Recently, I traveled with Chris Smyth to the Italian regions of Sicilia, Piemonte and Lazio. I published these on my private social media account, but have decided to publish the text of the journal on my blog. If you would like pictures of any of the items of these, I am happy to provide these to collaborators and Patrons.
Day 1 of this Italy trip, and our transportation got disrupted by railroad workers strike. So like, when in Rome… go march with your fellow workers. They had a marching band at the head of the procession, and they started playing “Bella Ciao” as we peeled off to get gelato. Now, where can I go to get some decent garum?!
Day 2 of this Italy trip. We went to a Sagra Della Castagne, “sacred” feast day/festival of the chestnut, in San Martino al Cimino. It was just as much about porcini mushrooms as it was about nuts, as the two help each other out. A lot of chestnut and black locust honey being sold. Later we went to Viterbo and drank spring water from one of the pope’s many summer residences, and a few different gentian beverages.
Menu from the Sagra, in the group photo:
Polenta con funghi- grits with porcini mushrooms
zuppa di funghi- stew with porcini and chanterelle mushrooms + potato
stracatto alle castagne- braised beef with chestnuts
birra alla castagne- barley wine with chestnuts
Not pictured: deep fried porcinis, no breading 🥲
That night back in Rome, we ate at a Slow Food movement restaurant. We had several noteworthy dishes:
-Reginelle al ragú bianco e porcini. Another pasta with a meaty white sauce and PORCINI MUSHROOMS
-Bocconcini di collo di maiale con uva e castagne. Little bites of pork neck with grapes and chestnuts!
Day 3 of this Italy trip. With the help of some friends we caught a ride to fiumicino and flew to Turin, and hopped in our cheapo rental car. We stopped by Eurospin for groceries. The exceedingly cheap prices and good quality really has me questioning my life choices! Stopped by an anarchist cafe to refresh before starting our Main Quest for today. We had heard that the Knights Templar started a massive chestnut forest in a particular stretch of the Susa Valley, so we decided to find it. That’s basically all the info we had. Looking at a map, it seemed like it would probably be on the slopes to the south of San Giorio de Susa, so we dropped a pin in the map and made for the hills. When we got there, we saw a lot of cars parked in a field by a sign reading Festa de Marrone 
we followed the crowds through orchards, vineyards, vegetable gardens and poplar plantations. The main event was incredible! A group of guys singing a capella while locals passed through line to get wine and chestnuts, roasted to order. We eventually found the chestnut cooperativistas and interviewed them about porcini and Templars. On the way, we bought some deliciously moldy (naturally fermented) salami with truffles, some amazing seed garlic, chestnut and tansy beverages, and a few mountain pasture tome cheeses… the live brass band in another part of the festival and the throngs of locals streaming through, with nobody speaking English, made us feel very fortunate and aligned to have found this place. But anyway- the co-op people pointed us to the Templar fortress on top of a distant mountain, and suggested we visit and pick up our beloved castagnes there. So we did. Ascending the mountain, it felt like a Dan Brown novel 
and the views from the top of Sacra di San Michele were exquisite! Apparently people replaced the natural oak-maple forest with chestnuts a long time ago? And now ecologists say you can’t cut an oak or maple, only chestnuts. Well boo hiss, I say. Perish the thought, castagne is for everyone 
The monks that live in the fortress have a fenced off yard of Ribes (several types of currants, I think, what do they do with those?). The sun had set and the moon had long since risen, so we took the other bit of advice and retired to the *Palafungo*. This is a pop-up restaraunt in a church in Giaveno, a town known as the “Citta’ del Fungo” . Here you will find is the HQ of their “Fungo in Festa” event… We sat down and tucked into the Dolcetto and a three-course mushroom meal. The first: sauteed porcini and caramelized shallots roasted over a wheel of brie (or something)- this was a strong crowd-pleaser. Porcini at the heart of the Piedmont region’s rightfully famous risotto had us giggling with glee as the second course, while the third course was perfectly fried porcini. Frying teased out the bolete’s hidden sweetness, which I had not tasted before… then, there came a surprise fourth course! The eager congregation enjoyed something like cultured cream mixed with strawberry puree, served chilled.
We are pretty tuckered out now, but we’re headed for our agriturismo. We will definitely sleep in.
Day 4 of this Italy trip, we are staying in the Province of Asti, region of Langhe, east of Alba. Langhe is plural for elongated hill. The landscape is a system of wide valleys and narrow ridges. The backslopes are mainly covered in wine grape vineyards. Any sloping sites not suited to Vitis vinifera are coppiced, or simply ignored. During the daytime anyway. At night, truffle hunters roam the forest with their specially trained dogs. The subterranean ascomycete is pungent, man’s best friend sniffs it out with ease.
Our host, Elvio is a grape farmer. What kinds of vines does he grow? Barbera (what the locals drink) and Moscato for export to Germany and US. “We drink two bottles of Moscato a year, on my birthday and Christmas. By comparison, everyone here drink two bottles of Barbera a day.” Wow, that is a lot of wine! Reservatrol ftw.
Their wine tractors have several enviable features to keep from tipping and rolling down the hill, while managing to keep a narrow profile. Even with the safety features, it is still scary for the operator to turn the tractor, parallel to contour on steeper hills. To feel safer at this frequent and dangerous juncture, E. says you prayerfully grab your crotch while doing the Devil’s mudra. This successfully drives away ill luck, preventing tractor rollover.
Elvio prunes the vines with his tractor, bales the clippings with his tractor, then burns these in winter to heat the home.
Elvio subsoils on contour every year before the rain, to make sure the rain soaks in, and to root prune the vines. This drives the root architecture down.
