From Tuscany to Sicily (June & July)

Better late than never. We figure it's high time to post these pictures from our last two months in Italy even though we left there about 7 months ago.

After a few weeks at Flavia Constans in Umbria, we had a short stay in Ponteginori (a village in Tuscany a quick train ride from Pisa). Most of our work there involved landscaping, with a little olive pruning thrown in one day for a change. Our accommodation was beautiful, but we were only in Tuscany for a couple of weeks and didn't have a chance to see much of it owing to the fact that Amy pulled something in her back and ended up needing time off to recover. And so we headed to Pisa, with its affordable campground / swimming pool. Meals there were usually our own creation but a great place called Cafe Emma was within walking distance from our campsite. The days were mostly sunny, but one afternoon we were hit by a freak storm including enough hail to carpet the ground with ice. Other than this 4-day vacation to Pisa the highlight of our time in Tuscany was a wonderful meal at Il Vecchio Mulino, a restaurant in the town of Saline. Our evening-long dinner consisted of bruschetta, wild boar ravioli, grilled wild mushrooms, and an amazing dish of grilled beef in chocolate / ginger / balsamic sauce. We know we had something for desert, but the rest of the food was so amazing that we've both forgotten what it was.

in this storefront in Pisa, as elsewhere in Italy, the design of pasta
is another excellent opportunity to create beauty

the famous leaning tower

some battered sage leaves from our garden in Tuscany

viva Italia! (swimming at Pisa)

After Amy had a chance to recover her back by the pool, we took a train to Genova and from there an overnight ferry to Palermo. We spent our last month and a half doing very little work and a lot of resting and eating at a restaurant / agriturismo / farm in central Italy called Feudo Tudia. I think we both put some weight on, as most meals had double courses of pasta and meat, many served with this divine creamed pistachio sauce, plus lots of fried or marinated appetizers. We also got treated to some great meals courtesy of the billionaire neighbor, who personally cooked for us the most amazing tuna steaks I've ever eaten. While at Tudia we managed to spend several days in Cefalu, Syracuse, and Palermo. In the end it was painful to leave Sicily. The people were extremely welcoming, the beaches were beautiful, and the food was soooo good.

on the ferry from Genoa to Palermo

a chapel in the Palermo Cathedral

another picture taken in Palermo Cathedral

at Mondello beach (Palermo is just on the other side of that rock)

the cathedral palazzo in Cefalu

in front of Cefalu cathedral you'll find this restaurant
(La Corte dei Golosi)
with the best pizza we tasted in Italy

this is the best pizza we had in Italy:
prawns, asparagus, and fresh tomatoes

sweets for sale in Cefalu
(breakfast that day was ice cream served on a brioche
with whipped cream)

yummy-looking candied mandarins on display in Syracuse

in Syracuse with an arancino - our favorite street food

a couple fish heads at the market in Syracuse

the duomo of Syracuse, built onto the pavement and columns
of the ancient Greek temple of Athena

Flavia Constans in central Umbria

"But you're not my mother!"
holding one of the new kids.

Our time in Italy took a turn for the better when we arrived at Flavia Constans, a family farm, agriturismo, and soon-to-be restaurant in central Umbria just outside the hill town of Spello. It is now two weeks after our arrival and we are feeling sad about departure tomorrow. We especially loved the goats. They were among our responsibilities while we were here, and they were always the first animals we went to check on. They were in the middle of kidding during our whole time here, so as the two weeks progressed the goat paddock began to fill more and more with baby goats stumbling and hopping about and exploring the place. Just today two of the smallest goats yet appeared on the scene, animals not much larger than puppies. We can’t wait to have our own smallholding and herd of goats – they are so delightful and curious.

love at first sight- just born

taking milk donations

One thing that came as a surprise to us upon arrival is that our hosts not only produce their own ricotta and pecorino cheeses from sheep and cow milk, but they cure their own meats as well. As a result we have eaten more meat while staying here than at any other time in our lives. This is not an exaggeration. The finest quality cured meats of too many varieties to remember were a regular feature of every meal. Not to mention all the several ways we had lamb prepared for us, as well as rabbit, goose, and snail. Every day we were kept in suspense about what kind of meat we would be served. We would not recommend the place to vegetarians, or to anyone with a weak stomach, but to everyone else it would be a paradise. Not that the hosts wouldn’t be and haven’t been accommodating to vegetarians. They are excellent cooks, and we had a number of tasty, local vegetable and bean dishes. We also did some foraging in the mountains for wild asparagus, wild thyme, and a small edible shrub that few people even around here remember you can eat.


