La Comune di Bagnaia

My best advice to people considering wwoofing is to spend at least three weeks.  Don't cheat yourself. There's something that clicks between the second and third weeks.  Before my first wwoofing experience I was so hesitant to concede to the 3 weeks minimum that Zak wanted me to stay at Pignano.  When it was all said and done, I stayed a month, and the only reason I felt it was time to move on was because all my fellow wwoofers were on the way out, including Zak the baker.  

At my second post, I arrived without a set departure date.  As I got to know the place I realized I could easily stay a month.  What stopped me was my original intention to experience at least three places in Italy, and the ease at which I could transfer to a farm nearby.  After two memorable weeks with Andrea, Monica, Camilla, and Teo, I moved just down the road to a very interesting place...

 

La Comune di Bagnaia

Stefano, un burlone

Una coppia felice, Guerino e Lucia

I learned about the place through Lucia, the sister of Andrea. She had called the place home since its founding in the 70s or 80s.  Like its name implies, the "settlement" is a community of 13 people living together.  It was founded to serve as a place where both city-folk and country-folk may live together peacefully and sustainably.  It is like nothing I had ever hear of before: people of no particular religious following (mostly non-practicing), of all ages between 28 and 85, married people, single people, but all people who had distinctly chosen Bagnaia as home.  (Fyi, don't be deceived into believing that this way of living is at all common in Italy. While others exist  - and I did even hear of a nationwide conference for communities like Bagnaia to help in developing community-based/charity project amongst the different communities - they are few.)

Equally as interesting were the ways in which it sustained. Some worked in the city (three as teachers, one at a bank, one in a library, one as a street entertainer) and others on the farm.  But all profit -every euro cent earned - was put together to support the entire community.  That financial dependency was one of the things that inevitably brought them closer together.  Trust and Love.  

Andrea, Lucia, Stefano, e Cecco

The other thing that brings them together is lunch and dinner. Residents take turns cooking, and every lunch and dinner is another incredible Italian creation. I can't say enough about the things I ate.  Things straight out of the garden.  Homemade Tuscan bread.  Red wine from the vineyard.  And every meal followed by a shot of espresso (which I would usually pass up after lunch in order to get some shut eye during the mid-day siesta/pausa).  And after dinner maybe a game of "Wist" as they called it - a card game based on Briscola in which you are rewarded for predicting the number of sets you can win per round. 

...

When I arrived at Bagnaia, the women were de-feathering chickens. I right away jumped in, eager to show that I was willing to work and thankful for their reception.  What followed left me without an appetite for a well-prepared lunch....

How to clean a chicken: 

• after defeathering by hand, we used a propane torch to burn off all small hairs and feathers. 
• break leg at knee and discard chicken feet
• pierce skin where body meets neck. Pull out cord which extends up the neck. At bottom of cord is the "vocal cord box" of the chicken. Pull it out and discard
• Pierce skin at anus.  Pull out end of rectum. Make sure any loose excrement is removed.  Pull all intestines out and discard.
• Reach into the butt and pull out organs.  We would save liver and heart and discard the other parts.  Basically what you're doing here is making a tunnel from the butt up to the bottom of the neck where you pierced earlier.  When this tunnel is clean, your chicken is a clean one.
• Chop off neck (we saved these for flavoring stews), Wash thoroughly, and refrigerate. 

Had I used gloves, my hands would still have stunk to high heaven.  However, nobody was using gloves.  The worst part was when I went to bed -because I usually sleep with my hands under my pillow.  This was in no way possible for the next two nights though.  Chicken innards have a relentless odor. 

While I value that experience, I was glad that there was no repeat during my tenure.  In fact, one of my normal tasks was helping Cecco with preparing orders of firewood (la legna) for buyers.  Aside from having ~3 acres of vegetables, ~12 acres of vineyards,  and lands for cattle, Bagnaia owned 40 hectares of woodlands, and the selling of firewood was a sizeable income generator. They already had a massive stock pile of fallen logs.  I would find the big logs (~1 ft in diameter and 3-6 ft in length) and he would cut them with a band-saw hooked up to a power-take-off on a John Deere.  Then, for the second wave, Stefano and I would split these into appropriate sizes with a hydraulic log splitter hooked up as an implement.  Bigger girth logs would be split into thirds or even quarters.  

Stefano

Karin

I first met Stefano doing exactly that.  We developed trust immediately; in fact, we'd alternate putting the fate of our hands in the others' hands.  Literally, one person would be loading the log while the other would operate the hydraulic splitter controls, which would take off an hand in a heartbeat.  Stefano - an ex-hair stylist appealing for acceptance to Bagnaia (with his girlfriend Karin) having already been there for a year trial period - would become my closest friend there and now my main contact.  In fact, in my second week at Bagnaia after a weekend meeting among the current members, Stefano and Karin were officially accepted into the community as full members (and the youngest, being in their late 20s). 

