Life And Death On An Umbrian Farm

I woke up Tuesday morning to the sound of a breeze blowing through the cherry trees outside my bedroom window, the air was fresh, the sky a little less gray and the fields stretching south from my I sister's hill top farm were dappled in the weak September sunlight pushing through between the clouds.

Below my bedroom windows my nephews are digging a swimming pool for their plans to have paying guests visit the farm, an ambitious plan that their father my brother in law views with a mixture of pride and apprehension.

This is, I thought to myself, quite the privilege, living the life even if temporarily of leisure amid the hustle and bustle of farm life. I get to see it up close, and as much as I was glad to get away thirty years ago, I was okay with being back here now. My sister Liz is ten years older than I and she is the elder of her twin sister by ten minutes so in some sense she is the matriarch of the family now our parents are dead. She has been a housewife married to the same man for close to forty years. They rebuilt this farmhouse where her husband grew up int their family home, Cerqueti Farm:

And there she is, the smiling face in the bottom left hand window surveying her world as she has for the past many decades, raising two boys and watching her husband till the fields and kill the pigs and raise the cows for market.

Her husband was not considered suitable by our rather snobbish mother and they were secret sweethearts from the age of 15 a full half century ago and despite their public reticence they are as much in love now as ever.

They labeled him a gold digger in the village because he was marrying the heiress of a landed fortune, five hundred acres of extremely hard work and a ton of inherited debt and no prospects. Today, after a lifetime of back breaking work he has handed over plans for the farm to his two strapping boys but he still raises livestock, the thing he has always loved to do as his boys expand and make their own plans for a "modern" farm. Vincenzo's idea of farming is to get up early, feed the animals, take care of the fields feed the animals watch the news and curse the politicians and then go to bed. I am not much of one to get up early on vacation but I did his evening rounds Monday night with him.

He found some wild boar piglets lost in the forest one day a few years ago and he brought them home, hand fed them and built them a pen. They were probably victims of hunters who love to kill these pigs for their rather gamey meat.

He let them out when they were adults but they just kept coming back to their home and one day this one came home pregnant. They know where they are well off he laughs, pouring their ground corn flour into their trough. Wild boar are as intelligent and tough as iguana in the Florida Keys. They are as destructive and lack all natural predators. Hunters are scared of them as thy will turn on an armed human and gore him to death if cornered.

Then it's down to the cow byre to feed the cows his sons don't want to deal with. They dislike the requirement to feed and water the animals every single daily day but he thrives on it. Vincenzo doesn't take vacations, he doesn't drink or play cards, he doesn't smoke, so his only vice is his livestock.

Most of his herd, reduced to three dozen from double that when he was younger he keeps on hundreds of acres of mountainside fenced in and free to come down and get hay and water or to stay on the hillside where he has a trough for them and they can forage as they please. He's says even in winter they frequently prefer to be up on the hill than in the shed that he has built for them at the bottom of the hill. The young ones and the pregnant cows he keeps in the shed.

This one, pictured above gave birth Tuesday night and Vincenzo and I went out in a rainstorm to help the newborn calf get its first meal. The new mother, afterbirth hanging down her hindquarters was kicking the calf away so Vincenzo tied up her foreleg and distracted her with hay while leading the calf to milk. I stood outside the pen holding the rope taut that kept her foreleg in the air and prevented her raising her hind leg to kick away her starving calf. It was all very elemental and satisfying when the calf finally pulled away and burped and the mother, released, started licking him.

The fact is he will go to the butcher in less than two years and will bring in six Euros a kilo, which puts your middle class urge to go "Aww!" in an unfortunate perspective. But that is life on the farm. My sister also called in the vet who spent twenty minutes and twenty five Euros removing a blade of grass from her pet dog's ear... So animal love has its place on the farm. As do tractors, viewed fondly enough that Vincenzo calls this his car.

It's the oldest and smallest in the fleet of five that they have but it's his and he uses it to look after his cows, moving feed around including bales of hay for the outdoor cows, by the light of the feeble glow of the headlamps.

It has been his entire life and my mother thought my sister could do better than marry the third child of a sharecropper who used to cultivate one of her farms. I guess she was wrong.

