14. The Food

The Food

The Food!

Oh, my dears, The Food! THE FOOD!

Elisabetta was a Master Cook. (Chef is too effete!)

Lucky for all of us at Il Poggio--guests and staff--and even temporary employees like me--were welcome at the big dining room Lazy Susan table, the outdoor Marble topped table in the patio at lunch, the Swiss style plenty of everything and eat all you want breakfasts.

When she appeared at the entrance of the dining room with a huge bowl of steaming pasta--strong men wept for joy! 

As I said, Elisabetta practically lived in the kitchen--always on her favorite stool by the fireplace or preparing or supervising other staff in the preparation of meals.

Her family had been in the hotel business for generations--with the current grand family hotel being on Lago Majori on the Italian side--and she maintained the noble tradition wonderfully well.

Since one of my chores was to carry out the kitchen garbage, I can certify that everything used in food preparation  except tomato-paste was natural and fresh (I did find tomato paste cans in the trash!)

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13. Tables

There was a wide assortment of tables at Il Poggio.


Elisabetta had scrounged and bought old--even antique--serviceable, solid, durable  tables and other furniture in Florence (fifteen miles distant) and in nearby villages so there were unique tables in every guest room, in the broad hallways holding lamps, in the ceramic display room, in the ceramica work rooms--and even a granite topped outdoor table seating about twelve people in the patio formed by the U-shaped main building.


The two most remarkable indoor tables, however, were the main work table in the kitchen and the big round table in the dining room.


The kitchen table had a thick wooden surface and trestle legs. Elisabetta had found it in a defunct monastery and somehow had talked the secular owners out of it. With the table were several heavy benches and chairs so about twelve to fourteen people could comfortably sit around it.


Pick-up snacks and meals were often served on it in the cheerful, homey-feeling kitchen. Guests and Il Poggio workers gathered there at all times for friendly talk and maybe a glass of the ever-present Tuscan Chianti wine.


And Elisabetta was almost always nearby on her stool in the hearth-side corner or at work with the tasks of cooking ON the table--since it was the primary work table of the kitchen--though not the only working surface to say the least. (There were working cabinet-tops and cupboards on every wall.)

The main dining room table was most unusual-- circular with matching chairs for about fourteen people. The center was a Lazy-Susan revolving platform for passing plates and bowls of food around--which was kept in almost constant motion during the convivial luncheons and evening meals. I have never seen another like it.

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12. The Kitchen

The kitchen was the heart and center of Il Poggio, and this is where Elisabetta could be found at  almost any time of any day.


Remember, Il Poggio was built in medieval times by one  the Medici family as a country estate, so the kitchen was planned to prepare the food (and banquets) for thirty or more people at every  meal. 

The kitchen was big. and rather dark because there were windows on only one side.

The far side--away from the window light--was well-lit by modern standards by electric light but was still rather darkish and country kitcheny.


In the farthest corner--away from the windows-- was a wood-burning fireplace which was always alight. 

This was not a floor fireplace necessary for heating but an old-fashioned table-high fireplace with a wide brick hearth and a wide smoke hood which was used every day for cooking of the most marvelous foods.


Elisabetta had a strong high stool near this fireplace and from this stool she directed all the activities of her Bed and Breakfast.

I saw, as one of my tasks, that there was always a plentiful supply of all sizes of firewood from kindling to logs for her to burn. 

There had been a hard frost two years before my arrival which had killed the trees in a nearby olive grove so,  stacked  in one of the out-buildings, was a good supply of seasoned, dry olive wood--choice cooking fuel.

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11. The Garden

There was a good-sized vegetable garden at Il Poggio and a larger forested plot of land surrounding the buildings. 

I enjoyed working amongst the vegetables and walking and sitting in the small forest.


There was a young Welshman who came around often who planted and worked in the garden and who also helped with building maintenance and the general yard-work and so forth required. I forget his name but lets call him Peter (Pete for short). He was an important high-energy member of the Il Poggio family.

Pete and I worked side by side in the hot sun weeding, watering and taking care of the tomatoes, squash, onions and--most especially--the broad beans, of which he was most particularly  partial. In fact he had brought these broad bean seeds with him from his old family garden in Wales and so the beans  were familiar to him and he claimed them to be Welsh broad-beans generations old.  Pete absolutely loved his broad beans! 

