EUROPE NEWS

TUPNews recently visited Italy.

My aunt lives out there, in an old Tuscan mining town with her six-year-old daughter and estranged husband. Once a cocktail waitress in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and a trained chef of the Culinary Institute of America, she now works in the fields of the Fattoria il Palago vineyard, which is owned by the Zonin corporation. There are two teams at the vineyard – the field team and the wine press team. My aunt works in the field team. “Breaking the rocks / in the hot sun / I fought the law / and the law won,” she would sing when she got home from work, because that was in fact what she was doing. She took me on a tour of the vineyard one day.

We started at the wine press, an airy building full of terracotta, stainless steel and air-conditioning. A short, friendly Italian man took me through the whole process, from the loading of the grapes from the field to the aging in the barrels. Men in white coats walked around, adjusting dials on forty-foot vats of fermenting wine. I was surprised by the sleek cleanliness of the environment – somehow in my head I expected wine spills and stains everywhere, and big open cauldrons letting off steam. As it was, you could have told me that it was a baby milk, or anthrax factory and I would have happily believed you. Only in the dimly-lit, chandeliered foyer, where there were fifty or sixty wooden barrels patiently awaiting export to Islington, did the place carry any rustic charm. But still, it seemed a pretty cool place to work.

After that we checked out the fields. They are as you imagine – rows and rows of vines. The work of the field orderly is varied. One day it may be as simple as making sure that the growing vines are fastened securely between the wires of the row. I had a go at this; it was relaxing. Other days, they may be pulling rocks out of the dirt to prepare unused ground for planting. The work can be hard, but there is camaraderie among the workers. And my aunt says she likes being close to nature.

Italian labour laws suck, however. The field orderlies only get paid if they work. If it rains and they can’t work, they don’t get paid. Many employers don’t offer paid holidays – instead, the government pays you a kind of unemployment benefit if you’ve worked enough – but not too many – hours that year.

In the UK, this kind of bitch labour is generally undertaken by plucky immigrants. Here, all of the workers were local. Many even lived on the grounds of the estate in workers’ accommodation, and had worked there all their lives.

My aunt is at least lucky to be paid on the level. Her husband, who manages the public relations of a baseball team, is paid in cash. No tax sounds great – except many companies, including his, take advantage of the semi-official status of their workers by only paying them when they feel it is convenient. He is always paid what he is owed, but never on time.

On the way up to the tractor yard, we passed a ruddy, weathered fellow in overalls. He declined a lift; “why get the car all dirty?” He was covered in dust. As we pulled away, my aunt explained that he was a Sicilian. It’s common in Italy for Sicilians to turn up in places other than Sicily and quietly take jobs without going through any formal selection process. This is because they have links to organised crime.

We finished the tour by visiting the spot where the field orderlies sometimes have their lunch together, if they don’t feel like going home. It was high up on a hill, with an excellent view of the surrounds. At the bottom of the hill was a small statue of St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners. At the top of the hill was a cast-iron memorial to victims of a mining disaster.

We stayed a few minutes, and then drove off to visit a couple from North London. There we drank gin and tonics, talked about property prices, and discovered from the World Service that things were getting hot in Beirut.