La Raccolta

I left my lonely weekend in Pesaro Monday morning for the best experience of my study abroad. To sum it up in one word, ‘happiness’ almost does it justice, but I am so thankful and passionate about my experience that I would like to share all the details with the following novella about the harvest.
I spent my week picking olives on top of a hill with a view of the ocean with people I truly cared for. My life is very blessed and I am so grateful.
It was a bit of a risk, choosing to spend my fall break on my own. It was also a bit of a risk choosing to spend it farming with people I had never met and that I knew did not speak English. Best risks ever.

I arrived at the train station in Montemarciano, near Ancona in Le Marche, excited but nervous to meet Roberto and Roberta. I found their farm through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) that I used to farm in Ireland. I met Roberto briefly, he was off to work, and quickly hopped in the car with Roberta to get out of the rain. I instantly liked them, trusted them, felt that they were good people, and was able to relax as a stranger drove me to her home. The drive to the house had the typical where are you from, what do you study questions, and there was not much of a language barrier. When we got to the house and started talking about practical things, I was a deer in headlights.
Why did I think I knew enough Italian to live with a family for a week? The only practice I had had was with Americans, teachers, Italian students, and other people who knew what words and speed to use when talking to a foreigner. Each sentence that I heard sounded like one long strange word.
After a cappuccino and some breakfast, it was time for the day to begin, and I got my mind off of this language barrier. Roberta and I used her mother’s recipe for mela cotogna marmellata. These strange apples have a pale yellow skin and typical white flesh. She advised against trying them raw, so I waited until the jam was ready. It had turned red like a strawberry and had a great sweet and tart taste.
When the rest of the family came home for the day, I was once again very confused. There was a lot of very fast Italian flying across the room from each and every direction. Roberta and Roberto have four children, a 17 year old girl Dorella, a 14 year old boy Michele, a 12 year old boy Riccardo, and a 6 year old girl Giorgia.
Because of the rain in the morning, it was not until later that day that we went outside to harvest the olives.
Picking olives is like picking very big blueberries, something I have a bit of experience with. The difference is that you place a net under the tree, so you can be a little messy and not worry about dropping things. You just run your hand down a branch and all the olives pop off and fall to the ground. It is a very relaxing job, especially since this farm overlooks the ocean. After my first full day of harvesting, my hands were frozen from the bitter wind, but from then on I wore gloves and the work was always pleasant, almost therapeutic.

On rainy days, I stayed in the house helping to measure out grains and package them for sale, or helping package the essential oils and soaps that Roberta produced. When I finished with the work, I would take some time to read Harry Potter in Italian or play with Giorgia. I loved playing with Giorgia because I was less anxious about my lack of Italian. I probably should have been a little more worried when we played school. She was a very strict teacher and while I excelled in writing and drawing, my alphabet was atrocious. We got very frustrated with each other one day when I could not hear the difference in my pronunciation of the letter E in Italian and the correct pronunciation. I think I know it now. We often played with the adorable cat that ended up being a good way to calmly improve my Italian.

For the first few days, I was too nervous to say much of anything, let alone to say it correctly. I felt like I must be a nuisance, someone eating their food but not contributing to conversation at meals. But midweek, things started to click. I wasn’t making as many mistakes, I understood more, and I was actually engaging in conversation. Roberto and Roberta seemed to pick up on the fact that I needed to be spoken to a bit more slowly and that one-on-one conversations were not as nerve-wracking for me. They also helped by reiterating what I would say so that if I made agreement mistakes, I could hear it said correctly. I feel like it just clicked all of a sudden, like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, whatever was holding my voice back broke, and I could speak.

I was living the life. Harvesting olives in Italy with a really nice family and really good food. I’ve been a slightly obsessed with Italian food all semester, but this week, I could not stop thinking about it and I don’t remember the last time I was hungry. I am not sure what customs are in Italy, but it seems like people want you to finish your food and take seconds or thirds when offered. No one ever said they were full, so when offered seconds, I gladly took them to be polite and also because it was so delicious.

