A Room with a View

[From Saturday]

Well.  That was exciting.

But first, some background.  I am currently in Sicily, in a small town called San Giuseppe Jato, just outside of Palermo.  I’m working with Libera Terra, learning how they use land and sustainable farming as a tool in the struggle against the Mafia.  There was a law passed relatively recently in Italy which requires all land confiscated by the government from Mafia members, if not needed for government purposes (fire stations, government offices, and the like), to be used for the public good: things like parks, volunteer group headquarters, drug rehabilitation programs, and cooperatives.  The Libera Terra cooperatives are one such program, using the land for organic agriculture to produce pasta, wine, olive oil, preserves, and a whole lot more (all sold under the Libera Terra logo throughout Italy, and I think also abroad).  At the same time, and just as importantly, the process also provides jobs in areas where reliable work is difficult to find, and rehabilitates land that has often been completely abandoned since it was confiscated, making it productive and attractive again.  Libera Terra literally means “Free Earth” (free in the sense of “liberated”) and the idea is that these farms (and the brave, stubborn, hard-working members of the cooperatives who run them) go beyond simply taking away resources from the Mafia: they contribute in a positive, concrete way to the communities around them.  They are powerful, working examples of an alternative economy to that dominated by the Mafia.

I’ll be spending a month here: the first half in the Libera Terra office doing research on the program and its history, the second half in the fields getting my hands dirty and getting to know the people who work and volunteer there.  I’m sharing an apartment with two other Italian-speaking American students: Ned, who’s writing his thesis on Libera Terra, and Joel, who will be arriving shortly to do we’re not quite sure what—photography, and maybe some journalism?  We’re up on a third floor (that’s actually the fourth floor, by American numbering), in this enormous, endearing, not-quite-fully renovated, rambling apartment with balconies on both ends and a spectacular panorama.  Here is the view from our front balcony (click to enlarge):

You will understand why we’ve been eating outside on the balcony whenever possible.
And here is my room:

And the view out my window:

But I was going to tell you about today.  Today was laundry day (by hand, as we don’t have a washing machine but do have a nice assortment of sinks on the balcony).  I washed my clothes in the morning, rigged up a clothesline out on the back balcony, and then went for a walk in the afternoon.  As I got back to the apartment building, I got a call from Ned, who had managed to lock himself out on the back balcony while hanging out his laundry (wind blew the door shut).  This meant I was also locked out, as I’d left the key with him.  We only have one set of keys at the moment, so we’ve taken to leaving them in the lock on the inside of the door, and the last person out takes the keys too.  I rang the bell for our downstairs neighbors (Salvatore’s brother and family), to see if they had a copy of the key.  They didn’t, but could at least let me in the front door of the building.

Meanwhile, Ned called Micciché, who was on his way to Palermo, but turned around to come rescue us.  So there we were: Ned sitting out on the back balcony with the laundry, me sitting in the stairwell outside our front door.  I attempted to pick the lock with my hairclip, which would have been cool if it worked, but, alas, didn’t.  My international student ID card, a 5-euro-cent coin and a pen were equally unsuccessful.  So I sat on the landing and listened to Ned trying to get the balcony door open using various tools and advice passed up to him from the balcony below.  This seemed to involve a lot of banging.  I found out afterwards that he was using a rubber mallet to wedge a block of wood between the two doors enough to get his hand inside—but the door handle turned out to be jammed, and the block of wood managed to put enough pressure on the door in such a way that the glass cracked.  At that point he consulted with Miciché (still driving back from Palermo), who told him (to Ned’s delight) to go ahead and just break the glass to get in.  Ned relayed this via the balcony to Domenica (the daughter of the family below), who went back through their apartment and called up the stairwell to warn me, so that I wouldn’t be alarmed by the sound of glass breaking.  So that’s what we did, and Domenica and her mother, whose name I don’t know yet, came upstairs (in true Italian mother fashion) to make sure we knew how to clean up glass shards without injuring ourselves.

So that was the adventure for the day.  On Monday we’re going to get a second set of keys made.

Cornetto vegetale

[From Friday]

This is what I had for breakfast today:

The bulb-shaped fruit is essentially a giant fig.  You peel back the outer layer, and then eat the inside, which is a pale beige color with numerous tiny dark seeds, has a consistency something like pumpkin guts crossed with strawberry jam, and resembles nothing so much as a sea urchin turned outside-in.  But—and you’ll just have to trust me on this, since they’re too delicate to travel long distances—the taste!  Madonna mia.  Suffice it to say that the taste is enough to override any and all qualms you might have had about eating something that looks like a sea urchin.  The taste is reminiscent of regular figs, but milder and more delicate—I don’t remember whether I’ve ever had a fresh fig before, but I imagine drying them intensifies the taste.  Think of the difference between a fresh apricot and a dried one.  These giant figs are just sweet enough without being overly so, and surprisingly filling.  One of these and a mug of tea is easily a full breakfast.  They also work nicely as dessert.