Hazelnut is the dominant crop in flat areas by streams. Makes me feel good about the SARE grant Karam and Julia worked on before leaving Athens. For everyone who said “Impossible!” proposal to grow European hazels in riparian buffers, you know who you are, and you need to visit here. As Tyler the Creator would say: so that was a fucking lie! Nobody would drain wetlands to plant agroforestry as a conservation measure. In zones of soil accumulation at the base of hills, hazel is working fine here, and that is not where vineyards thrive, so there is no contest. The world’s hunger for Nutella demands hazels be planted where it grows profitably, and we’re seeing it by the streams.
FIERA INTERNAZIONALE TARTUFO BIANCO D’ALBA
We girded our loins and drove into the touristy capital of the Langhe part of Piedmont- Alba. Alba plays host to the international white truffle fair. We paid for a walking tour of the town that is based around truffles. We heard a lot, some of it we can repeat.
Some farmers are clearing profitable vineyard to plant linden, willow and also hazelnut, English and turkey oaks, stone pine, aspen, and sainfoin (a forage legume). Why? Truffles! Some people wish you could not cultivate truffles artificially, but people here are doing it. There is a lot of confusion on this point- cries of “Impossible!” are perhaps deliberate misinformation, because abundant truffles would drive down the price. The price has gone up though, as wild truffle yields are trending down, which our guide correlated with less and less snow falling in winter. The festival organizers do pay a portion of their proceeds to create truffle-innoculated trees. Strategic of them, to support their region continuing as the epicenter of Italian truffle culture.
We interviewed a trufflehunter as part of the tour. He confirned that Chestnut is ideal for both foraging and cultivating the black truffle. The man felt very similar to someone from Chris and I’s regular social set. He enjoys his life quite a bit. As we left town, we snagged both a black and a white truffle at a couple of shops. Black is 1/3 the price of white rn. Maybe because it grows in more localities, and perhaps because more people are successfully growing it. We got black truffle gelato as well 
Chris loved it. I can’t stop thinking about the kaki gelato- American persimmon will make great ice cream when we get back.
The last relatable chapter of today was making an omelette with our white truffles, and sharing it with Elvis. You shave ’em like you would parmesano regiano, raw over your pasta or eggs or whatever. It was good. Fucking subtle, and sublime. Judging on the smell, I thought these ascomycetes were going to punch me in the face, but such was not the case. For everyone not living in or visiting the Langhe region, fret not. Truly, doing an oil extraction makes A LOT OF SENSE versus shaving truffles raw, like they do here- you want to pull the flavor out, and bind it to oil that can slide over your tongue. I think I’d focus on growing, making and selling the oil (maybe hickory oil?). But yessss. It was amazing. 3 hours later we were still exstatic. As Chris pointed out, this euphoria woulda cost us $315 in the restaraunts in town, but cost us $55 to do at home.
Elvis came over and we had a deep sharing about being farmers, politics, religion and lore, and the decision to walk away from middle class cultural trappings and towards an ever more elaborate relationship with topagraphic and climatic elements. Now we are sliding into a hot tub, then passing out. Buona notte!
PS: I note that porcini (Boletus edulis) is known to co-occur with sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa), which is interesting. We also heard about Necci, the chestnut flour crepes from some villages in the Toscana region of Italy.
Day 5 of this Italy trip. We headed West and eventually arrived in Chiusa di Pesio. On the way, we stopped to examine English walnut + goat silvopasture, willow coppice on the streambank for animal fodder, European hazelnut in riparian fields, and large chestnut orchards/forests/sproutlands that were planted in the Middle Ages- for flour and roundwood. I will note that in the silvopasture, the unwanted vegetation in the forage layer tended to be nettles. The chestnut “forest” had coppice stools that were 6 feet in diameter at breast height! The sign there said it was planted in the 1400’s, and that archaeologists have found evidence of 22 chestnut processing buildings nearby, associated with a Catholic religious complex. I would like Pope Francis’s next encyclical to be about the moral necessity of agroforestry in the 21st century 
but seriously 
The Main Quest for the day was visiting the Chestnut R&D Center Piemonte. This turned put to be a lot like HARC (well, HARF lol) at University of Missouri’s Center for Agroforestry. Associated with the University of Torino, they have a large germplasm collection including many Castanea sativa, crenata and their hybrids plus a few pumila, dentata and mollissima. It is a 12ish acre arboretum. The research we saw was focused on rooting hardwood cuttings (60% success rate) to give better immunity to chestnut blight. Chris and I were blown away by this. One grafted tree suddenly is made to supply many clones, growing on their own roots, which can then be used at superior rootstock. They have a chestnut harvester implement that loads onto a 3 point hitch and needs only 30 hp on the PTO- dreamy. I loaded up a bunch of pictures on iNaturalist if anyone wants to look. Our hosts were several of the technicians, Leonardo and
Alessandro. These guys claimed that Chris and I were the first Americans to visit. It seems like the idea of this Center was conceived in 2003, and the project was formally established in 2009. 14 years without a single American visiting?! We need to get out more, people!
At the end of the day we came back to Turin and ate at Locanda del Pentagallo. This is a dedicated gluten free restaraunt and it warrants a small side bar conversation. It’s hard to have Celiac’s Disease in a culture that is completely obsessed with wheat pasta. The ministry of health sends you food stamps if you can’t eat wheat, and there are dedicated GF grocery stores to spend the stamps at. I have a wheat allergy, so yeah doesn’t sound too bad. Back to the restaraunt: many reviews said it was cheap, and also the best pizza ever, glutinous or otherwise. It was better than anything I remember. Pomodoro, mozzarella, salsiccia, funghi e grana on mine, and we washed it down with Chinnoto (Laurel-leafed Orange) & Gazzosa (Amalfi Coast Lemon) sodas. We took our time getting back to our rented room to look at the architecture, monuments and grafitti.