As I was accustomed to with wwoofing, I did all sorts of things at Bagnaia... cleaning out the chicken area, feeding the cows, picking walnuts, picking dried beans (let to dry in the pod on the plant until dry), stacking hay, weeding, collecting figs, eating figs...

Another thing that made Bagnaia awesome was that it was like a zoo. They raised... allow me to list: ducks, turkeys (called "faraou"?), chickens, pigs, several bulls, several cows, pidgeons, and rabbits.  They'd produce their own prosciutto. 

Rabbits and pigeons

When I wasn't eating figs or staring at the bull, I was wondering around the quiet hillside (around Sovicille).  Bagnaia was located in a valley.  At the top of a nearby hill was both an old monastery and the former estate of a significant family in Sienese history - a family which produced not one but two popes. Check out these pics...

Along the path: stations w/ frescos

My target is the monastery at the top

stone staircase to the top

Looking at mansion at bottom of staircase

mansion from top of staircase

front fascade of monastery

Posted sign on monastery

I ventured into the woods, enticed by a low rock wall that looked centuries-old. As you can see, what seems to be man-made neck-high property boundaries. 

the resident sculptor

Occasionally I'd peer into Guerino's workshop.  Guerino, the resident geezer-sculptor-jokester, was in the process of a marble piece to serve as a tribute to the founding of Bagnaia. The sculpture, a rendezvous of male and female nudes in the countryside - is a depiction of the "union" of friends from the city and the country.  Guerino was crazy about what he did; it was his job.  He'd miss meals just to finish sculpting a leg or a breast.  He was also the funniest guy there.  Without a lick of English in his vocabulary, Guero would go off in long tangents of fast Italian to me (knowing well that I wasn't getting it) and end with a "ah?" as if I'd completely gotten his point.  For all I know, he was giving me useful advice for life. 

La Vendemia

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Most of my time at Bagnaia was pretty lax in terms of workload - maybe a few hours in the morning and two hours after a pausa (4-6 perhaps).  It was September, and there was nothing to be planted, only harvesting.  And the big harvest came on   Monday, September 19.  After two months of drought in Tuscany, the rain fell, summer turned to fall immediately, and the grapes were declared by the resident farmer Andrea to be ready for harvest. Called "la vendemia", the grape harvest is a period of intense work, meaning irregular hours, no after-lunch siestas, and work rain-or-shine.  To help, three grape-harvest hobbyists - Italians who do it yearly for free - arrived on Sunday. On Monday, we started with the whites as there was only a half-day's worth of work to collect them.  Afterwards, in a not-so-pleasant misty rain we started with the real work, the infinitesimal rows of reds. 

cluster, un grappolo

Unfortunately, in July, the grapes had been hit by a hail storm, leaving a good 20% of the grapes on each cluster shriveled.  These were our enemy.  Andrea insisted that in years past, these shriveled grapes had given the wine an unpleasant flavor. Therefore, each cluster had to be examined and the bad grapes had to be removed.  Had it not been for this fact, the harvest would have moved at a significantly faster pace, and been much more pleasant. As a result of that hail damage, Bagnaia collected compensation from the insurance company for the first time in 20 years.  (That's how bad it was.)

Storage for final product-after pulp removed.

Still there were a lot of grapes.  After two days of insane hours in the vineyards, I was so glad I had booked those tickets for Norway.  After the trailer was full of crates, they were taken back to be de-stemmed with a machine, and then pumped into the vats to begin fermentation.  [See my video below].  Bagnaia makes three wines: a lot of red, some white, and a rose' (which is come from the second press of the reds).  Wine is not sold by the bottle but by the caraffa (~10 gallon jug set in a basket covering to shade it).  

Petriola 

Chestnuts - Castagne

I would be impossible to fully convey the awesomeness of Bagnaia to you in my weak English.  Let me however leave you with a bizarre experience.  On the weekend before Stefano and Karin were officially admitted as members, everyone was gone on retreat except Stefano, Karin, two wwoofers from a nearby farm (Spinocchio) and myself. With nothing to do after dinner - it must have been 11:00 - we set off to a place called Petriola, a natural hot springs where I encountered the most stark naked people I had ever seen in one place.  What struck me about this place was its Italianess. Something like this could never exist in the states.  We would call them hippies (but they were just regular Italians).  I almost want to say that Italians are more mature than us.  Baring themselves in front of others (it was all adults) was not an issue.  I was, shall I say, impressed.  But to conclude (well, almost) my Italian experience it was perfect: I was sitting in an ancient pool of steamy hot water coming straight out of the earth, with Etruscan ruins surrounding me.  Above the water was a brisk summer night air.  It was after midnight. A clear night, a starry sky.  Need I mention sitting amongst a bunch of naked Italians?

