Hunting and gathering

Foraging in Italy, feeling at home

It’s almost a year since I collected these black raspberries in Montegiovi, a hilltop village in the heart of Tuscany. I was there for a self-directed artist’s residency — a difficult and amazing experience that has taken me 348 days to begin to understand.

I arrived in Rome on a hot Thursday and boarded a train to Grosseto. Valentina met me at the station; gamine haircut, shy smile. We drove to the Co-op in Castel del Piano for groceries, then up to the village of Montegiovi, population 175. Valentina pressed the apartment key into my palm and said, “Buona fortuna,” probably, then drove off to care for her young children.

I, on the other hand, was alone, my children far away and not young anymore, anyway. My eyelids were heavy and the simple bed in one of the two simple rooms called to me, but the sun was still hanging on the horizon, orange as an Italian egg yolk, so I locked the apartment with the unfamiliar key and took a walk.

The first thing I noticed was a wild hillside of prickly pears, fico d’India in Italian. You can eat those, I might have said out loud, to no one at all. Valentina had told me there was a pizzeria up the hill and I climbed in the late heat, thinking I might introduce myself — Sono Bonny, I would say — and have a cold drink. The village had not a single shop, cafe, bakery or tabac, nothing except this pizzeria which, I would come to understand, served as a community center, grocery, social hall and meeting place, as well as a restaurant with zucchini-flower pizza five nights a week.

But that first late afternoon, it was still riposo, and when I rounded the corner and found the primitive patio with 180-degree views across the valley, all was deserted. I stepped over two feral cats lounging on the front step to try the door, which I could already see was locked and shuttered. My limbs felt too loose as I started back down the hill toward the apartment, wondering how I would survive in such a quiet place, a place where it was impossible to hide from my own thoughts.

Tired as I was, the sky was becoming pink and I wasn’t ready to go inside. A block before the apartment, I turned down a gently winding road lined with Italian Cyprus. I jumped, a little, when a donkey brayed from not too far away. A car passed by, a blur of flying hair and tanned limbs.

Just a little further down, I found the thicket of black raspberries in the twilight. As I began to gather them in my hand, I stopped being a middle-aged writer struggling, a little, to know who she was. I’d lost my mother and started an impossible book about my father. I’d become heavy with all I was carrying. But among the berries, I was a little kid at summer camp. My friends were water skiing, making arts and crafts, riding horses, while I was here in the woods, hiding from counsellors and filling my canteen with juicy Saskatoon berries. I popped two berries in my mouth. I closed my eyes.

Back in the apartment, I ate a plate of cheese and focaccia from the Co-op. I threw the bedroom window open to catch the breeze and the sound of the donkey braying. I tossed and turned and dreamed until morning.