On the first day, I collect rocks. Folsom Prison Blues is on repeat in my head
as I lug buckets of boulders up and down the vineyard like a man condemned
to hard labour. Flat, heavy stones under a sun in foul temper. Church bells
on the hill split the hours into quarters. Yes, there are birds singing, and
bumblebees buzzing in freaking harmony, to greet the glorious Tuscan
morning. But with another four hours to serve before my release for good
behaviour, I hang my head and sigh.
This is an inglorious start to my farm tour of Italy. Amid the country’s grand
porticoes and pockmarked marble men, there is now a stone patio set in
concrete that will always say me.
Adding to that legacy among the folds of Tuscany’s plump hills, rolling in
every shade of green, my companion and I will tend vineyards, sand wooden
beams and haul manure. Breathe life into a vegetable garden, gorge on
prosciutto and pasta, and drink homemade red wine among the tall grass. We
will shower in a bucket and defecate in a hole.
There are ways to live Italy beyond B&Bs or hotel stars. To inhale its
perfume of cherry trees, conifers and rosemary, but also its sweat and stink
after toiling in a field; soap suds from scrubbing soil under the nails; and
the fresh aroma of homemade pasta, tomatoes, oil and salt.
We toured Tuscany, Sorrento and Emilia-Romagna via the website Help Exchange (www.helpx.net).
For about five hours’ work on a farm, five days a week, we were paid in food
and board. There are more than a dozen such farms across Italy, and dozens
more across Europe — including 32 in the UK and 35 in Ireland. The scheme
also operates further afield, with options in the USA, India, Japan and
South America. And unlike Wwoofs, the organic-farmworkers’ network, neither
you nor your host pays for the privilege of working up a sweat in the field
or kitchen.
The fresh food is reward enough for gathering stones, or the sting on my hands
from pulling nettles out of a tainted English lawn. On a 45-acre farm near
Montepulciano, where our room is a converted cow shed, handfuls of
artichokes, beans, leeks and lettuce, rosemary, sage and wild mint travel
only from the garden bed to the kitchen. The food is so fresh that it needs
little seasoning. Vegetables are served with oil and salt, melted into a ribollita
(bean soup) or fried with pasta, basil and onion in a sauce squeezed from
home-grown tomatoes. Salami, speck and ham hang from the rafters of the
15th-century farmhouse like a clothesline of crusted socks. On the wood
table are nine-pint bottles filled with wine from last season’s vendemmia,
or grape harvest.
Barbara Mariotti, who was born in Queensland, learnt some of her recipes from
the old women of the nearby spiralling stone city of Petroio, while they
talked and queued for drinking water at a fountain. The Mariottis have a
well now, dug 90yd into the clay bed. There will be a shower and a flushing
toilet one day. For now, there is a bucket for bathing, and a hole and a
bucket of sawdust for the rest.
We spend long hours at the wood table with Barbara and her husband, Ugo, a
native of Tuscany; both are former residents of Paddington. We eat honey
with pecorino cheese from a factory near a wooden bridge in Pienza, drink
grappa from Montepulciano and talk about grapevines and death and how hard
it can be to love your family.
The Mariottis host tours of Tuscany, so together we plot weekends to see the
towers of San Gimignano, the frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo and
the view of the valley from Volterra.
Ugo is late in pruning his vineyard, but we make little time as he calls me to
marvel at the contours of a branch on a hazelnut tree. In the main, though,
each day is hard work. My arms look as if I have been self-harming after a
day of ripping blackberry bush from a grapevine. Farming in Italy, as in
Australia, toughens your skin and hardens your gaze. Still, one day Barbara
cries after a spool of wire flicks from under the wheel of the tractor and
cuts her cheek, barely missing her left eye.
There is some joy in waking with arms aching, back groaning and hands stained
from turning a vegetable bed, clearing weeds from the base of a peach tree
or carving post holes into the clay. After the near paralysis of desk work,
hunched over a computer or straining my neck to hold the phone, I have
rediscovered muscles that have been in stasis for years. My body is tired
and my mind clear.
Even lugging rocks under the Italian sun, within a valley of apricot trees,
has its rewards. At a farm in Emilia-Romagna, there are afternoons spent
reading in a field of long grass, and Sunday lunches at the home of our
hosts’ parents — fresh tomatoes with eggs and small circles of homemade
pasta. Nearby is Imola, where for three days the valley roars with the sound
of car engines and the local schools shut as the town hosts the San Marino
grand prix.
Our hosts, Victoria and Davide Edmenson, met in Imola when she was on holiday
from Cambridgeshire, and stopped him to admire the sharp cut of his retro
1960s suit. Between setting stone patios and sanding wood beams, Davide puts
on a trenchcoat and scarf to take us to a market near Ferrari. Stalls of
sky-blue chandeliers, lace and antique garden tools stretch for streets
towards the main square, but you are unlikely to find this market in a
guidebook.
Davide buys an LP of disco songs to add to his collection of more than 10,000
records, which tumble out of boxes and over the floor of a room at the back
of his home. We buy pear and yoghurt gelato, and the sweet scoops
are shaped into a rose blooming atop the cone. We walk among the stalls and,
for a moment, meld into the crowd of Italians watching each other and
themselves in the reflections of the shop windows. And I feel, for a moment,
that I am no longer a tourist in a foreign land. n
For more information on help-exchange farms, visit www.helpx.net. There are
other groups offering a similar experience. Worldwide Opportunities on
Organic Farms (www.wwoofinternational.org)
offers farm work in more than 70 countries. It is essentially the same as
Help Exchange, with two main differences — the farms must be certified as
organic, and workers must pay to join; the amount varies for each country
(£15 for the UK, for example, and £17 for Italy).
The website www.organicvolunteers.com
has volunteer work on organic farms in the USA and Latin
America; www.idealist.org
offers volunteer work on farms across the world, as well as work for
not-for-profit and community organisations in areas such as mental health,
care for the elderly, disaster relief and animal welfare
Here are some other options.
Fran Keally, Madison,