WWOOFING In Italy

San Giovani a Piro, Italy - Oct. 10th-20th 2009

We made our daredevil 7 hr drive on the autostrada in the Skoda Roomster rental car from Umbria south to San Giovani. When we exited the freeway and headed toward the sea on the narrow curvy roads, the terrain became more dramatic with higher mountains and deeper valleys. From the exit, after about an hour of driving, we finally made the climb up the mountain road and arrived in a small picturesque Italian hillside village. We tried to find the road per our instructions but there were not many street signs so we called the owner of the wwoofing farm where we were going to stay and he said he would meet us. Sebastiano was a handsome and fit 50 yr old well dressed grey headed guy driving a beat-up 2 door 4 wheel drive white Fiat Panda hatch back. We followed him up and down and around very narrow cobbled village streets at a rather high rate of speed until we reached the house, a large old building anchoring the lower edge of this medieval hilltop village. The house was a massive 4 story tall but narrow structure that followed the contour of the land for probably 150 ft with stone retaining walls above and below it. It was old with areas of exposed stone masonry but mostly stucco of various mottled shades of beige and of course the red clay tiled roof.

We entered the back door on the ground floor into what was like a huge old basement with rough cobbled floors, and century old relics of farming tools, olive grinding mills, wine making presses and oak barrels spread out in work rooms and storage rooms that seemed to go in both directions forever. He led us up the stairs to the main entrance level where there were 12 ft tall double wood doors with hand forged iron hardware that opened out onto the village street. Another flight of stairs took us up to the much more refined and finished main living area with polished Italian marble floors, antique furniture, chandeliers and large paintings. There were two bedrooms and an office on one end with the formal dinning room, kitchen, den and outdoor terrace on the other end. Up another flight of stairs to the top floor there were three more large bedrooms, another office and some other storage rooms. I’d say with all floors probably 12k sf of house.

After unloading our bags in our room on the top floor we went down to the kitchen area to meet the two other woofers and Sebastiano’s 75 year old Mother Fiamma. She explained to us that the house was a 400 yr old family country hunting palace and went over some of her specific details of the house and kitchen dos and don’ts. I had a hard time focusing because I kept looking out of the huge windows at the surrounding landscape and the unbelievable setting of this little town. Below the house was a sloped green river valley with intermittent farm cottages surrounded by pastures, field crops, vineyards and olive orchards. In the distance across the valley were residing ridges of overlapping shades of green forests. Looking to the left the valley continued to slope quickly upwards to a fantastic vertical light grey almost white granite mountain peak that towered over the village - to the right the valley sloped for 20 miles all the way down to where you good see the blue half moon Bay of Sapri on the Mediterranean Sea. All of the land immediately below the house all the way down to the river was Sebastiano’s – probably a few hundred acres of prime farmland with an old farm house that he was renovating into an agro-tourism lodge. And this was just one of several of his parcels of land in the area.

As Sebastiano made dinner we chatted with our housemates Andrew – a recent college grad from New York and Stefan – a late 20-something chef from Paris. They both had been there already for a few weeks so they showed us around the house a bit more and gave us a run down on how things worked, what the work days would be like and how to stay on mama Fiama’s good side. She was not real comfortable with Sebastiano inviting these yahoo strangers from god knows where into her house to live and work. She is an intelligent, rather fussy, prim and proper widower from Italian royalty whose prized possessions were her wine glasses and stoneware. She also had a pet peeve for beautiful
and absolutely correct table settings. Dinners were delicious (always with bread and homemade wine), very formal presentations and usually filled with lively conversation which escalated into a loud almost yelling mix of Italian / English between Sebastiano and his mother over some obscure community political issue.

Later in the evening Andrew told us the daily routine was to wake and have breakfast around 7:30 am then take the kitchen scrap bucket down the hill to collect semi rotten fruit from the fig trees, persimmon trees and Indian fig cactus, along with a basket of moldy pressed grape pulp down through the vineyard to feed the two pigs. Once we finished feeding the pigs we would come back up to the house and wait for Sebastiano to instruct us on the day’s chores. I was asked to “Turn The Wine” – I was so excited. Andrew and Stefan had just harvested and pressed the pinot noir grapes a few days before we got there. The grape pulp and juices were now fermenting in four 500 liter tubs but had to be turned twice a day once in the morning and once at night unless of course it was a full moon then you shouldn’t touch it for two days. Turning is required because the grapes rise to the top of the tub to form this mat of pulp and the juice is at the bottom. The wine needs to be mixed up so it all ferments evenly. It’s a chore but a messy bit of fun.