As with the meat, we have never drunk so much wine at any other time in our lives. Our hosts, like most of the people around here, grow their own grapes and produce their own wine, both white and red. Two bottles of wine are always on the table at lunch and dinner, as well as a variety of sweet red wine only made in a few local villages and towns. This is called vernaccia. The people here also drink plenty of grappa, mix their espresso with sambuca (something you should try if you haven't already), and wash it all down with amaretto.


On our days off we either slept in because we were tired out or coming down with colds, or we visited Spello or Assisi. Our visit to Spello was a little anticlimactic, as we came on the wrong day of the week leading into Easter, or the wrong time of day, and the streets were largely deserted. There were some very nice shops there, and beautiful frescoes to see in the churches, and the town itself, clustered on a hill with its old walls and its Roman arch, was very picturesque. Maybe we were just tired out and there was too much climbing to do (the cobbled streets are very steep and after you walk back and forth across the town a couple times you start to long for a level surface). We were also in a reflective mood, feeling like outsiders here. We could go into these people's churches and walk along their picturesque walls, but their life was so different from anything that could be ours.


Definitely the highlight of our time at Flavia Constans was the day we started off foraging with Manuele for wild asparagus in the mountains and then cycled through the countryside to Assisi. After struggling up the very steep hill into the town we were easily tempted by the many beautiful pasticcerias lining the streets and at Gran Caffe we purchased two of the most expensive but loveliest looking cakes we had ever bought (12.24 Euros for two small cakes, of which we are still savoring every mouthful and making last as long as possible). We visited the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi and spent quite some time down in the crypt beside his tomb. Going to the basilica was very moving for us. It was the most beautiful church we have ever been inside in terms of the frescoes and elegant architecture.


The basilica is the mother church of the Franciscan Order, which means it remains an extremely important place for pilgrims to this day. The day we visited also happened to be the day before the beatification of John Paul II, so the church was flooded with pilgrims either on their way to Rome or who had come to Assisi to watch the ceremony televised and be present for a special mass.


After leaving the basilica, still in a thoughtful daze from all we had seen and felt there, we stumbled into a loud medieval procession ushering in the festive time of Calendimaggio (see the video below). The streets were crammed full of onlookers as scores of drummers, pipers, trumpeters, and women in beautiful dresses, sometimes playing tambourines, paraded along after colorful banners. Following our time in the silent, sacred basilica where we had been withdrawn into our thoughts, finding ourselves in the middle of the procession was like getting splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water – shocking and waking us up. We followed the last group of drummers right to the Porta Moiano, where we left Assisi and descended again into the quiet valley.

foraging for wild asparagus in the hills overlooking Spello

display window of Gran Caffe Pasticceria
photo by Jerry (original)

bad photo of one of the loveliest churches

basilica of St. Francis, main portal

interior of the lower church, directly above the tomb of St. Francis

Snow White in retirement in Spello
(missing half a dwarf)

don't rain on my parade
(emergency measures taken in Assisi)

A piece of advice for wwoofers coming to Flavia Constans, there is plenty of work to do here, it will tire you out, and because your two days off each week aren’t always going to be consecutive, there won’t necessarily be a chance to take one day to just rest and then go exploring on the next day. So be prepared either to be very tired when you go exploring, or not to go exploring quite as much as you might in other places. The living conditions here are top notch, the people are the best kind, the food is excellent with healthy variety, but be prepared to work and be tired. Not that the work was as hard on our bodies as some places we’ve wwoofed before (i.e., Casa Caponetti in Lazio and Cal Sereno in Catalonia, Spain) but it did wear us out. It was exactly the kind of work we came wwoofing to do, a good mix of animal care, gardening, and general domestic chores. We also had a little time each day to take a nap or go on a bike ride into the nearby countryside. That was when we had a chance to soak in the peace and quiet of this place, to look out over the often hazy valley at the many layers of mountain ridges vanishing into the distance, or up at the nearby towns of Assisi or Spello.

