The Green Heart of Italy

I used to have a pet the­o­ry that in a tru­ly civ­i­lized coun­try, the phone sys­tem doesn’t work. I’m updat­ing that to “there’s no broad­band in par­adise.”

La famiglia and I just had a great vis­it back to our old stomp­ing ground in Italy where we recon­nect­ed to some old friends and a dif­fer­ent way of life.
Paciano is a tiny town on the bor­der of Umbria and Tus­cany where I lived on an organ­ic olive farm set up by David McTag­gart a decade ago. It’s a medieval hill town, pop­u­la­tion 1000, with a strange and rich his­to­ry of polit­i­cal resis­tance. My friend Pad­dy the Anar­chist tells the town’s sto­ry to my son Doon this way:

“See that aban­doned tow­er up there on the hill, Doon? Well a guy used to live there who was very rich and told all the towns­peo­ple around here that if they gave him half their veg­eta­bles and ani­mals they could all come live in the tow­er when­ev­er any­one attacked, and he’d pay some sol­diers to go and defend their land. They all said ok. Then he said that to make this work real­ly well, they’d have to build a wall around his tow­er, and they should go out and start gath­er­ing the rocks to build a real­ly big wall. But the towns­peo­ple got to think­ing why should we build a wall around his tow­er when we can build a wall around our own hous­es and not have to pay him half our fruits and veg­eta­bles and ani­mals? So they did. And that’s where Paciano came from.”

And so it is: the walled town isn’t the fortress, it’s the artisan’s res­i­dences, most of whom vote unre­formed com­mu­nist in the fab­u­lous­ly enter­tain­ing sport which is Ital­ian pol­i­tics today.

Pad­dy and his part­ner Suzan­na moved to Italy to try and cre­ate a more sus­tain­able lifestyle. They teach Eng­lish and had been run­ning an inter­net cafe (ISDN only) from their book­store, until the Berlus­coni gov­ern­ment start­ed “doing their part for ter­ror­ism” by insist­ing on know­ing who dropped into their cafe and where they went on the inter­net. Pad is one of the most polit­i­cal­ly and social­ly inde­pen­dent thinkers I know, and tru­ly strives to live a “do no evil” lifestyle. A trans­la­tion he agreed to do recent­ly turned out to be an insur­ance claim for a ship­ment of arms — he was unable to get out of it by the time he real­ized what it was, so he washed his hands by donat­ing the pro­ceeds from the job to Amnesty. And as for the inter­net cafe, he pulled the plug on a thriv­ing busi­ness rather than fink on his cus­tomers.

There’s a clus­ter of oth­er inter­est­ing char­ac­ters in Paciano thanks large­ly to David McTag­gart set­ting up shop out there back when he retired from active lead­er­ship of Green­peace Inter­na­tion­al. Leslie Bus­by, Gior­gio Pil­leri, Sid­ney Holt are all heroes of the whale con­ser­va­tion. Sid­ney is a marine biol­o­gist who led what the Japan­ese called the “Holt Fac­tion” at the Inter­na­tion­al Whal­ing Com­mis­sion. This group of sci­en­tists built the com­put­er mod­els for esti­mat­ing whale pop­u­la­tions which demon­strat­ed that between what we know and what remains uncer­tain, com­mer­cial whal­ing had to stop to ensure the recov­ery of many species, and as a hedge again­st the extinc­tion of the most endan­gered ones. Recent­ly, the EU has been inves­ti­gat­ing adopt­ing the same mod­el for Euro­pean Fish­eries. Sid­ney is full of sto­ries and wise beyond his years — which is say­ing some­thing, because he’s an OLD geezer.
We both walked around the big house talk­ing to McTaggart’s ghost for a bit, and he told me a sto­ry about how expen­sive it has got­ten to heat homes in the region with oil and gas prices being what they are. Many homes have now switched over to high­ly effi­cient bio­mass “pel­let stoves.” They can burn wood pel­lets made from saw­dust and oth­er recy­cled wood prod­ucts, but are most effi­cient when burn­ing maize (corn) pel­lets. The maize won’t burn until the stove cross­es a cer­tain tem­per­a­ture, so the real­ly good stoves burn wood pel­lets fed by one hop­per until the tem­per­a­ture is suf­fi­cient, then switch over to the corn hop­per. Now the Lago Trasi­meno region used to raise a lot of corn as ani­mal feed. But the ani­mals have dis­ap­peared over the years as the region has shift­ed to agro­tourism and oth­er more prof­itable crops. Farms that had been rais­ing corn failed or shut down and all but van­ished, until home heat­ing sud­den­ly put the price of corn in com­pe­ti­tion not with soy and sun­flow­ers but with petro­le­um — and sud­den­ly corn is the gold­en crop. Sid­ney broke into the big grin he reserves for tales of the unex­pect­ed, and talked about how unfore­see­able the future can be when serendip­i­ty like that is at large.

There are a thou­sand sto­ries to tell from our week in Umbria — it was a GREAT wind-down, a week of liv­ing far closer to nature than we do here in Ams­ter­dam, full of play­time and adven­ture walks with the kids, in the com­pa­ny of friends, fine wine, good food, and sun­shine.