Lucas it!

Many people have dreams of spending their Italian vacation on a farm... seeing cheese and wine made, perhaps learning how to make pasta, milk a goat or make fresh sausage. Of course, you can always spend your vacation on an agriturismo in the region of your choice. An agriturismo will typically have fairly posh and comfy apartments or rooms, wine tastings (for extra $$$), cooking lessons (again, more $$$) and even their own restaurants on site--some include meals, most don't.
You can find some that are historic and agriculturally oriented, but many are simply overly developed investment hotelier or B&B properties often owned by non-Italian investors and staffed by young, inexperienced hotel staff. The wine and olive oil they produce and sell to tourists are not known to be high quality. If you research meticulously, you can find some that are actually working farms run by the same family that lives and works on the farm. But there is another way to have an authentic, hands-on experience with Italian agricultural organic techniques, food-to-table, and Slow Food movements.... 

WWOOF is a worldwide movement linking volunteers with organic farmers and growers to promote cultural and educational experiences based on trust and non-monetary exchange--yes, people work for free--but they gain a whole lot more than money in these experiences.  The goal of the organization is to help spread the message of building a sustainable global community. As the average age of farmers is 55, the world needs more young people to return from the big city job centers to sustain farming--especially organic methods--and carry on the skills and craftsmanship needed for smaller, owner-operator farms to survive. Many young Americans see this as an opportunity to learn authentic skills that they can use to start their own green enterprises at home.

There are WWOOF farms in many countries around the world... and luckily for the Italophile interested in honing their organic skills, Italy has many opportunities, too. Membership for one year is €35. There are over 650 WWOOF host farm members in Italy in many areas of specialty: cheesemaking, olives and olive oil production, vines and wines, sheep & herding, goats, almonds, fowl (chickens, ducks and others), cows & milking, pigs & sausage, butchering, beekeeping, hay & cereals and vegetables of all kinds. In addition, some offer opportunities to learn construction trades relating to farming... carpentry, masonry, historic restoration, blacksmithing and more.

Volunteers stay in a variety of accommodations from tents to castles, Trulli to masseria farm complexes, converted barns and shared dorms. There are even those that welcome entire families with programs for children. The WWOOF site has an excellent keyword driven search engine that can help you locate a perfect match for the skills you are interested in experiencing first hand. 

Click for a LIST OF WWOOF Farms in Italy.

To register for a WWOOF experience, SIGN UP HERE.

When my father was a young immigrant man in Hoboken, NJ, he and his brother pooled their meager resources and bought what Dad called their "three legged horse" and cart. Because the horse was lame in one leg, they got a great deal on him. Apparently, the cart wasn't in great shape, either. But this allowed them the opportunity to take their cart down to the docks and sell fruit and vegetables to the sailors coming off the many ships docking in Hoboken at the time. They didn't make a lot of money, but it helped them survive...

In the same way many immigrant men started their own small street vendor businesses, that in many cases eventually evolved into brick and mortar shops where their entire family worked, or they would hire compatriots as they also emigrated from their home villages in Italy.  Eventually these clusters of vendors, shops and tenements became the Little Italys of America, merging Italians into becoming true Americans. Italians didn't arrive with much money, but they did come with many varied skills: tailors, cheese makers, butchers, bakers, carpenters, masons and much, much more...

--Jerry Finzi

I copied it my Phrasebook doc onto my Kindle and phones as a ready reference file. I remember studying it right before important events as we were traveling. It helped me retain mainly the phrases and words that I knew for sure I'd need to use that day.

The only warning I'll give is to use a single device when creating your personal phrasebook. It seems that each device saved its own version of the Phrasebook. At the beginning I would use the PC for some translating and my Kindle for the rest. Each list was different. I would have saved a lot of time typing in the list from one to merge into the other if I knew about this ahead of time.

As I researched our Voyage to Italy, I kept Google Translate always open in a browser tab.  I could easily pop over to the tab, cutting and pasting Italian phrases that I found on Italian web sites (ones that offered ny English translation), or the reverse... typing in an English word or phrase to see the translation, then using the Italian phrase to find what I was looking for on an Italian website.

You can also hear the translation spoken by clicking the speaker icon on the bottom left of a panel. The only trouble is, the voice is female. There is no way to change the voice on Google Translate. Each language has it's own voice.... some are male, some female.

Here is part of my own list I created of phrases and words I knew I might need...

Even though I'm back in the States, I still use Google Translate every day. I keep adding to my Phrasebook--it helps to keep practicing. I often use it to help communicate with my new Grand Voyage Italy friends in Italy... I just need to keep what I need to say jargon-free and say everything in simplistic ways, otherwise the translation might sound odd to a real Italian.

After all, we want to go back to Italy someday... in una data futura...

Ciao!

--Jerry Finzi


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The art of Trompe L'oeil (fool the eye) has been around for at least two thousand years... as evidenced by frescoes and mosaics from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Artists have always attempted to make their works seem as realistic as possible--of course, it all depends on the skills of the artists' hands and eyes, some being better than others.

When they added realistic shadows, cast from the same direction as the real world light in the viewing room, the effect was magical. When they would put a life sized mouse running along the edge of the floor, the reality effect was enhanced. If they made some elements like grapes or vines seeming come right out of the frame and onto the wall, you felt like you could reach out and touch and feel what your eyes perceived.

While Tromp L'Oeil usually keeps the objects the same size as the item is in real life to trick the eye into thinking the two dimensional objects are really three dimensional things coming out of the painting and into our real world, modern day Photo Realism or Hyper Realism painters of today have a different goal: to fool the viewer into thinking that they are not looking at paintings at all, but photographs or digital captures of real life.

I find it curious that photography has become the symbol of "reality" rather than real life. When photography was in its infancy, artists were in an uproar (especially portrait artists) because they were losing assignments to people who they claimed were not artists, but merely technicians clicking the shutter on a machine. In no way could photography become a true art form. 

It's amazing to see how photography has become both a form of artistic expression and a way to capture reality as if the viewer was looking through a window at the real life scene. It's also curious how it has come full circle and painters are now imitating photography. 

In any event, I've collected a small sampling of Hyper Realism paintings of food relating to Italian cuisine...

Enjoy...  

--Jerry Finzi