Monday,
August 20, 2007
14,000 Agriturismi
in
The
ANNOTICO Report
While
the countryside vacation has been around forever, agriturismo as a state-supported
institution in
In
Internal
Herald Tribune
Monday, August 13, 2007
We were not
10 miles out of
The sheep were
pursued, if that's the word, by an older gentleman in a dark cap, halfheartedly
brandishing a stick. He was in no more hurry than they were. Rush hour, it
seemed, could wait.
So could we.
We went there to
count sheep. Also pigs, goats, donkeys and the occasional
ostrich. In 2003, my wife, Fran Pado, and I
spent our Sardinian honeymoon following the hollow tinkle of goat bells from
one guest farm to the next, sampling the flavors of the land, sneaking sweet
clover through fences to grateful livestock. This past May we returned,
chaperoned by Violet, 2 =, a happy consequence of the first trip.
While the
countryside vacation has been around forever, agriturismo
as a state-supported institution in
An agriturismo is a real farm: most of what you eat and drink
is produced on the premises, or at least nearby. The farmer is happy to let you
see how sausage is made, as it were, and perhaps even get your hands dirty or
milky at chore time. Many hosts also offer outdoorsy extras like horseback
rides or guided hikes to ruins.
Accommodations
vary from spartan to pleasant and can feel
improvised: at one place, our big window commanded a view of the back of a
wooden cabinet in a hallway; at another, an unenclosed shower tended to turn
the whole bathroom into a wading pool. But with a combination petting zoo,
fine-food atelier, nature preserve, playground and all-you-can-eat artisanal restaurant outside your door, there's little
reason to linger in your room.
The highway
northeast from
They showed us
our simple, comfortable quarters off their living room, refreshed us with loquats
little peachy fruits with thick
skin, sweet-tart flesh and a smooth round stone and turned us loose. In the pigpen, we
found a shrine to porcine beauty. Gray pigs, pink pigs, spotted pigs, pigs with
lustrous golden hair that did not deserve to be called bristles, all frolicked
in the mud.
For a family of
vegetarians (O.K., two vegetarians and a cheater) the farm can be a challenging
environment. Pork and lamb and veal are ubiquitous on the Sardinian menu, and
some of us learned tough lessons about our animal pals. But if you're going to
have to survive sometimes on crisp rosemary-flecked flatbread, cheese and oiled
pasta,
Architecturally,
most agriturismi are somewhat formal if not fancy
affairs, with a separate dining room for guests and motel-like outbuildings. Sa
Perda is just the Marongius'
house, with two spare rooms. Their living room was ours. Dinner is at their
table.
Such intimacy has
its perils. In my first chat with their 17-year-old son, Eros, he told me he
planned to join the military after high school. I mentioned this to his parents
over dinner after he had gone back to his room. It was apparently the first
they'd heard of it. "Eros!" Denise shouted
across the house. "So you're going into a military career?" A lively
discussion ensued.
After a
revelatory visit to a honey farm carob and arbutus flowers yield a
bittersweet honey with a chocolaty, coffeed finish we meandered 70 miles north to our next
stop, Su Barraccu. There, the rooms were big and had
adjoining bathrooms, but the difference between agritourism
and ecotourism was apparent. Violet froze in her tracks when the owner's
daughter opened the pig barn door, revealing 150 sad-looking specimens
corralled in cramped concrete-floored pens.
The puppylike brown-and-black-striped boar piglets tagging
along after their mother outside seemed a lot more cheerful, and dinner,
starring culurgiones pillows of pasta fluffed with potatoes,
mint, garlic and pecorino was
delicious. But we were glad to return the next day to Su Mugrone,
one of the highlights of our first trip, 15 steeply sloped acres piled against
a long curtain of fluted white-gray stone outside the town of
We were welcomed
back like family. One of the owners, Maria Asunto Selis, gave Violet the ornately embroidered hat off a
life-size doll to try on and let her baby-sit for her infant son, Michele,
while she made dinner. That night, the Selises took
us into town to visit Maria Asunto's mother-in-law,
the maker of the hat. At her kitchen table, she opened a battered magazine
between whose pages she kept different colored threads and ran a few cobalt
stitches in a wedding shawl.
We met another
guardian of the island's handiwork traditions later in the trip, Gilda Garau, whose agriturismo, Sa Lorighitta, sits in the center of the
About 80 miles away,
perched on a high plain above the provincial capital of Nuoro, Agriturismo
Costiolu would be the perfect setting for a
magical-realist spaghetti western. One of the most established agriturismi on the island, it is run by three Costa
brothers Giovanni, the hardheaded
but kindly boss; Giuseppe, the sentimental horse whisperer; and Pietro, the
dashing sculptor, whose monolithic humanoid creations of baked scraped clay are
scattered like grim jokes across the premises.
Costiolu is full of enchanted
corners. Battered cheese pots hang from the branches of a dead tree in the
courtyard formed by the arms of the salmon-painted main building. Next to a
conical, twig-roofed smokehouse, an orange cat slept all day in the crook of a
low bough. A plank swing hanging from the bough took in a dizzying view over
rocky pasture and cork plantation.
In the afternoon,
Giovanni invited us into a dark, cavelike kitchen
where stalactites of pepper-coated salami and pancetta hung from the ceiling. A
glowing mass of mozzarella rested in a pan of hot water. Giovanni formed two
little vases of cheese, tied them on a string like balloons and handed them to
Violet.
In the corner
hung a bouquet of desiccated lambs' stomachs, the source of the rennet that
curdled the milk that made our cheese. I decided not to point them out to my
companions.
Instead, I
changed the subject. I asked Giovanni if the property had any nuraghi, the fortresslike stone
structures built by
"Here,"
he said, pointing to a clump of blocky boulders. At first glance, their
positions seemed random
Over two days, we
worked out a comfortable routine: descending from our pretty, whitewashed room
with wooden shutters and wooden beds for a breakfast built around honey,
ricotta and pane carasau, the paper-thin crisp bread;
watching from the the courtyard as the animals made
their midmorning rounds; then off into the fields. Violet made friends with a
3-year-old and took long pretend rides with him on a disused tractor. Dung
beetles rolled balls of dung along a dirt track. Sheep defied their sheepdogs'
efforts to maintain an orderly procession across the property.
Our last morning
at Costiolu, Giovanni beckoned us into an outbuilding
where he was mixing a batch of ricotta. We watched mesmerized as he stirred it
with a long stick studded with pegs like a crude guitar. As the cheese formed,
he handed out spoonfuls. It tasted like hot ice cream. The milky broth left
over, he said, would be fed to the pigs.
As we made our
way down the long, dusty driveway, it occurred to me that we were eating like
the pigs of
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