Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [129]
We’re too American. We lost our nerve. We dined well, but no seminary-trained pumpkin met its maker that night.
A type of tourist establishment exists in Italy that does not easily translate: categorically called agriturismo, it’s a guest accommodation on a working family farm. The rooms tend to be few in number, charmingly furnished, in a picturesque setting, similar to a bed and breakfast with the addition of lunch and dinner, plus the opportunity to help hoe the turnips and harvest the grapes if a guest is so inclined. The main point of the visit for the guest, however, is dinner, usually served family-style at a long wooden table adjacent to the kitchen. Virtually everything set down upon that table, from the wine, olive oil, and cheeses to the after-dinner liqueur, will have been grown and proudly fabricated on the premises. The growers and fabricators will be on hand to accept the diners’ queries and appreciation. The host family will likely join the guests at the table, discussing the meal’s preparation while enjoying it. By law, this type of accommodation must be run by farmers whose principal income derives from farming rather than tourism. The guest rooms must be converted from farm buildings; all food served must be the farm’s own. Fakes are not tolerated.
This hospitality tradition is big business in Italy, with 9,000 establishments hosting more than 10 million bed-nights in a typical recent year, turning over nearly 500 million euros. The notion of agri-vacationing originated in the days (not so long ago) when urban Italians routinely made trips to the countryside to visit relatives and friends who were still on the farm. Any farmstead with a little extra in the storehouse could hang a leafy bough out on the public highway, announcing that travelers were welcome to stop in, sample, and purchase some of the local bounty to take home. It was customary for city-dwelling Italians to spend a few nights out in the country, whenever they could get away, tasting regional specialties at their freshest and best.
It still is customary. The farmhouse holiday business attracts some outsiders, but during our foray through Italian agritourism we met few other foreigners, mostly from elsewhere in Europe. The great majority of our companions at the farm table had traveled less than 100 kilometers. Whether old or young, from Rome or Perugia, their common purpose was to remind themselves of the best flavors their region had to offer. We chatted with elderly couples who were nostalgic for the tastes of their rural childhoods. One young couple, busy working parents, had looked forward to this as their first romantic getaway since the birth of their twins two years earlier. Most guests were urban professionals whose hectic lives were calmed by farm weekends when they could exchange the cell phone’s electronic jingle for a rooster’s wake-up call and the gentle mooing of Chianina cattle. And more to the point, eating the aforementioned beasts.
These Italian agri-tourists were lovely dinner companions who met the arrival of each course with intense interest, questions, and sometimes applause. My customary instincts about rural-urban antipathy ran aground here where our farmer hosts, wearing aprons tied over their work clothes, were the stars of the evening, basking in the glow of their city guests’ reverent appreciation.
The farm hotel often has the word fattoria in its name. It sounds like a place designed to make you fat, and I can’t argue with that, but it means “farm,” deriving from the same root as factory—a place where things get made. Our favorite fattoria was in Tuscany, not far from Siena, where many things were getting made on the day we arrived, including wine. We watched the grapes go through the crusher and into giant stainless steel fermenting tanks in a barn near our guest room. Some guests had brought work gloves to help pick grapes the next morning. We were on vacation from farm work, thanks, but walked around the property to investigate the gardens and cattle paddocks. A specialty of the house here was the