Blogs we like

Living on a farm is just like that game on facebook: Farmville. Take for instance the other day, this really really lonely purple cow randomly wandered onto the property looking for companionship….

Nah, but for real…

The past ten days have been times of hard work, full stomachs, dirty hands, deep slumbers, early mornings, and red wine.  Rural Tuscany is a land of natural beauty and heavily romanced meals that attracts millions of people around the world who visit the region to take part in some form of agriturismo.

I could write a book on farm life in Tuscany, but I’ll spare you the pain by providing a little spark notes guide to my time here at Montepulciano.

Overview

I’ve been living a humble relationship with nature based on absolute resourcefulness and recycling—not in the sense of throwing your plastic and glass into a blue container and dragging it out to the sidewalk every Tuesday. We actually re-use everything—bread, water and ashes from burnt rubbish. Spending your time earning money to buy things vs. spending your time to make things is an interesting matter for a recent graduate and I’m happy to be on the other side of the fence for a little while—to learn the value of things for which I only know the price.   I’ve been working every day from sunrise to sunset in a storybook setting, enjoying family style meals, practicing Italian, and writing come moonlight. This countryside interlude has been a fine experience, but an interlude is all it is because the long term opportunity here is not promising and I will be hitting the road again this Sunday.

Setting & Characters

la casa

I’m sleeping my nights and working my days at an old farmhouse a few kilometers outside of the ancient hillside town of Montepulciano with 6 other people. Nicla, the current proprietor of the home is the host with whom I arranged this stay. Although I have not directly asked her, I deduce that she’s in her mid-fifties. She moved out to the farmhouse 4 years ago when she quit her job in Rome [because after 18 years of employment with this one company, they told her that they changed the retirement policy so that she would not be entitled to a pension after 20 years as previously promised (this world is a cruel place)]. The house belongs to her Uncle, but because of Alzheimer’s disease, he is no longer able to take care of the place by himself so Nicla and her mother moved in to take care of him while Nicla hacks away at the restoration process. Apparently, “Zio” (Uncle in Italian, as he’s called around the house) was living in very primitive conditions when Nicla and her mother arrived. For the past three years, Nicla has been restoring the property to its old glory and it looks pretty good.

Ciao Nicla

The gigantic property sits on a hill in the Val di Chiana of Southern Tuscany. There are two other houses on the premises, but both are quite far from being inhabitable and are works in progress. Also on the farm grounds is a pond, an under-construction swimming pool, chicken quarters, wood shed(s), bench areas, and a world-class back porch with an expansive view of the Tuscan landscape. Along with Nicla’s family, a Romanian family of three stays here in a work-exchange type of scenario. The mother Violetta and father Danny are in their early 30’s and their 6 year old daughter Adrianna goes to school in Montepulciano. From sunrise onwards, everyone is busy taking care of their respective chores and jobs. Come lunch and supper, all 7 of us are gathered around the kitchen table, sharing massive bowls of fresh pasta that nonna (Nicla’s mom) just finished making from flour and eggs. These family style meals are the cornerstone of the day and have provided some of the most pleasurable moments of my trip.

The picture above is the view from the back of the house. As pleasant as the photograph seems, it does nothing to justify what the eye does for this landscape. It’s surreal, sublime, heart-melting, picturesque—everything. There’s no point in wasting polluted words on such a sight. As mesmerizing as it is during the day, it is also captivating at night when the village and city lights fill the horizon in patches of glowing mosaic. Cars pass slowly along the country roads, major highways, and mountain passes, like little dots of light sailing gracefully across the deep purple sky. I’ve been told that Zio used to prefer taking a lawnchair out to the main highway to witness progress rather than relaxing by the beautiful valley. At first I was a bit taken back, but progress and the motion of humans, from social patterns to physical movement, is very inspiring when you take the chance to appreciate it from stillness.  Seeing the state the disease has put him in now, this thought has been pretty heavy in my mind lately.

Conscience: thanks, that was uplifting.

Plot Summary

In the past two weeks, I’ve been earning my bed and meals as a cook, lumberjack, marketing agent, website designer, grape harvester, baker and butcher. Working so closely with a farmer, experienced cook and carpenter, I’m picking up a lot of knowledge I wouldn’t usually come across on 36th avenue in College Park.  I’ve been carrying out a lot of tasks I’ve never tried before, picking up many tricks and skills that I can carry with me in the long run.

The Vendemmia–Friday October 16th

On my second evening at the farm, we got a phone call during dinner from Lido, a family friend and wine expert, saying that our vines needed harvesting asap. The next day we headed out around 9am to the vineyard down the street to perform the vendemmia (grape harvest in Italian). We worked down each row of grape vines for 9 hours and picked a total of 10 tons between 3 people. During the lunch break I was famished and ate a kilo of mortadella Panini and 3 green tangerines. The harvest had a very romantic aspect to it: here’s a scribble from my noteboook:

‘Tasting the fresh grapes off the vine as the sunny day of work presses on. Looking down the row of untamed vines, the hill gently slopes to reveal a lush countryside view of green hills rolling like cartoon waves in a sea of land.’  It’s moments like this that strike a powerful chord in your heart and put you in equilibrium with the natural environment, above the pains of labor and sorrow, and at peace with the mysterious world that surrounds you.