Our last weeks in Lazio - and some more about Casa Caponetti

Imagine a horse barn with a walkway in the middle and stables on either side… that pretty much sums up the wwoofer living quarters at Casa Caponetti: horses living in the stables on one side, us living in two converted stables on the other side. Wwoofers can open the bathroom window and stick their heads out and there will be a horse in his stable opposite looking at them. Trust us, it’s as good as it sounds! We are astounded by how much noise seven horses make in the course of the night. And as you’ve probably guessed we are getting very little sleep in this barn, which is heartbreaking as there is a nice row of luxury cabins about 100 meters away where the paying guests stay. At about midnight or two am every night one of our ne-iii-gh-ghbours goes into a sneezing fit. Another of them falls asleep up against the side of its stable and wakes up in a frenzy, apparently having forgotten that it is inside a small enclosed space.  While they spend their nights neighing, kicking their stable doors, and throwing themselves down on the ground, we spend ours wishing we could get some rest.

We would be very hesitant to recommend Casa Caponetti farm to anyone interested in wwoofing here. The work is very hard, the days are long and hot, and the owner’s sarcasm seems boundless.  By the way, for any prospective wwoofers, the cooking school here has absolutely nothing to do with wwoofer work or life – it’s actually just something the mother does in another house.  We never get to eat any of her food, another heartbreaking fact of life here. The hosts themselves can cook fine, but neither of them much enjoy cooking, which came as a sad shock to us when we arrived, seeing as they have their own line of organic foods. We had imagined long hours at the table with wine and cheese and Italian conviviality but these things are not a feature here. Our hosts don’t even drink wine. Wwoofers have the choice to either eat with the little host family or prepare their own food in the stable-cabin.  Mostly we have chosen to prepare our own food as meal times with our hosts are often awkward, what with them conversing so much in Italian and asking us no questions about ourselves.

On a more positive side of things, we have learned a lot about pruning and mulching olive trees, building trails in a forest with medieval technology, using a scythe, and optimally stacking grass cuttings and sticks on the back of tractor. We have also become adept at interpreting complex instructions in Italian, because although the hosts themselves speak fluent English, the workers speak none of it. Another plus is that the host is an archaeology buff who is publishing a paper about an Etruscan labyrinth under a neighbour’s property. He has even asked us to help prepare a diagram of the labyrinth to go into a British archaeology journal.

The day after we arrived at Casa Caponetti we celebrated one of our birthdays. We visited the village in the sky, Bagnaregis, where we sampled some wine and bruchetta and some local gelato. Bagnaregis is a beautiful little village and being there wasn’t like anywhere we had ever experienced before. Our host had been invited to a private party in the village to celebrate the opening of a B&B so we also went along to that for a little while and enjoyed some mozzerralla and rice croquets and a Porchetta panini (de-boned piglet, stuffed and rolled), which was delicious.

Our first official day off at Casa Caponetti we took a bus to Viterbo. The Popes used to flee there whenever Rome got sacked or looked like getting sacked by barbarians. They liked to flee there because of the very thick walls, or so we’ve heard. We had a great time exploring the old city, wandering the romantic lanes around San Pelegrino (where Romeo and Juliet was filmed), and eating a massive pizza and calzone at a place called Il Labarinto. Probably the highlight of our time occurred near the start when we wandered into the Piazza sans Trinitate (or something like that) and went to see if we could get in the doors of the big church. We were surprised by a kind and very little old priest who was just then coming outside. We thought he muttered something about pilgrims and we thought he was telling us to go away because the church was closed to the public. But when we tried to leave, he waved us back and invited us through the doors into his amazing church. The place was silent and, aside from the three of us, was empty. He spoke about three words of English but still endeavoured to give us an extensive tour of the church. He spent a long time explaining some of the many frescoes lining a courtyard to one side of the church, mentioning things (we think) about the life of Saint Augustine, Macchu Pichu though we didn’t see the connection, about Sardinia, and about a monkey in one of the scenes.


Well, as you can probably infer from our comments above, Casa Caponetti was not for us. We had intended to be there for four weeks but ended up leaving in the early hours of the morning, after only two weeks. We’ve found another host, a farm called Flavia Constans. It is a small family farm where the son cares for the animals, the father cures the meat and makes the cheese and the mother cooks most of the food. We’ll tell you more about this place in our next entry, but for now we’ll just say it is worlds better than our last place...

