The great day is nigh : è finita la caccia (and I'm still married)

After months of being a caccia widow, tomorrow is the last day of the hunting season. Marco will be putting away his padded Forrest Gump dungarees, his Big Jim camouflage pyjamas and locking up his gun for another year and we will get him back as a husband and father. From 1 February walking in the woods will become a safe activity and our days will stop starting with the sound of gunshot echoing across the valleys.

Cue a collective sigh of relief.

Montalcino was a poor town until very recently and the hunting that goes on in this area is a residue of “contadino” (peasant with no pejorative implications) culture. It’s all about bringing something home for the pot. Men in this area tend to have a very conflictual relationship with nature; they can’t just go for a walk, but have to rape and pillage the countryside in one way or another. So whether its porcini mushrooms, snails after heavy summer rains, “insalata di campo” (wild salad), bietole for ribollita soup, wild asparagus or small birds, the important thing is not to come home empty-handed.

There is a big distinction between two types of hunters in this area depending on whether they hunt wild boar or birds. You’re either one or the other and each group has its own calendar and social events. The wild boar hunt, la caccia al cinghiale, is a group activity involving hordes of dogs and many participants. The dogs flush out the boar. The hunters have to stay put in their position, “la posta,” all day long, in case the boar will rush out past them. Although they are meant to wear fluorescent jackets, every year at least a couple of friends shoot each other by mistake. After sitting for 7 hours, apparently it’s easy to mistake the sound of your neighbour lumbering through the undergrowth to ask for a light for the beast you’ve been waiting for, and before you know it, you’ve shot your best mate. From Il Palazzone there is an amazing view of scrubby Mediterranean macchia and our visitors often ask if there are wild boar in this area. A quick glance at any local menu gives the answer. There certainly are boar, and deer too, greedy for our vine shoots and grapes. A wild boar team (“la squadra”) might catch between 100 and 400 boar during the season. They can weight up to 120 kg (265 lb.)

The other caccia is for birds and smaller creatures; pheasants, hares, thrush and so on. Unfortunately robins here are a prized gourmet delicacy and not the harbingers of Christmas. This kind of hunting is much freer since each hunter has to know their places and wildlife and bide their time. It involves getting up before dawn and hanging about in the cold in the hopes of catching four or five tiny songbirds. The point of all this is to have a “girarrosto;” a great event. Up to one hundred little birdies are plucked and singed (but not emptied of their innards, and complete with head and beak) and placed on a spit, interspersed with chunks of bread and lumps of rigatino (a kind of fatty bacon). They are then cooked over an open fire for an hour and a half, stroked periodically with a tiny broomstick made of rosemary and sage branches which is soaked in olive oil. Our spit is a post-modern affair. Its looks smoke-blackened and medieval and yet it turns thanks to electricity. One hundred birds represent two or three weeks of hunting and might feed five hungry friends, sluiced down with quantities of Brunello. The only thing left on the plates are little piles of tiny skulls.

Sadly for me I met Marco in the summertime so had no idea before I spent my first winter here what la caccia meant to him. I have had to learn to co-exist with his hunting passion; it is fortunately circumscribed by law, starting in mid-September and finishing at the end of January with two days of “silenzio venatoria” a week (Tuesdays and Fridays). There is a license to be paid and a series of rules and regulations regarding what is fair game when. I am consoled by the fact that everything that he shoots is eaten, by the way it unites generations and by how very difficult it is. Though it won’t be fair until the birds are equipped with guns too, this is a far cry from a rich mans’ sport.

This said, I can’t wait for Monday and the start of the next season… wild asparagus.
Hunting for vegetables is much more my thing.