Whadup Lido

The day to day

7:10am—Alarm rings again and I actually wake up because I passed out at 11pm last night. I grab my work jeans from the dresser, put them on over my sweatpants, throw on my jacket and head downstairs.

7:30am—After making the chicken scratch in the wood shed, I’m now in the heart of the chicken pen, scooping heaves of wet bread mixed with grain and seeds into iron feeding bowls as chickens surround me, savagely “bocking” while I fill their plates.

8:30am—Breakfast (5 slices of fresh bread with jam and a banana) is over and I resume making the bread I started last night…85 year old grandma is laughing at me as I struggle to mix the flour and knead the dough, telling me to use some olio di gomito (elbow grease).  I tell her to fuck off and mind her own business.  (JK)

10:00am—Outside of woodshed, wearing a woman’s long jacket I found in the dresser, and a red checkered scarf, holding a sledgehammer in my hand, and asking Nicla, “Uh where should I put this?”

12:00 noon—Been working for about 3 hours now, moving land, cutting down trees, peeling the bark off trees I cut down, cleaning buckets of ash and water used to do the laundry, and other things I learned to do in college.

2:00pm—Adrianna comes home from school—lunch time. Brilliant! Eating pounds of fresh pasta in savory gravy, soaking up every drop with the bread my hands slaved over this morning. Dan, the Romanian carpenter, and I, get in trouble for giggling at Zio as he holds the tines of the fork in his hand, stabbing at the soup below him with handle.

2:45pm—Enjoying cup of coffee with Nicla

3:00pm—“Wow this fantastic,” I take a break from cleaning chicken discharge to admire the valley vista, as I go through countless ambitions in my head, whistling blissfully along the way.

4:30pm—Knees sunk in the muddy clay of the wet Tuscan earth, dejected, picking up sticks and thinking about how the dismal economy is the result of caffeine induced optimism rather than a bubbling market or greedy wall-street bigots.

6:00pm—Sun has set. Work is over. In my room reading Newcastle United headlines, contemplating the benefits of becoming a Geordie legend by murdering Mike Ashley.

7:00pm—showered and in the kitchen, waiting for dinner, my desire to have children is taking serious chops to the knees as I listen to Adrianna talk about every letter she learned today at school.

8:00pm—Dinner is over, I’m experiencing slight pain from eating so many meatballs, but I get on with the bread process, getting yelled at a few times along the way, “well you made a bigger mess tonight than you did on Tuesday, bravo.” I watch a soap opera until around 930 and head up to my room

11:00pm—In my room, wrapped in two fleece blankets because the heating system is broken. I give productivity a try, but quickly submit to my heavy eye lids.

Themes & Motifs

Between caffeine rage and depression, I am learning a lot from the experience, like how to: make fresh pesto, maintain a vegetable garden, construct a bench, care for lumber, silence children, and work more effectively with my hands (become better at “hand jobs,” as the Italians say). In Florence I made my living through writing and mental labor whereas Montepulciano demands the services of my body. I think my body appreciates it too. I feel solid and healthy when eating dinner after working all day on the land, re-affirmed in the idea that people aren’t made of glass.

Aside from the labor, I’ve been constantly charmed with the natural setting of my workplace. I really enjoy taking walks through country roads, along corridors of olive groves, passing ancient wine cellars and sampling fresh pomegranate fruit from the trees. Breaking from work and glancing over my shoulder, there is always a world class view to be admired. I feel a strong connection with the natural surroundings and organic lifestyle.

To spend your time making the things you need to live, instead of making money to buy the things you do, has always been a curiosity of mine and working here has been an enlightening way of exploring this interest.  It’s always healthy to take a step outside of your perspective and see it from another angle, and being here has definitely provided me with the chance to meditate on the things I take for granted all too often.

So this begs the question: Then why are you leaving so soon??

Conclusion

There are a number of reasons pushing me to move on from Belmondo farms at this point, but it all boils down to the timing. I’m on my last life, financially speaking, to try out a new city, and I don’t want to save it for January only to fail and fly home on February 1st at the expense of missing the holidays with my family. I want to take my gamble before December so that if things don’t work out, at least I will be home for Christmas. It’s a tender time of the year for decision making and I’ve got to be strategic with my moves, and leaving Montepulciano this Sunday is the most rational move I can make.

My brief sojourn here on the farm has been fantastic, but the timing seems mutually beneficial for Nicla and I to part ways as the cold weather kills outdoor work and I am strategizing my next move. Perhaps the abundance of sarcasm in the “day to day” section of this post is a reflection of a subconscious dissatisfaction with the hardships of living on the farm, who knows?  It doesn’t bother me too much when little green bugs crawl out from my pants, or when I discover a giant wasp spending the night with me under my sheets. I appreciate the soreness of a day’s work, but the soreness certainly comes from somewhere and maybe subjecting myself to this kind of labor over an extended period of time is not what my mind and body are calling for….

Where to?

This week I committed to a bedroom in the city of Bari for the month of November. Bari is the city from which my paternal grandmother’s family comes from and is located on the back heel of the Italian boot, right around the Achilles tendon. It is Southern Italy in the purest form and I’m looking forward to what this transition has to offer. I leave Montepulciano on Sunday and spend a day in Florence before making the 9 hour train ride down South. The next time I write, I will two blocks away from the sea on the beautiful Adriatic coast.

Nell’attesa,

Craigorio