Bagnaregis
the village in the sky

medieval architecture outside the Piazza San Pelegrino

giant pizza and calzone at Il Labarinto

the ceiling of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, Viterbo

Roma

Buon giorno from Italia,

So here we are in Italy, after planning the trip for so long, and then changing our plans and for a while being unsure if we were actually coming. We arrived on a Tuesday and quite promptly got ourselves lost in Rome. Just so you know, there are two different bus \ train stations in Rome called Aurelia which you can get to from the Termini station. One of them is just Stazione Aurelia, while the other is Valle Aurelia. Don’t get them confused. They are both in the district of Aurelia, but they are not all that close to each other, at least when you’re carrying a giant rucksack and feeling shell shocked by all the traffic, noise, and graffiti. Anyway, we ended up arriving about two hours late to the camping site (Camping Village Roma, run by Plus Hostels). This turned out to be a nice place, and we recommend it for anyone considering staying fairly cheaply in Rome. Not in the best part of town, but not the worst either. During peak season, a shuttle leaves every twenty minutes or so for the Vatican Museum. Read more on their website.

Day two found us standing at the entrance to the Vatican Museum, bewildered by the monumental scale of the place and by the crowds of people pressing through it. The visit to the museum was like a refresher course in art history. There’s no way to describe the Vatican Museum without minimizing the grandeur and beauty of the buildings and their contents. If you can ever go, you’ve got to do it. There’s nothing like seeing those sculptures and paintings for yourself and imagining the hands and tools that shaped them so many years ago. One of the highlights of our time there was visiting the Sistine Chapel.

with the Nile

famous sculptures of some Roman guys

the map room (it's like being inside a geography book)

the ceiling of a dome

a painted ceiling at the Vatican Museum

at St Peters (no Pope)

Day three we went to the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill. We could have easily spent another day or two exploring that whole complex. It felt so strange to walk on the same paving stones that people were walking on at the time of Christ. We found the Colosseum especially amazing and spent a couple hours inside imagining what it was like to be there two thousand years ago. Probably the Colosseum was our favourite of all we saw that day.

On the third day, which happened to be April 1^st, we were supposed to make the train trip to Tarquinia and the bus connection to Tuscania. However, the Italian transportation system shut down for a strike, so we got to spend a day at the campsite reading about the history of the Colosseum, eating a full tub of ice cream and getting shut out of our room twice (but we still recommend the place we were staying because it’s cheap and the people were pretty nice about opening the door for us).

So on the fourth day we arrived at our first Italian host, Casa Caponetti. This is essentially a big organic olive grove and livery (horse farm) that is converting a part of its land into a kind of park with trails and picnic areas. Stay tuned for more stories and photos from our time here and our adventures in the countryside around about.

February in the North

The northeast of England is still a pretty cold place, with only a little sun each week, and we've taken advantage of the gloomy drear to stay inside and write. Still, we have been getting out into it when we can. This last Thursday we drove to a part of Hadrian’s Wall we hadn’t visited before and hiked along for a couple hours. We had a lot of fun and saw some beautiful scenery, though some of the slopes were very steep and muddy and we thought we might get blown off into the sheep manure if we weren’t careful. We had a lovely picnic there, as the English seem to enjoy lovely picnics whatever the weather. From one of the lookouts we saw a few hundred rooks circling and calling from their rookery. We also encountered a curious white rooster at the trailhead.

We have enjoyed a few performances in Newcastle this last month. The first was Shakespeare’s Richard III, performed by the theatre company Propeller. This was an amazing show, very bloody but also very creatively done. It was Brian's first Shakespeare inside England, which was a different kind of experience for him. The second show was a performance of The Talent by an all male company called Ballet Boyz. We enjoyed this a lot, though we thought the second act was by far the best and could have been developed more. We thought the last act was a little unfocused and never clearly resolved into any conclusion. Still, we would go to see them again, and it’s been nice for us to get out and start familiarising ourselves with some of the cool things going on in town. We also found a new restaurant in Newcastle, a Japanese-inspired place called Wagamama. Actually it is a restaurant serving pan-Asian food in the style of a modern Japanese Ramen bar. Positive eating + positive thinking = positivity. We’re thinking of going back there for our approaching 2-year anniversary.