Roberto and Roberta seem to have all organic food in their household and a lot of it they grow themselves, it’s all fantastic. In the mornings I would wake up and make myself an espresso with a little hot foamy milk. Midweek, I discovered the joy of dipping biscotti into espresso. This is one of life’s gems and I am going to need to enjoy this treat on a daily basis in Florence. With my espresso, I might have a bowl of granola and oats with warm milk, or I might opt for bread. It could be a toasted prosciutto and cheese sandwich, maybe bread with some hazelnut spread, maybe with homemade honey, but most likely, it would be bread with the mela cotogna marmellata that I helped to make.
When I told Roberta I usually enjoy a sandwich for lunch, she was shocked. Pranzo seemed to be the most important meal of the day and everyone was home for it. Pasta with eggplant and peppers, pasta and clam sauce, chicken cutlets, fish, ravioli and mushrooms, fresh vegetables, and more made me extremely full and tired after lunch.
Around 8 or 9 in the evening we would sit down to dinner. Dinner seemed to call for less preparation, but still excellent quality. Mashed potato cooked with prosciutto and cheese, salad, potato and tuna, chick pea soup, some sort of rice soup, bread and cheese, and other dishes filled me right back up to where I was after lunch.
If my stomach was capable, I would warm up after dinner with Orzo, a coffee-like drink made with toasted grains and cereals that was thankfully caffeine free. It never hurt to dip in biscotti either.

When it comes to food in Italy, the extra virgin olive oil is one of the most important ingredients. When I was picking olives alongside the family, I felt like I was part of the culture. I was helping to harvest something that people all over Italy have been growing throughout history. As I peacefully ran my fingers through the olive branches, I could have been at any time in history, before the Romans or a hundred years from now. The hilltop seemed like it was unchanging. The olives smelled fresh and green, and I could not wait to press them into oil.
The process of the spremintura, the press, has been of interest to me since I came to Italy. How exactly do they get the oil? Well they send the olives to the factory. So if they send the olives to a factory with machines, how did they make olive oil before machines existed? Thanks to Roberto’s generosity of time and knowledge, I was able to learn the answers to these questions.

Some of the 260 kg of olives

He let me accompany him and the 260 kg of olives to the frattolio, the factory. This place was like the best second-grade math problem, the kind with the in-box and out-box with an imaginary machine in-between to get the answer. The olives were pulled up a conveyer belt, a vacuum sucked out the leaves, they fell down a fume to get washed, they were churned into a sort of tapenade, went into a mystery machine and separated into oil and other stuff. The other stuff plopped out of a tube into a big brown pile of olive stuff outside. The thick oil came out of pipes and splattered onto a filter. What passed through the filter filled up a bucket with pretty greenish yellow oil. This was my favorite part. I watched this gold fill up one side of the bucket and finally it reached the top of the separator and spilled down to the other side of the bucket like a beautiful waterfall. Sometimes it was one shear waterfall, other times it was a bunch of thin olive oil streams. I wanted to swim in this bucket with giant bread paddles on my hands. The olive oil scented vapors in the factory might have influenced this thinking but I think I am just crazy for olive oil. Then the oil poured out a spigot into the big metal canister to take home. I think we had about 43 liters of olive oil. When I left, Roberta and Roberto kindly gave me a bottle of this oil made from olives I helped harvest. They also gave me a bottle from last year’s harvest. The new oil is more opaque and has a different flavor because it has little particles still in it that will eventually settle and be separated in more aged oil. I wondered how they made oil back in the day before factories, so after collecting our oil, Roberto took me to another frattolio that used more traditional methods where a giant wheel presses the olives.
Each and every day I appreciated this experience more and more. The Rinaldi family was so kind and generous to be sharing their life with me. While I did a lot of work, I felt privileged to be doing it and enjoyed it. When the weekend came and we did not do work, I felt almost guilty for not contributing, but the family was very appreciative of the work I had done that week and the conversation that my newly found language skills were providing.

Corinaldo

Giorgia (left) and her friends

On Saturday, we went to an inauguration of solar panels nearby where Dorella performed with her band. It was a very nice event and a beautifully sunny day. At this point, a new wwoofer was with us from Montana, so I had a new friend to practice Italian with at a slow pace. That evening Roberto, Roberta, Wanda (the wwoofer), Giorgia and I went to Corinaldo for a Festival of Witches the night before Halloween. Some of Giorgia’s friends and their families came too. This beautiful hilltop town, home to Saint Maria Goretti, had people flocking in on buses and parking their trailers outside the city center. There were decorations and music and a haunted house. Italy doesn’t do Halloween, so this was very exciting for me since I did not expect to celebrate it this year. I was told this festival is famous throughout Europe, but I don’t know if that was a joke. It was a lot of fun seeing street performers playing accordions on unicycles and swallowing flames.

Sunday morning, I took a walk to the beach before I left. The beautiful ocean that I stared at all week from the hilltop was just as beautiful up close. Saying goodbye to the family was very difficult, but I am convinced that I will return. I also made sure to say goodbye to the horses and cat of course. I am very thankful for this incredible week and will always cherish it.