Workin Hard or Hardly Working

This past saturday our gardens and cuisine professor asked for volunteers  to help her in her garden out in the countryside.  She is a landscape architect and a great chef and I had heard that she has a beautiful house and garden around her house and the offer of a good home cooked meal I just couldn't turn it down.  So my friend Mike and I volunteered to help her and she picked us up at 930 in the morning.  Unfortunately I was in a bit of rough shape that morning but ended up sweating it out once we got out there.  On the way out she took us on this ancient Etruscan road that was carved at least thirty feet down through solid rock sometime around 400 BC.  The road was pretty scary actually, hardly large enough for a 4 door fiat punto and wound around the looming rock walls at close to 90 degree corners to the point that our teacher had to lay on the horn while bustling around the corners.  Once out of the tunnel like road we hit the countryside and the pavement soon ended to a terribly rutted dirt road through hundreds of acres of sheep farms, the sheep kept and bred mostly for their milk to make cheese.  The sheep had their lambs and she informed us that most of the lambs would not live past easter as it is customary to eat the lambs on easter.  The older sheep however, were rarely eaten because the meat becomes too tough.  The farm surrounding their house, as she said had over a thousand sheep and the sheep were the loudest neighbors they had.  As we pulled off the road into their driveway we came upon their house a three story place constructed of the local redish brown volcanic rock.  The yard or i should say garden surrounding the house was absolutely beautiful, a few rows of olive trees which they use to hand crush their own olive oil, a formal 4 section garden design out front and a wrap around porch covered in lattice with numerous thorned vines running up the pillars and up the lattice.  The whole compound was surrounded by tall hedges and from inside the garden yard you felt as if in paradise because the only view was over the hedges and spread out over the countryside to blue hazy mountains sitting just on the horizon.  However, lost in the beauty we were assigned to a pile of dirt towards the back the of house.  There we were given pitchforks to sift through the pile of dirt and pick out the trash, sticks, rocks, and gremenia, which is a kind of root weed that grows and sprouts without being planted or cared for.  As we prepared the dirt to be put into the vegetable garden her husband would shovel it into the the wheel barrow and one of us would help him dump it carefully not to spill into the raised bed garden which was already growing leafy greens and beans.  After a few hours of work at the same monotonous project we took a break for lunch of capricollo, prosciutto, pane pizza, and caciatta cheese.  After the half hour break we returned for another three and a half hours of work and depleted most of the pile.  They were impressed with our work and were satisfied with the progress we made that day.  We cleaned up the yard and she set up to start dinner.  The first step was starting a fire in their outside wood fired oven because the flavor from it was unmatched.  While our teacher started at dinner, her husband took us out to these ancient Etruscan tombs.  Carved into the solid exposed rock from a cliff side was a full necropolis.  The set up of the tombs was a large carved facade with T shaped "false door" above the actual entrance and the actual entrance was just a large void into the cliff face with a set of stairs cut down below the meeting area.  Down into the actual tomb would lie the bodies in stone sarcophaguses of the families deceased members.  The actual site was in pretty terrible shape as it was open to the public and there are no funds for the up keep.  Most of the facades were broken off and stairs to the tombs were blocked off by the fallen rock from the facade.  All of the tombs had been raided in earlier times and all that remained were the massive beds that the bodies would lay on.  I was pretty erie being down inside the tombs a very strange energy was in the air and we didn't spend lots of time actually inside.  From the necropolis out across a small flat valley and over a river sat the acropolis.  Taken over in the medieval times by a fort and lookout tower.  The only remaining piece of Etruscan architecture left was the original entrance archway.  But we went inside the fort anyway and climbed to the top of the lookout tower for a spectacular view out over the Lazio region.  From the top you could clearly see why the spot was chosen for a civilization.  Where the acropolis sat was on a triangular shape of land in between two rivers that converged at the point and entrance of the fort.  And as I said directly across the valley sat up on the hillside and inside the cliff the necropolis, completely visible from the acropolis and protected by the river.  That finished our tour of the ancient landscape and we wandered back to the house through vineyards and olive groves the vineyards mostly used for homemade wine which to todays standards are unfavorable and only the farmers who make their own drink their own, comparable i guess to moonshine.  We returned back to the house exhausted and in just enough time to sit out on the porch and watch the blood red sun sink beneath transcending lines of pinks, purples, and blues.  Then came dinner, for first course we had pasta with a sausage cream sauce followed by a roasted chicken and potatoes and the Fibonacci sequence broccoli like vegetable.  Accompanied by an expensive bottle of local red wine which was a mix of merlot and some other grape that I was unfamiliar with.  To finish the night off we had a fresh made apple crisp and an interesting conversation about what to do around Viterbo.  We worked hard but it was totally worth it, good people, good food, good times.