I rode shotgun on the tractor, an extremely uncomfortable place on the incredibly torn up road we had to take to his other stable of animals and there he went through the same routine twenty minutes later. Sweep the dirt, put out ground flour and hay and make sure the water drips are working.

He put out some pasta for the guard cat,

And admired his pigs which he himself will slaughter in January for his rather excellent home cured prosciutto and dried sausages, of which I am eating as much as I can while I am here. He told me the story of the European Union inspector who came by the farm to take blood samples of his animals to see if they were being fed artificial hormones. "I wanted to give him some artificial hormones up the back side," my brother in law said with a grimace. Damned government regulations.

He used to slaughter pigs in winter for money but new European regulations put a stop to that. Vincenzo, like everyone else I have talked to is fed up with the over reach of government in Italy. There are regulations for everything and it makes me laugh as I think back to the US Tea Party people who think we have too much government interference in the US.

It has been days of eating and talking, telling stories and thinking about the past which I find quite exhausting but rewarding. And it gives me much to think about and be thankful for. It's good to get off the rock and remember how most of the rest of the world lives.

Raising food, killing it and eating it. It doesn't get more elemental than that, agro-tourism and swimming pools notwithstanding.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Vacation Day 5

A few of my favorite things. A ride on the Bonneville, a drink with a woman I love and a pint of Smithwicks works too, at Finnegan's Wake. Instead I'm in Italy.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Swimming,Not Drowning, At Fano

You' think September is too late for crowds to show up on Italian beaches when the country as a whole is known for taking massively lengthy vacations en masse in August but this Sunday Giovanni and I rode over the Apennine Mountians across the middle of Italy and landed up ona rocky paradise, many miles from Key West.

It was gray when we got there but by the late afternoon the sun had come out and every nearby Italian and his brother and sister had showed up to enjoy their square meter of pebbly beach on the Adriatic Coast.

We pored over a map Sunday morning and settled on a quick run over the mountains, about 200 miles, not too far so we could stop and talk and so my cardiologist friend could smoke a cigarette or three.

I enjoy pausing to take pictures and see the sights and do a little exploring, but Giovanni rides for the pleasure of the ride so the mountain views and the intriguing villages perched upon them you will mostly have to imagine as we didn't often stop for the most scenic vistas...and I did what I could while my riding partner sighed in the background reminding me what a wanker I am for always having the camera out (his words exactly: Che pugnetta Michele!). An artiste gets no respect around here from the motorcycling masses.

The bad news is gasoline in Italy costs around €1:84 a liter which I translated at €1:30 to the dollar into about $10 US per US gallon. My four cylinder beast seems to drink the stuff like a dipsomaniac chugs cheap vodka though Giovanni's massive six cylinder BMW K1600GTL has a huge tank and sips the stuff around 45mpg by my calculation which he thought wasn't so great. It's all a matter of perspective I suppose.

Our first proper stop of the morning and our second stop for coffee was in San Giustino in Northern Umbria. Neither of us had been there before and I was entranced by the architecture even before we got into the village itself so I stopped and took a picture before the tour leader could start griping. U bria is filled with villages like this:

As we pulled up outside the bar making an appalling commotion with our very expensive ten cylinders of Teutonic motorcycling perfection I noticed a totally fabulous modest little bike from my youth and this guy about to jump on and ride off. Wait I said as I rushed to disrobe and pull out my Android camera. We got to talking about his pride and joy, an electric start Harley Davidson 350 built by Aermacchi. A flat cylinder lightweight motorcycle sold when Giovanni and I were kids forty years ago. He's had it almost that long:

Naturally in my haste I cocked up the picture taking so badly the motorcycle never came out, and I didn't notice as we were all three reminiscing nineteen to the dozen so here is a feeble Internet substitute:

His was perfectly maintained down to the original paint and decals. I'm not sure why but I took a picture of him riding sedately away so this is all I have of that lovely motorcycle:

We got down to the serious business of breakfast, Giovanni's first and my Hobbit-like second breakfast:

And then we strolled the Sunday morning flea market, more for Giovanni than for me as I have a well known aversion to collecting dust catchers.

