Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

38. A Farm Feast, Colle Val D’Elsa, Bongo Drums for the Bishop

Hot spaghetti, swimming in olive oil, garlic, red pepper, and parsley, is dished high by Rina upon my flower-encrusted dinnerware till I cry “Basta!” “I hope you don’t mind garlic,” she says. This does not seem a problem for me, since, once I begin to eat, the wine dilutes most pleasantly any shock to the tongue, whether induced by too much garlic or too much peperoncini. While we swirl the strands of spaghetti around our forks, the Count and Countess tell us of their busy lives, lived half the year in Florence and the rest at the farm. Their Fattoria Belvedere is one of a group of seventeen farms in the area between Florence and Siena that offer rustic accommodations at a much lower price than a hotel vacation would cost. (An apartment for two in Fattoria Belvedere costs this year about $300 a week.) All those who run the farms cook home-made food (or sell their farm products to the visitors who may want to cook in their own apartments) and offer activities such as cooking classes, horseback riding , folk dancing, country hikes, fishing, and various activities for the children. In addition, Roberto tells us, here at the fattoria they make their 189 38 A Farm Feast, Colle Val d’Elsa, Bongo Drums for the Bishop own wine, and if, after lunch, we’d like to see his small wine-making apparatus, he’d be pleased to show it to us. The wine, he tells us, is made from their own grapes: Sangiovese, black Canaiolo, Tuscan Trebbiano , and Chianti Malvasia. (Rina says it is all written in their little booklet, if we’d like to have a copy to take home with us.) When I have eaten all I can of the pasta and imbibed all I can handle of the delicious wine, I push my chair back, expecting we will shortly leave to see the wine cellar, but Rina goes to the kitchen and comes back with an enormous bowl of green, ragged-edged escarole. She disappears , to return again with a pottery casserole filled to the brim with beans and sausages. To all of this she adds additional slices of the coarse Tuscan bread. “You said a simple lunch! A light lunch!” “Oh, but this is. This is what we eat every day at lunch. We work so hard, we are very hungry at lunch time.” “If this is simple, then what is a fancy meal?” “If you could come next Friday night, you would see. That’s when we make the farewell dinner at the end of the season for all our guests. On that night, we serve all our special recipes. After that we shut down the farm for the winter and do all the repairs and work on the apartments.” The beans are delicious, plump, and tender in tomato sauce, but when I cut into the thick, round sausage, oozing with juices and fat, I see the curly tails and the bright eyes of the pigs in their pen. I do the best I can with it, not wanting to offend our hosts, but in the end most of the sausage remains on the plate. “Don’t worry,” Rina says, clearing my plate away. “We know Americans these days don’t eat so much meat as we do.” This time I don’t make a move to leave the table. I wait for the last course, which is dessert, a cake made from chestnut flour and pine nuts, dark, delicious, and sweet. Rina serves it with espresso coffee, strong and pungent. I sigh with contentment as we sit, relaxed, and talk about our lives and children. Again I have the sense of how Italians live in the moment, take their reward after working hard, and relish the gifts of food and rest well earned. Merrill Joan Gerber 190 Roberto leads us to the small stone building that houses the wine cellar , while Rina stays behind to tend to the kitchen. We follow him carefully down the stone steps to a chilly room, where he shows us four tanks for storing red wine and only one for white wine. (This last has an engraving on it of grapes and grape leaves painted in pastel colors, an image that lends a warmth and softness to the chill of the cell-like room.) I open the brochure Rina has given me and...