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
 |
| Add caption |
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?
