Mature Life Features

. . . so take it EZ

and drop by to schmooz

around Sunday’s ice cream

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Happiness is

not having to set the alarm clock.

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Roman Festival Brightens

Umbrian Hillside

Why not drop around on Sunday, Riccardo suggested, “We’ll have a few artichokes.”

The retired Alitalia pilot and his wife, Mariolina, were our landlords when we arrived in the medieval central-Italy castle-town of Panicale and became our friends before we left. They opted out of big-city living in Rome and built a picture-book home in a hill-clinging olive grove just below the town’s centuries-old walls.

This fortress overlooks Lake Trasemino, the peninsula’s fourth largest lake, to the north; the manicured Tuscan countryside to the west, and the rolling Umbrian hills to the south and east.

As every hiker knows, you walk a hill at your own pace. That’s why no one hurries. Everything here is up hill. So it was about a 25-minute walk to Riccardo’s.

We knew we were in for something special as we approached the lane sloping into their farmyard. It was like breaking into an opera. About three dozen people wearing the full array of bright yellows, reds, greens – pick a color – were milling about chittering, chattering, and chanting in that Italian sing-song from which arias emerged. The accompaniment was provided by Riccardo’s tractor as it hauled dead olive branches to a pile resembling a titanic tumbleweed.

We became a member of the cast immediately because our chore was to pluck mint leaves off the plant stems and chop the stocks off the artichokes – shopping-cart-sized mounds of them. The leaves were minced with garlic and olive oil and the artichokes were given a good slam on the ground to soften them because the centers were opened up and crammed with the mint leave-garlic-oil mixture.

Through all this, you had to balance wine – almost everybody brings their own to determine whose is best for bragging rights – with oil-drenched bread, cheese, fresh fava beans, and more wine before the fire was ready.

The giant pile of shrubbery is burned and the ashes raked into a flat lava-like bed of coals. Then you had to tuck your artichoke into the coals to cook. Again, the operatic metaphor arose as each person displayed a distinctive dance pirouetting around the blistering mound. It takes about 45 minutes for the artichokes to cook in this manner, which gave everyone time to sample more wine with the sausages and pork barbecued on a fire fed with larger chunks of trimmed olive wood.

Then flowed the desserts, all of them home-made.