Agriturismi amore

This trip has been a real avalanche of glorious moments, vistas, and encounters, but I do think that staying at an agriturismo (namely Le Mandrie San Paolo, crazy-highly recommended) has to be in the running for "if you could only save one stretch of the trip in your memory, which would you hang on to forever?" After the jump: what exactly an agriturismo is, and why at least this one made me an immediate convert to their glories!

Not the agriturismo itself, but a park trail that begins on the property, did I mention this agriturismo was located within a national park on a dang mountain seems like a pretty cool combination of things as far as I personally am concerned!!!

Well before I had traveled abroad by myself, I used to spend my lunch hour at my day job scrolling websites devoted to "slow travel," trips orchestrated around longer stays in your destination, with less of a checklist-tourism focus and more of a "soak into the local culture and explore life as a temporary Parisian or bqwhatever" approach. One of the "how to do this" approaches that kept coming up was WWOOFing, an international system in which travelers work as visiting volunteer labor on organic farms in exchange for room and board. It never came to pass, but as somebody who loves living in cities but has fond memories of family trips out to the more farm-country areas where my folks are from (and nature breaks in general) it stuck in the back of my head.

I'll talk more about where this photo comes from later in the post (that's what you call "foreshadowing" or "arguably putting photos in the wrong order given the things you discuss overall" please stop shouting at me I am doing my best)

When I started planning my first travels in Italy, I started reading about agriturismi, which are, to be crystal-clear, entirely different from WWOOFing, but share some of the ah-nature-and-a-real-farm appeal of that pathway. An agriturismo is a working farm (by Italian law, I'm told, you have to make more money from the farm than from hosting guests to qualify) that rents rooms to travelers. These can range from full-on farming operations with a few dingy spare rooms to fairly luxe accommodations, but if a place bills itself as an agriturismo, some kind of farm activity is taking place. I recommend doing some digging on the agriturismi you are interested in to see what they produce; if they only list olive oil, it's probably going to feel a lot more like a luxe country getaway without much "farm" to it, whereas if - like Le Mandrie - they also have some kind of dairy operation, meat production, and other crops in the mix, you're going to feel more of that land-connection.

Like for instance what if there was a bunch of lavender planted right next to the pool? Would that be a cool connective gesture? To ME, it would be! I refuse to speak on behalf of others!

Arriving at Le Mandrie by taxi (the driver immediately knew the name of the agriturismo as I started to offer it, which seemed a good sign), I walked into the main building as a man with wild, stiff, graying hair strode in from his beat-up pickup truck carrying a large pail. "Shopping? A room? Dinner?" he asked me. "A room," I said, "Hai una prenotazione per King?" "Ah," he said, "one moment." He took a few steps toward what looked to be a kitchen in the back, then turned back. "Have you ever had ricotta?" I nodded, and he leaned toward me conspiratorially. "But have you ever had it fresh?" "NOPE," I squeaked excitedly, and in a moment he had grabbed a spoon from a nearby table, scooped out a dollop, and handed it to me. Creamy, light, warm - this was going to be a good time.

This fella, who runs the farm and is known by most of the staff and guests as Il Capo, was a glorious character, energetic and passionate; I'd see him around for the next few days, sometimes offering to give me a lift in his truck up or down the hill (I'd booked a cottage a half-mile downhill from the main building), sometimes pulling up a chair to join a group at dinner or kibbutz with guests. The day I departed, we talked a bit about the farm itself - it having been a farming property going back to 1092 at least, with the current iteration of the farm as a sustainable agriturismo starting in 2008. It's hard work, and they are facing some of the same labor shortages that many places are - but it's a remarkable, beautiful place. (As he told me when letting me into the cottage that first day: "You will feel something special here.")

FACT CHECK: I did in fact feel something special here. Holy moly.

I had opted for Le Mandrie in part because it was a short (€20) taxi ride from the Assisi train station; but also because it is nestled within a national park whose trails are reachable by a pathway that starts at the agriturismo's swimming pool. Having hiked in my previous Umbrian visit, I knew I'd want to get out and about, and it was indeed glorious to plunge deep into the wooded groves dotting Monte Subasio, emerging periodically to see the landscape splayed out below. One day, late in the afternoon, reading outside my cottage, I looked across the Umbrian landscape and saw storms literally rolling in, sheets of rain visible in the distance, and decided to walk up to the dinner area before it reached the mountain so I could watch from under the canopy of the dining patio. There was a dog on the farm who wanted pets even more than she wanted food.

Not that she didn't want food. She was happy with a lot of outcomes. She also befriended a Belgian couple's dog and spent an entire day hanging out in their guesthouse room with their pup. She is the queen of my heart.

But of course a huge part of the appeal of a stay like this is the food; Le Mandrie offers B&B accommodation, but also half or full-board options. I went for half-board (breakfast and dinner), relying on a hearty breakfast and an afternoon nap to get through the day before returning at night, working over the course of three days to pick through as much of the menu as I could eat. And when I say that you may want to see what your agriturismo produces: this is why. The dinner menu, like many nowadays, has notes about the provenance of ingredients, but here each ingredient was specified, with its origin designated as "Le Mandrie" or "Umbria" or "Italy." You could easily have several meals here that are true zero-kilometer meals, with nothing coming from beyond the farm itself. Breakfast, similarly, was a spread of cheeses from the farm (I got a nearly perverse thrill out of cutting into a pristine, uncut wheel of cheese one morning) along with breads made from their wheat, jams from their orchard fruits, some cured meats from their animals, and yogurt from their dairy. All this, plus an espresso machine? Well. Please.

Also, in addition to an awning-covered dining area, there was an entire dang garden dining area, and they even let you eat food there. Wow! What a country!

It's also the kind of place where, if you stay a few days, you'll start to get to know people. I'm saving some of this for a future post, but the family that stayed in the other cottage on the property, adjacent to mine, became charming conversational partners later in my stay; meanwhile, Reno (who worked breakfasts in the kitchen and dining patio, and who had started working at the farm in the midst of the pandemic in 2020) and I became occasional chatty pals who began to hug our greetings to each other by the end of my stay. It's one of those places where everybody has opted in to a certain kind of experience, and so you feel a sense of community that's a bit unique. I was delighted, late in my stay, to be able to translate between a German group of tourists and our Italian server at dinner one night, helping them navigate some questions about the dessert menu. And, wildest of all, the day after I left the farm, traveling 150 miles to Bologna, a young woman from a group of (I came to learn over about 24 hours of drinks, food, and conversation) Brazilians who had been gathering on the farm in the runup to a friend's wedding called out to me in the street, delighted to have crossed paths a couple of regions away from where we'd last seen (but never spoken to) each other.

All of which is to say: agriturismi rule, and if you're planning an Italian vacation I think it is well worth investigating as an option. Wandering through groves of olive trees or past enclosures for geese and chickens, encountering a herd of donkeys, or just looking up at the stars at  night through the open wooden shutters of your cottage a half-mile away from the rest of the agriturismo's guests... these are, to me, good things!