I went for a drive the other night. I met no one which was part of the plan and I got out for 45 minutes driving roads where I learned to ride a motorcycle. The pavement is desperate in most places, a rippling coating of black that barely suffices for paving.
Tourism is big here now and some enterprising soul has created a hiking circuit through the “Silent Villages” (I Borghi Silenti) so every now and again you’ll see sweating city folk clumping along the multi-day 55 mile circuit visiting these tiny almost abandoned villages struggling to make a life among these lonely hills.
Mechanized, profitable agriculture is tough where so many fields live at a steep angle. You grow a bit of this olives and wheat, and that harvesting wild chestnuts and raising meat…and you learn to work at an acute angle.
The soils are rocky and thin and the fields are small and oddly shaped. When I was a boy they used cattle to haul stuff and to plough fields, a system that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years and was made possible by sharecropper systems that involved no money exchange. It was poverty farming.
Nowadays these big white beasts are prized beef cattle, raised mostly in Tuscany and Umbria and their meat is highly sought after and expensive. When I was a child they were “cows” and now they’re known by their breed from the Chianti region, Chianina -“kee-an-neena”- because there is no K in the Italian alphabet CH is pronounced hard.
They are beautiful animals with a thick leathery skin but which is soft to the touch. This bull below is supposed to go to slaughter soon with 600 kgs (1300 pounds) of meat on him. He is mean too, shaking his head at me and watching me suspiciously instead of eating. I rather like him but only as long as there are bars between me and him. 
In the picture below you can spot where the metal tubing has been bent. Apparently a Bull decided he’d had enough and he broke out one night and they found him wandering the stable in the morning. 
The cows have huge tongues and large rubbery lips which they will stick in your face to get the measure of you. They don’t like having their foreheads rubbed and their horns are off limits. If you touch those they shake their heads violently.
There are flies and unless you have Covid like me the place smells of cow shit. They eat all the time so the place reeks of used hay.
I picked up this description of the White Giants (they are huge animals) online and if you can get past the peculiarly Italian translation it describes fondly the cows from Valdichiana:
They are my only companions day after day as they clank their bars to reach the hay. One or other of my nephews comes by in the race I h to feed them but otherwise they and I are alone 23 hours a day.
The other morning I was woken up by some insistent mooing and I figured there might be a problem. Instead I saw Dario (38 years old in the green t shirt) directing the trailer into place.
It was time for three cows to go their summer pasture with the adults on the hillside. They are the lucky ones being kept back for breeding.
The boys and the genetically inferior cows go for meat in a few weeks. Nevertheless the lucky ones didn’t feel so lucky as Daniele (43 years old in a blue t shirt) tried to herd them into the trailer.
Their replacements in the pen started sniffing the walls as though checking for the previous occupants. The circle of life is pretty small for these animals, most of whom live two years and that’s it. Their meat is so expensive they are very profitable according to Daniele.
Slowly peace returns as the cows settle back down after the excitement of the extraction of three of their number.
Dario in the silver pick up is off ahead to prepare the field for the arrival of the three new members.
Daniele the older brother follows with the tractor and trailer and the three new breed cows.
Their new life:
Daniele said his oldest breed cow has produced a calf every year for the past 17 years. “Does she go into honorable retirement when she can’t have any more?” I asked naively. He gave me a quizzical look. “Hamburger,” he said as he got back into the tractor. I’m too sentimental to be a farmer. I’d put them all out to pasture, profits be damned.
