Trying out an Italian farmhouse out for size
In the Piemontese Monferrato region Walter Nicklin goes native in a foreigner’s kitchen, cooking with their utensils
FRAMED by a mountainous horizon, the farm fields were littered with hay bales and I was reminded of the Virginia Piedmont, where I grew up. Such a gentle, pastoral landscape seemed imprinted in my spiritual DNA and was the real reason I’d journeyed there, to Northern Italy’s Piemonte region: to discover whether the two places have more than similar names in common.
The shared name means, from the Latin root, “foot of the mountains”.
For the Virginia Piedmont, the mountains are the Blue Ridge. For the Piemonte, they’re the much taller, less eroded and therefore younger Alps.
As my wife, Pat, and I settled into the first of seven days in “our very own”
I was tempted to conclude that whimsy – such as seeking connections between the two – leads to the very best travel destinations.
The traditional Italian farmhouse with a courtyard belonged to my newest best friend, Massimo. In the countryside near the town of Valenza, in the Piemontese Monferrato region, it has been in his family for more than two centuries. Since he works and lives with his family in Milan, about an hour away by train or car, the serves as a second home.
Strange as it might sound, it was through my second home – in Maine’s Mid Coast region – that Massimo’s
felt comfortably familiar. He and I first met several months ago through an online community, HomeExchange. com, in which homeowners can arrange to swop dwellings temporarily. As part of what has become known as the “sharing economy”, it’s different from a hotel or Airbnb: it’s your house for mine.
You get not only a place to stay, but also the opportunity to try on another lifestyle. In a foreigner’s kitchen, cooking with their pots and pans, you have inexorably gone native.
When the capricious notion to use my Virginia Piedmont roots as an excuse to travel to the Italian Piemonte hit, I clicked on a HomeExchange search. Massimo’s property stood out. The trick was to interest him in my rustic Maine cabin an ocean away. As the HomeExchange platform facilitates messages between members, it was easy for Massimo and me to volley questions and answers back and forth over several days.
But “closing the sale” required a more personal touch, so Massimo proposed a Skype conversation one Saturday from his kitchen table to mine. With him was his wife, Simone, and one of his two sons. Pat and I were joined by our dog Angel. Our talk range from practical details to understanding the land and people of the Piemonte. By the time we said
it felt as if we were dear, old friends. On the day Pat and I arrived at the
weeks later, the online friendship was reaffirmed by Massimo’s warm welcome. He took the day off from work to show us the house and the surrounding environs – including an in-depth history tour and where to find the best gelato.
Massimo’s charming, heavily accented English more than compensated for his American guests’ lack of Italian. Still, I wondered if I understood him correctly when, upon opening his well-stocked wine cellar, he expressed the hope that we would help ourselves.
That night, as dinner guests at the BREATHTAKING: The view from the top of Sacro Monte di Crea, a half-hour drive from the HomeExchange farmhouse. nearby home of Massimo’s in-laws, Margherita and Ginetto, Pat and I were treated to a memorable introduction to Piemontese cuisine. The antipasto’s multitude of vegetables had been gathered from their garden.
The next morning, Pat and I awoke to a combination of birdsong from the open window and the purring of Mina the cat nestled on the comforter at the foot of the bed. As we made breakfast from the yoghurt, fruit and muesli Massimo had thoughtfully left for us, we reread his five typewritten pages highlighting nearby attractions. The daunting number and range of enticing places to visit was such that the easiest thing to do on the first day was to settle in and enjoy the country house, its garden and farm fields and the views all around it.
Over the next week, we used Massimo’s bicycles to explore the Monferrato countryside and our rental car to venture as far as the Maritime and Ligurian Alps to the south-west. Wherever we went, I was struck by how the landscape, so similar to my native Virginia, was also profoundly different. It was all about the way the land was used. The mostly agricultural Piemonte had not surrendered much ground to residential or commercial “sprawl”. Even the farmers seldom had houses on the farmland; instead, they lived in the quaint villages that punctuated the pastoral landscape.
Viewing all the multicoloured fields of wheat, fruit trees, corn, vineyards, even rice, made it easy to understand why Piemonte is the birthplace of the Slow Food movement. Founded in 1986 by forerunner Arcigola in reaction to a McDonald’s opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome, the now-global Slow Food has its headquarters in the Piemontese city of Bra.
Agritourism venues that promote local foods and traditional gastronomy (including places to hunt truffles in the autumn) abound in the Piemonte. But Slow Food also can mean slow traffic, as Pat and I often found our car stuck behind a tractor on the narrow country roads.
The vineyards of the Monferrato and Langhe-Roero areas of Piemonte have been designated as a UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Heritage sites, meaning what the organisation calls the “cultural landscapes” of these special places are worthy of preservation where humans interact with the natural environment in harmonious, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing ways.
The best known, justly praised wines here include barolo and barbaresco (sometimes compared to drinking velvet), made from the nebbiolo grape. A few daring Virginia vineyards are planting that grape.
To burn calories from the local cuisine – heavy on the wine and pasta – Pat and I made sure each day’s excursion included lots of walking. The most strenuous exercise entailed hiking to the top of one of the nine Sacri Monti (Sacred Mountains), also recognised as a World Heritage site by Unesco for their powerful admixture of landscape, art and history.
These small, erosion-resistant mountains, standing conspicuously above their surroundings, are called monadnocks or inselbergs by geologists.
As Pat and I climbed the tree-lined, uphill switchbacks of the Sacro Monte di Crea, we stopped at each chapel or sanctuary along the way – as much to catch our breath as to admire the architecture and artwork from the 16th and 17th centuries.
Inside each were wall paintings and statuary commemorating the Christian faith’s foundational stories, from the Nativity to the Last Supper. Atop the mountain is the Cappella del Paradiso (Paradise Chapel).
For our last dinner in Italy, Pat and I drove to a seemingly remote restaurant recommended by Massimo for its food in the Piemontese tradition. The tasting menu included tomino cheese with honey and hazelnuts, a first course of agnolotti, a main course of veal shank prepared with Arneis and panna cotta and pansy for dessert.
What perhaps made Piemonte seem most like home came the next morning when we were preparing to leave the
Unlike a hotel or Airbnb, there is no maid or cleaning service. Doing the dishes, putting things back in their place, emptying the rubbish; the time-consuming, oh-so-familiar chores are no different from those back home. Besides the simple courtesy of leaving things the way we found them, we had the practical incentive of knowing Massimo and his family would be visiting our place soon.
And I was feeling guilty. Instead of a wine cellar under my rustic Maine cabin, Massimo might find a porcupine or a skunk. – The Washington Post
HomeExchange Membership is $150 (R2 115) a year, allowing you to list your own property to be made available for exchange. Website: homeexchange.com