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By Root 962 0

cavity in the center packed with huge white seeds. We took pity on the wailing hogs and chopped up the pumpkin flesh for their dinner rather than ours, distributing the pieces carefully among the pens to avoid a porcine riot. Back in our room, I washed the sticky pulp from the seeds as best I could in our bathroom sink, but really needed a colander, which the kitchen staff also happily supplied. For the rest of our stay we spread out the seeds on towels in the sun, but they weren’t completely dried by the time we had to depart from the fattoria. They would mildew and become inviable if we left them packed in a suitcase, so the rest of our Italian vacation (in the rain, on the train) was in some way organized around opportunities to spread out the seeds for further drying. Most challenging was a fancy hotel room in Venice, where I put them in a heavy, hand-blown glass ashtray on the dresser. We were going out for the whole day so I left a note to housekeeping, whom I feared would throw them away. I gave it my best, something like: “Please not to disturb the seminary importants, Thanking You!”

But most of our days were spent in bucolic places where we and our seeds could all bask in the Tuscan sunshine, surrounded by views too charming to be believed. The landscape of rural central Italy is nothing like the celebrated tourist sights of North America: neither the uninhabited wildness of the Grand Tetons, nor the constructed grandeur of the Manhattan skyline. Tuscany is just farms, like my home county. Its beauty is a harmonious blend of the natural and the domestic: rolling hills quilted with yellowy-green vineyard rows running along one contour, silvery-green circles of olive trees dotting another. The fields of alfalfa, sunflowers, and vegetables form a patchwork of shapes in shades of yellow and green, all set at different angles, with dark triangles of fencerows and woodlots between them.

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It’s the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn’t Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

Tuscans and Umbrians have had a lot more time than we have, of course, to recognize the end of the frontier when they see it, and make peace with their place. They were living on and eating from this carefully honed human landscape more than a thousand years before the Pilgrims learned to bury a fish head under each corn plant in the New World. They have chosen to retain in their food one central compelling value: that it’s fresh from the ground beneath the diners’ feet. The simple pastas still taste of sunshine and grain; the tomatoes dressed with fruity olive oil capture the sugars and heat of late summer; the leaf lettuce and red chicory have the specific mineral tang of their soil; the black kale soup tastes of a humus-rich garden.

On the road to the fattoria we’d passed a modest billboard that seemed to epitomize the untranslatable difference between Italy’s food culture and our own. It’s a statement you just don’t hear from the tourist boards of America. It promised, simply:

Nostro terra…

E suo sapore.

I’m no expert, but I see what it means: You can taste our dirt.

16 • SMASHING PUMPKINS

October

Driving through our little town in late fall, still a bit love-struck for Tuscany’s charm, I began to see my home through new eyes. We don’t have medieval hilltop towns here, but we do have bucolic seasonal decor and we are not afraid to use it. “Look,” I cried to my family, “we live in Pleasantville.” They were forced to agree. Every store window had its own cheerful autumnal arrangement to celebrate the season. The lampposts on Main Street had corn shocks tied around them with bright orange ribbons. The police station had a scarecrow out front.

As I have mentioned, yard