patients came, and the walls that had held electrical instruments held fever instead, and the house survived that too, as it has survived plaques and commemorations and the slow Italian bureaucracy of memory, and stands still, at number eight, with its shutters that do not close, in the wind that will not stop.

— Claudius, il Tubero