Day 6 of this Italy trip! This will be a brief post, since it was a day of transitioning from Turin to Catania. We went for a drive to Vidracco, to go for a hike at a dolomite glade. There is an interesting-sounding pagan cult nearby, the Federation of Damanhur, but we didn’t have time to thoroughly explore the town. We did learn that they have a sacred chestnut grove apparently… seems like everyone does nowadays! We saw an interesting community garden with cole crops growing under a home orchard. I’d say the main attraction of the morning was actually the many kinds of pollarding and coppicing we are seeing. Princess tree saw logs, pollarded at 15 or 16 ft for shade of your housing during summer, was a cool passive solar design feature. I think most of the rest of what we saw was tree hay for feeding your livestock during drought. The ubiquity of that tree hay, growing in the margins of grass and row crop fields, is really putting some pep in my step. Outstanding.
We flew to Sicily and waited for MaryKate in Catania while she took the train from Rome. Dinner was fresh raw tuna and avocado sushi with black truffle on top, all you can eat. It was to die for. Pistachio gelato as well. Now we are in Bronte, the center of Moorish pistachio culture on the island. The cave of Polyphemos (the cyclops from The Odyssey) is somewhere near our Air B&B.
PS: Here is an interesting paper on Coltura Promiscua, a southern European agroforestry practice of growing wine grapes on pollarded trees, intercropped with forage, row crops or grazing. There certainly seems to be enough pollarding going on here that if some big vineyard decided to adapt and revive the practice profitably, I can imagine others following suit. Apparently there was a critique of Coltura Promiscua by visiting American agronomists at one point, saying the practice produced more wine grapes, but of a lower quality. We did not see any of this, but my friend Badgeraint Britton wanted to add this to the conversation about Coltura Promiscua: “As the paper says, uva maritata, ‘married’ to a tree – here in Lazio usually, but not exclusively, elm or mulberry. Meanwhile prior to mechanisation, most olive groves were cultivated with wheat/grain, fava bean and forage. There’s an area of Rome, just south of the centre, Garbatella, which was built following the ‘Garden village’ trend of the late C19th, worth a visit for it’s idiosyncratic architecture (though not as lavish as the quartiere Coppede to the north), apparently Garbatella is a reference to the uva maritata system.”
Day 7 of this Italy trip and once again, we’ve struck gold. We started the day with pistachio cappacinnos and treats at Anacheria Bar Conti Gallenti, which didn’t dissappoint. They make both pistachio sweet cream and pistachio pesto here and both are toothsome AF.
We accepted an invite from our Air B&B hosts (Steph and Gino) to hang out. Our host took us out for breakfast and then took us on a magic carpet ride of agritourism 
Bronte is the city of pistachios, thanks to the Saracens- Muslim folks from North Africa, Palestine and Syria that came after the Pagan, Catholic and Jewish residents. The Saracens were the dominant political force on the island for awhile and they are credited for bringing the skill and affection for pistachios with them, as well as a touch of the eccumenical (comparatively with the Norman invaders and then the Catholic Inquisition that followed, in particular). Under Saracen rule you couldn’t build a new Christian church or Jewish Synagogue, but those places of worship weren’t torn town or banned or anything. The Saracen period when Saracens, Catholics, Orthodox and Mizrachi people all co-existed fairly peacefully is what made Bronte tbe city of pistachios. It is unfortunately hard for people to imagine in this historical moment, but these ancient pistachio plantings give testament to it.
How did Muslim and Jewish people come to be dispaced from their homes in Sicily? This is what Wikipedia had to say:
***The Emirate of Sicily lasted from 831 until 1061, and controlled the whole island by 902… In 1061 the Normans took Messina, and by 1071 Palermo and its citadel (1072) were captured. In 1091 Noto also fell to the Normans, and the conquest was complete… In 1245, Muslim Sicilians were deported to the settlement of Lucera, by order of Frederick II, king of Sicily. In 1300, Giovanni Pipino da Barletta, count of Altamura, seized Lucera and exiled or sold into slavery its population, bringing an end to the medieval Muslim presence in Italy.
The expulsion of the Jews from Sicily began in 1493 when the Spanish Inquisition reached the island of Sicily and its population of more than 30,000 Jews… In 1479 Sicily and Malta came under Aragonese rule. In 1492, as part of an attempt to maintain Catholic orthodoxy and purify their kingdom of Moorish influence, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the forced expulsion or conversion of all Jews on pain of death. The date of the expulsion was extended from 18 September 1492 to 12 January 1493 to allow the extortion of opportunist tax levies. Many Sicilian Jews fled to the neighboring mainland of Calabria, where the Spanish Inquisition came later. Not all of the Sicilian Jews or other religious communities departed. A small number of Sicily’s Jewish community converted to Catholicism and remained on the island. The great part of the Sicilian Jewish community fled to the Ottoman Empire, especially to what is since the 20th century Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, and were well received there. The settlements of those Jews were in Greece and Turkey were large enough great to build their own congregations and to print books.***
Everyone living together fairly peacefully was a thing. The Catholic hegemony tore down or remodeled everyone else’s place of worship. If I had to pick, I’d obviously rather live under the comparatively tolerant Saracen rule, no refugees that way and you didn’t have to assimilate, leave or die. Tragic to see plans in place to resettle people from Gaza here in Sicily next year. I don’t think expelling the Saracen and Jewish people from this place did it a lick of good. It comes into my ear strangely when I read Catholic tour guides say that the pistachio is “a gift of Saracen domination”. What iconic and staple tree crops did the Inquisition bring? Fuck ’em. That thinking and violence was, is and always will be a dead-end. It is cool to see the legacy of these Saracen orchardists living on, and so deeply cared for by people today. Will the Saracens’ descendents get to return to what they built here, if Gaza refugees are forcibly relocated here? It would be nice to imagine a world where people can come and go as they please. There are now a few mosques again in Sicily from North African folks. And in 2005, for the first time since the expulsion, a Passover seder was conducted in Sicily (in Palermo), held by a progressive Rabbi from Milan.
