254 animal, vegetable, miracleIt still is customary. The farmhouse holiday business attracts some
outsiders, but during our foray through Italian agritourism we met few
other foreigners, mostly from elsewhere in Europe. The great majority of
our companions at the farm table had traveled less than 100 kilometers.
Whether old or young, from Rome or Perugia, their common purpose was
to remind themselves of the best flavors their region had to offer. We chat-
ted with elderly couples who were nostalgic for the tastes of their rural
childhoods. One young couple, busy working parents, had looked forward
to this as their first romantic getaway since the birth of their twins two
years earlier. Most guests were urban professionals whose hectic lives
were calmed by farm weekends when they could exchange the cell
phone’s electronic jingle for a rooster’s wake- up call and the gentle moo-
ing of Chianina cattle. And more to the point, eating the aforementioned
beasts.
These Italian agri- tourists were lovely dinner companions who met
the arrival of each course with intense interest, questions, and sometimes
applause. My customary instincts about rural- urban antipathy ran
aground here where our farmer hosts, wearing aprons tied over their work
clothes, were the stars of the evening, basking in the glow of their city
guests’ reverent appreciation.
The farm hotel often has the word fattoria in its name. It sounds like a
place designed to make you fat, and I can’t argue with that, but it means
“farm,” deriving from the same root as factory—a place where things get
made. Our favorite fattoria was in Tuscany, not far from Siena, where
many things were getting made on the day we arrived, including wine. We
watched the grapes go through the crusher and into giant stainless steel
fermenting tanks in a barn near our guest room. Some guests had brought
work gloves to help pick grapes the next morning. We were on vacation
from farm work, thanks, but walked around the property to investigate
the gardens and cattle paddocks. A specialty of the house here was the
beef of Chianina, the world’s largest and oldest breed of cattle, dating
back to Etruscan times. Snow white, standing six feet at the shoulder,
they are gentle by reputation but I found them as intimidating as bison.
In a vegetable garden near the main house an elderly farm worker