Aria Condizionata, Berlusconi, e birra (guess what these things are)

Yesterday I experienced the world-famous Italian strike/demonstration.  But this one was different that the one I wrote about in Torino, which was a one-day national strike in which all major transportations (train and buses) shut down to protest high income taxes.  So, there exist three main workers unions in Italy.  The one which put on the demonstration yesterday (all around Italy) was called the CGIL, and is supposedly the farthest (politically) union from Berlusconi (the most anti-Berlusconi).  Here, in Tuscany, though, everyone it seems is anti-Berlusconi.  Monica wears shirts that say "I didn't vote for him" in 5 languages.  And Andrea tells me that all of Tuscany hates him.  Only the south and the north (especially Milan, where Berlusconi comes from) fell prey to his tactics when he bought up television channels and cunningly used them to gain political power.  Today, he has been president of Italy for 20 years, is the richest man in Italy, owns a whole lot of television channels and some newspapers, and until recently, Catholic bishops supported him (b/c he somewhat defended Christian values on his platform despite his backwards personal life; this is awfully similar to the way that Republicans gather votes in the Bible belt) unfortunately. (I don't think bishops should be supporting any politician at any time.)

The strike was basically a parade of noisy Sienese people (Andrea and Monica were constantly talking to people they knew) who paraded through the streets in a big mass.  I joined.  We started at the bus station, paraded through the streets to the Piazza del Campo (the main one) and then into a smaller piazza finally where a stage was set up for several speeches which followed. This particular strike (which occurred nationally via the CGIL) was in protest to Berlusconi's proposition to raise tax rates in order to pay for Italy's developing financial crisis (similar to the crisis currently being experienced in Spain and Greece).  Income taxes are already high in Italy, and I would think, although not an expert, that a better solution would be to cut unnecessary spending (military comes to mind as many Italians are anti-military).  

Funny thing I think: Andrea was telling me that one year ago Berlusconi was hosting Quaddafi (the bad guy in Libya) in Roma and they were great friends.  Really odd: Berlusconi had an expensive tent set up somewhere in a park in Rome where Quaddafi stayed. Security was intense for this 'event.'  Really strange: As a spectacle of their "friendship", Berlusconi presented to Quaddafi several Italians who then proceeded to convert to Islam (as a display of openness to Muslims, I suppose).  What a way of doing foreign relations, huh?  And the kicker: In weeks past, Berlusconi has been bombing Libya. 

What can you do?   Che cosa ci puoi fare?

'Nother funny thing.  We were in the car yesterday (mind you, with the windows down, A/C was off, as usual) when Andrea and Monica were talking about how they thought their new post lady was exceptionally weird.  When I asked why, Andrea explained that she always has her windows rolled up and the air conditioning on.  She must not like working in the country, he said.  ....I never realized that this might be weird to them.  Thinking back to the spring and summer months of South Carolina and how we have the A/C blasting as high as it goes.... But here A/C is either regarded as silly or a waste or simply unnecessary.  Granted, I don't think even the worst of heat in Tuscany can measure up to the heat we get in Columbia, SC.  Still, it's something to think about.  Not yet, in any vehicle or house in Italy have I felt the cool breeze of A/C.  And I'm still alive.  Also, Andrea often states that it's humid, but compared to Columbia, it's pleasantly dry. 

Alcohol

Last night, a famous symphony from Israel/Palestine played in Siena. The theater was booked solid, and as a courtesy, the theater set up a live display (with projector and speakers) of the concerto in the Piazza del Duomo (actually, right next to the cathedral).  Since Teo and I didn't have tickets, (Andrea, Monica, Camilla and boyfriend Fillipo had gotten theirs long ago), we hung out in Siena. 

Over a beer, we got to talking about the drinking culture in our countries. The drinking age in Italy is 16, but he told me it is easy to buy alcohol in bars even younger, at 14.  Contrary to my expectations, teenagers in Italy do drink to get drunk in their early years.  However, by the time they are legal to drive (age 18), usually the excessive drinking stage has passed.  In contrast, in America, as we know, the binge drinking lasts throughout the college years. 

So which is better?  Learn to drive and then learn to drink.  Or learn to drink and then learn to drive.   ?  

The other thing in Italy are several liberties with alcohol that we don't have in the states.  Like the liberty to walk in the streets with a bottle of alcohol.  To sit down next to a fountain in your favorite piazza and have a Birra Morretti or even share wine with friends.  We in the states can't do that. Nor can we buy alcohol or certain days and certain times.  