…
It is typical on the fertile but incredibly rocky volcanic side of the valley, for extended families to keep 1 acre of pistachios, and harvest the whole thing for family and community use. Medlars, grape vines, olives, pomagranates and figs are common in this family farm part of the landscape as well, but strictly in small amounts and for household consumption. Growing wild and abundantly on the ground between these small trees and shrubs are many useful herbs. Dog rose, wild fennel, mandrake root, wild “asaparagus”, nopales with giant fruit, thyme, milk thistle and saffron crocus along with many fragrant species of desert Lamiales caught our eye. This Saracen way of growing pistachios continues near the town on the steepest and rockiest areas. Once you cross the river, you enter a non-volcanic clay soil type and the cultivation pattern switches to competing industrial and organic farming sysyems. These dualing systems consist primarily of olive and pistachio. “Conventional” here looks like drip irrigation and no vegetation at all on the orchard floor, glyphosate keeps it that way. On the organic side (run by the “Green Jackets”, Giacche Verdi Bronte), there is terracing to catch water. On the lip of the terraces they plant rosemary bushes to stabilize the soil. As in other places we’ve seen where hybrid poplar plantations utilize tillage, they till under these trees on terraces, and over winter plant sulpa clover and winter wheat. The clover feeds the bees that they also keep, and rather than harvest the wheat and clover hay, they just mow it in July to feed the soil. This means there’s no living ground cover, just thick mulch around the trees, during the hottest and dryest part of the year. If any livestock were allowed in, it would be sheep. They don’t use sheep. But, some landless peasants with cows nearby treat the whole world as open range, and sometimes those auroch-esque beasts break into the terraced orchards to munch on the cover crop. Nbd, really. This heralds back to the old days when people grew wheat and faba bean for human and livestock consumption, under the olives, as the norm. The yield of conventional and organic was the same this year!
After that tour, we went on a hike up to a little cone on the side of Etna, and witnessed sauntering shepherds and their sheep, under the spreading oaks. Fragrant herbs like flixweed (Descurainia sophia) perfumed our path as we made our way to the summit.
The last episode of our day was preluded by getting beguiled by Google. Roads that don’t exist, or never existed, or are comfortable only for Vespas. I joked with the others that we had better watch for an ambush and keep our crossbows at the ready. We did end up at a pizza shop called Bona Bone and I had the best. Pizza. Of my whole. Literal friggin life. They were tickled pink that we enjoyed it so much and plyed us with limoncello. I was higher on food than I’ve been since that meal in Turner’s Falls, Massachussetts in June. The pizza was gluten free, no problem. The people here have got the gluten free shit down COLD. Since we were high on $12 Sicilian pizzas we just strolled through the city, took in its beauty, and shared stories. Now we’re back at the $35.88/night/person homestay, wrapping up and preparing for the next adventure. Stay tuned!
Day 8 of this Italy trip. I have fallen in love with Bronte. We made observations and digested what we had heard yesterday.
The landscape is highly productive, much more densely populated than rural America, and is mostly tree crops. Extended families, or groups of families, coming together in their small cabins and tents for a few weeks a year seems nice. I miss having more family reunions and reunions with particular groups of friends that are far away or dead, and I see how I have sought to kinda recreate that in my life with chestnut planting and harvest parties. Here, it’s been an institution for 1200 years. These tiny family compounds are dotted pretty evenly across the landcape, with networks of tiny lanes connecting this peculiar landscape to the rest of the world. Observations today confirmed what we heard yestetday, that there are like 1 to 2 dwellings per acre generally. There’s something so appealing to me about how the system seems to work: there is overall a low amount of work involved in growing lots of food, this way. Most of the labor is shared evenly between the group. You’re harvesting, processing and eating with the people you’re closest with anyway, but perhaps don’t always get to see during rest of the year. Farmers doing the whole operation by themselves from a machine, as their whole livelihood, don’t get that opportunity- instead this way, you’re doing the work in one leisurely, and consolidated, sprint every year.
It makes so much sense to me! If gas became expensive enough as to be relatively unavailable, this system would continue to provide a lot of the nutrition for this community. Wheat for bread would still be grown elsewhere by specialists, but besides that, a lot of what people consume every day is taken care of.
I love the idea of Bronte, anyway. It’s a bit of hiraeth, that yearning for something that may never have existed. I have attributed such yearning in myself variously as an atavistic back to Eden urge and also the progressive reaching forward towards a new Utopia. But with a set-up like they have in Bronte, that yearning of mine might naturally find a deeper reconciliation with the present moment. I feel that. The traditional pistachio landscape here, or something like it, is a place that I could actually be reconciled with. Feeling extra glad that we’re doing the chestnut thing now, I hope it is leading in this kind of direction.
The Main Quest today was visiting the Italian national tree in Catania, which is supposedly the largest tree in the EU. It was a three hour drive and took us through the Bronte land scape I’ve been waxing on about for quite a ways. We stopped at a roadside stand, where an old man was selling cactus fruit, and also homemade fruit leather and wine from the cactus. They call it Indian Fig here, Opuntia ficus carica. The leather is good! This whole thing is reminiscent to us of Arslan-bob in Kyrgyzstan, the big difference (besides the particular tree crops and soils) being that housing is spread throughout the landscape. In Arslan-Bob, people only camp in the food forest, and have permanent living in the compact town because there’s 9 ft of snow in winter.
Anyway, as we travel, my beloved Bronte landscape eventually yielded to mostly industrial olives, and then citrus, as the dominant crops. Occasionally, brassicas/cole crops were alley cropped in young citrus orchards. The olive monocultures were here and there succumbing en masse to Xylella fastidiosa, which causes
olive quick decline syndrome. It didn’t seem to impact the much more diverse orchards that included olives, in Bronte.
We passed on through a much drier landscape, with huge mountainsides being entirely burned with prescribed fire, and chisel plowed by small and low tractors on treads. We saw them spraying fire off the side of the tractor as they drove along, I guess to make it easier to plow. All that churned soil on steep hillsides made me sick to my stomach with thoughts of soil erosion. I imagine this choice is defended due to the lack of rain. Still. We also passed through fields of lacinato kale, artichokes and what looked like Seminole pumpkins.
