Ave Atque Vale

In the past two months, we’ve gone from laying irrigation lines and only beginning to plant entire fields to being well into the harvest. We’ve cut and bailed most of the property, staked several rows of tomatoes, and prepared for the ever delayed arrival of the new pigs. Obviously this wasn’t all thanks to my work, but I feel pretty good about the role I played in all of it. When I left yesterday , it wasn’t with a sense of accomplishment though, but a feeling of having things left unfinished. The season’s far from over and there’s much more to do. The pigs showed up yesterday 6 hours after   I left and 6 weeks after we’d expected them. My Italian’s finally beginning to shape up, and I’ve established enough of a foundation that I’m starting to hit the spike in that exponential learning curve. I wish I could stay out the rest of the season, but with my visa expiring in less than a month, I’ll just have to wait to resume the pastoral life until I get to Turkey.

On the plus side though, I’ll be travelling around Italia for the next 4 weeks or so before I return to work. Right now I’m writing from my hotel balcony in Venice. I can’t say the view’s spectacular, but it’s still my own personal balcony in Venice. I went touring through the markets this morning and it really made me wish that I had a full kitchen while I was here. The seafood market is incredible and carries so many different types of fish, many of which I could identify and many more which  I couldn’t.

The butchers  in Italia are incredible. While industrial food production has squeezed many less typical types of meat out of the market in America, many of these rarer meats are still readily available in Italy, where laws have protected small stores and their suppliers since the fascists were in power. With less people buying their groceries in supermarkets there’s more variety for all kinds of foods. This is especially apparent when it comes to meats. Since coming to Italy, I’ve been served rabbit, capon, wild boar, and horse (best eaten raw), all without trying to seek them out . After lusting after all the meats and fish I couldn’t cook, I got myself some cold cuts, cheese, and a bag of fruit (can you say local kiwi). The Italians are much less inventive when it comes to animals for their deli meats, with nearly all their sandwich meat coming from pigs except for bresaola which is a salted and smoked beef that costs upwards of 40 euro a kilo.

I ate my lunch beneath a tree in Campo San Polo, and then headed off towards the Academia and the arts district. As the crow flies the Academia is maybe about 400 meters directly south of where I was eating. In New York this would be a 5 minute walk, maybe 7 if there were some bad street crossings.  In Venezia it takes 20 minutes provided you don’t make any wrong turns, a caveat which is far from trivial if you’d like to look out from above your map every now and again. There are no through streets on the whole island, where every walk is conducted via the ducks and turns of narrow roads that are hardly distinguishable from alleys. Without any clear lines between different places, Venice is a city of points, connected by a maze of alleys and bridges that wind over and along the city’s many canals. The Grand Canal makes a large mirrored “S” through the island and is spanned by only four bridges adding to the complication and making these vertices key to the navigation of the many other disparate points. The buildings push in against the narrow streets, squeezing out sky, and at night their upper halves are lost and fade into the black above.  There are less piazzas or open spaces than in other Italian cities, as there is only so much room on an island has only so much space. This has a significant effect on the architecture as the streets and canals push you up against the buildings and prevent the type of awesome facade that characterizes the architecture of other Renaissance powers like Florence or Milan. In Venice the most magnificent buildings don’t overlook piazzas, but the canals. Domes litter the skylines around the Grand Canal where they can be seen over the congestion of the streets, and the Doge’s Palace, set against the one great piazza on the island fronts its best face to large ships in the Canal di San Marco.



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The lay of the land

Hey team, the past couple of weeks have been pretty busy around here so I haven’t had time to put together any more posts.  Much to my chagrin, I’m only going to be staying on my current farm for a little more than week. I need to be out of Europe by mid August for visa reasons, and I’d like to try and see a little more of Italy before I leave. The good news though is, that I’m planning on holing up on the Amalfi Coast for a week just to write. Hopefully this will result in a coule more posts popping up while I’m there. Anyway, I wrote this a little while back, it’s not complete but I hope it paints a good picture of the farm for everyone:

Our property rests along 20 acres of hillside in the Taro Valley, 60 km south of Parma.  The steep incline of the hill effectively divides our farm into two parts, an upper and a lower half. The house, workshop, and trailer that I live in all sit on the upper end of the hill, while the fields, bees, and greenhouse we’ve been working on lie below. The Taro River runs along the bottom edge of the hill and marks the edge of our land. Over time the river has left the soil of the lower fields rocky and dry, making it difficult to plant in. Right along the river sits our largest field, where we have strawberries, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini. Just across the way from this, lies another smaller field further away from the river and its rocky soil. In this field we grow potatoes, onions, beans  and other vegetables which don’t require as much water. Above these fields lies a grove of saplings, planted last year, which will eventually bear apples, lemons, apricots and other  fruits. Below these  are our beehives, and just a little further down the path heading back towards the house lie the beginnings of the greenhouse.

