Moving On

New Pictures!

Here Tyler plays a traditional bag-throwing game for Derby day (Kentucky Derby!) in front of the Spannocchia Villa.

Riccio (the boss) and his band play for the Mayday celebration.

San Galgano monastery near Spannocchia. They claim to have the sword in the stone from the King Arthur story.

After cooking class, enjoying our handmade spinach ricotta ravioli.

A random beautiful church in Genova where we visited for the Slow Food event "Slow Fish." Summary of the trip: DON'T EAT FISH.

Yesterday we finished our last day of work at Spannocchia, and all the interns are leaving this coming Monday. It's a bittersweet departure (like most), I'm delighted with all the knowledge and skills I've gained, but disappointed I couldn't do more to improve the farm and make it more viable. My plans for the next few weeks are solid, then things get a bit vague again. First, I'm biking down to the Amalfi coast in southern Italy, which is about 450 km. It should take about 4-5 days, then I'm meeting some of the other interns from here and we're renting an apartment on the coast for a week. I've been working on my base tan, so I'm well prepared to sit on a beach for a while. We actually took a field trip to a much closer beach today and it was gorgeous. The water was the perfect temperature, actually a bit warmer than the pool here that they just opened (and the salt feels tremendously better than chlorine). After the week on the coast I'm biking a bit farther south to Calabria, where I'll be working on a farm with someone named Antonio. He sent me some pictures of him in his artichoke patch, and he looks quite friendly. I'm hoping to do more in the vegetable garden and learn a bit of wood frame construction. I'll be there for about three weeks, then probably take a brief trek south to Sicilia to see/climb Mt Etna, then back north. I'm looking for a dairy farm in the north to spend either my July or August, but it's too early to know how that will pan out.

There was a funny moment yesterday evening which I think captures the essence of my experience here and shows how my comfort level has changed. I was sitting on the top of the 12th century tower in the center of our villa playing ukulele and noticed that some of the piglets were rooting around outside their pen. I got Kate, another animal intern to help me put them back inside. She was already dressed for dinner, wearing a nice black skirt and shirt, I was barefoot in my boxers. A couple of the pigs were easy to round up, but one was being stubborn and kept running past the open gate without going inside. We trapped him in a corner and I grabbed his back legs. Pigs are very strong, and when you first grab them, they keep kicking their legs which makes your arms piston back and forth. I dragged him along the ground wheelbarrow-style and Kate helped me direct him back into his pen. It was quite a sight, one formally dressed and one hardly dressed intern wheeling a pig around in the evening light.