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10. Early Birds

Elisabetta assigned me another job which I liked a lot.

She asked me to get up early every day and feed the chickens and ducks which were a part of the Il Poggio family.


I spent some  years as a kid on a half-acre family farm "The Three Willow Ranch" in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and learned to take care of chickens, pigeons, ducks, turkeys, pigs, calves, donkeys, cats and dogs, a desert turtle and other critters large and small--so I knew what to do.

When I was a boy I didn't much like doing "the chores", but at Il Poggio I thoroughly enjoyed them. 

It was fun for me in the very early Tuscan morning  to throw grain to some eager birds and watch them merrily dine!

I especially admired the two huge multi-colored roosters--the way they would scratch the earth for the hens and then stand tall and bright-eyed alert while the females would peck, peck, peck  at whatever was there to eat. Such gentlemen!


Oddly enough, at Il Poggio there was no cat and no dog!

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9. Clay Curls

Another thing I discovered about the nature of clay.

Something so obvious that I had never thought about it.

Clay naturally likes to dry in thinnish  curves.

You have noticed that when clay dries in the hot summer sun on the river bottom--the clay cracks in fairly small, fairly thin pieces--not quite geometrical patterns--but also not very large "plates", and you have also noticed that the clay shards curl up, toward the heat source--the sun--slightly at the edges.


 Dishes, cups. pots, vases--BIG vases--all the most useful ceramic objects --except tiles--are round or roundish. And all the most common flat objects made of clay--like tiles--are usually small or smallish, because clay likes to curl up as it dries! And almost all ceramic objects have fairly uniformly thin "walls".


I  think most potters grasp these facts early on and intuitively--but if they come at the craft like  I did--not knowing  a thing about it--they will discover by trial and error these interesting facts because everything they try to make too big or too flat or too thick WILL crack as it dries---even if it dries VERY slowly.

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8. Patience

I soon learned that time is a very important factor in ceramic work.

The artist must be constantly aware that the clay he is working with is drying as he works. This changes the consistency of the clay which can be a positive or negative thing.

Clay is just dirt after all--but a special kind of rather sticky dirt that will hold a shape as  long  as it has just the right amount of moisture in it. Too much water and it becomes mud and too little and it becomes dry and cracks.

There are deposits of good ceramic clay in the Tuscan hills of Italy and this is why good pottery has been produced here for centuries and wasn't I lucky to find this out and to actually be living at Il Poggio with my own hands in it up to the elbows !

But, back to time. 

When you draw a picture--you draw it and it is done. But when you work on a clay shape you have to be aware that the clay is changing as you work. If you can't finish the project, you must keep the clay in it's proper state of moisture--not too wet--not too dry--until you can work on it again. At Il Poggio we used plastic sheeting or bags around the work in progress to keep the moisture just right.

And when the shape you want is finished it must dry slowly. If it drys too fast the whole thing will crack like you have seen in clay deposits in river beds on hot summer days. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey--until the whole piece is consistently dry. 

Before it goes into the kiln to be fired, the work must be absolutely, completely dry or it will explode.

So to prepare one  piece for firing might take not just minuts or hours, but days or even weeks. 

And, of course, the first firing is not the end of the process!

Patience is a key to ceramic production.

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7. Me Ceramist

I tried to throw a pot on the electric wheels but my efforts always ended with a disastrous mess--a muddy lump. I tried on the foot-powered old fashioned wheel--same result.

I impatiently wanted to make something good--something I could show and be proud of.

One of the real potters showed me how to make a "pinch pot" with  handful of clay and I made a couple of dozen of these beginner's projects--good fun, but no Kewpie Doll artistically.

Next somebody showed me how to roll "snakes"of clay and then coil them up into a pot shape and smooth the sides--well, this was getting somewhere but not where I wanted to go.

Then somebody showed me how to roll a sheet clay of uniform thickness between two wooden lathes with a cook's rolling pin. Ahh--then you could use the slabs of clay to form shapes--almost any shape you could imagine. Vases, cups, big flat tiles with incised pictures and words! 

This was much more like it!

