The fountain tour

On Thursday the 22nd, during the wine-and-cookie celebration of our citizenship application, Pino and Paolo had proposed that they give us a tour of a few of Montagano's 50 or so fountains. They decided the best time would be at 6 the next evening, late enough to avoid the midday heat but before our good-bye party at the Circolo started at 8:30. Because of course there had to be a good-bye party.

So on Friday at 6 Max, Lina, Stephany, and I, along with Laura, Jorge, Michael, and a friend of his who'd arrived from Rome, assembled at the town hall for our tour. (Steven was home working on the haggis he was making for the dinner, and Danny was taking a break from trying to listen to people.) We set off with Paolo and Pino in the town's very beat-up van.

Montagano's hills are full of natural springs, and the town's fountains are not decorative waterworks but stone basins, most of them out in the fields around the town, built to provide water to the townspeople, their animals, and their crops. Maria told me that when she was a little girl, people still got their household water by filling large jugs at the fountains and carrying them home on their heads. Today people continue to use them to water their fields, and maybe some of them are still drinking it, too.

Paolo drove us a little way outside of town and dropped us off at the top of a path. The tour involved a beautiful walk through fields and woods, along a trail that has probably existed for centuries and that led us from one fountain to the next. The fountains have recently been restored, so they look very tidy and new. This one is pretty typical.

This lady was working in her garden next to one of the fountains when we came along. She stopped gardening to watch us. A hose led from the fountain to her tomato plants.

Most of the others in the group sampled the water, except at the fountains where Pino warned us the water quality wasn't very good because of upstream farms or cattle. As far as I know, no one got sick.




Along the way, we also revisited the church at Faifoli. It was still locked tight, but Pino and Paolo encouraged us to ring the church bell and hop the fence to the (private) property next door, where we could view the man-made grotto where long ago someone saw a vision of the Virgin Mary enthroned in a tree. Danny and I hadn't dared to do either of these things when we'd visited the church a few days before, but if you're with the mayor and the police chief, who's going to stop you from doing just about anything?

Of course Paolo had to get some photos. Here we are on the church steps--from left to right, Jorge, Laura, Pino, me, Michael, Max, Paolo, Lina, and Stephany.

At one point along the way Paolo hailed a man as we passed by a farm and engaged him in animated conversation. A little while later, while we were stopped at one more fountain, the man arrived bearing three bottles of wine and some biscotti. The wine was his own production--a not-to-sweet muscat wine that Paolo told us is typical of the area, a very floral white, and a nice full-bodied red. No money changed hands; it was just one more expression of Montaganesi hospitality, and readiness to have a party on any pretext.

Here's our benefactor, opening up his wine for us. The bucket is full of cold water from the fountain, to chill the wine.

And here's Paolo, serving up the muscat wine. It was sensational with the biscotti.

But it was now past 8 p.m. and this party was starting to bump up against the next one. I told Paolo we had to be getting home--because we were supposed to be making part of the dinner.