Tag Archives: rural

Sausage Party, or the Stuff FDA Nightmares Are Made Of

Still foggy with sleep, we tumbled off the bus to see two wood-fired cauldrons, belching out clouds of smoke and steam in a medieval fashion. The air was filled with the finest perfume any gastronome could wear: the scent of pig lard.

I found myself on yet another of northern Italy’s ubiquitous small-scale farms, surrounded by idle farm machinery, deadened remnants of the fall harvest, and the sharp smell of pig shit. This trip had been touted on the syllabus as a visit to an “artisanal butcher,” but we were about to see that this butcher was one of the more minimalistic variety.

Tools of the sausage-making trade: kidneys, salt and cigarettes

On this plot of farmland in the sleepy village of Guastalla, about 3,000 pigs are housed and nourished. Yesterday though, the pigs counted one fewer among them. “Normally, we wouldn’t work on Sunday,” said Alberto, “but today is the saint’s day for Sant’Antonio, and you would not want to slaughter a pig on that day. So, we went ahead and did the job ahead of time.”

Inside the shed, several grizzled men milled about, dressed in heavy-duty galoshes, beards, and puffy vests to defend against the crisp January cold. A long table was placed in the center of the room, piles of pig bits arranged neatly on top. Meat, skin, and bones; the disassembly had been swift and democratic. Ribs lay stacked inside a plastic crate, buried beneath a thick layer of salt and pepper. Feet lay splayed at the table’s edge, still intact and furry. Pools of fresh crimson blood dotted the room, soaking into the dirt floor. Behind the operating table, anonymous organs dangled from hooks. “What is that?” I asked. Rae came to my rescue. “These are the lungs, and here’s the spleen and the three lobes of the liver.” He pointed them out to me. One, two, three. Apparently, there are some benefits to growing up in a family of butchers.
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Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
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