Ciao dall'italia! Last time I wrote I described my trip over to Italy, which involved the infamous pillow fight and the lost luggage. I didn't really get a chance to describe my time thus far, so I will try to give you an idea of what I've been doing here.
Bra, Italy, isn't quite the small town I expected. There is a three-line bus system, for instance, that connects places in town with the surrounding towns. There are many concrete six-story apartment buildings that ring the downtown area, and there are a number of high-end clothing shops that sell only very expensive Italian duds, some of which I, for better or worse, now own.
But at the same time there are narrow, cobbled streets filled with small, bug-like cars, people on bikes, and stooped octogenarians carrying bread. There are huge, ancient churches, crumbling old houses with peeling stucco and lavish hilltop villas overlooking the town. There are even packs of leather-clad youths zipping through the streets on souped-up Vespas.
It is into this place that I have been dropped baggage-less, with only the clothes on my back, a fiddle, 10 empty notebooks and a few glue sticks. Luckily the good people at Slow Food have made it their goal to find me stylish, tight, tapered pants to wear until my backpack arrives from out of the ether.
Bennett (back left) and folks from the Slow Food office.
Actually they have been better than that. There has been in fact so much that I will first list the most notable events then flesh out some details. I had dinner with Carlo Petrini (founder and director of Slow Food International) at an old hilltop castle (www.castellodiverduno.com ). I shared another dinner at a vineyard with 12 local winemakers and the official Slow Food wine tasters/journalists who author the wildly popular S.F. guide to wine.
I took part in a banquet feast and traditional Piedmontese music at the Institute for Gastronomy. I watched a Senegalese drumming/dancing troupe and ate traditional Senegalese rice and fish. I sang sea shanties with 40 local pirates. I played my fiddle for a few rowdy crowds of Italians, composed a tune, swam in two pools, attended an awards banquet for a local farmer's society, danced in the street, bought an eight-pack of cheap socks for $2, and called the airport 14 times to enquire about my luggage, which is still lost. I think it may have decided to go on vacation in Jakarta.
If it sounds like all I've been doing is eating, playing music and calling about my luggage, you're right. That and sleeping, which is easy with this kind of schedule.
And I don't mean to sound smug about it. It is simply that as soon as I arrived it became clear that the Slow Food people had planned my week for me. Meal moved into meeting which moved into meal, which moved into music and so on, for a whole seven days. I should also mention that I have been fortunate enough to be invited into planning meetings for Slow Food's newest project, Slow Folk, a festival of traditional music from food communities around the world. This is exciting because it meshes so seamlessly with my Watson Fellowship.
Naturally people here are quite excited about my journey and it looks like Slow Folk might be a place where people from each stop on my trip can come together to meet each other and swap tunes. It adds a fascinating dimension to my travels!
So by Saturday I had met a solid group of the people who make Slow Food work. I feel happy to report that it is a remarkable lot. Most are in the 25 to 35 range, all are sharp as a tack, and all are working quite hard at whatever they do. Some work in the "Editore," the Slow Food Press, which publishes an astonishing collection of journals, guides, books and even some fiction, all connected to food.
Some work in the Biodiversity office, which organizes and funds projects that defend our world's heritage of agricultural biodiversity and food traditions. (Did you know that 93 percent of America's food product diversity has been lost since 1900? Old apple varieties, heirloom tomatoes, heritage turkeys, indigenous corn ... even though they taste amazing most have been dropped because they don't fit into industrial modes of production, packaging and shelf life.)
Some other people work in the events office, which works to organize the myriad of festivals put on by Slow Food, including Slow Fish, Cheese, Vinitaly, Terre Madre (a gathering of 5,000 farmers and rare foods producers from 400 food communities around the world!), and a host of other smaller festivals created to celebrate various links in the chain of quality food.
And of course some work in the president's office, which is where I've found myself mostly, calling Air France, using e-mail, and meeting the various cogs in the amazingly hard working wheel that is Slow Food. This office works mainly to organize the busy life of Carlo (aka Carlin) Petrini, whose charisma is so legendary in town people just smile and nod when you tell them why you are in town. "Carlin is a genius," and, "People just want to work for him," they say, and it seems to be the case. When Carlo speaks, people listen, and when he says jump, they ask, "Which shoes should I wear?" which is to say he runs quite a tight ship.
My biggest goal here in Bra was to find connections to farming communities in a few of my countries. I am happy to say I have been successful in this, too- I now have e-mails for contacts in Ghana and Vietnam, which were the least planned of the countries on my list.
This week will doubtless be more of the same, but since Carlin has headed off to America to interview Pete Seeger (and I know how the "interview" will go: "Hi Pete great to meet you. So you play banjo? Great—let me tell you about Slow Folk!") the office will be more relaxed and I think my week will be too. Which is great. More time to eat, sleep and play music.
Here's hoping you all find time to do the same!
Bennett