Salvatore Micciché, our landlord-cum-adoptive-uncle, invited us over to his house the other night, where we met his wife (who’s name I really should remember, but don’t.  I’ve me a lot of people in the past week) and got a tour of the house (which they built themselves).  We wound up sitting around their kitchen table over the giant figs (from a tree in their yard) followed by coffee ice cream followed by limoncello, talking until well after midnight, at which point it was all I could do not to fall asleep into my limoncello glass.  They sent us home with bundles of salvia, mint, and rosemary, several bottles of fresh spring water from their well (the tap water here is too-something to drink, maybe too chalky?), and, to my delight, a bag of the giant figs.  We’re going to make them an apple pie at some point as a thank you gift, although if this keeps up, it may need to be six apple pies and some homemade bread and a jar of honey.

June

Hello again!

Since I last wrote, I have:

1) Said goodbye to my host family (Emilia is off to Brazil for the summer) and the rest of the JYA Florence crew as we one by one finished our exams and took off for home or summer travel.  There was a week or so where you couldn't set foot in the Sede without running into someone heading out the door teary-eyed on her way to the airport.  Poor Monica and Giovanna must have gone through I don't know how many boxes of tissues.  At least most of us will see each other again in the fall, but after a year together, it was still hard to say goodbye.

2) Spent one last Friday morning at La Talea, harvesting string beans.  Antonio gave me a poster of my favorite map of Florence as a good-bye gift, and I got a little teary-eyed walking down the drive-way for the last time (although I'm sure I'll be back to visit sooner or later).  It wasn't until I got home that I noticed I had a string bean stuck to my shirt.

Also, here are (at long last) some pictures of La Talea:

3) Taken my math final exam at the University of Florence.  It was... challenging.  The course was a difficult one (graduate level, and I hadn't seen roughly half the prerequisite material before hand--someone remind me why I thought that was a good idea?), and I studied like crazy for it and still wound up postponing it a week.  But in the end it went well, and was even satisfying.  Half the victory was staying calm on the way there, and the fact that I did the exam at all (did I mention it was oral?).

4) Spent 10 days wwoofing on a farm/agriturismo called Ca' Penelope in Maranello (where Ferrari is based), which is near-ish to Bologna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.  And I wish it could have been longer.  When I went wwoofing in January, I had fun, and enjoyed the family I worked with, but I never really got as close with them as I did with Vale, Fabrizia, Atos, Lorna, and Nanase at Ca' Penelope.  This time I really felt like part of the crew, and if I didn't already have plans for the rest of the summer, I would have gladly stayed another month or two there instead.  More on that shortly.

5) Miraculously fit all of my stuff into various bags and suitcases which will live under Emilia's stairs for the summer, and relocated myself to Sicily, where I am spending the next month working with and learning about a program called Libera Terra, which organizes cooperative, organic farms on land confiscated from the Mafia.  More on that soon as well.

And somehow it is already nearly July.  Bizarre...

Finite fields and escapist chickens.

So, yesterday I managed to completely forget that it was Friday until about noon, at which point I was lounging on a sunny stone wall studying finite field extensions (of the mathematical variety) and occasionally glancing up to admire the Tuscan countryside extending off into the distance below me, also full of finite fields (of the dirt variety).  Right about when my sunny spot on the wall was getting a little too hot for comfort, I abruptly remembered that it WAS  Friday, and that I ought to have been off working in fields at La Talea all morning.  Oops.  Antonio laughed when I told him.

But that was how I wound up working at the farm this morning (Saturday) instead of yesterday.  My job today was to clear out a section of bietola (a variety of edible Italian greens) that was being taken over by this clingy, slender weed-tendril-plant thing.  It's not a huge deal for the bietola, but the bietola are right next to a row of tomato seedlings, where it could potentially do major damage.

I was cutting off that section of bietola at the base (it'll grow back), and carting the whole tangle over to the chickens, who were absolutely delighted.  On my second trip over to the chicken pen, I was surprised to discover a chicken wandering around on the outside of the pen.  She made a vague attempt to run away, but managed to run herself directly into a corner instead, and then, when I took a step forward, she bolted--and got herself wedged in the space between my the side of my shoe and the fence.  So I picked her up, and, not knowing what else to do, put her back in again, by the simple expedient of dropping her over the fence.  She didn't seem terribly perturbed.

I told Antonio later that one of the chickens had gotten out, thinking he'd want to know.  "Oh?" he said.  "Yeah," I said "I put her back, but I have no idea how she got out."  "Well," he said, "Generally they either fly or get under the fence somewhere."  It turns out that the chickens escaping is the norm lately.  They don't go anywhere once they get out: they have no idea what to do about the fact that they've escaped, and food and company are on the inside of the fence.  Antonio apparently makes a loop round the outside of the pen every morning, collecting chickens and tossing them back in again.

Today I also finally remember to bring my camera with me, so there will be pictures of the farm as soon as I upload them.