The rest of the hill is divided into two large pastures, the one further to the right when looking downhill is shared by Elio, our donkey,  and two horses, while the other field to the left has been let to grow out and is where I go to cut grass for the animals (Since I first wrote this it has been mowed and bailed into neat little boxes). A path between the pastures has been beaten down by the tractor and leads up the hill to the house and our third garden where we grow herbs, lettuce, tomatoes and other foods which we use regularly in the kitchen.  Near the house is a workshop as well as a gravelled patio with tables and chairs that overlook the rest of the property. At the end of the patio there’s an old stone oven for baking bread and foccaccia. The view from the patio looks out across at the hill on the opposite side of the valley.  To the west sit two other farms before the hill slopes down into Pieve di Campi, the one street town below, which has half a dozen houses, a church, a World War II monument, and the belltower that chimes out the time as we work throughout the day. To the east the hills are covered in forest and slope up higher into what becomes the Apennines. Over the hills, low mountains shadow the edge of the horizon and add a hazy blue to the sunbeaten yellows and verdant greens of the less distant hills. For the past couple nights, the full moon has risen centered perfectly over this panorama casting a haunting, yellow pallor through the thick fog over the mountains. On rainy days, we can lose all but the nearest hill in this fog, and it stretches up into the dark clouds that coat the sky.  The mountains play a large role in the weather here. Being on the edge of the Apennines, the weather changes quickly and we always find ourselves on the cusp of a front. Storms come and go in the mid-afternoon, showing up on a whim, raging for twenty minutes, and then dispersing without leaving a trace in the sky, only the fresh droplets that coat every surface in sight.  At the higher altitude the effects of the sun alsoseem stronger, and during the days it can get insufferably hot, while at night the thin air makes it very chilly and I find myself having to bundle up tightly to fall asleep in my trailer. This still hasn’t stopped me from sleeping in the nude, but I’ve gotten in the habit of sleeping with both my blankets and a sleeping bag.

My trailer sits down a little path removed from the patio and the rest of the living space. I have a bed, two closets, and a sink without running water.  There’s  a small stovetop which I use as a nightstand since I take all of my meals in teh house and can use the kitchen when I cook. My living space is small with barely room for two people to stand, but it’s comfortable and I spend little time there during the day, when the trailer cooks in the sun, and it’s more pleasant to be on the porch or in the hammock which sits on the hill above my trailer. At nights when it rains the splattering of the drops on my roof is deafening and somehow manages to both excite me and then gently lull me to sleep.

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Farm Lesson of the Day 7/5/10

If you get up at 4, you can get a whole day’s work in before lunch.

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In Fattoria di Angelo e Simona Part II

Since the beginning of June, I’ve been working on a farm 60 km southwest of Parma. Most of our efforts go into growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs but we also run a bed & breakfast, keep bees, and even have a couple horses and a very talkative donkey named Elio. We recently fenced off some land and even put up a house for a few pigs, but their arrival keeps getting delayed. Right now I think we’re on week 3 of , “They should be here in ten days.”

My hosts, Angelo and Simona bought the farm a little over a year ago, after having worked ten years on another farm a few kilometers away. We’re still getting many of the very basic operations up and running, and a cold winter followed by a rainy spring have put us even further behind. When I first arrived there were very few plants in the ground, and our largest field didn’t even have irrigation lines. My first couple of weeks were mostly spent planting, fertilizing, and mulching. All the planting has really helped to familiarize me with everything that we grow. Since we refer to each plant in Italian, there are a couple of herbs and vegetables that I’m still not sure  I could match to an english name.

That brings up another topic, language. If you ask them, Simona and Angelo will tell you they don’t speak any English. What they actually mean by this is that they speak English better than I could ever hope to speak Italian. Still, this doesn’t mean communication is always smooth, or even always possible.  It takes a back and forth hodge podge of broken english and italian to communicate anything aside from very basic sentences.  If Simona weren’ so good at pantomime, sometimes i think we’d be completely lost. Despite this, I think we understand each other and we get along very well. They have many friends who are around all time, many of whom I’ve gotten to know very well. Between these friends, the guests at the B&B, and half a dozen or so trips off the farm, I’ve met quite a lot of people considering how otherwise isolated I’ve been.

Most days I get up a little before eight, and have a small breakfast. Tea, toast with jam that Simona makes, andsometimes a cup of yogurt. Afterwards I go out to cut hay for the horses, and work on my main project for the day. At first this was planting, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been weeding, working on the new greenhouse, staking tomatoes, and cleaning up some of the overgrowth with good old fashioned industrial weedwacker.  I tyically work with my friend Francesco. He is about 60, speaks no English but but has a  great sense of humor and would have made a great silent era comedian. Yesterday he unbuttoned his flannel with a smile to reveal a SEx Pistols t-shirt. At around noon Francesco and I stop and lay out in the shade for a while before Simona calls us for pranzo (lunch). Pranzo often has several courses and for the first couple weeks, I kept eating until I was full only to have another course come out. There’s usually some sort of pasta, salad or plate of salame and cheese, and often another course of meat after that.  I plan on doing an entire post on food soon,where I can try to do more justice to Simona’s excellent cooking. After lunch we break until 4, since the sun makes it too hot to work. At 4 I cut more hay for the horses and then start working on some smaller project, either planting a couple lines or picking strawberries or cherries. By 6 o’clock I’m done and have more down time until dinner. We usually sit down to eat a little after 8, and rarely get up before 9:30. Most nights dinner consists of the full italian menu, antipasta, primo, secondo, and dolce. I’m still getting used to 3 course meals, and Angelo worries that I don’t eat enough. If I’m not careful he’ll slap half a pound of cheese on my plate and say, “You work hard, you are hungry, manga!”

By the time dinner’s over it’s dark and i’ll head off to my trailer to read a little bit and go to sleep. For the first week my trailer didn’t have electricity and I was out with the sun. Now I’ll stay up and read for a little while, before going to sleep in order to get up early again the next day.

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Farm Lesson of the day 7/1/10

Do not wear red when working near the beehives.

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