In Catania, the tree was indeed impossibly big. This Ficus sends down roots from the high lateral branches that then root, become new trunks, and the tree sort of walks across the landscape. Pieces of sidewalk had been ripped out and fenced off, for new of these trunks.
We checked out The Triumph of Death, and a bunch of weird religious art from 500 years ago, at a museum. Some of it was quite funny to us. I wish they had an exhibit on the Sicilian Tarot! The pleasant art diversion was mostly killing time, until the international ice cream competition would start. Japanese and Italian ice cream masters battled to impress judges with both traditional and avant garde flavors. Between the three of us, we split 15 small cups of ice cream of different flavors. Our favorites were hazelnut, polenta (both quite creamy) and a vegan olive oil+almond+orange marmalade were our favorite flavors. The lavender sherbet, Japanese lime and amazake, apple/Ceylon/cinnamon were runners up.
We finished the night with some amazing pasta, soup, and various kinds of roasted eggplant. Food on the street and at the restaurant was all quite tastey and pretty affordable, even in the big city. Though last night’s pizza and the truffle sushi before that, still stand out in my mind as amazing. It pays to do your research for amazing holes in the wall.
PS: here are three chestnut soups you could try making at home, if you want to eat your way towards the creation of a chestnutty analog of Bronte, in Appalachian Ohio or wherever:
Day 9 of this Italy trip and there was a lot of really cool agroecology stuff to share about- I believe the phrase is drinking from a fire hydrant.
We had a final morning in Bronte, the City of Pistachios. We started by poking around the place we were staying, which revealed a system of pastures with high stone walls. These stone walls were simply the lava rock that is the soil parent material. It has made incredibly fertile, well drained, though often shallow soils. There were holm oak (Quercus ilex), Eurasian walnut (Juglans regia) and sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) left as an overstory savanna to shade and feed the livestock, which at this historical moment is just horses for locals and tourists to ride on, but historically would have been a lot of pigs. Every other tree in the neighborhood were those nut trees, or common hazels, or one of a dozen different fruit trees. In newer parts of town, people plant ornamental cyperus or whatever. It reminds me of one of MaryKate’s stories about chestnuts! At the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, as the story goes, chestnuts were mostly an ornamental tree on the estates of veterans, senators and the like. After Rome fell, the harder the times got, the more people appreciated these dang chestnuts. When the Columbian exchange brought potatoes (and many other things) to Italy, the tates replaced chestnut in a lot of dishes so now it is mostly folks in the hilly parts of the country where potato cultivation doesn’t make so much sense that still treasure our favorite tree. People in more affluent and flatter regions where chestnut has always grown, tend to look at the chestnut as a seasonal treat, or sometimes look down on it as poor people’s food. This is a widespread thing, we talk about it in our food sovereignty lecture… But that trajectory from a landscape tree, to survival food, to being put aside and either just seasonally savored or looked down upon, we will come back to it later in this entry. Because I think humans would do well to remember that whole story- we might find in our lifetimes that history is more cyclical, in some ways, than we’d like, and the chestnut could once again be a pivotal ally to humanity.
After saying goodbye to the place we’d been staying, we celebrated our departure from the area with a pistachio cappuccino and canoli. We then wandered around taking in a few other sites in Bronte. One thing which caught my eye today, in this land of 1000 coppice techniques, was a large tree of heaven that was the epicenter of a pocket park. It is being pollarded, way up in the canopy, and it has a DBH of probably 28 in, 1.5 saw logs, so like 434 board feet in one tree that people think is just evil trash. One result of this treatment is that it is not sexually reproducing atm, and is not shading out the roses that were growing below it. Granted, it was root sprouting, but I guess those were being controlled with mowing, because all were less than 1 year old. Just goes to show, there are often a lot of ways do things and we’re not always doing it the only or right way, wherever we happen to be from… Don’t get me wrong, kill it with fire is still my approach to tree of heaven. But this town builds a lot of things with roundwood, and that could be used as a post in a cathedral or something.
There is this thing that happens, where with no watering, no pot, and no soil above the level of the cobblestones, figs, grapevines and maybe a few other things are able to grow out of a patch of dirt that is half a square foot across if it’s out of the way, between the road and a wall, and produce a ton of canopy. I have not heard a name for this technique, but it is super impressive and would be fun to emulate. Especially as a sun screen above an outdoor seating area. I am also enjoying the use of large rolling planters with hedge plants growing, that people use to make pop-up outdoor seating spaces in the sidewalks and roads.
We left Bronte and snaked around the northern side of the volcano. We saw many, many stone terraces that had been former vineyards. Some were obviously abandoned because of the volcanic eruptions that keep this place in a certain state of precarity. Others were still going as family establishments, often with lots of fruit and nut trees, sometimes with chickens underneath. When we’d come to flatter areas, there would be many small (acre or less) fields in rotation, being worked on as forage, grain, vegetables, etc. Long crop rotations, when planned properly, can significantly boost yields without additional inputs of fertilizer, and it was cool to see it in practice. As we went higher on the mountain, we got back into a zone where chestnuts were in the overstory- coppiced as these were, the trees pulled double duty as small saw logs and food. Many people from the city were pulled over on the sides of the road to pick nuts from the road edge, and young people went deeper into the forest. This was actually the same for hazelnuts! All of them were tree sized, and coppiced… We stopped at a table where four teenage guys were selling chestnuts and hazelnuts which they had harvested. Fun times.
