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Dozza, Italia 12 September 2011


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Dozza Farmstay Life

Work is never finished. As soon as the siesta is over, dinner preparations begin, and in this slow food world like our farmstay, that begins with the harvest. This night's dinner consisted of roasted peppers and eggplants and a tomato salad, all from the garden. Milo is making foccacia, and Victoria is making a flatbread. "I'm not a bread baker," she explained, and so hers is an unleavened bread that is cooked in a skillet, then "stuffed" at the table with the diner's choice of roasted peppers, tomatoes, and fresh local cheeses.


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Dinner is the only time when work is set down and everyone gets together. Wine and good companionship, although the fact is we're in Italy and the ability to follow a conversation in Italian helps. Contributions in English in this bilingual family are welcome, but after the first night, the dominant language was Italian.

Interestingly, the children, Isabel, seven, and Charlotte, five, do not dine with the adults, but take their own dinner earlier and then return to their usual occupation: watching television. Our observation of these children was that they were stand-offish, as if the constant onslaught of new faces and personalities had fatigued them. For Rochelle and me in particular, for whom children are such an important focus, this seemed strange.

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The vineyard takes up a good share of Davide's at-home time. He works outside the home more than half the time, then cares for the gardens and the grapes and supervises the building projects. The grapes get harvested soon, to be sent to a neighbor who makes the wine and returns what the family needs for the year, and some money for the rest.


Agriculture in the Val Sellustre

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<p>Properly rolled out dough looks like the healthy living skin of a tawny beast</p>

Properly rolled out dough looks like the healthy living skin of a tawny beast

Davide's mother Claudia lives close by, and one morning she offered us a pasta making lesson: tortelli, tortellini, garganelli, tagliatelle, and lasagne ...but mostly, a lesson about the pasta itself, possibly the most elemental truth about this place.

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The Farmstay is, as described by Davide, “a work in progress,” in the middle of a rich agricultural valley dominated for a millennium or more by large holdings in the hands of wealthy owners. This makes this little in-holding an outlier from the prevalent pattern ...but one of Italy's most endearing traits is its tolerance of outliers and eccentrics.

Visitors from afar tend, at least during the first few weeks of their travels, to judge their hosts' culture by standards of their own: one of the tourist's greatest and most unforgiveable mistakes. I see the hallmarks of this error in much that I have written so far. Davide, Victoria, and their flock of children, volunteers, and animals, have broken the mold, and their different views help me realign my own. Just in this, this has been a valuable stay for me, an insight into how real people live here ...even if colored by the effects of many visitors passing through, and interpreted through the wise yet British eyes of our hostess.


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