As November comes to a close, so does the Olive Harvest in Italy.. So what better time than this to talk about the absolutely amazing experience we had this month harvesting olives and making our own olive oil in Umbria?

Liquid Gold.  The one thing that I make sure I bring back to the states every year.  After all, as I tell our guests, we can get good wine, good leather, good ceramics, etc. back in the states.  We may pay more for it, but it is there.  But no matter how much I try, I can never find decent olive oil.   At least nothing that compares to what I get from the olive mill we get our oil from.

Every week during our vacations, we take our guests one day to a tiny little olive mill and winery at the border between Latium and Umbria, in Orvieto country.  When we arrive, we take them into the mill to show them how the olive oil is produced.  This is one of Italy’s few remaining “Traditional” Cold Press mills…  The one with the giant stone wheels.  The one known to produce the absolute best of the best.

Week after week, we describe what they would see if the mill were in operation, and it takes some imagination.  After all, this places only goes into operation for a few weeks a year beginning in November when the olives are ready.  But one of our groups this year chose to brave the risk of cold and rain in order to not only see it in operation, but to be a part of the olive oil making experience.  While we were not sure how it would all turn out, it ended up being what was possibly the most exciting day we have ever had on our vacations.  We Came.  We Harvested.  We Made Olive Oil.

We started out our morning as we do each and every morning in Soriano.  We all met at the local coffee bar & pastry shop for breakfast.  We dad our “Espresso”, “Cappuccino”, and our “Cornetti:, then boarded our minibus, headed for the village of Castiglione in Teverina, just south of Orvieto, Umbria.   We stopped at the mill and met with Serena, one of the owners and a close friend.  We loaded crates, tarp, clippers & gloves, then followed her to a remote olive grove in southern Umbria.

One by one, we got off the minibus and made our way to the olive grove.  For a couple hours, our group split into smaller groups, each tackling one tree at a time.  We laughed and had a wonderful time picking olives & taking pictures on what turned out to be a beautiful sunny day with the “Dying City” of Civita di Bagnoregio as our backdrop.

When all of us had decided we had picked enough olives, we walked back to the minibus, carrying our crates full of newly harvested olives.  We loaded them into the back, climbed aboard, and headed back to the mill.

Once back at the mill, two by two, we carried the crates inside and set them on a large floor scale to see what we came up with.  All said and done, we had harvested 110.5kg (~225 pounds) of olives.  We then picked them up and dumped them into a large container inside the mill which then loaded them into the grinder where two massive millstones began to turn and crush them.

For about a half hour, the millstones turned nonstop, grinding our olives into a thick paste, while we headed into the old wine cellar, just a few feet away.  While visiting the cellar, we tasted a few of the white wines the winery here produces while having some Bruschetta that was made with the “NEW” olive oil that had just been pressed the day before..  We also had the opportunity to do a taste comparison between the new oil and last year’s oil, so that we could have a better understanding of how much better the brand new olive oil was…. AND IT WAS!

After our brief tasting, we headed back to the mill once again.  Our olives were all crushed and ready for the next step of the process.  While we only expected o be harvesting olives today, our friends at the mill had a very unexpected surprise for us.  As it turns out, we were also to operate the mill today!

One by one, guests that wanted to wore an apron and stood in front of a machine next to the grindstones.   The olive paste was loaded into a sort of large food processor.  Each guest would place a fiber disk on top of a turntable, then press a button that would start the table turning as olive paste was spread onto the disk.  Once it was spread around the entire disk, they would press another button that would cause a mechanical arm to pick up the disk, lift it and place it onto a large cylinder.  The process would repeat over and over, stacking the disks on top of one another as our guests operated the machinery one by one.

When the stack of disks layered with olive paste was tall enough, we wheeled it all over to the olive press and it it into operation.  The oil began to slowly drip along the sides of the press, and we headed into another room for lunch.

While we were operating the press, tasting wine and oil, and visiting the old wine cellar; Serena’s mom was upstairs preparing lunch for us.  We were served a wonderful assortment of local cold cuts, local cheese, Tuscan beans, fresh garden salad, and much more.  During our lunch, Serena opened up a selection of their red wines, one by one, so that by the end we had samples all seven of their amazing wines.  Finally for dessert she brought down cups of fresh ricotta cheese that had been made that day by her neighbor, then smothered in Acacia honey produced by a close friend.  As always, it was truly and amazing lunch.

