WWOOF Italy Rule #2: Make friends as quickly and as frequently as you can.

Luckily, by this point on the ride to the first Italy WWOOF, I had already begun a congenial friendship with the bus driver, so he decided we were in this together. He doesn’t stop driving his bus until we’ve found my farm. So there we are, Alex and Franco, the two adventurers in a giant bus on a road that was surely first intended for nothing wider than two lanes of donkeys. For every passerby, Franco rolled down his window/opened the door and shouted to ask if they knew Tempa del Fico. After a few tries and several unintelligible answers (more on dialects of Italy later), we found the winner. He not only told us where the farm was, he offered me a ride! His name was Gean Paulo, a 28 year old who drives a hearse (he does a lot of driving, in fact; tomorrow he was to go down the mountain to the town from which I had come with the closest hospital to collect a body for a funeral). I was fortunate to have found such generous spirits (which you will find are the rule and not the exception in Italy), as it was already dark and in total it was at least a twenty minute car ride in empty, isolated country. Once we thought we had made it, the sign marking the farm was on the wrong side of the road, we turned down an unmarked dirt path, his hearse became stuck in the mud, and we unknowingly interrupted the path of a man and his cows who were going home for the night. A full 12 hours after I had originally set out in the morning, I had made it safely to my first Italy WWOOF farm.