Eventually we came to the site of the Main Quest, which today was the Castagno dei Cento Cavalli/Chestnut of 100 Horses. This thing is massive and much ink has been spilled on it. It is believed to be 2000-4000 years old. I got a totally different story from the signs and people here, about the origin of the name, than I had reading online. The signs here indicated both that the UN has declared the tree as a “Monument Messenger of the Culture of Peace”. I can sorta see why- this thing has born witness to many waves colonization, devastation by volcanic eruption, and yet there is cultural continuity for the people sheltered by its branches and fed by its nuts, year after year for THOUSANDS of years. There is also the legend of a Queen Giovanna visited the tree with a company of 100 knights, and had an orgy with them. People really wax poetic about the place. Depending on how you measure it, it definitely gives that enormous Chinese banyan we saw yesterday a run for its money as largest tree in Europe… We saved the biggest nuts we could from it, and hopefully we can grow out our own generation of “sacred messenger of peace and sexy times” trees to share with an American audience
A few other facts about the Hundred Horse Chestnut that were interesting to me. The tree and the ground immediately around it was siezed by the government to protect it as a national monument, but the surrounding areas are productive hazelnut and wine grape farms. You can see very clearly where the sacred tree has been ravaged by fire in the past. There are more of those glorious crocuses growing up in the middle, where the central trunk once grew. Signs nearby to the tree celebrate the union of Bolete mushrooms broadly with chestnuts, oaks and pines. There is another ancient chestnut tree nearby, dedicated to Saint Agatha (don’t ask me to tell their story, it is weird and gross) which hopefully we will visit in a few days… Overall, this place is very dreamy for a troupe of chestnutters like ourselves. I bought a small wooden owl, carved from one of the dead branches that was pruned last year. The carver said this particular owl species represents wisdom gained through meditation, in Sicilian culture.
We came down into a slightly lower town, Zaffarana Etnea, which has a good view of the smoking cone at the top of the mountain- as well as the sea, and the full moon on this special night, which is a partial lunar eclipse. We got a taste of a special beverage the vintners make out of the fruit of almonds, and sauntered up and down the streets and alleys. People’s level of backyard orcharding is completely off the fucking charts here. What’s more, everywhere is terraced, and they control all competing vegetation under the trees with TILLAGE. In the well-kept orchards, if there were not chickens or horses eating the grass, it was literally all freshly tilled. I saw clover growing under some of these. My mind balks at this choice. My companions point out that there is comparatively little rainfall or wind here, and that erosion is not as big of a deal perhaps. I settle down.
We eat incredibly well tonight. Crackers, smoked salmon, lupini beans and cheese from the highest alpine pastures were our horderves, before we ambled over to the Hosteria Il Porcino. I had the best food of the bunch: saffron and parmesan risotto with a hearty serving of savory roasted boletes. As I said about the olives we were noshing on on the lower slopes of Bronte yesterday, I feel like I am eating the damn volcano this is so earthy, rich and good.
PS:
My next car will hopefully be a Panda 4×4 convertible-style cab, that is also a pickup truck, and gets like 45 mpg. The picture is the kind of model I’d look for. The website has info about the latest version, which is diesel and gets 60 mpg on the highway. New, it’s $15K, used ones are $5K-$10K it seems, though the Cabriolet (convertible) version I’m sharing a link to is between $11K & $12K. It’ the most popular car ever made in Italy for a reason: the thing is great for parking in tiny spots in medieval alleys, and climbing dirt roads into your family’s ancestral lands. From what I could find online, it might take me $2,500 to import to the US. Various people have advised me to import multiple and sell most of these, in order to pay for mine entirely or cut down on the cost.
Archive of the one I might like to buy, a Cabriolet.
The Green Car Guide to the most recent models and their features.
PPS: According to this article– most of the Italian settlers in Cincy were from Genoa (Northwest, Piedmont region), while the northern Kentucky immigrants from Italy were from Sicily, and other southern provinces. This tracks with what I heard growing up in Fort Thomas, KY.
Day 10 of this Italy trip. This whole escapade was planned so as to ground us in the global chestnut culture, a bit, and I’d say it’s working. Today we went to another chestnut festival 
This one celebrated the cheap wine that a lot of people make here, too. People were selling re-used 1 L water bottles full of wine they make in their kitchens. People were also selling liquors of thistle, orange blossom, walnut, wild fennel, and pistachio. Many thousands of people were strolling through the streets with or without such drinks in hand. Closest thing to that which I have seen in the states is NOLA, I guess. In Italy you can’t open carry a firearm if you’re a civilian, but yeah you can stroll down the street with wine. If you could (and had to) choose which freedom to have, which would you take? I can see why people might say you can’t have both.
We focused on sampling as many tree crop foods as we could, and are bringing back as much as we can carry. Mulberry jam was one such item, and chestnut butter- which everyone says should be a thing in the states- is already a thing here. Oyster mushroom paté, carob butter, many competing recipes for pistachio pesto and pistachio cream, the fresh juice of pomegranate as well as cactus fruits, were all a delight to my senses. So too did we finally find “chestnut butter”, a thing that has been proposed to us many times in America, being sold in jars- here is a recipe for this pesto di castagne. So were a few particular honeys: from the chestnuts, and from that sulla clover they use as a winter cover crop under the olive trees. People said the chestnut is good for sore throats, and the sulla honey is for athletes. There were other honeys, with their separate prescriptions… a different honey for all occaions! I’m getting a sense of more ways to make what we grow into in these agroforestry systems into so many more foods to share, which makes me happy.
We saw additional models of chestnut roasters, and finally found one that is maybe standardized for street vendors, because it’s the first time we’d seen a particular build replicated by more than one mom & pop style chestnut roaster. The unit itself is a three piece chiminea, wood fire in the bottom, hot rocks in the middle holding and radiating that heat, and a removable grill bucket in the top of it. There are pictures, we could hire someone to make one! Any volunteers?
There was a lot of good street food we sampled. Some of my favorites to follow:
-artichokes roasted on a bed of charcoal that was made from almond hulls- daaaaang.
-Link pork sausage, that inside was half boiled chestnut- so good.
-There was a mushroom grower that mainly sold bowls of grilled and garlicky oyster mushrooms with parsley. It was so. Damn. Good!