Our bellies full and our sobriety in question, we walked back over to the mill once again.  While we were eating an drinking, our stack of disks had been pressing away, extracting  all the juice from the olive paste.  The olives have water content as well as the oil, so they must be separated.  The juice drips from the disks, and gets pumped into a container up by the ceiling that gravity feeds it into a centrifuge.  Out one side of the centrifuge, the water is drained.  Out the other side, a golden-green liquid gently flows… Liquid Gold!  Olive Oil.. just pressed from olive harvested from their trees less than three hours prior.

One by one, each of us took a one liter can and kneeled by the spicket.  We each filled our own can of olive oil that we had just made from harvest to pressing.

When it was all over, it was getting dark.  We hopped back on the minibus to go home to Soriano, each of us clasping onto our can as though it were a priceless treasure.  Each of us had smiles from ear to to ear, having just had one of the most amazing experiences of our lives.  To say the day was pure magic is an absolute understatement.  It was all we talked about for the rest of the week.

Every week on our tours, we visit this olive mill.  But only one week each year do we have this experience.  Only once do we get to actually see it in action, be a part of the process, and make it ourselves.  It is a source of incredible pride for us, because as a company that is all about cooking & culinary vacations in Italy, we know what a unique experience this is.  You will find a few others that include harvesting for a day.  You will find some that let you see a mill in action.  But that we know of, we are the only company that actually has its guests making the olive oil at every stage… especially in one of Italy’s few remaining traditional cold press olive mills, and what a difference it makes!

>> More info on our Olive Harvest Week can be found by clicking here.

The History of The Mummies of Ferentillo

The Mummies Today

I tried to shoot a good amount of video this year to give me a bunch of material for the blog, so I will have quite a few of the various cities we visited on our tours. Spoleto was a place that we visited fairly often, but I only shot video once while there for a few hours. Unfortunately, it was very early in the season, and I was still getting used to the new camera, so the shaking in this video is pretty obvious.

Additionally, they were setting up for their world-famous jazz festival. That being the case, there is so much I didn’t catch on camera. Spoleto is one of the more beautiful cities in Umbria, but it is best known for its Jazz festival. The city dates back to the fifth century BC, and its vast history can still be seen at every corner. Some of the more interesting sights in Spoleto are the massive 14th century Rocca Albornoziana (The Albornozian Castle), which is full of beautiful frescoes and the 12th century cathedral (Duomo), both of which are shown in the video. Interesting sights in Spoleto that are not shown in the video include: The Ancient Roman theater, the 1st century Ponte Sanguinario (The bloody bridge), Ponte delle Torri (the 13th century aqueduct), the 16th century Palazzo Racani-Anoni, the 14th century Palazzo della Signoria, and much more.

Many of our Culture Discovery Vacations itineraries feature a visit to this magnificent town, but for those that wish to go on their own, it can be found in the Perugia Province of Umbria, Italy; about 15 miles north of Terni, or about 75 miles north of Rome. It is about 30 miles north of our home base, Soriano nel Cimino.

7 months, 17 tours, 56 cooking classes, 144 guests and over 35,000 miles of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio are behind us.  That was the 2008 season for us at Culture Discovery.  As with last year, after coming back to the US, I have gone into video mode.  Here is the first video I have made since coming back, which essentially sums up the season:

What a wild ride it was.   It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work…. but always very rewarding.  Most of all, we made a ton of new friends and had the opportunity to share something we love with so many new people.

Some new stuff in 2008…

We started the year unexpectedly using our ‘old’ kitchen down at the villa. We had started construction in September 2007 on a new 700 square foot kitchen, where the barn had once stood.  Our old kitchen was too small for us to comfortably do classes for more than 6 people at a time, so the new kitchen was a matter of urgency.  The new kitchen was supposed to be finished in April, but of course, we are in Italy. So in April we had a structure and nothing more.  It wasn’t finished until late July, so we had quite a few groups crowd into the old kitchen for a while.

The new kitchen, which Paola and I designed ourselves, came out even more beautiful than we imagined.  All of the counters are travertine marble, the sink is a solid carved block of travertine, all of the tiles are hand-painted, and the masonry for the separating wall and fireplace came out breathtakingly beautiful.  The large lighting fixtures and our 90-bottle wine rack (which we found ourselves restocking every 2 weeks) were all hand-crafted in iron; and everything was finished by local artisans.  What a pleasure it was to begin using it!

