“A Pistol That Shoots A Big Nail In Front Of The Animal”

Our landlady, the Countess Rina Masotti, calls long-distance from her fattoria in Colle Val d’Elsa to invite us to visit her farm. She wonders if we would like to come next weekend or wait for the day in December when the pigs are slaughtered. I tell her, as politely as I can, that I’m not sure I’m ready for that experience. What happens on such a day?

“Oh, it’s a long and complicated story,” she says (she means too long to explain by long distance, as the phone scatti click by). “But you have e-mail, yes?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I’ll write to you about it. Tell me your e-mail address. Then you can decide, and we can set a date for you to come.”

The next morning when I log on to check my e-mail, there is a letter from the Countess.

Subject: PIGS

To My Dear American Friends,

If you would like to come on the day the three pigs are transformed into “salami” etc., etc., you will see the “specialist” whose” profession” name is “NORCINO”. The day before the pigs will be killed with a kind of pistol that shoots a big nail in front of the animal and it dies immediately. The blood is collected to be used for a special kind of “salame” made with blood, fat and salt and spices. Each pig is cut into several pieces, after having taken away the hair with very hot water. This day there are at least three men helping the “killer” who is not the “norcino”: he will come only the day after to transform the pieces of pigs’ meat into salami, finocchiona (salami with seeds of wild fennel), ham (the typical Tuscan one which is rather salted, that matches very well with our unsalted bread), sausages (excellent with beans and tomato sauce!!!)

With the head of the pig we make a very good tasting food named “soprassata” also with salt and spices and, in addition, garlic and some lemon. Here they say that of the pig you eat everything, and it is true. The remaining fat is cooked and it will be used, instead of the oil, to fry potatoes (delicious!)

I could continue for hours to list food made out of pig meat or fat. The day of the processing is an exciting and important day for the farm: the farmers join us to help the “norcino” (who acts like a surgeon) and all are busy around. Outside there are two fires burning: one has a huge cauldron where the heads of the pigs are cooking and the other is used to cook the fat that will become “strutto.” Inside, in the large kitchen a lunch for the “staff” will be prepared, using also some fresh meat of the pigs. Believe me, it is a rustic, old-fashioned and very interesting happening! I do not like to see animals be killed—but I must accept the way of living in a farm.

If this will be too difficult for you to see, I understand of course, and we will be pleased to have you come another day, and perhaps share a small light lunch with us.

On the day we travel to Col Val d’Elsa, the next weekend (I have told Rina—with some relief—that we must forgo the December slaughter invitation since we have reservations to fly home on December 5), a freezing fog hangs over Firenze, and the same route we took on the SITA bus toward Siena is today buried in a gray, dull haze. Without the sunlit fields, the high blue sky, the mountainous clouds, the trip is tedious and seems endless. Furthermore, there are five travelers more than there are seats, and the four men and one young woman who stand in the aisle beside us, though patient and uncomplaining, manage to make me extremely uneasy. I know Joe is likewise discomforted; he may be wondering if he should give the seat to the young woman, who is at least thirty years his junior, whereas many hale young men on the bus seem to feel no obligation to do so. This is not a route on which people get on and off the bus at every stop—once boarded, one is pretty likely to be going all the way to Siena, or Poggibonsi, or to a city at least an hour out of Florence.

I begin to redesign the laws of Italy in my mind: there will be no more tickets sold than seats on SITA bus routes, for one thing. Bus drivers will be permitted to sell tickets on the bus to confused tourists who have no idea when they first arrive how the bus system works. Banks and museums will never close their doors upon a whim. Strikes will be limited to two a year and announced in advance. Better heating will be provided in the cold museum rooms where guards have to sit all day. The postal system will not charge an additional tax when delivering a letter or parcel from someone who has already paid a high postal fee in her country. Flu shots will be made available in a logical manner so that a person does not have to buy the vaccine and go in search of a needle. Sidewalks shall be designed larger than ten inches wide. Pooper-scooper laws will be instituted and enforced. Airport waiting rooms will have clear glass windows that permit one to see arriving visitors. Mufflers will be required on motor scooters. Water will be served without charge in restaurants. And, finally and of great importance, there will be NO SMOKING laws enforced in all restaurants, bars, trattorias and cafes.

There, I have already improved the quality of life in Italy a thousand fold.

When I look out the window again, I see that the sun is glowing behind the fog. Its heat is drying the water droplets, lifting them bodily from the hills, the treetops, the orange tile roofs, the spires of the churches, the skins of the olives. The curtain of fog rises slowly as we speed along the curving road, revealing a scene that cannot—by any law—be improved upon. The Italians around me are sleeping, or talking to their companions, but not one is looking out the window. I tap Joe’s hand and point. The landscape is as soothing as a balm to the eyes, green and gold, curved, slanted, shadowed and magnificent.

Joe considers the view. He says, finally, “That’s exactly what they saw, the great painters. They saw it, and put it in their paintings.”

My camera is a sorry substitute for art, but I raise it, aim it out the window, and capture what I can of this dream-like vision.