We then hopped into the Fiat Panda with Sebass, as Andrew called him, to go off and harvest some walnuts. Patti shared the passenger seat with Vikka the black cocker and Andrew and I sat backwards in the hatchback complete with some scattered hand tools, old gloves for cushioning, a gas soaked rope, a water jug and 2 big baskets for the nuts. We headed through the windy streets of town and up a steep mountain on a mix of cobble and dirt roads at near rally speeds with our feet hanging out of the open hatchback to let some fresh non-emission controlled tail pipe fumes into the car. When we arrived Sebastiano pulled up onto a grassy leveled pasture under the shade of a walnut loaded tree. We piled out of the car, dizzy from the blur of riding backwards, to take in an incredible view from the site which was just below the vertical granite bluffs looking all the way down to the sea. It was about 68 degrees with sunshine, a faint breeze, a few misty clouds hanging half way up on the mountain and wild fennel & mint growing everywhere. Andrew scaled the tree to shake some nuts loose and we filled our baskets to the sound of wild donkey kongs echoing in the cliffs and jingling herds of bell collared goats somewhere down valley.

After lunch on the fourth story open air sunset terrace back at the palace we sat and ate American grapes for dessert. They are like concord grapes you just squeeze on the skin, and the meat, sweet juices and seeds pop into you mouth. We had a little siesta up in our room for an hour or so between 2 and 3 pm and then Sebass suggested we all go wild mushroom hunting. We followed him in our Skoda around to the back side of the mountain and up this gnarly rock road to his favorite childhood hunting grounds. We each grabbed a basket and a hiking cane and headed down the steep wooded slopes. It was a rich mix of biodiversity with pines and oaks evenly spaced over lush grasses, ferns, wild herbs and giant hidden mushrooms. We later found out that it’s not unheard of to run into the highly poisonous Viper snake in this region of Italy - Greaaat. After an hour of hiking around we had filled our baskets with probably 8 or 10 different varieties of edible mushrooms. Sebass would rummage through our findings and toss out the toxic species and praise us with an approving chuckle and a “Well Done” if we had found any of the rarer varieties – some so prized that they cost as much as $75 an entrée in a good restaurant in Rome. Dinner was gonna be special tonight! Actually we had mushrooms on pizza, in pasta, in soup, in salads, in the risotto and of course just sautéed pretty much every night all week. Fine with us!

The next day, after turning the wine and feeding the pigs, we harvested some organic tomatoes and tilled & weeded a 25’ by 50’ section of the garden with hand tools to prepare it for planting later in the week - a good little morning’s workout. Midweek Patti and Stefan boiled some jars and prepared a hug vat of fig jam for canning in the basement. Of course I had to sample a ladle or two of the sugary slurry straight from the caldron before they were allowed to can.

About every other night Fiama would have friends or neighbors from the local village over to join us for dinner – always a formal occasion with impeccable place settings accompanied by a table center piece arrangement of flowers, garden fruits or vegetables and some of our beautiful mushrooms. We normally didn’t sit for dinner until about 9 pm and the mostly Italian conversation would get louder in direct proportion to the amount of wine that was poured - lasting until 11 pm at times. One evening we were pleasantly surprised with an impromptu concert. Fiamma’s guest was a professional musician and he brought his guitar with him so after dinner we congregated in the kitchen and he and Andrew who played the banjo, put on a two hour jam session for us all.

Waiting for dinner one night Patti and I were lounging around upstairs, Patti reading and I practicing my guitar, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a small shadow streak across the wall in dim light. We looked at each other at the same time and both said – what was that? Then, as it made another pass, we both clearly saw what it was and screeched in unison – It’s A Bat! Patti immediately ducked under her pillow and I began to nervously dance around the room unsuccessfully wielding my guitar as a bat swatter. After stirring us around for a minute or two it finally disappeared into the adjoining office and I quickly closed the double doors. As I said, we were in a 400 year old structure.

At diner that night we made plans with Andrew to join us for a Saturday road trip to the Pompeii ruins. The 2 hr. drive along the Italian coastal back roads was great. We stopped along the way at a cheese shop, in the middle of the Buffalo Mozzarella producing region of Campana, to get some fresh Buffalo Mozzarella cheese balls. We didn’t even get back to the car before we opened up the package and passed it around scarfing it down as we stood in the parking lot. Incredible stuff.

