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10 October 2001

The Baroness and the Water Buffalo

Making Mozzerella
and another stroll amongst the ruins at Paestum

This morning at seven I woke to gunshots. Someone hunting birds out here in the country, I thought... so much for getting out of the city noise. I opened my curtains and a pigeon flew in a panic around the tree to the wall with the pink roses. The field beyond glowed green in the new day.

I gathered myself together for a dip in the pool. The water temperature is kept cool enough so that a swim is refreshing in the hot summer sunshine. In the morning it is a bit of a shock, but a strong cafe latte cured me of my shivers. The gunshots continued. No real shooting, someone said, they were just scaring the birds out of the fields.

Today the baroness promised to take me to see her water buffalo and the mozzerella cheese-making facility nearby. We hopped into three cars -- by 10:30 the rest of the guests (three American women from Oakland, the Scottish couple and a German couple who arrived last night) had got wind of the tour -- and drove for five minutes down a dirt road to the water buffalo farm where they were happily wallowing in a muddy pond especially made for them.

When we got out of our cars the buffalo got out of their pond and we all walked toward one another until we were separated only by a fence. "The buffalos are very clever, and naturally curious," said the baroness. Indeed, they followed me, staring at my video camera, and I had the feeling if they could turn the tables they would.

The buffalo have been here for about 800 years, putting some good use to this former malarial swamp by the sea that is now so popular with tourists and campers. "When there was malaria the farmers used to work here during the day and then go back up into the mountains where they lived," explained the baroness in her husky voice. "It was very dangerous then. Now we still have some mosquitos but we don't have malaria."

I can attest to the mosquitos. They plague me whereever I go, and though none of the other guests had been bitten my skin is dotted with welts. It has been a problem since Sicilia, and I haven't been able to find the poisonous but effective DEET, though they say the pharmacy's have it.

Back to the buffalo. There are about 600 of them on the farm. Each female gives 10 to 12 liters of milk per day, a process which is done by machine, eight cows at a time starting at four in the morning. The milk is taken to the mozzerella-making facility where it is heated to 40C and combined with rennet and stirred until it's thick. Then it's put into a machine where it gets spit out into small bits and combined with water that's 140C (yes, that's VERY hot!) and a bit of salt and is then stirred again until it's the consistancy of bread dough. The smell is fresh and yeasty, like bread.

Then it gets pulled by machine or by hand into lumps and packaged in plastic bags of water.

A larger product is a braid of mozzerella, a skill demonstrated by the woman below.

The entire process takes five to ten minutes per batch.

I wandered the Paestum ruins again. They were built in the 5th century over even earlier ruins and I guess you can't blame the townspeople for building souvenier shops right on top of some of them... after all, the road builders started the destruction processes a century ago, and there are ruins all over Italy. You can't walk five minutes withoutseeing something, and so what if they built a road over half the ampitheater, the other half is there, mirroring it.

Some of the text in my guidebook scorns thisattitude and I think they areright, but the baroness said, about the broken pieces of centuries old artifacts strewn about her garden, that they are always dug up by farmers. Her land is full of them. I suppose that if all the artifacts in Italy were dug up there would be no land left for farming or for building houses.

So, we have these examples. Greek and Roman tombs with elaborate drawings of the transition into the next life sit in the museum across the street (which was built above an important altar).

I wandered for a while, looking at the temples and the remains of the shops and the houses, marvelling at the fact that in the 5th century they had swimming pools. Why should I? I suppose that when I think of the 5th century I think of primitive people, but there were governments and aquaducts and roads and astrology and proper clothing... nobody was running around in furs saying "ugh." Well, at least not here, not then.

It didn't look at all like the depictions of Roman/Greek cities I've seen in the history books. And in the movie Gladiator they lost an opportunity to show life as it really was. The temples and houses were painted in riotious colors, probably similar to those I saw in India last year. Perhaps we prefer to imagine them elegant, in subtle, understated tones. But they were not understated at all.

Why did the empire fall? Because they kept warring, aquiring countries that they needed to control, and warring more often. So they took their young men from the farms and replaced them with slaves, who needed supervision, and eventually the system became so heavy that it collapsed.

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