Leonessa

I doubt there are too many occasions in life when the smell of cow shit brings a smile to your face. I smiled broadly when I realized I could smell it wafting in from the stable below. Then I smelled the eggs frying in olive oil for my breakfast, and as an experiment I boiled water for tea. It was all there, taste and smell were back. I was going out to dinner in Leonessa.  

As soon as I got the negative Covid test the pharmacist said, “You are free to go and be among people,” an Italian’s highest aspiration as being alone is an incomprehensible state of unendurable solitude   in these underpopulated hills. “I want an ice cream,” I said firmly.  Even if I couldn’t taste it I wanted something cool and creamy, a memory of vanilla to celebrate the disappearance of my Covid. The pharmacist laughed. Fair enough she said as she scooped up my 15 Euros and we were both maskless, the first time in a week I wasn’t unclean. 

I walked to the village shop where my Facebook friend Enrica owns her late mother’s institution, the convenience store. Below you her mother Angelina getting water at the public fountain fifty or sixty years ago as everyone had to in those inconvenient days, and she was dressed as I remember her in her black widow’s weeds:

Armed with my chocolate coated vanilla ice cream bar I got into my rented Fiat 500 for the forty five minute drive to the hospital at Terni. That ice cream bar had flavor, and I thought of the comment left on this page which affected me profoundly. Imagine losing your senses of smell and taste forever? Unbearable. I had an inkling mine was coming back as I sat in the car licking the chocolate coating off the vanilla and I was profoundly grateful. 

The Italian countryside is littered with fixed speed traps which seem to have multiplied since the last time I was here, orange pillars everywhere. The fines arrive by mail and are not subject to appeal. I don’t drive fast in my old age but the cars beeps at me every time I exceed the speed limit, even by one kilometer per hour,  in the vicinity of these damned Autovelox machines. The car sounds like a juvenile’s phone texting beeping at every village. 

Giovanni spent forty plus years as a cardiologist at the public Hospital of Santa Maria in Terni (no separation of church and state here). They put up the obligatory banner thanking healthcare workers but Giovanni retired with a profound sense of relief at escaping a politicized and under funded public hospital. Forty years of public service paid back the state for his medical education and assured him a pension plan. 

With his instructions I found the infectious disease ward but visiting hours are in the evening only and pretty strict so I left a message for my sister that I had been by and went off to meet Giovanni who had plans to go for a drive.  I was ready to do anything other than sit still. 

Just like the majority of the United States central Italy is enjoying an appalling heatwave so to escape one hundred degree temperatures we planned to head to the mountains of Terminillo, a ski resort a short drive from the heat sink that is Terni. 

Giovanni was rather dismissive of the town of Leonessa saying it voted him. Personally I rather liked it, properly medieval, comfortably flat for strolling with lots of interesting alleys and medieval buildings, many wracked by recent earthquakes which take decades to repair in lackadaisical Italy. 

The interior of the church held together by a jigsaw of plumbing bolted together to stop the thing from imploding..so far so good. 

Inside one church we came across this rather startling mural painted in 2016 about a massacre that took place in April 1944. Italy was the scene of some ghastly violence in that year as the Germans grew increasingly desperate as they were forced to retreat. My grandfather was imprisoned by the Gestapo for hiding  guns (true) but he was saved by the arrival of the British, including my father who ended up marrying his daughter. Wars do terrible and sometimes astonishing things for people. 

Twenty four people including a priest were murdered in a public execution to try to persuade the partisans to stop fighting and the whole city watched.  Ghastly stuff not easily forgotten, apparently. 

More earthquake damage: 







More earthquake straps…

“I know this place,” Giovanni said and they squeezed us in for dinner without a reservation. It turns out she was his patient. 

I can’t tell if Italians are hypochondriacs of if they are just more ill than they tell us in the US where the “Mediterranean diet” is promoted as heart healthy; but there was a positive parade of people stopping by to say “Hi!” to the doctor. I kept my head down and ate my heart- friendly portions as ordered by my cardiologist. 

Giovanni insisted on paying but as he told me later “ I had to give her something…” otherwise as he put it she’d wanted her heart checkups for free! 

It was a short walk back to the car but it helped settle dinner…

Whereupon someone else flagged down the intrepid doctor from their car. The weird thing is the town of Leonessa isn’t even in Umbria and is miles off our beaten path in the Lazio region. But not that far from Terni.  

Finally we got going for a drive through the cool night air several thousand feet up, me snug in the Audi’s comfortable passenger lounge half listening to Giovanni explain why Italy is such a mess thanks to the communists and immigration and all that stuff. 

All I could see was miles of oppressed middle class tax evading Italians enjoying expensive full dinners out in the mountains many of them wild camping in parking lots at the ski resorts closed for the season. 

I missed GANNET2…

And so we drove back to Terni and there I took my Fiat 500 back to my farmhouse. 

Another day in retirement. 

Chianina

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.