7 May 2011
At this farm the agritourism was added seven years ago in addition to a small garden, olive trees, vinyard, the sheep and goats, the cheese production, and the bees. Agritourism in Italy can mean two things: or beds for a stay and/or a restaurant. Here they have both. Beds cost about 25€ per person and meals about 15 €. The few beds that they do have are secondary, though; most people come for the restaurant. The “restaurant” is basically the dining room where the family always eats. Everyone in the restaurant eats together at the same time and at the same table, and unless there is no room, the family and the WWOOFers join them. There is one meal and I doubt that guests are told what it will be in advance: basically they come to be fed by Mario and Isa. Most of the food comes from the farm: cheeses, sausages (made on the farm from pig meat bought from a local farmer), handmade pasta, veggies from the farm (in this season all wild growing greens), and a dessert (typically some variation on ricotta from the farm). In my experience, this farm is fairly atypical. While agritourism restaurants are obliged to use 70% of their own production in the restaurant, it seems that it rarely happens. In my interviews, in fact, this has sort of been the joke: that agritourisms rarely follow through with the goals and government criteria for agritourisms, mainly because there is nobody checking up on them.
The weekend is when most guests come to eat. This past Sunday at lunch, for example, we had a couple of two, a group of three, and a group of eleven. Lunch lasted from about 1:30 until 5:00. We, the WWOOFers, helped prepare, serve, and clean up the entire ordeal. If we had not been there to help, I do not know if such an agritourism would be possible with a farm that still functions so smoothly.
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