A WWOOFing Experience - Finding the Heart of Italy

When my college friend Ariel told me that it was possible to live and work on a random farm in the world, I thought it had to be a scam. My whole life, I had dreamed of experiencing true cultivation from land. My family used to joke that I was a "Renaissance" girl, not just because of my love of the arts (ballet and piano girl since I was six), but because of my love of the outdoors. You could find me foraging random plants and dreaming of a reality where I really knew how to live off the land.

Ariel and I honed in on Italy as the country we would do our WWOOFing experience in. Neither of us had ever been before, and we wanted to explore the classics. We planned to visit Florance, Rome, Venice, and Slovenia on a mini Italian tour following our WWOOFing. We then reached out to several farms on WWOOF, made a final choice, booked our flights, packed our bags, and left for Italia.

Around 20 hours after leaving home, I found myself at a train station in Stradella, a town in the provence of Pavia, an area in Lombardy very close to the Emilia Romagna border. We were immensely nervous, stomachs churning, worried and hoping that our upcoming experience would be positive.

We were picked up from the train station by our hosts husband, in a tiny and old grey Fiat Punto. I remember a flicker of fear as a hauled my big backpack into the back of the car that I was simply getting into a car with a random man. He didn't speak any English, so we exchanged sentances using a translator app. As we drove, the flat landscape suddenly burst into rolling hills - all of vineyards. The hills were bathed in fog, and were barely lit by the light of dusk. Andrea told us that the weather was not so good today, "but when the sun comes out, time stands still".

He was right. Over the next three weeks, life was simply magic.