Rome to Sicignano Degli Alburni (340km)

We took two trains to get to Sicignano Degli Alburni, the first an intercity train from Rome to Salerno and then a regional train up through the moutains to Sicignano Degli Alburni.

Our host Gianpaolo had his worker Stefano waiting at the train station to pick us up. After a short 10 minute drive we arrived at the property where we would spend the next two weeks as WWOOFers.
(Photos: on the train).

Stefano has limited English but he introduced us to Giuseppina and Domenico who live in the main house on the property (named Il Sentiero del Riccio - Path of the Hedgehog) and speak only Italian, and then he showed us to our living quarters in a donga on the property.
There were actually two dongas joined together, one being a kitchen/dining area with a washing machine and the other being for sleeping with two bedrooms (each with a set of bunk beds) separated by a bathroom in the middle. The accommodation was very basic and has not had a good clean for a very long time, but it is quite typical of the type of accommodation you would see on farms in Australia.

(Photos: view of the mountain from Il Sentiero del Riccio; photos around the property; our accommodation).

We got settled in and then later in the afternoon Gianpaolo came out to see us and explain things to us. We quickly learned that Gianpaolo is basically the only person who speaks English, but he doesn't actually live on the property and he is hardly ever there. As such we would be working with Stefano and his wife Lina. Stefano and Lina were both very nice and friendly and they made a big effort to try and communicate with us but there was big language barrier.

This was ultimately pretty disappointing as it meant that we were not really able to learn much from them as they could not speak English. It also became apparent that although Gianpaolo owns and manages the property and sells the produce (wine, olive oil and honey), he doesn't actually do any of the hard work on the property. You could tell straight away by looking at his hands that he doesn't do any farm work. As such Stefano and Lina are left to manage not just the property where we were staying, but also the other properties which Gianpaolo owns. We also found that they only work 5-6 hours per day so as a result the properties are overgrown and they seem to struggle to keep up with everything.

(Photos: farm dogs Lucky and Latte).

This was our first real culture clash in Italy. We found it really hard to understand their work ethic. Firstly, Italy is still a very classist society in that manual labour like farm work is still seen as 'peasant work' only to be done by the lower classes. This explains why Gianpaolo never does any manual labour and we found it really hard to respect him as a result. We also could not understand how they work so few hours in the day. Even when they were at work they just kind of cruised along. Stefano explained to us that he previously worked as a graphic designer for a large magazine in Italy but then he lost his job after the global financial crisis and that is how he ended up working for Gianpaolo. So we understood that this work is a means to an end for him and it is not even his property so why should he bust his gut.

We started work on a Friday and were told we would do a 'big day' as Stefano and Lina would be taking a 3 day weekend and having the Monday off to go see Bruce Springsteen in concert in Rome. The 'big day' was only 7 hours of work, from 7am to 10am then a big break and then 3pm to 7pm in the evening. The first day we worked pruning the grape vines and we both found this to be fairly enjoyable work.
(Photo: grape vines).

We had to ask Stefano to leave us jobs to do on our own over the long weekend however as we wanted to take a few days off during the week to do some sightseeing. As no one was going to be on the property we were given fairly basic jobs to do including weeding and maintaining the potato patch, weeding the vegetable garden and cutting the grass (which was extremely overgrown).

The potato patch took us most of the first day although we only worked about 4-5 hours. On the Sunday I worked on the vegetable garden while Matt got out the whipper snipper to cut back grass. Giuseppina came out to help me in the veggie garden and she also showed me how to harvest the garlic which was ready to be picked. We didn't feel like we were learning much doing these jobs, but it was peaceful and we were able to work at our own pace and we both enjoyed doing some physical work.

(Photos: working the potato patch; vegetable garden; preparing the garlic; Domenico watching from his usual spot; Giuseppina sneaks a ciggie behind the truck).

We also started to get to know Giuseppina a little bit. She spoke absolutely no English and would speak to us only in Italian, but she did not quite seem to realise that we did not speak any Italian. She would come down to the kitchen every evening and have a whiskey with Matt and talk to us non-stop in Italian. We used Google Translate as best we could to try and communicate with her. We soon figured out that she was a feisty little old lady who liked to drink and smoke and swear. She took us out during our mid-day break on Sunday for Sambucca at a small bar in the village. She also loaded us up with bread and vegetables from the garden.

On Monday we continued with our jobs but we also took it upon ourselves to clean out the small horse stable. One of our daily jobs was to feed the horse every morning and evening and this was one of our favourite jobs because it was something new and different for us that put us out of our comfort zone.
Gianpaolo is a vegan and he was so proud to tell us how the horse is a jumping horse and Gianpaolo saved him from the slaughterhouse.

