The view of the farm I stayed on, La Sorgente
Hello, lovely readers! I apologize that so much time has passed since I've updated you on my life. Today I shall undertake an entry chronicling my time in Sicily and important subjects including:
WWOOFing
Religious pilgrims and the beatification
Working Italians moving north
Educated Italians moving out of the country
During Easter break I WWOOFed in Sicily. When you WWOOF, you go stay on a farm where you work, usually for 5-6 days a week for 4-7 hours a day, and you get to stay there and eat there for free. WWOOFing stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms and is something that is becoming increasingly popular with my alternative-minded peers largely because it is A) cheap, B) brings people closer to means of production, and C) a way to build a real community in a world where more and more social interactions take place online.
I took the train down to Syracuse (11 hours!) in favor of the plane with hopes of seeing much of the beautiful countryside. I saw a lot of gorgeous Italy, but I was also struck at how, the further south in Italy I went, the more it seemed like a third-world country. And indeed, mezzogiorno Italia is much more impoverished than the industrial north. As soon as I got off of the train I meandered over to the bus station to hop on a bus to Sortino, the little town where I was going to WWOOF. As it was a holiday (Easter Monday), I feared the bus wouldn't be running. I asked a (gold-chained, top-buttons-unbuttoned-shirt) bus driver of a different bus who confirmed my fears. However, like a good Sicilian, he was exceedingly friendly and helpful and offered to let me sit in his bus while he called a friend of his brother's who knew a guy who drove a taxi. I thought to myself how Sicilian the whole scene was: in Sicily you never call a cab company, but instead you call a guy who knows a guy.
I got to
the farm alright, and it was absolutely gorgeous. I was impressed that most of the stuff we ate there either came from the farm itself, or Bippo's neighbors and friends down the street. We ate cheese straight from his goats right up the hill. How much fresha can you get? One of the first days we went to a birthday party for the boss's 22-year-old niece, Martina. It was in a big converted garage/barn, and unlike an American birthday party for a young twenty something, the guests included older relatives like aunts, uncles and parents, all getting drunk together on the homemade wine. All of the kids, more or less my age, were making pizzas, all from scratch, in a genuine brick oven.
On the train ride back I was in a little sleeper car with 3 other women, a 21-year-old and her 36-year-old sister and a 23-year-old who talked incessantly. The sisters were very normal, sweet women, who happened to be religious pilgrims heading to Rome for the beatification of Pope John Paul II, an event which drew over a million people. The other girl was a classic example of a southerner heading north to find work, a phenomenon that happens so often in Italy. She was a real chatty Kathy, had an opinion on just about everything from Nicole Kidman (the most elegant and beautiful woman in the world, according to her), to the mafia. She talked a lot about this migration of southerners to the north, and said she knew a bunch of guys who would go north from Calabria to work during the week, take the night train home on Friday night so they could spend the weekend with their families, and then would take the night train home on Sunday night and arrive at work just in time on Monday morning.
Also, many educated Italians, not wanting to work at factories in the north, opt out of the country all together due to the lack of readily available work. More and more Italians go to school for longer periods of time to try to avoid the job market, become "overly educated" (is there such a thing, according to you?), don't want to settle for physical labor, and pack their belongings.
Fresh Sicilian ricotta--made from goat's milk!
Goat's milk pecorino
La Sorgente
La Sorgente
Old-ass caves. So much stuff of archeological interest everywhere in Sicily!
This was an escapee bull. It looked me in the eyes and got real close. For future reference, what are you supposed to do when a runaway bull stares you down?
AND THERE WERE BABY GOATS! Who knew baby goats were just about the cutest thang ever?
Fellow WWOOFer, Lucia, making caprino cheese.
The boss of the farm Bippo Pane with escargot.
