You can catch up on this exciting series here and here.
If you’re new here, welcome! Benvenuti! Herzlich Willkommen! Italy 1.0 is a series of posts about our first years as Italian residents and first-time B&B owners.
Acqui Terme, Italy - Saturday, August 15, 2004
7:00 am - 38° C / 104° F
Our first paying guests for both rooms were due to arrive on the 29th of August. It was now August 15th and, this being our first full year in Italy, we had no clue that it was the official start of the summer vacation season.
Despite their best efforts, the potato beetles didn’t manage to destroy our crop. In the end, we had a good amount of surviving plants which meant underground there would be enough food to hold us through the winter. If you didn’t mind living on gnocchi, which we didn’t.
The outdoor work droned on, and by the first week in August, we had a beautiful pool, full of clean water and a paved walk way around it, but that was surrounded by dirt. I was confused. Why would we fill the pool before finishing pouring the gravel and doing the plantings around the walk way? It would just mean the pool getting dirty again. But questions of this type in Italy are painful, because the answers will slap your face.
Hard.
I decided it would be good idea to make a list of the things that Carmelo the builder and his crew needed to complete before the arrival of the guests. The pavers in the back had gotten finished but the large patio in the front and the walkways around the house hadn’t even been started, plus all of the grouting and a few loads of good-looking gravel. I didn’t see how any of this could take more than a week if they worked through and put in full days. Camelo said he’d be coming by on Saturday to square everything away.
Saturday! He never worked a Saturday before!
At dawn break the morning of August 15th, I woke to the sound of Franco’s tractor coming up our hill. Michael was drinking coffee and cursing in the living room - we don’t like morning interruptions much (not a great thing considering the business we were about to open. )
I threw on shorts, kept my pyjama top on and peered outside. It was already broiling hot out there. Franco was waving to me with both arms. “Time to pick the potatoes!” he smiled and pointed to the back of the tractor, full of empty crates. I yelled to Micha that we needed to pick the potatoes and did not know why but Franco said we had to.
A discussion ensued.
Franco explained to us that the potatoes had to be picked today, because it was the start of the full moon. La luna nuova, he said, his hands gesticulating to the sky and the earth. I couldn’t make a mental connection. What did our field of potatoes have to do with the new moon?
Apparently everything.
We learned if we were to leave the potatoes (not to mention the over four hundred tomatoes threatening my peace by looking menacingly red in that same field) had to be picked or the growth cycle would accelerate, causing the potatoes to potentially rot in the ground.
I did not question.
I did not talk about how my father had a garden every year that produced bombastic amounts of food and never mentioned the moon, ever.
Arguing was useless.
Michael rode the tractor down with Franco and I stayed at the house, waiting for Carmelo and the crew to come up. I made myself a coffee and grabbed my list.
A few minutes later, Carmelo was in my driveway, his head shaven. But he was not in his construction truck; he instead drove his brand-new sapphire blue Golf GTI we had absolutely just paid for.
“Nice haircut,” I grinned. “La luna nuova", he grinned back. I didn’t understand and I didn’t ask because I was mad as hell at the new moon already.
I tried to hand him the list, but he jumped back, waving his hands no no no.
“I just stopped by to tell you I leave for the coast today. We’ll be back after your guests go home, around the middle of September. Let me know when they’re gone.”
I was physically blowing a gasket, but he just laughed. “They’re Germans! All they care is there’s a pool and sunshine. They’ll be fine!”
His car shot back down the road, leaving a cloud of dust. I vaguely recall break dancing all over the drive way while howling like a coyote who’d been shot in the arse.
Gathering myself, I wiped away my tears, wrapped my hair in a scarf, put on some flip flops, and stumbled down the hill to pick potatoes.
Franco had an attachment for the tractor that dug up the potatoes and left them on the surface, which was a good thing. By the time I got down to the field, he had dug up about half, with Michael following, bending down and filling crate after crate. He was not a happy man.
The sun was already hot enough to fry an egg on my back. My pyjama top was on inside-out, I had not brushed my teeth, and a bandana was wrapped around my head. My flip flop broke in the dirt. I was sunburned, covered in dirt and smelled exactly how I looked.
I could have been an extra in The Grapes of Wrath remake.
I stood up and shouted with great clarity to absolutely no one, “I DID NOT MOVE TO ITALY TO BECOME A POTATO FARMER!” Michael did look up briefly but he was in the middle of his own existential potato crisis so he kept picking.
Franco, finished with the dig-up, waved at me from the tractor and pointed to the tomatoes, a massive haze of hot, angry red at the back of the garden. I smiled broadly and gave him the thumbs up.
Or a freaking tomato farmer, I thought to myself.
Back up at the house later that day, I thought about what to with seven large crates full of tomatoes. Franco said just leave them in the dark barn with the potatoes but I thought - well, they’re probably going to rot. So I thought we’d get really Italian and make an insane amount of tomato sauce and can it.
We could do that.
Of course we could.
Franco shook his head no. “Botulismo.”
Ok. So if we made sauce and canned it in sterilised jars - the new moon’s intensive growth phase meant that the canned tomatoes could get botulism and kill us?
If, however, we left them in the dark but uninsulated barn, the intense heat would mean we’d have bushels of rotten tomatoes anyway - because the new moon meant things would rot fast which is why we were in this predicament today in the first place?
The real choice was either completely lose my shit or grab control of my own destiny.
The minute Franco left for the day we started washing and churning those tomatoes into pulp. By Sunday, we had dozens of liters of canned tomato sauce, more than enough to get us through the winter.
But would we be brave enough to eat it? Would we be found dead in January over a plate of linguine and sauce?
With thousands of potatoes in the barn and plenty of sauce in the pantry, we started making the final preparations for the first guests as best we could.
Hash browns would certainly be on the breakfast menu. And pasta with fresh sauce would certainly be the welcome dinner.
The perfect chance to test out the tomatoes.
We cleaned up outside the best we could, set up a few lounge chairs and umbrellas around the pool, and waited for our guests.
Spoiler alert: they survived the pasta.
But nothing ever really goes to plan, does it? Nothing, ever, at all.
A story for another day.
Marvelous. I can just see you - flip-flops, head scarf, cursing at potatoes... and tomatoes. I loved reading this. I feel like I'm on an exciting adventure with you.
I can't even... WOW. As you and I are cut from the same cloth, I can actually FEEL these stories deep in my perfectionistic bones. God love you! LOL!