Pompeii was a wonderful look back in time. What an amazing city and lifestyle it must have been. With Mt.Vesuvius towering overhead, we walked along Pompeii’s 2000 year old cobbled stone streets in and out of palatial residences with colorfully plastered walls, marble floors and courtyard fountains and strolled up to what used to be a street side wine bar with wine vases and stone tile mosaic counter tops still intact. The wonder of what it must have been like?

We were having a lot of fun on the farm and the surrounding area so far but Sebastiano had a sizable chore in store for us the last week we were there. We would now start to earn our room and board by constructing a hog wire fence around the walnut tree pasture. Sebastiano planned to build a new pinot noir vineyard and he needed to keep out the free-range goats. After a twenty minute argument between Sebass and his farm manager Savalio as to how to construct the fence, Sebass strung a rope along the proposed alignment, took two paces to show me the spacing and handed me a 15 pound straight iron digging bar to make the post holes. Sebass would cut the salvaged tree limb fence post to length, I would dig the holes, Andrew would pound the post in and Patti and Stefan would be the wire fence stringers and tiers. The soil was moist and loose, easy for digging in, and had just the right amount of gravel in it to make the post sturdy. It was tough work but it actually went much quicker and easier than expected. Unfortunately Andrew and Stefan were leaving; so Roby and I had to finish the job by ourselves. Sebass decided he wanted to change the alignment requiring us to remove a portion of the fence and redo it. Four days later we completed 500 linear feet of fence.

Feeling bad about the extra hours he had us work, Sebass gave us an early reprieve the next day. Roby and I took a drive and hung out at the beach on the Mediterranean Sea. Nestled at the base of the Cilento National Forest the beach creeps out from the primitive sand dunes and native vegetation. The sand is more gravel-like with a rocky entrance into the water. Although not as warm as on the Spanish coast, we braved the waves. Trying to absorb the balance of the sun, we hung out on our make-shift beach blanket, but as the sun was going down, Patti started shivering. She immediately ran back to the car and changed into her clothes. We spent the remaining portion of the evening enjoying the dark reddish-orange sunset.

We realized we had been in San Giovanni for almost a week and had hiked up to the mountain above the village and driven to the neighboring villages of Sapri and Scario, but we hadn’t walked up through the heart of the old village centro of San Giovanni even though it was located within walking distance from the house. Our next free afternoon Patti and I ventured up the steep streets to find a beautiful historic centre that is a labyrinth of little alley-ways and lanes that wind and intersect around the 2 ancient town squares: Piazza Teodoro Gaza, where you can find the Chiesa Madre (church) dating back to the 15th century, and Piazza San Gaetano. The narrow steep passage ways which were barely wide enough to walk led you through 3 to 5 story medieval stone and stucco structures terraced up the hillside. Each home had its own personality with mottled layers of paint, tons of hand crafted stone, and wood and iron details. The village as most of the Italian towns was initially built thousands of years ago as a high density community to protect itself from neighboring warriors but also for the efficiency of shared resources. What a concept!

Our final days were spent tending to the wine. After letting the wine rest during the full moon phase, we completed one last “turn” and checked the sugar content. The gravitational pull from the moon did its job and extracted the rest of the juices from the pulp. It was time to make the wine!! Savalio, the expert winemaker and winedrinker, instructed us on the procedure. In short form: you scoop out the fermented grape pulp from the hug vats with a 5 gallon bucket and dump it into the wine press. Another person compresses the grapes in the press until it is full. Then you manually crank the press hundreds of times to get all the juices out which would be collecting in small plastic buckets under the spickets of the press. Each time these buckets filled up, you would pump the wine juice into the curing barrels, and keep going until no juice is left in the press. Any remaining juice in the vats, after all pulp was removed, would be pumped directly into the curing barrel. Unfortunately during the process, Savalio had to leave and Roby and I were left on our own. Thankfully Maria, Savalio’s wife and her mother came over and helped us pack and press the wine. To make the afternoon more enjoyable all four of us sampled the wine frequently straight from the press spout for quality control. A few minor mechanical difficulties set us back a bit making it two 10 hour workdays. The night before we left, we put the finishing touches on over 1500 liters of Pinot Noir and set it to rest for a few weeks before it was to be bottled.

Roby and Patti professional wine-makers.