Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Italy (or rather the Sorrento Peninsula), in no particular order.

Things I ate, which were clearly growing over the property line and therefore free.
- Blackberries.
- Ripe green fig (shared with the resident bugs in the interior).
- Green seeded grape.
- Hazelnut crushed underfoot with a questionably clean shoe sole.
- Tiny purple grape with one big seed inside.
- Swiss chard or beet green.
- Ripe purple fig.

Things I tried to eat.
- Underrripe purple figs.
- Inedible orange variety of passion fruit, mealy and tasteless.
- Ripe purple fig that I held in my hand for a while and then decided to use as a waymarker for those who came after us on a mostly imperceptible trail by placing it on a dead stem of a plant.
- Various green and black olives, just to see if the wrinkly ones were less bitter than the plump ones tasted in Malta (they are not; lizard on olive-catching net shown).
- Persimmons, because the only ripe ones over the line were out of reach.
- Walnut, figuring it would be too difficult to open it without totally destroying the nut using the shoe method, and plus we were on a busy road so I just bowled it towards some car's tires.

Things that were given to us by strangers when we were totally miserable after only having completed 2/3 of a hike with night falling and ominous clouds rolling in.
- Underripe-looking but really perfectly-ripe, decidedly delicious peaches. And then it turns out we didn't miss the bus after all, so we took it down the hill towards our town as the rain descended, and it all worked out fine.

Aromatic plants growing wild, picked and crushed for the scent.
- Bay.
- Fennel.
- Rosemary.

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