Shephards guiding their flock....

One of the things I like about living in Italy is their urban planning, at least certain aspects of it. For instance, most of the residential areas are concentrated in actual towns, where most towns have a central piazza, church, and/or villa which defines the town. The towns often have pedestrian-only zones, with all their little pasticcerias, trattorias, café bars, and gelaterias. In between the towns, instead of sprawling residential neighborhoods and strip malls, there are mostly just farm fields and vineyards. It’s pleasant.

The downside of this arrangement, perhaps, is that there is lots of farming done just on the outskirts of town. As you drive from town to town, you generally drive on roads that are in fact two-way traffic, but that most Americans would consider being only 1.5 lanes wide. There are no shoulders and immediately adjacent to the road on both sides are usually drainage and irrigation ditches. But whether you are on the outskirts of town or driving between them, you will get all of the sights, sounds, and smells of farms. And during this time of year especially, that means lots of tractors driving down these narrow roads and lots of very strong smelling fertilizers.

As I told Suzanne when we got here, we needed to pay attention to where we were looking to live, because even though things seemed quiet and normal in the dead of winter, come Spring and Summer when you want to open up your windows and start spending more time outside in your yard or whatever, the smells can be downright RIPE!

Here’s a new one on me though. I was driving along one fine day, making my way over to where I intended to by vino sfuso (tap wine directly out of the casket). I was zipping along the roundabouts near the autostrada and exited down onto one of the local roads. As soon as I came off the ramp I had to brake rather quickly because right there in front of me was a flock of sheep being herded across the road. ….what I mean by that is that a FLOCK OF SHEEP was being herded by SHEPHARDS across the road! I’m talking about HUNDREDS of sheep, along with a whole mess of donkeys mixed in, replete with all the herding Border Collies running around, and SHEPHARDS with their shepherd staffs yelling and whistling to try and hurry their flock of sheep along. This flock of animals tracked a swath of mud and leaves across the road, kicking up clouds of dust, baa’ing their baa’s, like 100 meters from the exit to the autostrada. I sat there and waited in my car, laughing my ass off out-loud to myself, looking around to see if anyone else behind me found this to be as unusual and interesting as I. If they were as impressed as I was, they didn’t show it. I guess this is just what we do here. So what do you do – snap a cell phone picture or two, wait for the last sheep and shepherd to cross the road, shrug your shoulders, and continue driving on. After all, there is wine to buy!

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