James & Vilija

Over a month ago, Chiara started wording me up on the upcoming Chestnut (Castagne) season. Every year when Castagna season (said like Elmer Fudd) arrives Chiara, Ottavio and other volunteers (cheap labour, read: friends and family) pack up for a weekend at Chiara’s family’s house in Toscana.

Last Friday night after work we went over to Chiara and Ottavio’s place on the trendy east side of Genova from where we set off. Chiara’s family’s house is located in a tiny village (if you can call it that) called Veggio, in Tuscany. It is about 40km south of Bologna or 60kn north of Firenze. It’s really more of a group of houses (called a Borgo in Italian) where apparently the population peaks at 20 in the summer and dips to 7 in the winter. Her family have owned it forever (well not exactly but at a minimum, longer than the age of Australia European settlement).

Chiara’s great aunt (Zia), a sprightly 82 year-old, lives at their family house as an escape from her city “prison”. Zia owns a large amount of property around Veggio, and her house is HUGE! The first room (a cantena where you make wine) was built some time in the 1200’s, but the rest of the house it relatively new (1600’s – 1800’s!!!!).

We went there to go chestnut picking as Zia makes a chestnut jam of which she keeps a portion and sells the rest at the local market. Before our first introduction to Castagne a few weekends previously, we didn’t realise that chestnuts grow in a spiky casing (I guess so that birds can’t get to them). You need to wait for them to fall from the tress and crack open before collecting them. Even then, you need to work with a stick and gloves! The other workers for the weekend we the the remainder of Ottavio’s siblings, Alberto and Tiziana, Marie-Cristina and Marie-Chiara.

Saturday morning saw us starting our collecting duties. After a relaxed breakfast we collect our poking-sticks, gloves, buckets and sacks, received final instructions from Zia and made our way to the Castagna field. Under STRICT instruction only to get the best of the best we quickly found out there was no shortage. Fanning out we started our mission of depriving the squirrels and other forest animals of their winter food. I’m not sure how many kilos we collected, but it was heaps!

After the mornings adventure and a series of back stretches for me we had lunch. Zia had made us homemade lasagne (she even made the pasta herself) - amazing old-school Italian cooking! After lunch we headed off to another Castagna field. Even stricter quality control instructions this time. We had evidently been too slack in our efforts that morning.

By the end of this round we were all quite tired and all enjoyed a quite relaxing break. That evening we jumped into cars, and patiently waited in the traffic jams that led into Bologna. Bologna is a beautiful walled old town. It is a university town with a predominantly young population. We had a wander around and enjoyed the Saturday night atmosphere. Given the enormous lunch we enjoyed at lunch, non of us were that hungry so we settled for an aperitivo at a flashy local bar. We arrived back at Veggio going on 11pm and we were all exhausted. I must add that we are planning on heading back to Bologna to explore some more. It was a very attractive town.

We started the second day with another quite breakfast and a 45 minute walk to Church. The walk took a little longer than planned we arrived just as the last of the service was finishing. We turned around and headed back to Veggio. We had an appointment at the house of a neighbour who makes use of their pasta-making skills by running a restaurant in their home. They are so good that they have won countless awards for their Tagliatelle and are apparently the current Italian Tagliatelle champions.

We again ate amazing pasta, Tagliatelle with meat (I enjoyed mine with tomato and ricotta sauce) and spinach and ricotta ravioli. We were all bursting at the seams after the first two courses! When the call came for desert, several of us looked at each other trying to gauge if anyone was game. At the mention of Tiramisu I found the space in my dessert stomach to try it. I’m still working it off I think as I don’t have my usual appetite!

After lunch, to try and help our stomachs recover we went for a walk in the countryside with the loose aim of looking for mushrooms. This turned out to be somewhat unsuccessful given that all we found had tops with lovely red and white polka-dots. The countryside in Toscana is just beautiful and it is easy to see why it has the reputation that it does.

That evening we headed back to Genova, tired, full but exceptionally happy.

We have uploaded all our photos from the weekend to flickr for all to see. Click here

Tags: Chestnuts, Italia, Ottavio & Chiara, Toscana, Veggio

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