C’è un po’ di farina dappertutto

I sing ”Dentro la tasca di un qualunque mattino, dentro la tasca ti porterei, nell fazzoletto di cotone e profuma nel fazzoletto ti nasconderei…” while driving through the early morning towards Cuneo. How could I not think of Gianmaria Testa while approaching this town.

And then I get to the bakery and mill on the northern outskirts. Il papavero rosso. Now at the end of the day the origin, the choice of this name is still a mystery to me. A modest sign, almost nothing shows what there is behind the flour-dusty windows.

A curtain. I enter into a world with a smell that is new and strange to me, a special kind of burned. A warm smell. There are a lot of pumpkins, pasta, flour, big glasses with different kind of small cookies that we would get to try later. Carlo greets me and gives me a chair to sit down.

There is this thin layer of flour everywhere. On the computer keyboard, on the apples that almost seem like peaches, on the chairs and just about everywhere where it finds a possibility to lay itself down. On the hands and clothes.

I hear sound from different machines. Some kind of rubbing and squeezing. Then the others arrive and soon we are immersed in questions over questions and answers and facts. Our curiosity, the hunger to get to know everything. We write in our notebooks and I watch Carlos hands which tell us, which form the facts and picture the things he tells us about. The history and how it all developed, how they started off with baking and how they got more and more independent by incorporating their own mill and the growing of own cereal into their business – una intera filiera. We learn even about le giornate piemontese a local measure or he mentions that they start the harvest around San Giovanni, at the end of June. Later we sit outside accompanied by a cigarette. Also this smell follows us along, through the lunch break and our work in the sunshine later. I enjoy some beautiful words even if they have to do with something rather challenging for the farmer like allettamento – when the cereal do not stand up but lie down, like if they would go to bed or also the verb svestire – when the farro has to get rid of its outer shell. Giovannis joins us for a moment. We hear about economical and structural challenges and hardships and dietary facts around gluten and old and new varieties. We visit the mill in all its aspects, touch the different structures of flour and other products of this process, see where all the baking takes place. We taste cookies with corn (Carlos favorites) or farro, with chocolate or raisins. Una torta di zucca, a pumpkin cake, bright yellow orange like the warm afternoon sun where we stand later and work with red corn that scratches up our hands, still laughing, while Carlo comes to one of his favorite moments: asking us who we are and what brought us here, giving us space for our own stories.