Upon telling Teo that he's lucky to have more liberal municipal laws, he told me that Italy has plenty of nonsensical ones: it's illegal to walk shirtless in a city, and it's illegal to drive shirtless. 

Andrea, Monica, and friend demonstrating

Lavoratori (workers), members of CGIL

Andrea got pretty angry during the strike

March through Piazza del Campo

Living 'Sustainably' with the Fantaccis

I'm sitting here during my pausa (siesta) after lunch, and have decided to write a little about my current whereabouts. I'm at my second wwoofing site, having been here now for a week.

I am currently living in my own small apartment which is part of an old house built in the 1850s (the walls are 1.5 feet thick). The family of four - Andrea (who I work for) is the father, Monica the mother, Camilla (24-yr old daughter, student), and Teo (typical 16-yr old boy, student). Although not a farm, the family has a good sized orto (garden) and also tries to live sustainably in the countryside outside of Siena.

Here are some examples of how they live...

• they have 10 chickens which they feed kitchen scraps as well as organic feed
• water collection from rooftop feeds an enormous concrete cistern which we emptied and cleaned the other day (Initially I estimated that nothing less than a pressure washer and hydro-vacuum would be necessary to clean this monster. We did it with buckets of water and rags.)
• since the stored water is not necessarily potable, they fill glass jugs when they go into the city (it is free public water)
• solar panels for heating water. Also other solar panels upload electricity onto the grid. (Unfortunately, the electric company will not let them use their own power on an exclusive line; but they do get paid for the energy they contribute).
• they recycle paper, plastic, glass, and metal
• no clothes dryer; they use the Tuscan air
• the orto produces a good quantity of produce. So do the prolific fig trees and pear trees. No commercial fertilizers used. Only an anaerobic mixture of chicken poop.
• they make their own bread -traditional tuscan bread with only mother, flour, and water - in a brick oven attached to the house (original)
• they jar fruits (fig jam, pears) and tomato sauce from the orto
• roof is traditional clay roof, bought locally, and lasts a long time
• they use homeopathic medicines
• rechargeable batteries
• the car runs on methane. Plus, Teo drives a moped into the city often.
• no air conditioning. windows often left open, but it is always cool inside. I think the stone walls/clay roof helps.
• the family is very conscious of the origin of the food they eat. They try to buy organic often. And on Wednesdays, they buy from the weekly outdoor market in Siena. They also go to the grocery store, "Co-op"

Also, you know how there are certain things that you always keep on your dinner table because you use them so often. This family always has these seven things on their table:

1. Glass jug of water
2. Red wine
3. Salt
4. Tuscan bread
5. Balsamic vinegar
6. Extra virgin olive oil
7. Another jug of water

While we're in to listing things, here are some of my tasks so far:

• gathering wood in the forest to make posts for a fence around the orto (and later scraping the bark and staining)
• cleaning out the big outdoor underground cement cistern (this water for garden only)
• cleaning out the two big water tanks used for household
• removing vines from on top of a 4-ft wall around the orto (this wall is from the late 1700s and was built without cement or binder; very sturdy; the previous owner planted things on top though which would have eventually weakened it)
• general orto maintenance
• chopping firewood

I'm guessing you're tired of list, but I'm not.

Things I've done with the family:

• eat lunch and dinner together everyday
• talk about Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel, etc (Andrea and his sister Lucia saw Neil Young when he came to Rome in the 80s)
• big concert in Siena last Friday by famous Tuscan artist, Silvestri. Music was awesome. He plays piano and guitar and has a band. Played everything from lullabies to heavy rock stuff. Anti-Berlusconi from what I can tell. I thought he was awesome. So did the crowd - ages 2 to 95. Really diverse following.
• dinner at a friend's house, an artist friend named Francesco, who happens to be well-known around Siena. Incredible dinner. Art nice too. That reminds me, I need to talk more about food.
• Dinner with a small community of 13 people who live nearby.
• Card games, native ones, and poker
• yesterday we went to the weekly market and then "Co-op" - grocery store. (noticed that the back wheels on the grocery carts were also swivel wheels - unlike in the US - making steering a bit difficult). I bought nutella.
• wii sports

All-in-all terrific family. Andrea only speaks to me in Italian to help me learn. He worked in a bank for 30 years (hated it), retired, and now raises a family out in the country. I speak English to Teo to help him learn.

The aspect you're missing is the food. I need to write about the food.

So do you like lists? I doubt it. You'd rather read stories I think. Tell me in the comments.

Fennel,cabbage, and eggplant

The house (from 1800s)

Teo, me, and 1/2 Camilla

Andrea at his best

L'orto (garden) from the side