WWOOFing in Italy: Recreational Farming

21 February 2011

I spent a long weekend visiting old friends in Salerno, the main city in the province. Johanna had come from Austria to a family in Salerno the same year that I had been an exchange student in Vallo, and we had become great friends in a very short time, traveling Europe together the following summer and remaining pen pals for the past six years (that’s right: in 2011 I still have a real pen and paper pen pal!) Knowing that I would be near, Johanna came on her week break from university to visit her host family, a family that had been like a second family to me during my exchange year. Anna Maria and Franco, Johanna’s host parents, own a classy seafood restaurant in Salerno. Franco grew up on the land outside of Salerno in Buccino, and in recent years he has maintained the land that his parents owned. This is a phenomenon of many well-[enough]-to-do Southern Italians: they own a farm but live in the city. They are “farmers” that go to their farm to escape from city life and pay someone else to care for it for them.* Franco has hens, roosters, bunnies, goats, dogs, and even a horse, all of which he sees about once a week on his day off from the restaurant. The farmhouse could not be more bucolic: when you arrive to the big gate out front by four dogs wait excitedly for Franco’s car to arrive; mountains covered in farmhouses and orchards lined with olive and fruit trees surround it; and hens, roosters, goats and rabbits all live in one big farmyard pen in harmony. Even at the farm in Tempa del Fico the bunnies are separated in three cages (the young, the adult, and the mating couple), the chickens are caged in together on all sides, and the donkeys are penned together, too. The farm in Buccino was a proper scene from Charlotte’s Web. I realized, this is exactly the role that this farm serves. Whether this structure is the best or not (not a judgment; I certainly like to think that it is!) it fits their one-visit-per-week image of a harmonious farm. I mentioned eating the rabbits to Anna Maria and she said, “Oh, no! I would never eat my rabbits! They would have to die of natural causes.” I suppose this is the difference between recreational farming and livelihood farming.

* Not just my cultural notation: I found my thoughts proven correct in a (fabulous) book, The Italians, that described the phenomena of city people owning but not necessarily working their farms, “Southern farmers anyway prefer to live not on the land but in nearby towns” (Barzini 244).