First Days at Casa Caponetti

Hello everyone! I am happy to say I finally made it all the way to Italy! This summer I am doing an internship at Casa Caponetti, an olive orchard and organic farm in a small town called Tuscania, about 60 miles north of Rome. After spending a night in London due to flight delays, losing my luggage to the chaotic conveyor belts of the Rome airport, two trains, and a cab from Tarquinia to Tuscania, the journey (that is, multiple giorni) seemed to take forever. Apparently there is a store in Alabama that sells lost luggage, and I had pretty much accepted that as the fate of my bag about an hour ago, when someone drove up the dirt road and delivered my missing backpack! So that has made this experience much more enjoyable.

Casa Caponetti is in general a quite enjoyable place to be. My first views upon arriving were of rolling hills dotted with olive trees, horses and sunshine. The heat in the middle of the day is made bearable by a trusty breeze that always seems to pick up in the afternoon. It’s pretty exhausting to work outside under the sun all day, so my day is divided by a long siesta after starting farm tasks between 7 and 8 am. After work in the morning, I make lunch and work for a few more hours around 4 or 5 pm. By 9:30 I’m tired enough to fall asleep before the sun has completely set.

I’ve actually been sleeping in a tent for the week since there is a large group of Butoh dancers staying in the volunteer cabins. They work on excavating the Etruscan necropolis that lies beneath the grounds of the farm, working with inspiration from this experience to culminate in a dance performance at the end of the week. We share a kitchen, and many of them speak English really well, but I am still trying to pick up bits of Italian. I definitely overestimated my capacity for language-learning, and had high hopes that it would be easy since I have a pretty good background in Spanish. It’s also been harder to motivate myself to learn it because everyone I need to talk to speaks English either fluently or well enough to get by. The exception is Stephano, one of the people who works with me in the gardens. He speaks to me in a particular Tuscanian dialect of Italian and I don’t understand a word, but I make a lot of blank expressions and get by using gestures.

So far I’ve been doing a lot of weeding, learning how the irrigation system works, trellising tomatoes, and harvesting zucchini and cucumbers. There is more basil than I can possibly imagine eating, which is also really exciting. Apparently there is another intern from Cornell coming next week, but I don’t know anything about him other than that I think his name is Danny. Anyone out there? Hope to see you soon if you happen to read this! I am looking forward to getting settled in more now that I have my luggage and will soon move into an actual cabin. Tomorrow I plan to check out the excavation site with the dancers. More to come soon!