A little more Montagano

Friday was our last day in Montagano. After our delectable lunch at Da Filomena, I retraced one of my favorite Montagano walks while Danny recuperated with a nap.

I took a road out into the countryside, After a kilometer or so you can look back and see Montagano on its hill, like a toy castle.

I can't tell what kind of orchard this is

The building in the distance is a dairy.

This is someone's little farm

 Coming back into town I ran into this lady, who was bringing a load of wood she'd gathered back to her house in the center. She was very friendly and told me she's 76 years old.

Later, Maria said she thinks this woman actually has a lot of money and doesn't need to gather firewood out in the country. Maybe she just likes the exercise. Of course Maria herself is planning to go out in the fields and pick nettles to cook as a filling for pasta. "I have a freezer full of greens," she declared. 

Since it was our last night in town, we met our friends for a drink at the Circolo Unione, the social club underneath the Montagano City Hall, where Rita, Fernando, and their kids all work. 

In the evenings the place fills up with men who play Italian card games, drink beer, and talk about sports at the top of their lungs. 

Our group adjourned to the Giardino di Bacco, a pizza place just outside of town. It's not that great, but it's the closest thing to a real restaurant that the town has. 

By the time I thought to take a picture, all the food had been eaten. We've noticed that Italians seem to eat really quickly. And they all tend to be members of the Clean Plate Club. Closest to the camera are Rita and, to her left, her husband Fernando and, to her right, their son, Francesco, and daughter, Luciana. Maria and Claudio are on either side of Danny.  

I have never been able to capture in a photo how entertaining Claudio and Maria are. Even when they're speaking Montaganese dialect to each other and I can't understand a word, their gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice are all hilarious. These photos do not do them justice.

The next morning Rita and Fernando saw us off over coffee at the Circolo. As a completely unnecessary going-away present, Fernando gave us a bag with two bottles of local wine and a chunk of his and Rita's own capocollo. They buy half of a pig, make sausages, capocollo, and other salumi out of it, and hang the meats to cure in their basement cantina. We'd had some of their coppa at lunch at Rita's and it was great. I'm looking forward to revisiting it. I have no doubt the wine is tasty, too.

So we ended up with quite a bit of Molise swag--the wine and capo from Rita and Fernando, the towels we bought at the Petrella market, and some items we picked up one morning when we stopped by the Molino Cofelice, the mill in the neighboring village of Matrice where we had our pasta lesson last summer. For old time's sake we bought bags of whole wheat and buckwheat flour and pasta made with ortica--nettles. 

When it came time to say good-bye to Rita and Fernando there was a lot of two-cheek kissing and Rita insisted several times that we instant-message her as soon as we got back to Fidenza, since otherwise she would worry about whether we had survived the (completely uneventful) train trip.

I feel foreign here in Italy in many ways, baffled by the language, the way things work, the nuances of how people behave. But many things about our visit to Molise--Rita's anxiety about us as we moved out of Montagano's orbit, everyone's worry that we might not be having a wonderful time, their obsession with good food, their nearly insatiable appetite for social contact---all this struck me as very Italian and also very familiar. Perhaps I'm more Italian than I realize.