Winding Down

by Daren Anderson

Fall in Italy comes on very slowly.  Today, just outside our door, there are pink, white, red and yellow roses blooming next to trees with bright yellow, orange and brown leaves that fall steadily to the ground in the blustery wind. The receding warmth of summer lets go reluctantly. Days start to cool down very gradually as the hours of sunlight drop steadily.

In mid-September the grapes were harvested. Vines that had been laden with clusters of Sangiovese were relieved of their heavy burden, seemingly overnight. Grapes were tossed by the containerful into vats for processing all over Tuscany, starting the process of making the 2026 vintages of Chianti Classico, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and Brunello di Montalcino.

About a month after the grape harvest, the olive harvest began. This seems to be a much more labor-intensive effort that is still going on now after several weeks.  First the workers lay out green tarps on the ground and use a long-handled power tool on an extended arm that sounds a bit like a window fan and spins slowly like a low-speed string trimmer, cutting down olives, leaves, and branches. The contents of the tarps are poured into large plastic crates that are then taken off to the mill for sorting and pressing.

This weekend we spent a day at Figline Valdarno’s fall festival. It was much like a New England fall festival but with a decidedly Italian flavor. While there were the usual crafts and farm products, the food stalls featured polenta dishes, pizza, local wines and olive oils as well as cheese and cured meats from all over Italy. A Sicilian truck had freshly made cannolis and almond paste cookies while a Neapolitan truck had sfogliatelle and bomboloni. Another stand sold arrosticini from Abruzzo, and stuffed olives from Le Marche. There were cheeses from Lombardy as well as huge bins of chestnuts.  Just as we were leaving, we passed a parade of flag throwers dressed in traditional Florentine Renaissance garb.

The slow change in season reflects our own gradual change in feelings about our trip. When we arrived in the spring, we experienced a slow, gradual unfolding of a life-altering experience that seemed to get better each day, just as spring itself unfolded over three beautiful months. And now, as fall strengthens its grip on Italy, we are on the down slope of our journey and thinking about our return. We’ve already started a return home spreadsheet and started making arrangements for Koji’s flight back to the states.

We are both a bit surprised to feel the tug of home starting to pull on us with three months still to go. On most vacations we’ve taken, there is usually a day when the mind switches from “vacation mode” to “going home mode”. I always hate that day because suddenly, the vacation feels over, and the remaining days start to feel like we are simply going through the motions. But this switch usually happens a few days before the flight home. With a much longer stay than a typical vacation, the transition is happening much earlier than we’d expected. Trips around Europe don’t feel quite as exciting, and learning Italian seems less essential now.

I think that the change in weather and the growing darkness have something to do with it. It’s just not as much fun being here in the dark and in the cold as it was when the sun was shining late and days were warm and crisp. Fall and winter are times to turn inwards and cozy up with friends and family. Our friends and family are back home in the U.S. We miss them.

We had many goals for our year in Italy and it’s hard to resist looking at them as a sort of checklist and seeing how we did. We are notorious list-keepers and check-box junkies. Checkbox number one on the list is Esterina’s citizenship. While this was not the only reason we came to Europe, it was a critical part of the year and the reason we chose Italy. We can’t check the box quite yet, but she received a communication from the town comune last week that everything was nearly complete.

Checkbox number two was to travel throughout Italy over the course of the year and see all 20 of the geographic regions of the country. We nearly did it. Eighteen out of twenty. We will not likely make it to the two big islands, Sicily and Sardinia. But we’ve been from the Alps in the north to the Ionian Sea in the south and seen so many amazing things. Along the way we’ve gotten to experience all the cultural and historical differences and similarities of each of these regions. Some of our favorites were destinations that were not even on our radar before arriving here:  Valle d’Aosta, Umbria, Verona, Abruzzo and Chiavari, to name just a few.

Another check box was to fully immerse ourselves in Italian culture including the language, the food, and the customs, and to experience what it is like to live in Italy rather than just visit as a tourist. We’ve learned the rhythms of daily life here: shopping, driving, and handling ordinary tasks of daily living. Things don’t seem exotic or foreign anymore. And while we are by no means fluent, we’ve built a solid foundation of Italian and could build on it if we return some day.

Our experience has not been quite as immersive as it could have been, largely because we chose to live in an apartment complex that is entirely populated by non-Italian residents. Given that we are located a bit out of town in a more rural location, we have not had much chance to meet, converse, or socialize much with local Italians. At the fall festival yesterday we spent time in several different booths featuring local clubs: a cycling club, a hiking club, a photography club, and several other organizations with charitable missions like caring for the frail elderly or helping the environment. Were we to do it all over, I would have wanted to learn about and maybe join some of these groups early on.

Perhaps the most important check box was to use this year in Italy as a time to disconnect from everything that was familiar in order to free ourselves to re-focus on some of the essential questions of life. For me, this meant lots of reading, self-exploration, writing, and thinking about the person I was and who I wanted to be. I took a long intellectual journey back to my younger self and explored the goals I had had and the morals I had hoped to follow. I read many books, including some I had read years ago, to see what I had learned over the years and to find new inspiration. I wrote extensively about this inner journey in a previous blog and am now developing a clearer idea of how I want to live this next phase of my life. I’ve had a chance to re-evaluate what is important to me and what is not.

We haven’t checked all the boxes. We probably won’t complete all the tasks. But we are already starting to turn our experience into memories and are looking back on our time, even though we are still here. In a few days we are heading out on the road for one last major trip. Hopefully we’ll be making great new memories even as our thoughts shift more towards home. And after we get back, we have the Christmas season just around the corner and, from everything we’ve heard, Christmas in Europe is something special to behold. It will be a bit strange to be simultaneously inhabiting two spaces at once, physically in Italy while increasingly back home in our minds. I left the U.S. a bit ambivalent about “home,” and open to the possibility of spending a longer time abroad. I feel differently now. Home is more than an address: it is the people and shared life we have missed, and we are looking forward to returning to them.