I started making bas-relief tile scenery with little houses and mountains and trees. I made castles and modeled little people--then I started curving strips of clay and started making life-size heads--first monsters (easy) and then  portraits of my fellow workers! Fun!

Look, Ma! I'm a ceramist!

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6. Clay

As I said, I had no experience with ceramics but soon became very involved with the craft, working at it in all my spare time and, since the tasks I did for Elisabetta were usually finished in a couple of morning hours, I worked with clay--you could say--full time and more--day and night--lost myself in the work and completely enjoyed myself!

Elisabetta gave me full run of the ceramic studio as well as the Il Poggio workshops--in fact the run of all the buildings and spaces in her huge sprawling antique stone dwelling. 

I had free use of any clay, glazes, throwing wheels, drying shelves or tools. She did all the firing--loading  and unloading the kiln and so forth--herself.  

She allowed me to watch her work and the other professional ceramists also answered my questions, gave me advice and let me watch them work.

Since I had NO experience in the field, I didn't know what you can't do with clay--so I did the most, to them, outrageous things, which they thought was great fun--like unheard of experiments!

They did warn me to make every item I produced hollow with an air passage out and of an almost uniform thickness so my creations would not explode in the kiln and destroy their own hard work.

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5. Ceramica

Il Poggio was not only a B+B, it was a "ceramica"--a small producer of hand made ceramic ware.  

I discovered that these small family-owned ceramicas were fairly common and an old tradition in Tuscany--the pots, dishes and bowls crafted here are famous and collected by people who appreciate good folk art.

Elisabetta had converted one wing of her old mansion into art studios and a large sales room.

She had made other suites into firing and work rooms with storage shelves for work in progress and a big walk-in gas fired kiln. 


 Making clay figures was her specialty. She was an expert potter with the wheel but to save time would often have another local potter come in and throw half a dozen stoneware pots which she would keep soft--covered with plastic bags. When she had time from her cooking and the management of her B+B hotel, she would decorate these pots--transforming them into Great Earth Mother style female figures. 

Elisabetta's artist sister Doris, who lived in another hotel owned by Elisabetta's family on Lago Majori at the Swiss border, would come down once or twice a month to decorate plates, bowls and cups. 

A young German woman who had been trained in a polytechnic university in Germany also lived and worked at Il Poggio. She threw precision coffee cups, saucers, boiled egg cups and things like that on a potter's wheel at a wonderfully fast pace.

Elisabetta let me work in the ceramica all afternoon and all night if I wished--any time I was free from the other little tasks she assigned me.

This was great for me because I have always been interested in art but never had the chance to use all the equipment and materials necessary for ceramic work.

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4. My Work

My work.

I have been an indoor classroom teacher for years and an indoor salesman of shoes and things like that for years and a rock n roll musician for long enough--but what I really LIKE to do is to work at my own speed with my own hands outdoors: gardening, farming, carpentry, animal care, building maintenance and repair, painting--THAT kind of thing--what I consider to be really creative, fully engaged work.


And THAT is EXACTLY what Elisabetta wanted me to do!

(I could repeat that sentence for emphasis.) 

That is exactly what Elisabetta wanted me to do!!

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3. The ticket

I had nowhere specific to go or to be--in fact I had become a traveler without a destination. I wanted to explore Europe and here I was.  

Elisabetta's proposal was just the ticket. I could work part-time here near Florence, see the sights, maybe learn a little Italian, eat steady, sleep dry and live.

My second-floor room was fine--bed, desk, chair, bath down the hall, heavy wooden door, window in the thick stone wall with a view of the patio and the rising farmland behind the old mansion--vineyards and the signature cypress trees of Tuscany. The view was so stunning in fact that I made the social error of leaving the solid wood shutters open the first day I moved in. This is not done. Open shutters anywhere in the house raised the indoor temperature noticeably and I was told to please keep the shutters closed during the day.

Another resident worker, Maria, had an apartment in the eastern wing of the house. Fiori, the maintenance man, lived with his wife and children in a nearby village and Elisabetta, the owner, manager, head cook and everything else  lived in a larger downstairs apartment.

The B&B rental rooms were mostly near mine on the second floor but there were several others in nearby stone annex buildings.

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