Besides the kitchen, this year we got sick of renting vans, and decided to buy a new one.  We headed to Germany and got a perfect 9-passenger Opel Vivaro that soon became lovingly known as ‘Shultz’.  When we have 8 or fewer people in a week, Shultz is always there to take care of us.

We started the season with five homes for our guests:  La Campana, Vecchio Forno, Ponticello, Chiosco, and Trinita.  By the end of the year, we added two new places, called ‘Caminetto’ and ‘Santa Maria’.  Santa Maria is perfect for our guests that don’t do well with hills, as it is just a few steps from Soriano’s Piazza.  It just went through a complete remodel, and makes for a beautiful place for up to four people.  Caminetto became available in August, so a good number of our 2008 guests had the opportunity to stay here.  It is the largest of the homes we offer, and boasts the largest terrace we have, with an amazing view out toward the Tiber Valley.

2008 also fostered some new relationships in Italy for our future guests.  During the season we began to take guests to a winery and olive mill near Orvieto called Madonna delle Macchie, which has proven to be so popular that we have built it into every week we offer in the future.  Moving into 2009, we will be offering our future guests the ability to actually rent part of the vineyard or olive orchard for their own personal wine and olive oil!

In April we met the incredibly gracious Prince Riccardo Nobile-Vitteleschi in the town of Labro, Umbria.  He lives in the 1,000 year old castle of his ancestors, and has personally taken our guests on tours of his ‘home’.  This has been so popular, that it is a staple for our 2009 itineraries now.

During the year, our travels through Tuscany and Umbria have brought us to new wineries, new monasteries, new restaurants, new towns… all of the more popular ones are in for next year, while the less popular are out.  So as I look at the 2009 calendar, I can honestly say I am VERY excited!

So to those of you reading this that were with us this season:  Thank you so much, it was a blast!  To those of you reading this that are still looking forward to your time with us, know this: I’m looking forward to it as much as you are!  We’re going to have a fantastic time.

Ask around Soriano about ‘Fosso Mulino’ (River Mill) and you will get mostly blank stares. So it is no surprise that after all of these years I had no idea that it existed. Very few people do.

One day I was out with my friend (and our contractor) Andrea D’Alessio. He asked me if I had ever been to the waterfalls. My immediate answer was YES! There is a place in Soriano with some beautiful waterfalls that few know about, and I had been there. In fact, years ago I was telling Paola about them, and she didn’t believe me until I showed her.

Anyhow, Andrea didn’t believe that I had been to ‘The waterfalls’, so he asked me to describe them. As I did, he laughed and simply explained that there were other, more breathtaking, waterfalls in Soriano. So he took me. He explained that not only was this a beautiful fork of the Tiber with awesome waterfalls, but there were the ruins of a 13th century Olive Mill. Cool!

We drove just past the Viterbo-Orte Superstrada, right at the Soriano-Bomarzo exit, and hung a left. We drove down a road which is well known as a hangout for some extremely vile looking prostitutes (another story there) and parked along a little dirt road. After exiting the car, we went down a small trail into what appeared to be complete nothingness.

At one point, I noticed beneath my feet there was some ancient concrete road, which was ribbed. Andrea explained that this was the path the mules used to cart the olives down, and the oil up.

Next I found myself in a tunnel of sorts, created by massive rocks around me, and extending about 200 feet down the hill. All the while, this ancient road ran beneath my feet.
After exiting the tunnel, immediately to my right was the river. As I walked toward it, I was struck by an absolutely beautiful set of waterfalls as I saw the water that had literally carved its passage through this ancient volcanic rock over millions of years. To say it was stunning would be an understatement.

We walked around as I cursed my lack of a spare battery for my camera. It had a little juice left in it, so I took what video I could. How could I never have known about this place?
As we crossed back to our entry point, there was an old structure in ruin. Andrea told me to look to my feet. There, sitting in the middle of this little forest was an ancient olive mill wheel. We then entered the structure, and a few more wheels were just lying there haphazardly. Wow! What a great experience to see all of this in such an untouched state.

Such was my morning visit to what I now know of as ‘Fosso Mulino’. You won’t find it in any tour books, and you won’t find any ‘professional’ guides that can show it to you. It is just one of those hidden treasures, like Corviano, that you just have to be with the right person to see.

I’m pretty sure I will make this a tour stop with my groups that are into nature and hiking.

It used to be that when I would come to Italy, for the first few days, people would see me and give me a huge ‘welcome back’.  That was then.  I would come here once a year in the summer and spend a month to six weeks here.  Michael and Paola are here… it must be summer, right?  Big hugs, dinner invites, the whole nine yards.

