Day Three

The weather was just perfect today: nice and warm, a good change from the pissing down rain misery of the first day. I woke up earlier then I ought have and found that breakfast was very far from being ready - Enzo, like most Italians, maintains a flexible view of when meals should be served. As my metabolism operates at whiplash speed and I wake up and am immediately devour-a-giraffe HUNGRY, this filled me with sadness and tears. I pulled myself together and walked down the hill towards town, enjoying the cool air, the quaint and tiny houses, and the excitement Italy's banzai drivers brought to my day. I would look up the traffic fatality rates for Italy for you but it might make you never want to visit. Thankfully a stint in India and the third world has turned me into a master at the fine art of "diving off the side of the road" at opportune times.

I returned to the house and was very pleased to see breakfast was ready: set up outside and indisputably picturesque. A view of the lake to go with my yogurt and cornflakes: not a bad job. The resident cat enjoys trying to get up in your lap and get hair/fleas in your food when you're eating - I actually don't mind it much but some of the other program participants find it more offputting, which I honestly think is much more normal. If I contract fleas I will know why.

The morning featured a lecture from Sabrina about the world's change from Extensive to Intensive agriculture- details on the NCCROW blog. We had to research a commodity and my group picked tomatoes: I learned considerably more about tomato companies then I had ever expected to. Hint: don't buy tomatoes in winter - they promote horrific modern day wage slavery in Florida! Aren't you glad you know that? (Whole Foods tomatoes and hydroponics are fine). Admittedly they taste like three week old ass anyway so it won't really be much of a stretch to eliminate them from my diet in the chilly months.



Next up was the most anticipated part of the afternoon: lunch. We ate this meal outside as well. I am really beginning to dig wine with every meal. In fact, I have consumed no liquid other then wine in about three days. It is working just fine for me. I think the secret to Italian's relaxed state and general pleasant demeanor lies in their constant buzz.



We began with risotto with wild mushrooms, which Enzo had gathered in the woods yesterday. Talk about local food. This was great: nice, slightly chewy rice with a pungent fungi flavor and a bit of cheese and milk. He paraded his locally-found mushrooms in front of us at breakfast which was pretty adorable. I would like to learn how to gather mushrooms, although I do fear that may begin a slippery slope at the bottom of which is bark wig-wams in the woods, moss under one's fingernails, and really hairy armpits.



Next was the classic dish of prosciutto and melon: really nice on a hot day. The melons were divine - I had forgotten how superior Italian melons are to the crappy bland monsters we eat in the states. This was especially nice with the additional tang of some nice white balsamic vinegar. Very nice, wold eat again!


After lunch, we met with Saviana, a biologist, geneticist, and expert in permaculture. Permaculture is a system of agriculture that attempts to mimic systems found in the natural world. Begun by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture seeks to develop methods of growing food that are sustainable and permanant, decreasing humanities reliance on industrial methods of food production and distribution. She was definitely a hell of a character: her lecture jumped from the hippie lifestyle of the Etruscan people to the evils of tomatoes (good god tomatoes keep coming up today) to the benefits of free-range child rearing. I was certainly entertained.

She also led us through the garden on a magical Eating Wild Junk adventure which I actually really enjoyed. You can chow down on almost everything in a standard garden, she said - the trick is learning the stuff that will kill you. Once you're up on that, you can assume everything else is fair game. (Hint: wild carrots look a whole lot like hemlock, which as you may recall killed Socrates. Be careful). A lot of those weird garden greens would taste pretty awesome sauteed in garlic and oil. The chicory from last night got me thinking.

After the walk, we headed toward her friend's permaculture garden, conveniently located extremely close to the restaurant we visited last night. (Same guy we saw eating in the restaurant last night owns the place: seems there's a clique of food nuts in town. I can dig it.) We were also subjected to the curious Italian method of driving on really narrow roads. You are both driving at around 50 miles an hour up a steep and gravelly road when you encounter holy crap another driver: you both screech to a halt. You stare one another down in a really subtle way until one person gives to their essentially wussy nature and decides to back up - this can be into another road, into the bushes, whatever. You drive past them assuming they will not make any sudden feints or attempts at dominance, and let's be honest, they probably will. You will probably repeat this process about four or five times until you reach your destination because Italians seem to love living at the end of fiendishly tiny roads. Explains why their cars are often the size of my big toenail. With great gas mileage, mind you.

The garden certainly looked wild: apparently a mature permaculture garden is a self-sustaining system, and once it gets going, the owners and gardeners don't need to do much to keep it active. In other words, it is the ideal garden for those of us in the lazy bastard category, which would include me. Perhaps I will start one and pretend like I'm doing tons of maintenance when actually I did diddly squat. I was particularly taken with a patch of wild daikon: I'd never seen it before.

Here's a bunch of photos of the permaculture garden:


The view from the house was great!


There were lots of lovely olive trees leading down to the water. Olives are less lovely when they are ripe and rotting everywhere but look real nice in June.


Wild daikon.


We had some nice Japanese green tea. Apparently Saviana's friend in town owns a bookstore that dishes out the good stuff....

The academic day done, some of us headed into town for a stroll. I had not actually been to town yet, having no time, and enjoyed having a chance to meander around. Around 7:00 in Italian towns, everyone congregates around coffee houses and gelato parlors to catch up, eat snacks, and talk shit about their fellow villagers: I like it. Grandmas and old folks hang out in doorways, young kids with adorably out of fashion hair discuss whatever the hell Italian kids in leather pants talk about, young professionals smoke cigarette after cigarette and yap on their cell phones - you get the picture. Bolsena is a tiny town and fulfills the classic Italian stereotype of what a small town should be with great skill: lots of twisting alleyways, adorable fruit vendor men, gelato shops and pizzerias, tacky-t-shirt emporiums and ceramics producers and so on and so on. There's lots of lovely greenery all over town and a pleasant vacation-village vibe - I'd advise spending a day or two here to relax on a busy trip to Italy. I thought I was lost for about two minutes but it turned out not to be true: it is very hard for me to get lost. My ritual of sniffing around my new setting done, I decided to head back to the convent and moon around hoping Enzo would feed me in a timely fashion. I am a simple person.



For dinner, Enzo started us off with a nice garbanzo bean soup, with parmesan and rosemary harvested from the garden. Another great rustic dish - I liked the earthy flavor of the garbanzos in conjunction with the pleasant flavor of the rosemary. Would make this at home.



The main course was a weinerschnitzel like filet of ground veal with spinach (I think he called it "milanesa") lightly fried and served with lemon and a salad. Real nice, as most deep fried meaty things are. Great salad as well: he actually cuts it up instead of buying it in those neat plastic bags like we do at home. Inspiring but I think I will stick with my eminently convenient little plastic bags.

And I'm here writing this post and listening to Al Green. Life is pretty okay.