Old Massimo Had a Farm

My wife, Liet, and I love Italy’s large cities, but we don’t like the crowds that fill them to bursting during summer. Last year we found an agreeable solution: We rented a house in the countryside south of Florence and explored the region by car. In June we returned to the old stone house in the company of our two daughters and their husbands; then Liet and I extended our Italian sojourn with two farm stays.

The handsome, century-old stone house stands tall on the slope of a vineyard in Tuscany’s Chianti region, near the town of Panzano. Its location halfway between Florence and Siena put us within easy driving distance of such smaller cities as Volterra, Arezzo, Pienza and Montepulciano. We could pass a day in any one of them and still be home by early evening for dinner, which on most nights we prepared ourselves.

The house is called La Rota, for the large, wheel-like stone once used to crush olives for oil. It has three bedrooms, two baths, a living room with color TV, a charming kitchen and an adjacent dining room with a fireplace almost tall enough for me to stand in. Outside are a beautifully landscaped garden and a large swimming pool. It doesn’t advertise; we heard about it from a friend who stayed there.

The only drawback to this idyll is the expense. Good houses don’t come cheap--ours cost $3,500 for two weeks--and they must be booked well in advance. Liet and I discovered the farm-stay alternative, agriturismo , in tourist literature. Thanks to a nonprofit organization known as Terranostra (“our land”), an offshoot of Italy’s major agricultural union, more than 4,000 farmers take paying guests as a way of supplementing the income they derive from their crops and livestock, olive oil and wine. It’s a way of making it possible for them to remain on their land, which in many cases has been in the same family for centuries.

The Tuscan branch of Terranostra in Florence--which we reached via the Internet and through which we made reservations for the two farms we moved to after leaving our rental house--lists about 500 properties, and the number grows every year. The average price is $90 to $115 per night for two people with half board, which is about what we paid.

An English-speaker handles the bookings via fax and e-mail; the guest pays the host directly.

The first choice to be made is atmosphere: Tuscany has a long coast, steep mountains, old cities and walled medieval towns. Much of the region is rolling, rural hill country--particularly in the Chianti wine-growing area where we rented the house--with some of the neatest farms I’ve seen in years. In the absence of billboards and other modern eyesores, it looks much as it does in the paintings of Italian Renaissance masters. I love it.

Next, you choose the accommodation that suits you best--a room and bath with half board (breakfast and dinner daily), for example, or a self-catering apartment.

The farmhouses are likely to be old, but this does not mean they are decrepit. Because each farm’s guest facilities must be approved by Terranostra, standards are high. Often the accommodations are in brick and stone outbuildings that have been converted to modern guest quarters. Many of the farms have swimming pools and make activities such as horseback riding, tennis, mountain biking and fishing available.

For American visitors, relaxing in the serenely beautiful countryside is not the only reward of a Tuscan farm stay. There’s also the opportunity to get to know Italians firsthand, to say nothing of feasting (when meals are part of the arrangement) on home-cooked Tuscan dishes, prepared with produce directly from the farmers’ fields, orchards and larders.

Despite such attractions, anyone who decides to take a down-to-earth Tuscan holiday should remember that these are working farms, where roosters crow, chickens cluck and cows moo. A few properties may even be a little rough around the edges, with farm implements and machinery in view. But how much does this matter when the cost of staying there is much below what you would pay for a decent hotel and dinner in a city like Florence or Rome--and when the experience is one you will never forget?

Not knowing Italian proved no disadvantage for us. The young owner of the first farm we visited, Massimo Camilliere, speaks some French, as does Liet, but his charm and contagious enthusiasm, to say nothing of his brilliance in the kitchen, made for a kind of wordless communication. Indeed, at the end of our five-night visit we felt we knew him well. We also got to know his family, which included his lovely wife, who each morning drove off to her job with the police in Florence, their two little girls and his 68-year-old father. When we departed, not only did Massimo give Liet a kiss on each cheek and a warm embrace, but, Italian style, me too.

Massimo’s farm--on which he raises white Chianina cattle, a Tuscan breed, and produces sunflower seeds for oil--sits on a plain in a not particularly glamorous part of Tuscany; a highway runs nearby, and the nearest city, Pontedera, is heavily industrial. But the farm’s location less than an hour’s drive from Lucca and Pisa put these attractions within easy striking distance. Driving around sightseeing, we never felt rushed. We had plenty of time to enjoy a light lunch or refreshments in one of the outdoor cafes that we found everywhere.

It was a pleasure to return to Massimo’s at day’s end. Our room was on the second floor of a converted old brick barn. There was a large wardrobe for our clothes and a small terra-cotta Madonna and Child hanging on one wall. Interior shutters kept the sun out during the day when we were away. The air conditioner came with a remote control, which we kept on the night table.

Across the hall was the bathroom, with a shower, a good sink, a generous supply of towels and a large mirror. Had there been guests in the other upstairs room, we would have been obliged to share the bathroom with them, an inconvenience we would have been willing to accept in light of the benefits coming from our stay. And if the roosters or the lowing of Massimo’s prize white cattle in the new barn close by the swimming pool sometimes woke us, well, we could always roll over and fall back to sleep.

As it was, we had the place to ourselves. This did not stop Massimo from pulling out all the stops at dinnertime. We ate in the cozy, white-walled guest dining room in the main house, where Massimo and his family live upstairs. The walls were hung with good paintings by a local art professor; I was taken with one still-life of a couple of plump porcini mushrooms lying in light and shadow on a tabletop.