But now things are different.  I got here yesterday and there was no fanfare.  Not a single dinner invite, not even an excited greeting.  Instead, most people never even realized I had been away.

Who can blame them?  They saw me 3 ½ weeks ago, after all.  I was here with the family all summer.  Before that, I was here for Christmas…  and in October before that… all summer before that… April before that… January before that… etc.  In between my solo trips and family trips, Paola always peppers a trip or two per year on her own, so to the untrained eye, it seems that there is always a Kovnick in Soriano.

When I tell them I have been in the states, I get that shocked look, accompanied with something on the order of ‘But didn’t I just see you???’.  In fact, I would argue that many people think we live here now.

Such is now my life with CultureDiscovery.com. 

So why do I blog this?  Last night I met a couple of our guests from Arizona who are leaving today.  (Hi Lynda and Christine).  They told me about how much they loved it here.  They felt so at home,  and Lynda was really interested in purchasing a place here as a vacation home.  It really occurred to me how doable something like that really is.  If you sit down and do the math, it isn’t really more difficult or costly than having your second home in the mountains or at the beach in the U.S.  It just seems that way.
To start, purchasing a place here is far less costly that it would be in the states.  One could easily get a beautiful place here for less than $75,000.  Property taxes here are extremely low.  Ongoing expenses such as heating, electricity, phone, internet, etc. are all relative, of course.  So what makes owning a vacation home here seem so far out is that it is a world away.

But if you consider that someone from the east coast only has an 8 hour flight, then a one-hour drive to get here, is it really that far?  Even from the west coast, it isn’t that bad.  Essentially, you give up coming for the weekends in favor of spending weeks, but the payoff is that you are in ITALY.    When you look at the cost of ownership here, it covers the airfare many, many times over.
Then it is worth considering what one would do with a second home in Italy.   The first and obvious answer is to see Italy.  After all, after 23 years, I am still discovering this wonderful country every time I come.  I’ve never seen such an amazing place.  But then consider the rest of Europe.  After all, in Soriano, we are about an hour from the Rome airport, and there are airlines that now sell tickets to just about anywhere in Europe for insane prices.  Think about spending the weekend in London, Berlin, Paris, etc. for around $40 each way.

Add all of that to the fact that Viterbo (the provincial capitol) is only 10 miles from us, and their airport is gearing up for commercial international air service.  All of Europe is literally at your doorstep.

Thinking about it, it really does add up.  The cost of having that cabin (and using it) in the mountains is really on par with the cost of having (and using) that medieval retreat in the heart of Italy.  Hmmmm.

Have you ever been on a vacation and come home having the feeling that you need a vacation from your vacation?  Have you ever phoned home and said something to the effect of ‘We’re exhausted, but we’ve seen this, and that, and that, and that, and that’?  When you plan trips, do you juggle your itinerary to try to fit things in?

If the answer to any of those is YES, read on.

Growing up, my family traveled quite a bit, and in my adult life I have continued that tradition with my own family.  I’ve been to many places and sat at the foot of countless landmarks.  Still, if I look back at it all, it amazes me to recognize where my fond memories come from, and which vacations I count among the best.  That said, I’ll give you the short list of my vacation memories to build up to the point of this article.

During my first time to Italy in 1983, I visited Rome, Florence, Milan, Positano, Pisa, Modena, and Calabria.  I visited each and every landmark in each of those places.  However, my strongest and fondest memories come from sitting outside of the home of my friend’s grandmother in Calabria. I watched the goat and the chickens run around… the children playing n the streets.  The sound of a family speaking a language I didn’t understand.  The little old lady wearing black and sitting in front of her door all day as she mourned her husband.  I remember seeing feathers on the ground while noting a missing chicken… and being told we were having chicken for dinner that night.  I remember the sweet look on ‘Nonna’s’  face as she would serve me and say MANGIA with that huge smile of hers.  I remember the smells and the sounds as though were yesterday.  As I think about this experience from 24 years ago, I take a deep breath and smile.  I have no such fond memories of any landmarks… just memories of having seen them… as though they were merely checked off a list.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am happy to have seen those landmarks, but they don’t define the vacation.  Rocco’s grandmother had a much greater impact.