-There were horse burgers, and the grill guys all had whisks, broom-like bundles of thyme. The thyme was used to spritz wine vinaigrette onto the meats.
I turned down some expensive dried figs, but the presentation was interesting- skewered on on slivered bamboo bits. Good use of river cane, or whatever you have laying around? We also saw people growing cole crops under backyard orchards, and got pictures. Related to figs and understory crops- we started hearing about a place in Tunisia that’s developed an epic system for doing that! 740 acres of cultivated fig overstory as the main crop, with vegetables grown underneath, on spring-fed mountainside terraces. That place is known as the hanging gardens of Djebba. Will have to ask Amel about that. We are close to Tunisia as the crow flies, but it may not fit on this trip/budget so last minute.
Another few words on coppice agroforestry. It seems virtually every urban street tree here that’s not pruned for fruit/tree is pollarded! We saw three different stalls with old men making baskets out of willow, or whatever. Shout out to my Pellers guys, you would be loving this. Also saw a small logging truck with boom, with a few butt logs from those trees. Pretty different from American forestry, this sourcing your timber from heavily managed urban trees that grow back, in place.
PS: I believe I have also seen, at the end of the trip, an American-looking log yard and saw mill. The kind you find in southern Ohio, where dimensional lumber and other products are processed using timber harvested from managed forest. So Italian woodland is not just one intermittent copse of pollarded trees, or wilderness. Still, the abundance of pollarded wood is astonishing to my untrained eye.
PPS: The chestnut sausage mentioned above is just a basic sweet Italian link sausage with a lot of boiled chestnuts mixed into the pork before being encased with intestine. In case you are not a sausage maker, here is a related recipe for incorporating chestnuts and sausage into American winter holiday menus: Chestnut sausage cornbread stuffing!!!
Day 11 of this Italy trip. We thought what the heck, we’ll lay around and be lazy today. Suddenly, unexpected curiosity gripped us. After drinking espresso and taking a cool soak, we ascended the mountain in search of Saint Agatha’s Chestnut. Puns were made that cannot be repeated in polite company. Saint Agatha’s Chestnut is the second oldest chestnut in Europe (1,800 years old? 2,000 years old?), and is right up the hill from the “biggin” we encountered recently.
This tree is a BEHEMOTH. The Hundred Horse Chestnut is three separate, massive, coppiced trunks. There is a space between these three massive trees where a central stool and trunk used to live, and you can see evidence of part of that which has not completely deteriorated. In contrast to that, Saint Agatha’s Chestnut is solid all the way across. It is on private property next to the public street, and you can’t easily approach it… just shockingly large and gnarled looking.
We decided to go higher up the mountain and hike around a bit in the national park. We entered a dense layer of fog that got deeper and deeper. We almost turned around but then we finally punched through it and parked. The forest was dominated by sweet chestnut, downy oak, Corsican pine and turkey oak. The soil is weathered from bubbly black lava rock, there’s a layer of this as rock mulch on top of the actual soil. We heard the jingling of bells and came upon a large flock of sheep crossing the road. One would stop and you’d hear a loud crunch-crunch-crunch as the downy oak acorns were masticated and assimilated. The herder and his dogs came by, and confirmed that the sheep eat the chestnuts too before wandering on. We wandered further, and came to a place where TSI was being conducted. Piles of small diameter posts separated from piles of finer brush with leaves. We found many mushrooms pushing up through the pummice. Parasol, panther cap and iodine bolete are the ones I thought I recognized. On our return to the vehicle, we passed a worksite where fence was being made from the posts. The bark looked like it had been taken off with a spoke shave or draw knife. The members destined to go in the ground had the narrow ends sharpened and charred, to slide in easier and keep from rotting. Very interesting use of poletimber from TSI.
We had some gelato, walked around historic downtown Acireale, and finally settled on Frumento, which has been called the best pizzaria in Sicily. I had the following pizza: “NEBRODI: FIOR DI LATTE LATTERIA SORRENTINA, CARDONCELLI MUSHROOMS, PDO PARMESAN CHEESE CREAM, 24-MONTH AGED NEBRODI BLACK PORK HAM, PARSLEY. We consider Luisa Agostino’s 24-month matured Nebrodi black pork ham to be the most interesting and valuable Sicilian cured meat product. Luisa treats the ecosystem like a family and each animal with extreme respect: each slice has the scent of the Nebrodi forests!” The Nebrodi forest is nearby to where we were hiking- a bit northwest of the volcano. The shaved meat was darkly colored and deeply flavorful. Chris had “IBERICO: STRACCIATELLA, RED CHERRY TOMATO CONFIT, 24- MONTH AGED JAMON IBERICO ADMIRACION. Not a ‘simple’ Jamon Iberico, but Bellota Admiracion cured for 24 months by Blasquez, who since 1932 in Salamanca has been curing the highest quality cured meats from pure-bred Iberian pigs according to strict criteria that have been handed down through generations.” It was the first time we’d had the legendary dehesa pork, and it was very sweet and delicious, equally intensely flavored to but different from mine… So, two forest pigs, I think mine ate more acorns. Chris addded a burrata cheese on his in honor of Justin Dean’s discerning suggestion 
MaryKate’s pizza was distinguished by several types of sundried tomatoes that had been reconstituted in freshly squeezed orange juice, atop a pile of mortadella and buratta cheeses.
I didn’t try their Durum wheat pizza crusts, but after carefully considering the risks, and in light of some wheat-sensitive friends saying they had found organic wheat in Italy to be suitable food, I did try an heirloom wheat crust. I can tell you what the menu said: “THE ANCIENT AND ORIGINAL MIDDLE EAST ORGANIC KHORASAN WHEAT, THAT WE USE IN ITS SICILIAN PERCIASACCHI VARIETY, CONTAINS A HIGH LEVEL OF PROTEINS AND SELENIUM, IS NOT CONTAMINATED WITH MODERN VARIETIES OF WHEAT, AND HAS A LOW GLUTEN CONTENT.” I ate only half the pizza and felt totally full (ate twice as much gf pizza the other night before feeling that way). I did feel a very very mild inflammation reaction, but I could still breath okay and didn’t get any of the other symptoms I associate with eating wheat normally. Other people recently suggested I try Einkorn, and grow it for them lol. Idk what the implications of all this is, but I’m glad I went for it cuz that shit was good. I would definitely eat it again, as a treat.
