Continuing Adventures: Olive Harvest (or: Trouble in Tuscany)

So. We rearranged our trip, cancelling the Schwarzwald, because of Cynthia's obsession with the Olive Harvest. Maurizio's invitation to assist them on their farm "between Grosetto and Scansano, on a hillside overlooking the sea," sounded just fine, and the news that the olive harvest had come early this year sent us scrambling to make it in time. Readers saw our account of our great luck travelling to Tuscany.

Our farm

Upon arriving we unpacked in our nice hotel-like room in the Agriturismo accommodation managed by the middle-aged (He is 55, she 67) couple Maurizio and Barbara. We were immediately a bit disappointed by the fact that instead of 80 sheep, they now had only 20. They sold them because there are so many wolves around (due to a highly successful reintroduction of them to the region) that the sheep have to be kept inside. We then heard a litany of woes related to seeming bad luck that have them struggling to decide on a direction to go with their business. We also learned that there was usually no internet here, for various reasons, and that we would have to wait for the occasional trip to town (maybe weekly) for wifi.

We then accompanied them to a very charming choir practice, directed by a gifted and quintessentially Italian conductor named Rosella. The people were all very friendly and jolly and we thought this a good beginning.

But later at dinner we found out that they are vegetarians, and furthermore that Maurizio is allergic to eggs and tomatoes. A little disheartening, but we still had plenty of hope. (We would soon become familiar with the regimen of dense, hard whole grain bread with no salt, raw carrots at every meal, various grains and legumes and other components of dogmatic dietary regimens randomly employed ineffectually...NOT the fantasy Tuscan culinary experience, needless to say).

Maurizio and Barbara

The first day on the job we really felt awkward. Picking olives was easy, fun, aesthetically great. But compared to our earlier hosts, these absolutely fluent-in-English people (native Italians who had lived for years in England) were inscrutable and difficult to please. It didn't seem we could follow their instructions correctly no matter how we tried. They often seemed uneasy or even suspicious - on our third morning they accused Cynthia of having poisoned them the previous night with her borscht, because it contained vinegar. Maurizio, although he had complimented it the night before, believed that his skin had exuded vinegar all night, and that C had done this knowing it was wrong, etc., and she would not be allowed to cook for them ever again....

OK then!

This all took a little while to get used to, especially the isolation. We like meeting people but there is no one to meet. We also depend so much on the internet. To say the least. but now a week into it, we've come to appreciate the beautiful scenery and the lack of diversions, so that we have finished a few books and had lots of discussions about the effect of adversity on character! Maurizio talks all day, in a deep, rather soothing voice, about the problems he has with government regulations, about auric healing, etheric energy, and other aspects of their Rudolph Steiner studies (they aspire to become auric healers), about history and olives, sheep, wolves and wild boar, and he has become more friendly. We went out with the choir one evening and the whole restaurant ended up singing. It seemed so Italian! We spent a day in Scansano (our day off, we had to hitch-hike in the rain 15 km) and ate in a restaurant. We found some porcini, and we have seen the olives we picked brought to the old fashioned mill and turned into olive oil which we have been able to use on our - buckwheat groats??? Well, you can't win'em all...