Put that camera down!

Oh all right then I'll just take a picture of your pride and joy.

We climbed the mountains highway through gorges alongside rivers and across passes crowded with parked Sunday riders. The twists and turns on the road to Urbino were too many to count. Then Giovanni decided that rather than view the lovely city known to historians of Art everywhere we would go straight to the sea. Luckily my wife and I stopped in Urbino in 2011 on our last visit to Italy and we had a lovely twilight stroll and an alfresco dinner in a piazza in the heart of the city. Key West Diary: Urbino

As usual our only stop in the mountains was a totally un-scenic pull out where Giovanni tried to reconnect with his phone (and smoke a cigarette) but eventually we stopped for another coffee and a cigarette once we had got out of the mountains and were closing in on the sea. Equally unmemorable view, actually:

I am in fact riding this ridiculously colorful 170 horsepower bumble bee loaned to me by a friend of Giovanni's, and I have to say Massimo is a generous man. But it is impossible to go anywhere in Italy on a loud yellow motorcycle and not be noticed and I am not very good at playing coo ,hand Luke when I show up on this decidedly awkward sport bike in a crowded parking area. Once I managed to back it into a flowerpot, no damage done luckily except to my ego, and heaven help me if there is anything remotely as treacherous underfoot as gravel because this thing is easy to drop. It is impossible to maneuver from a standstill as it has absolutely no steering lock and looking over your shoulder from the hunched riding position will give you a hernia in a most uncomfortable place.

However once rolling it is the motorized equivalent of a guided missile. I got it up to 125mph once and a 120 a couple of times more and for freeway riding it is amazing, steady as a rock with a powerful ABS braking system and perfect control in the corners. In the mountain twisties it is a bit more of a handful to throw into corners and it has a nasty habit of feeling like it is going to drop down into a corner when it gets past a certain lean angle, but it pulls like a train in any gear and on long straightaways I was hitting 85 (140kph) before I noticed. The redline is at 11,000 rpm and in 6th gear it is barely at 6,000 rpm when the needle is well past 100 mph and heading to 105 (170 kph).

In Italy passing cars is done just about anywhere a motorcyclist can see enough room, solid white lines, double solid white lines mean nothing, you takes your money and makes your choice. Most car drivers actually pull aside to give you more room and its not unusual to see a motorcycle barreling down the middle "lane" of a two lane highway passing cars. For that sort of stuff this K1200S excels. Put it in third at forty miles per hour and you can almost wheelie your way past any car in your path just by winding the throttle open and listening to the engine build up to a banshee wail as all other traffic falls behind as though standing still. Traffic lights will see scooters and motorcycles jump to the front of the line and take pole position for the green light. It is expected and it is a wonderful liberation from America's obsession with making two wheelers sit in line like they are SUVs. At one point there was a traffic jam as far as the eye could see. We were following a couple perched on a Ducati Monster and all three of us took the oncoming lane, pausing to let oncoming traffic by and we reached the construction zone in three minutes and not one car driver expected us to do otherwise. It was fantastic. I love riding in Italy it is so liberating.

At Fano we rented a couple of loungers for five Euros each and settled down to a 'light' lunch of lasagna, seafood for me and meat and to,ago for Giovanni who hates fish.

Then we had a salad each washed down with a bottle of white Verdicchio wine followed by the inevitable coffee.

And then we went for a refreshing swim,

Across the pebble beach,

Followed by a nap.

And a chat, putting the world to rights.

On the ride home we stopped for ice cream, as one does, zuppa inglese, which is supposed to resemble "English soup" or more accurately trifle, and tastes fantastic as gelato:

Three Euros each for more ice cream than a man should be allowed to eat, but we dropped some as did some final route planning:

And listened to some locals arguing over nothing and telling stories.

The it was it e to ride getting home after dark where Daddy's little girl, Eleonora now 19 was ready to tell us her tales of the day:

And in closing a picture for my ever patient wife of her favorite hard Italian candy:

Chupa Chups -just the name is enough to make an English speaker giggle. There endeth our first ride.

Posted with Blogsy