Rina has directed us to inform the driver to let us off at “fermata Hotel Belvedere” just past the main city stop of Colle Val d’Elsa. Though Joe told the driver this when we boarded, it is now two hours later and I urge him to remind the man again. He resists, I insist. (I see ourselves going all the way to Naples before we get off the bus.) But the same instinct that keeps men from asking directions must keep my husband from questioning the driver before there’s absolute reason to. I bite my tongue, trying to figure out how we will get back to wherever we should have got off the bus in the first place. We are now at least a mile or two past Colle Val d’Elsa. But Joe is vindicated when the bus stops at what seems the middle of nowhere, and the driver looks back toward us and nods.

“Grazie, grazie!” I call down the aisle. I am grateful and embarrassed to have doubted the man’s abilities. I wish I could make it up to him somehow. I do wave to him as he drives away. As for apologizing to Joe, I hold to my belief that I always prefer to be safe rather than sorry.

The Hotel Belvedere stands facing the highway in palatial splendor. It looks like a five star hotel (though I’ve never stayed in one) but we don’t stop to visit it since Rina advised me to walk “right past the hotel, up the dirt road beside it to the fattoria, where I will meet you. I will know the time the bus should be here.”

And she does meet us, there she is, my beautiful landlady, right on time, wearing rubber work boots, pants and a jacket, smiling warmly as she walks forward to greet us. The grass is soaked by the morning fog and already my shoes are completely wet.

“Forgive me, that I did not meet the bus on the road, but I have been busy with Roberto feeding the horses just now and I must hurry back. Will you mind walking around yourselves for a while? In that direction you will see the turkeys and rabbits, and beyond is the garden and the small pool (the larger pool is at the hotel), and here just behind us are the pigs.”

The pigs! The doomed-to-salami pigs! My heart goes out to them even before I see them: three, enormous pink creatures with curly tails and intelligent eyes. They have just come out of a rather fine stone hut, with a red-shingled roof, surrounded by a fenced yard. They look at us inquisitively, trustingly. They don’t know what we know about the pistol that shoots a big nail into the animal. They don’t know about salami seasoned with seeds of wild fennel or that their heads are destined to be transformed, with lemon and garlic, into “soprassata.” They certainly don’t know, on this fine fall day, that their skins will be removed from their persons and dumped into a boiling cauldron. I wish I didn’t know it myself.

“Which way are the gardens?” I ask, and Rina directs us, telling us she’ll meet us in just a little while in the main dining hall where we will all have lunch.

The formal garden is simple and elegant, a few pieces of statuary, some small lemon trees in large terra cotta pots, a line of cypress trees on either side of the path. Further away, the small circular pool is covered by a tarpaulin, and close by it is a caged area in which several large turkeys and a few hens are clucking and foraging for seed. The turkeys have brilliant red necks and heads, black feathers, and a ring of ridged white tail feathers. They, too, are no doubt destined for the dinner table. This is a farm, I remind myself, and this is what farms are about.

I prefer not to contemplate the ends of these animals’ days, but rather to walk in the vineyards and olive groves. I take Joe’s hand and urge him to follow toward the fields, far from the animals. When we come full circle around the garden, Rina is waiting for us outside the dining hall. She tells us that they have prepared a very simple lunch—please to come in and sit down.

The Count himself is setting the long dining table with lovely painted dinner plates; he puts out wine glasses and a bottle of his very own vineyard’s Chianti Classico wine. Rina says, “And please meet Roberto, my husband.” We both shake hands with him. Roberto tells us has heard from Rina that Joe is a professor; he, too, is a teacher, of math and of geology. The farm is a family responsibility they have taken on in order not to lose the land that has been in his family for 700 years. Did we notice the dovecote? That is their next project—to make it into additional apartments to rent to summer visitors. This whole business, this “agriturismo” has become very popular, especially with German tourists, who want to come to Tuscany, but not so much to the busy city centers as to the countryside.

“Let us eat, we can talk as we eat,” Rina says to us. “Would you like to wash up?”

Even the bathroom is rustic, farmlike, the shine of years is on the floor and walls, the towels, dried outside on the line, are rough to the touch perfumed with the scent of fresh air.

The most ordinary matters of Italian life seem to me, at times, the most desirable, the most perfect forms of existence. To think that Italians take these daily moments for granted, to know that such scenes and scents and tastes are their due, is an astonishment to me. Is heaven only heaven when you may not have it?

When I return to the table, Rina announces. “And look, in your honor, finally, the sun has come out with all her smiles.”

The brightening light gleams through the glass double-doors onto the red-and-green checked tablecloth, illuminating a large basket lined with dried fall leaves and filled to the brim with oranges, pears, and apples. Roberto has poured wine that has been transformed to rubies in the shining goblets. Rina begins to slice a crusty loaf of coarse bread on the cutting board. Crumbs fall onto the tablecloth and lie there like tiny jewels.

I take out my camera to capture this moment for later, our friends’ good will, this gift of still life, the glowing shape and shadow of fruit, wine bottle, sunlight and bread.