My first trip to England was two years later.  Again, I saw most of the ‘must-see’ sights.  But other things happened on that trip.  I proposed to Paola, and we went to Manchester for her friend’s wedding.  Besides the obvious wonderful memory of having become engaged to the love of my life, my fondest memory of that trip was an evening in her friend’s house laughing with friends.  I remember going downstairs and walking to the corner store for something and noting how incredibly British everything was.  It was an evening of full immersion into British culture.  It was a great day, and far more memorable than having seen Buckingham Palace a few days prior.  Again, I am happy to have seen the sights, but they did not define the trip.

I was motivated to write this article as I was looking at part of an itinerary of a soon-to-be guest of ours.  It was hectic and filled with tons of landmarks and little time in between.  I told her about my first trip to Paris.  It was a business trip that left me very little time to see anything.  Still, we squeezed in the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.  On our last day, we had a 3 hour window of time before our flight during which I made a mad dash through the Louvre… Saw Mona, and thought how great it would be to spend a week in this museum.  Still, when I think about that trip, I think about a lunch we had with some clients outside of the city in a small farmhouse Bistro.  I got a sense of the culture.  That lunch is a fond memory.  The Eiffel Tower was… well, The Eiffel Tower.  It was merely checked off.

On yet another business trip, I was in China.  The Great Wall was fascinating.  The Forbidden City was amazing.  But there was a night in particular in Xiamen that we had dinner with associates and their families that really sticks out in my mind.  We talked and talked and talked.  I learned so much about the culture and the people I was sharing a meal with.  I learned their political perspective, their family values, and their view of the world.  It was such an incredible experience.  The great wall was… Great.  But that dinner defines not only my trip to China, but a new understanding and appreciation I gained for their culture.

I could go on and on.  I have similar stories for so many other places, so many other trips.  I’ll convey just one more trip to finish my point.

Seven years ago Paola and I went to Bora Bora for a week. When we got there, we quickly learned that there is absolutely nothing to do on the island.  Everything there is to see can be seen in a morning.  You can swim, snorkel, boat and lay out… period.  When it gets dark, there are only two things to do:  Sleep and… well, it is definitely a place for couples.   And that is all we did.

To this day, I count Bora Bora as the best vacation of my life.  I also count it as the vacation in which we saw and did the least.  It was 0% landmarks, 100% experience.  0% itinerary, 100% relaxation.

I have never before, nor since come home from a vacation so recharged!  In fact, I keep a large fish bowl full of Bora Bora sand and shells on my desk as a reminder.

All of these experiences are of course my own, and they may or may not fit your personality.  However, in watching our guests, I see the same thing time after time.  None of our guests in Soriano have ever written us about their wonderful memories of The Trevi Fountain. They write us about their wonderful memories of ‘that evening sipping wine in Piazza’, or ‘that time we had pizza together’, or the little oddities they experienced here and there.  It is the culture that grabs them, not the landmarks.

In fact, it is never the things you plan on that define the trip.  It is always what happens in between.  So if you plan a trip with a schedule loaded with monuments and landmarks, you may not have enough time in between to make those wonderful memories… and you are more likely to go home needing a vacation from the vacation than relaxed.

If you are planning a trip to Italy (or anywhere for that matter), try to fight that urge to get it all in.  If you try to control the experience, you will miss something special.  Slow down and let the experience of a wonderful new culture come to you.  I promise it is worth it.

A tradition in Italy during Christmas time is the living manger.  Many towns go way beyond a simple manger scene, and produce a full scale reproduction of Bethlehem.   What makes it so special in many cases, is that they have the landscape and existing structures to really make it look and feel real.

Living Manger in Italy

Some towns do a better job, and others fail by comparison.  This holiday season, there are at least 15 towns doing it, and each one competes with the others to be the best.  Last year I saw the manger at the nearby town of Bassano, and thought it couldn’t possibly be outdone.  However, many people had told me that the one produced in Chia (a suburb or Soriano) is by far the best there was.

I was skeptical.  After all, the people of Soriano would naturally favor the living manger in their own suburb, and Chia is small beyond small.  How good can it be?  Still, this year I decided to check it out.

I went to Chia on December 26, thinking I really wanted to go back to Bassano.  When I stepped into their version of Jesus’ Bethlehem, I was awestruck. They had taken an area of town that was full of babbling brooks, caves, huge rock formations, etc. and literally constructed a massive production.  There must have been 500 people in full dress, each doing their unique job:  Roman soldiers, Carpenters, Blacksmiths, Baket weavers, etc. I felt as though I had been transported 2,000 years back in time.

It was so amazing, that I believe a trip from the states just to see this would be worth it.