I've been looking for a job since Christmas without much luck, as the economy here is pretty rubbish at the moment. Our idea was that I could work for a few months before we went wwoofing but now we’re thinking that if I do land a job it might be worth it for me to keep it. In that case Brian might make an abbreviated trip to Italy, just so we don’t leave our hosts in the lurch. Then he could return to the US to start filing for the visa that would let him return permanently to England. We would like to get married soon but for Brian to stay in England I have to be earning a living wage to support us both until he can get a work visa and find a job. I have an interview tomorrow, which might mean we can move ahead with these plans now. But we both feel the dilemma of wanting to see more of Europe before settling down too much. We’ll have to see…

Well, that’s all for now. After our Sunday dinner we’ll be gannin alang the river to the Baltic, which is full of new exhibits at the moment.

England before Christmas

So on December 1^st Brian caught a flight from Malaga and landed at Newcastle airport in the middle of a blizzard. I guess his plane was one of only a few that actually got to land that night, most being diverted elsewhere. I met him with warm clothes and we took the train to my parents' place. He said it felt so good to be in a familiar town again, to be able to take a hot shower, get into clean clothes, and eat a real homemade English dinner. Since we arrived here we’ve kept a low profile. Most days Brian wakes up early, makes himself some coffee, and works on the book he's writing for a couple hours before I get up. He says it's nice to be making progress on it again. He ended up taking a longer hiatus from it than he had originally planned to, but up until the week before leaving Spain he never really had the motivation to write.

Every day we usually venture out at least briefly in the afternoon, unless the sidewalks are treacherously icy, which has happened a few times. We’ve also made a few longer journeys, motivated both by the need to do some Christmas shopping and to see the beautiful snowy countryside. There’s an inviting patch of winter woods close to my place that we’ve explored. And we’ve gone to Durham a couple times. We went there for the Christmas market and a carol service at the cathedral. Then we went on my birthday to do some shopping and to eat at a French café by the bridge. We both like the feel of Durham, with its castle and cathedral perched over all those zig-zaggy medieval roads.

A few days ago we went to the Beamish museum for one of their Christmas events. Beamish is like a place I remember in New England called Sturbridge Village, where buildings and artefacts from a certain period of history have been collected in order to reconstruct a town. In this case, the period is around about 1910 or so. We took the wooden tram (which felt like riding in a boat) from the main entrance to the Edwardian town, where we sampled a pint of the local at a pub sitting beside a beautiful coal fire and saw a demonstration of candy making. At the candy shop we also had a sample of cinder toffee and some chocolates. One of our biggest highlights was the ride on a steam-powered carousel, which boasted an amazingly loud fairground organ complete with little wooden drummers.

In other news, we’ve heard back from more than a dozen farms in Italy that would like to host us during periods between February and the start of May. At the moment it looks like we’ll mainly be in Tuscany, because that’s where the best response is coming from. We’re excited as both of our top picks have sent us invitations.

on the carousel

he looks Canadian

the steam carousel at Beamish

another picture of the carousel

Last weeks in Totalan

His last two weeks in Totalan Brian spent alone, as I had to return to England for a doctor’s appointment. His days were spent picking olives, collecting and cutting firewood, and cooking (and eating). He also had the chance to go to a traditional festival in the little village, where he sampled some of the local sweet wines, which were a bit like sherry but lighter and fruitier, as well as some local cheeses made from sheep milk. He also hung out more with our hosts Geoff and Annie, who were definitely feeling sorry for him after I left. They had him over to their place for a nice meal of seafood and then he cooked some cajun-style food for them: shrimp etouffee, seafood jumbalya, and sweet potato cakes with Jack Daniels flambe. They were curious about this sort of food because they hadn’t ever heard of it, and were under the impression that the USA didn’t really have any cuisine of its own that was worth trying. Brian thought the food turned out well, though he had to improvise with ingredients a bit. It’s hard, for example, to find smoked sausage in that part of Spain, but he did find some beautiful okra, and the shrimp was wonderful. The last few days in Totalan were rainy and windy, and Brian mainly stayed inside by the fire, thinking about his time and looking forward to seeing me again :-) and being in a country that speaks his own language.