I’ll tell you this, but don’t get the wrong end of the stick, they weren’t poor, or needy. They were the people that reconstructed Italy after a terrible war and an even more terrible dictatorship.
I’m talking about folk who  defended taste and typicality…while modern progress and comfort advanced, they kept their country roots, (long before today’s consoling farmers’ markets and organic produce).
These were the people that around our area, after the harvests, with good manners and dignity, would ask the land-owners if they could go ‘grazing’.
I’ve met loads all over Italy, that picked corn after the combine harvesters had been through the fields, for their hens, so they would give lovely yolks, red like a sunset, and others that would collect shrivelled up, left-behind bunches of grapes for sharp but tasty wines. From north to south, crop to crop.
The other day a couple knocked at the door of my farm, a lady and her husband, elderly but lively, cheery and hearty “can we collect the leftover olives, there's only a few but they're nice and juicy, over-looked by your pickers?”
 
I could have hugged them, so tenaciously attached to their history, witnesses of a way of life that is simple but parsimonious and conscientious. In my positive answer there was gratitude towards these two survivors of compulsive consumerism, because from each of those olives a drop of a world that I loved would be squeezed. Here we are today looking and searching incessantly for something, without even remembering what it is exactly we are looking for. We should remember this real world fondly and take example.

Where there are now, in this period of the year, alignments of umbrellas and sun-beds, set out like armed phalanxes defending Mare Nostrum just between Anzio and Nettuno, the Trojan veterans landed three thousand years ago.

Aeneas and his people found refuge in a perfumed Mediterranean thicket, with the Tusculan Hills in the background and, further down the valley, the fatal Hills of the future Roman Empire. Whether this glorious history is true or fruit of the hired-pen of Virgil, looking for noble origins for the Gens Julia, fact remains that the Greek Culture bred rough and ready races of shepherds and farmers and every time I happily drink a Malvasia Puntinata, maybe even throwing my winning ‘briscola’ ace down on the the table, it brings a smile to my face. “There, Achilles , son of Peleus, take that! Hector is getting his own back. Landlord, open another bottle…it’s on them!”

There is and old photograph, my mother, really young, keeps me happy by showing me the hens and cockerel in the pens, distracting me so I would eat. What I would give today for that lack of appetite !

That black and white of real Agfas, the pigs that grew fat along the side of the vineyards. That little lane just beyond the Roman well that took us to happy fields where we could play football matches that lasted for four or five hours, but today obscured by rooftops.

Don’t think that I’m reminiscing the usual regrets of a world that is no more. I was on the scene of the crime, where my generation killed its best years: the hopes and the illusions.

Twenty five years ago I planted some trees a long way away, that I haven’t ever seen since. With stripes of yellow and green I have constructed landscapes. I still do today, by choosing which direction I plant rows of vines, or which varieties or crops I grow.

I have  in my head, the places, just as they were, are and will be.

That chicken coup, the warm egg cupped in my hand, carefully, so as not to let it break, the spoonful of my mothers feed, inspired me. I don’t care much for photographs, except for a few that I avoid ever looking at.

Italian wines have always made a great impression because of their minerality. But after all, this Country immersed in the seas by impetuous volcanic activity, has many microenvironments: the soil, climate and the men characterising hundreds of grape-types creating just as many wines,  giving distinctive mineral qualities to each. But the ‘saltiness’ of Frascati Wines is unique. When it is combined with that wonderful freshness and hints of fruit and flowers, aftertastes of dried figs and nuts, well… this salt can be really irresistible.

The roots of the vines delve deep into the lapilli and basalt to capture it then the Tuscan microclimate welds it there. It’s not like a sea salt, but rather light. A sensation that heeds the exclamation ‘this is a Frascati’!

Perfumes and tastes that come from deep down to make us feel at home.