(Photo: Matt and his new friend).

The horse has a decent sized paddock but his stable is very small with no ventilation and the ground is always muddy which can't be good for his feet. In addition the shit had piled up so much in the stable that he was constantly standing in it, and Stefano also feeds the horse his oats on the ground! We lost more respect points for Gianpaolo, who seemed so happy to take credit for 'saving' this horse but then doesn't life one finger to actually care for the bloody thing.

Stefano and Lina were supposed to return to work on Tuesday but Lina never showed up and Stefano was clearly ill. So we pretty much continued just doing our own thing. On Wednesday Stefano drove us to the train station so that we could take the 7.15am train to Salerno. We stayed at a B&B in Salerno for 2 nights and did some sightseeing around Salerno as well as taking the bus out to see the archeological site of Pompeii.
(Photos: Salerno).

We could not believe how huge the Pompeii archeological site is, it took us a full 45 minutes to walk from one side of the site to the other and they have only actually excavated about 2/3 of the whole site. It was very hot and dusty but it was worth it as the ruins of Pompeii are so well preserved and you really get a feel for how impressive the city must have been and how the citizens lived their lives. By far our favourite part of the trip was seeing the excavated bodies of citizens of Pompeii, perfectly preserved in mud and ash and lava in some bizarre positions. It was fascinating and really creepy at the same time.
(Photos: Pompeii Archeological Site).

We arrived back at the farm on Friday afternoon and so we had another weekend of working on our own and pottering around the property with Giuseppina. We also took a walk around the village which didn't take too long as it is really quite small. On the Monday Stefano took us up to another of Gianpaolo's properties higher up on the hill near the township of Terra Nova. We worked stacking the cut grass up into long piles to be pressed into hay bales for the horse. We did the same work on Tuesday and then on Tuesday afternoon a new WWOOFer arrived.

Gina is from Columbia and has been living in Tuscany for the past 5 months studying and working with a theatre company. Gina speaks Spanish but as Spanish is so similar to Italian she was able to understand most of what Stefano and Giuseppina were saying so we were finally able to start understanding what was going on. It turns out that Giuseppina - whom we initially thought to be about 70 years old and married to Domenico - is in fact only in her late 50s/early 60s and Domenico (who is in his 80s) is her father. We still didn't understand why should always hide her drinking and cigarettes from him though.

Our last day on the property was our best day by far. Stefano finally showed us how they collect and process the honey from the bee hives

(Photos: bee hives)

as Gianpaolo had been promising us from the start that we would do this. We got fully geared up in the beekeeping hats and jacket and used the smoker to subdue the bees while we stole the wooden panels laden with their honeycomb and honey. It was scary but really interesting. Once back in the shed we used metal comb tools to gently remove the outer layer of the wax from the honeycomb to allow the honey to flow out, then the panel were placed into a machine which spins at a great speed extracting the honey and leaving it at the bottom of the machine to be poured into jars. We got to eat big chunks of honeycomb dripping with honey which were so sweet that we got an immediate sugar rush.

Stefano explained that usually the honey is then filtered and then put into jars which have to be kept totally free of moisture otherwise the honey is spoiled by mould. Then the honey is aged for 20-30 days before it is ready for sale. But he gave us a small jar each of fresh honey which was very sweet and had a flavour of lavender and a much more pale colour than honey you buy in the shop.

That evening we decided to have a few drinks (as Gianpaolo had given us a bottle of his white wine and some bottles of his home brew honey beer) and then take Gina out to have pizza for dinner. As we were about to leave we saw most of the town walking up the street with a statue of a saint and Giuseppina explained that that evening there was the Feast of the Madonna or something along those lines. We had a few drinks with Giuseppina and some other locals at the bar across the road before heading for dinner. We didn't find any pizza but a group of teenage girls started talking to us in English and invited us to join in the pasta feast taking place at the church across the street.
The locals welcomed us with open arms and we were like celebrities (being new people in a very small town) and everyone wanted to talk to us. So we ate pasta, we danced to Italian music played by a guy with an accordion and we got to the know the people in the town. It was so Italian it was almost cliche! It was such a wonderful evening and it was a fantastic way to end our two weeks WWOOFing. The next morning we were a little hungover but we managed to get ourselves up for our early train towards Tuscany.
(Photos: around the village of Zuppino in Sicignano Degli Alburni; with Gina at La Festa on our last night in Sicignano).