Le Vacanze: Part II.

The second week of my winter vacation I spent WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms).  This is a program with chapters all over the world (including one for Italy) in which you arrange to work on an organic farm in exchange for housing, meals, the opportunity to learn about an organic farm, and often the chance to hang out with the family and get to know some really neat people.  I joined, and after several emails found a farm near Florence that could take me for the week right around New Years.  Their website is here if you'd like to see it.  There are pictures there too (including one of the family, although it was taken a while ago--the girls are now my age).  I took a half-hour bus ride out from Florence to Vaglia, and Dona picked me up there (when Stefano found out I was intending to get off at the end of their "driveway" and walk from there (google maps told me it was under a mile and should take about 15 minutes), he said no, no, Dona would be down in Vaglia anyway, and could give me a ride.  This turned out to be a very good thing, since what google maps didn't realize is that it is just under a mile STRAIGHT UP A MOUNTAIN.  Also it was raining and cold and I was lugging my duffel along with me).


When you imagine Stefano and Dona, don't think stereotypical country farmers.  Dona is outgoing and friendly and laughs easily, works in one of the University libraries (political science?) in Florence, and picked me up in high heels and what I remember as being a fur coat (although it may have just been a nice coat).  When she discovered I appreciate books, she pulled out a whole bunch of Really Old Books (think 1600s or so) that she'd discovered because someone was cleaning out storage space somewhere and was about to throw them away.  At lunch that first day I got the run down on local politics (which I didn't really follow very well, since I know none of the back history and she was speaking quickly).  Stefano is quiet, a fabulous cook, doesn't like to give orders (I discovered that I always had to ask what there was that needed doing), and has that wonderful kind of sense of humor that turns up out of nowhere when you least expect it.  He does most of the day-to-day work on the farm.

They live on their farm up in the mountains around Florence in a house that was built in the fifteenth century (bits of it have been rebuilt and added since then, but the original structure is, if I understood correctly, the same!), completely heated by woodstove (there are radiators, but the water for them is heated by woodstove), with their two daughters.  On the farm there are many pigs (for salami), 11 sheep, four cows, a flock of chickens, a pair of peacocks, eight cats, and a dog named Shalom (one afternoon I came around the corner of the house to find Stefano shouting SHA-LOOOHHM out across the woods and mountains, which would have been vaguely surreal if I hadn't already met the dog), all of whom are free range (with the exception of two of the pigs who had taken to eating lambs and were therefore confined in a pen and "in waiting to become salami" as Stefano put it, and another group of about six or seven pigs that I meant to ask about and forgot).

The first evening I was there, Stefano took me around to see the farm and help feed the animals and put the sheep away for the night (they have wolf problems).  I got to ride in the tractor.  And when I say "in the tractor", I don't mean on the seat.  This tractor had a squarish sort of the scoop/lifter thing on the front, which we loaded up with one bale of hay, two buckets of orzo flour, two buckets of water-logged favini beans, and one delighted american study abroad student in borrowed rubber boots, and went bouncing off along the rocky paths to do the evening feeding before the sheep got too high up the mountain (Timing is everything with the sheep: if you get it just right, they'll be near the sheep pen and will come when you call, but if you wait too long, they keep right on going up the mountain and don't come back.  "Till the next morning?" I asked.  "No," said Stefano, "Ever."  I was glad I was not in charge of timing the feeding of the sheep).

Stay tuned for Emily Goes WOOFing, Chapter II, in which Emily can't find the pigs, nearly whitewashes a cat, goes hiking with some cows, and has further adventures with sheep.

In the meantime, here are some pictures.