Cretaiole

We arrived on Saturday at Cretaiole, our final destination in Italy, just outside the Tuscan town of Pienza. Cretaiole is what is called an Agritourismo. Agritourismos are essentially farm-stays, in which families allow guests to stay in rustic rooms or apartments on the family farm. Many of these agritourismos also run restaurants in addition to the working farms.

Cretaiole is owned and run by the Morriccione family, and in addition to running the Agritourismo, they also farm grapes and olives from which they make wine and olive oil.

The unstoppable Isabella organizes a variety of activites for the people who stay with them, from cooking classes and visits to Siena, to organized dinners, winery tours and the opportunity to participate in the harvest of both the grapes and the olives depending on the time of year.

In the five or six rooms and apartments available here, all but one are occupied by Americans. The other family is from Australia. It has been nice to actually be able to socialize in our native tongue, though I have been trying out my Italian on Luciano, the Morriccione family patriarch, who tends the family garden (the most amazing zucchini I have ever tasted came from this garden) and invites all of the guests to spend the evening on the verandah with him sampling his homemade wine, grappa and vin santo.

Luciano speaks almost no English, and he brings an English/Italian dictionary to the table with him so we can look up words as we try to speak Italian with him! I seem to be the most game to try it out, and I feel like I am getting better every day, though I still have only the most basic of vocabularies and can only speak in the present tense!

The homemade vin santo is actually quite tasty, and Luciano told us all that we should put our cantucci (small cookie like a biscotti) into the glass of vin santo and let it soak for a bit before eating it.

The grappa is so strong it will light your innards on fire, but Luciano insists that the first glass is rough, but the second glass is much better. Though he himself admitted that any more than two glasses and you’re in trouble.

Our apartment has a fireplace and since I can literally spend a blissed-out few hours staring at a roaring fire, we tried to light one our first night. We got it lit just fine, and as it was roaring away, I looked at it.

I noticed that it was moving; not the fire itself, but the area around it. At first I thought it was ashes moving and swirling, but as I looked more closely, I noticed that what was moving were legs; lots and lots of legs.

What began to take shape in front of my eyes were bugs. Green bugs about the size of my thumbnail. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. They filled the hearth area around the fire, and some of them popped over the edge to squiggle around on the floor.

Steve, trying to be nonchalant, said, “It’s not too bad.” An hour later, though he was singing a different tune, as we scooped up these bugs by the shovel-ful and deposited them on the fire. Some of them flew around the room and we chased them down.

They just kept appearing, and we couldn’t figure out from where: the grate, the flu. Some other secret bug depository that we couldn’t see??

We spent nearly an hour scooping and chasing before the steady stream of them finally abated. When we went to the verandah for our well-earned grappa and vin santo, we learned that they are called stink-bugs.

Isabella and Carlo, who currently run Cretaiole (Luciano is Carlo’s father), said that our fire was the first of the season, and that probably the bugs had taken up residence in the flue and we had literally smoked them out when we lit our fire.

Subsequent fires have yielded no such deluge, so I think we got rid of the majority of them, though they still find their way periodically into the apartment. I have just seen that there is currently a stink-bug infestation happening in the US, with 29 states affected.

Looks like this (I am planning on including a photo of the bug here, but the internet connection is very bad, so I can't upload any photos at the moment. I will add it as soon as I can!) could be waiting for us on our return to San Francisco. Welcome home!