L’Estate di San Martino: Indian Summer Italian Style

After the first frost and the first relentless autumn equinox rains, after the days made even shorter by turning back clocks, Italians experience a surprising flourish of blue-skied, honey-lit, near summer days that Americans think of as Indian Summer.  L’estate di San Martino or the summer of Saint Martin is so named because, in Italy, these  welcome and astonishing days of mild weather almost mystically arrive just after the Festa di San Martino, November 11^th.  They are the last gasp of glory before gloom and cold set in and they bring out joy and a festival spirit in everyone—urging them to sit out basking in the piazzas with glasses of newly decanted wine, or to launch long, meandering mountain walks.

Among the walkers are those who set out with walking sticks, wicker baskets and  a special mission in mind:  to find the surprise of suddenly appearing mushrooms that rain followed by warm sun provides. One has to be either brave or better-yet licensed to go mushroom-hunting in the woods of Italy. Indeed  it is the law to pass a course and an exam before harvesting mushrooms, but given that mushrooms grow on off-the-beaten paths, hidden beneath shrubs, secretly close to the earth, I would imagine that arresting someone for mushroom picking without a license would be difficult, unless of course the mushroom picker happened to poison someone.  Detection of poisonous mushrooms from the edible, even delectable variety, is a true science and an art.  There are even those mushrooms that are poison if eaten uncooked, but fine roasted with your stinco di miale (pork shin)—and it seems the trickier the poison content, the more savory and coveted the mushrooms are in Italian cuisine.  But it takes a keen eye and a sensitive nose to seek out fresh mushrooms in the woods, and the ones found need to be eaten almost immediately after picking.  I have known several connoisseurs of fresh porcini mushroom to be surprised, while grilling them on the terrazzo/ terrace, to find an explosion of grubs leaping for their dear lives from the deep gills of the mushroom cap.  Yes, mushroom gathering and preparing is an art, but one taken seriously by those who live where mushrooms flourish.

Also abundant and accessible for the unlicensed, are the castagne or chestnuts that fall beneath the more-cultivated groves of chestnut trees.  These are not the ipocastane or inedible horse-chestnuts (sometimes the distinction is confusing), but the good kind, the fat marrone, the kind with shells to hatch  with a knife so the flesh bursts succulently when roasted on an open fire, the kind to boil with wild fennel for a soul-warming  autumn cena/supper.  Technically it is illegal to steal chestnuts from a cultivated grove; but an abundance falls onto woodsy paths and country roads and there are no holds barred when they fall on public property.  The fascinating process of stomping on the spiny husks  found along the road to break them open and discover the burnished shell of the chestnut, two or three clustered in the cushiony interior of that strange barnacle-like outer layer too prickly to touch with a bare hand—brings out the child in any free-spirited wanderer of L’estate di San Martino. 

Chestnuts are the traditional stuzzichini or aperitivo snack to accompany a glass of freshly decanted vino novello or new wine, lavishly displayed in brightly labeled bottles at bars, enoteche and grocery stores.  There’s a special sweetness to the grape-tasting wine before it has had time to settle that perfectly complements the tender flavors of a chestnut.  Add to the aperitivo bruschette drenched with a first press of oil and heaped with porcini or, even a rich tapenade of truffles and black olives and what better way to celebrate the cusp of seasons.