Day 12 of this Italy trip. I am mostly attending to grief today as we returned from Sicily to Rome. My cousin Stephen Hudson died of medical complications recently, and the displacement of 2 million Palestinians as backdrop for this trip… then last night, I got word that my childhood bestie Dominic Dorsa was hit by a car several days ago and died of his injuries. I almost lost it last night. I was going to say some things about genocide and the deep sorrow I feel about seemingly endless cycles of colonization after seeing Trajan’s Column in Rome, but sometimes, you got to slow down and just be with the sadness at your little human scale. I’m never going to be able to talk with Dominic again, or laugh at his jokes, and that’s heartbreaking.
Day 13 of this Italy trip. We went with Ware and Chiara to tour Viterbo and see a hazelnut farm. We met up with our new Italian friends Daniella, Mauro and Stephanie in Viterbo and traveled together for the day.
The farm we visited is a vineyard and hazelnut farm, and has been for a long time. When Mauro became farm manager, many of what we now see as orchards were impassible thickets of weeds. Meaning no disrespect to the Euonymus, Rubus or Ailanthus, but what was there couldn’t feed people. He began to tend the copse of hazel again, and now there are multiple orchards, harvested by a combination of mid-size tractor implements. We also looked at some Etruscan architectural remnants. The Etruscans were pre-Roman indigenous people of the area, and you can see where some of them were stomping grapes here, before anyone in Viterbo was speaking Latin. There was a tower carved out of the rock, and it turns out there is a pattern of cutting stone to create basements, then building the upper levels with said stone. We could not see the whole farm, because there was a drive hunt of wild boar happening with antique shotguns. A third of the hectares were dedicated to agriculture, the rest to the forest- which was largely chestnut, downy oak and walnut. The boars have plenty of room to roam and nuts to eat. The farm’s costs have come down and yields have come up every year. We definitely learned a few things we will be implementing ourselves.
We retired to Tutto N’Artro Magna, a ristorante that enjoys serving seasonal fair, grown in the region. The starter plates were all cold cuts and cheese, pear slices, honey and some kind of stewed beans. The feasting accelerated with a good chickpea and chestnut soup (gotta remember that one and recommend it to vegetarians). The hunter’s rabbit stewed with juniper, rosemary and olives was by far the tastiest lagomorph I have ever consumed. There was the beef covered in freshly ground hazelnut, bitter herbs to drink as Amari and bitter vegetables to eat. It’s worth noting that this included copious amounts of self-seeding chicory from ag fields, which I believe I may have seen in the tilledand terraced orchards, but also something like brocollini that we’ve seen in home vineyards and young citrus orchards. Brocollini is a cool-weather crop, and the thought is you can slow it from bolting with a little bit of shade. In any case, what we ate and what we’ve seen in agroforestry systems appears to be some sort of Brassica oleracea, even if I am not identifying the vegetable type correctly. There are a lot of endemic Brassica crop wild relatives (CWR) in Italy, so with that much diversity, I wouldn’t bet my life that it is the brocollini you get in the states, but something like that… To top off this gut-busting feast we had gluten-free chestnut tiramisù! Good lord. We were a somewhat raucous bunch, but by the end of the the afternoon they had to roll us out of there like logs Hazelnuts are so readily available that they are made into sweet or savory creams or patés. Mauro likes to eat toasted bread with melted cheese, crumbled hazelnut and slices of tomato, as a mid-morning breakfast in the field.
Back in Rome now. In seeing the Colliseum up close, I begrudgingly admit it is awe-inspiring architecturally. Contemplating it too deeply brings sorrow, however. In 70 A.D., Roman Emperor Vespasian ordered the construction of the new amphitheater in the city center, funded with the spoils from the Roman siege of Jerusalem, during the First Jewish-Roman War. This monument to spectacle came at the expense of a lot of Jewish non-combatants. It was said at the time that 1.1 million non-combatants died in Jerusalem, 100,000 more in Galilee, with 97,000 enslaved. These figures are according to Josephus, anyway. The genociding was a pattern for the Romans, as they did the same thing to Gaul (Plutarch and Appian said 1,000,000 Celts were killed in battle, and 1,000,000+ Celts captured or enslaved), Carthage (750,000 Carthaginians were killed in Third Punic War, allegedly). Some of these numbers are obviously questionable, but the survivors write the history books. Their sneering attitudes towards the targets of genocide, “woe to the vanquished”, continues today under the same aquiline aegis of empire. Once an enemy is made, their thought was you eventually have to kill them all- the policy of “total war”. The story the Romans told about why they did this is that they got successfully invaded once (July 16, 390 BC lol NEVER FORGET), and so they needed to push their boundaries so far from their center of power that it would never happen to them again… only to other people. This is not the only way to live, imho. I wish we would (as individuals, communities and societies) stop pretending that this is the way to the good life. Hurt people hurt people, and what goes around comes around. Bipedal chimps might wipe ourselves out sometime if we’re not careful.
PS: Recipes from the day.
Hunter’s Rabbit
Day 14 of this Italy trip. We spent the final day looking for Egyptian obelisks and cool fountains, mostly. We also checked out the Synagogue + Ghetto, the Pantheon, Agnes in Agony, and the cat colony where Caesar got stabbed. Normal tourist stuff. It’s been real y’all- thanks for following along!!! My question for any of you who have followed along is- where should we head next time? Visiting some of these landscapes and cultures, where temperate tree crops are flourishing, has been a lot of fun and very inspirational.
Paradise Ecological Services 