Our meals began with antipasti--paper-thin slices of ham that Massimo had cured himself, and homemade salamis studded with peppercorns, accompanied by crostini , pieces of toast that came with different toppings, including a warm chicken liver pate, savory with capers, anchovies and lemon juice. (My mouth waters writing this.)

Next came the pasta course. Each night the sauce was different--a wild boar ragout, dried porcini mushrooms plumped in butter, sun-ripened tomatoes sweet with the flavor of spring celery, fresh pesto tossed with boiled potatoes and green beans. We had our choice of bottled Tuscan wines but preferred to drink Massimo’s own, a light, pleasant rosso made from his sangiovese and trebbiano grapes.

In America we would have called it quits after the pasta, yet we knew that here we were only halfway through the meal, with the meat course to follow. One night we had pork loin roasted with rosemary, garlic and black olives, then enveloped in a pastry crust and returned to the oven to crisp. Another night, we feasted on wild boar from the nearby forest, shot in the garden where the animal had been rooting out Massimo’s potatoes. In the face of the mad-cow disease scare, we even dared eat Chianina beef, reassured as we had been by Massimo that his cattle never ingest anything but the grass and hay provided by his pastures.

But looking back now hungrily on the parade of marvelous dishes our host prepared for us, one looms above all the others: crespelle alla fiorentina . It consisted of delicate crepes filled with a light mixture of sheep’s ricotta and chopped spinach, subtly seasoned with nutmeg, then topped with a bechamel sauce and baked. It has to be one of the most satisfying dishes I have ever eaten.

We went on to spend a few days at a farm in southern Tuscany, in the seaside province of Grosseto, about 160 miles southwest of Florence. Until the Pisa-Rome railroad came through, the province was relatively unknown to outsiders, its malarial swamps along the coast a deterrent. The swamps are gone, in large part converted to farmland, but the rest of Grosseto looks much as it did in Renaissance times, dotted with numerous little walled towns, castles and churches housing exquisite frescoes and other works of art.

Our destination was a farm called Pereti, near the town of Ribolla. Its prime crop is olives, and in the breezes that play up and down the slopes, the trees reveal the silver sides of their leaves.

The farm is the property of a Scot, Frances Napier, a tall, red-haired, energetic woman, who with her late Swiss husband took a ruined 19th century stone house and converted it into the charming hostelry it is now. Each of the three guest rooms has a private patio area, shaded by a grape arbor, and each has an adjoining tiled bath, larger, we couldn’t help but notice, than any of three we have in our house in Virginia.

The building is engulfed in roses, grapevines and rosemary and laurel bushes, and the patio and verandas are bright with red geraniums, pink hydrangeas and begonias. There is a shadowy pond, whose waterlilies, little wooden bridge and weeping willow bring to mind a sun-dappled Impressionist painting. Behind it is a big swimming pool, fenced and gated against the farm’s three dogs, two of them lumbering, affectionate bouviers.

Not far off is Frances’ kitchen garden, from which she harvests most of the bounty she serves her guests. Artichokes, zucchini, green beans, six kinds of tomatoes and six varieties of peppers are among the vegetables we saw growing there. The olive oil she uses in her cooking comes, as does Massimo’s, from her own grove, cold pressed for her in the nearby town. She serves Tuscan-style dishes, assisted in their preparation by a local woman, and bakes all her own bread in an outdoor wood-burning oven. As a specialty, she occasionally includes preserved pumpkin with the meat course, something she and her husband, a chef, prepared. Tuscan pumpkins must be quite different from American ones; this was actually good (as was the pumpkin jam at breakfast on the sunny terrace), not needing the spices that rescue the Yankee variety from insipidity.

We took our dinners on the veranda, with the four other guests at tables of their own, but as the wine flowed, so did our talk, our conversations merging as the space between the tables evaporated and darkness settled over the landscape.

By now, Liet and I were pretty traveled out, but our eye had been caught the day we arrived by a medieval village, the musical-sounding Roccatederighi (which is also Frances’ postal address), perched on the top of a distant hill, its two ancient towers jutting into the sky. With the changing light, it seemed to grow and shrink and almost fade away; then, in the evening, bathed in an amber glow, it reappeared and took on so much magic it became an irresistible lure, something we would just have to see.

But the next day, after touring Massa Marittima, a perfect little medieval city, we were too tired to tackle the steep road to Roccatederighi and took a nap instead.

As we packed the following morning to start our journey home, there it was again, beckoning to us. It has since become our castle in the sky. I am positive we will climb to the village one day, perhaps as soon as next year. That’s something else a farm stay does: By being so affordable it brings the unattainable within reach.

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Guidebook: At Home on the Farm

* Getting there: A change of planes is required on all flights from Los Angeles to Rome or Florence on Alitalia, Swissair, American, US Airways, Delta, Air France, Lufthansa, KLM, Northwest, British and Continental. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,246.

Grosseto, in southwestern Tuscany, is about 75 miles north of Rome, 60 miles south of Florence.

* Booking: Contact Marta Picchi at Terranostra, Via della Villa Demidoff, 64/D-50127, Firenze (Florence), Italy; fax 011-390-055-3246612, e-mail terranostra.Toscana@coldiretti.it . She speaks English but prefers initial contact in writing. The Terranostra Web site is https://www.terranostra.it.

Frances Napier, president of the association, can be reached at 011-390-335-608-4578 (fax and cell phone); e-mail gruternapier.pereti@tin.it .

* For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles, CA 90025; telephone (310) 820-1898, fax (310) 820-6357, https://www.italiantourism.com.