Echoes from the past: Early history recounted by Dad's best friend

My dad once worked 49 days in a row with no days off, sometimes even pulling double shifts. I only learned this in 2005—long after Dad had passed away in 1984 at the age of 70.

Marvin Natucci, the pilot

Like many of us, I waited too long to interview my parents about their lives growing up. My mother also died suddenly and far too young, at just 58. During those years, I had been totally engrossed in my own job and raising a family. By 2005, life had slowed down; I had taken an easier job, and all four of our children had moved out. But by then, all six of Dad’s siblings had passed away too.

I wondered: How could I find out more about what his life had been like growing up in the Shore Acres neighborhood of Gig Harbor?

I had one final chance. Dad’s best friend from high school onward, Marvin Natucci, was still alive at age 90, living with one of my cousins. I interviewed Marvin in March of 2005. He passed away just two months later.

A summer that changed everything

Marvin at age 18

Technically, Marvin was not related to me. But given that three different members of the Natucci family had married into our Spadoni-Seghieri family, we all considered anyone named Natucci to be a cousin. Marvin kindly sat down with me to explain how he and my dad, Julius Daniel Spadoni, became best friends as teenagers.

“My uncle Remigio Natucci operated a small general store in Shore Acres,” Marvin told me. Remigio—who also went by Ray, Bigio, and Remy at different times—was married to Rosina Seghieri, the younger sister of my grandmother Anita Seghieri.

Rosina had immigrated from Montecarlo, Italy, to Gig Harbor in August of 1919, the last of the four children of Torello Seghieri and Ines Capocchi to arrive. She married Remigio in May of 1920, and they opened the store shortly after. Sadly, on April 29, 1931, Remigio died. Marvin said he had cancer.

At the time, Marvin was 16 and living with his family in Tacoma, where he wasn't particularly happy. Neither was Rosina, alone in Shore Acres.

“Rosina was terribly shook up,” Marvin explained. “It was just difficult for her to live here, trying to take care of herself. Emotionally, she was disturbed very easily. On June 15, my relatives talked me into coming out and living with her for the summer. And it was a good thing I did.”

It turned out to be a saving grace for both of them. Marvin was quickly welcomed into the extended Spadoni and Seghieri families, becoming fast friends with my dad and his brother, Roy. Rosina recovered her good humor, and Marvin decided to stay through the fall to attend Union High School.

“I wasn’t doing very well in Tacoma schools,” Marvin admitted. “I probably would have dropped out of school if I hadn’t come over here. I just felt more at home here.”

Dances, rodeos and locked doors

The Spadoni boys a few years before Marvin
came to live in Shore Acres. Julius, Roy,
Claude and Rudy.

“Julius, Roy and the sisters would go up with me to Hood Canal together to swim and play tennis,” Marvin reminisced. “We went to the rodeo in Ellensburg. We would often go to a dance at Horseshoe Lake on Friday, camp out that night, and then go on to Hood Canal for another dance Saturday night.

“Julius and Roy asked me to go every place with them. The girls taught me to dance. In the wintertime, almost every weekend there’d be a dance at Horseshoe Lake. It cost 50 cents to get in. I could scrape up that much money a couple, three times a month.”

When funds were tight, they made their own entertainment. "My cousin Alma [Seghieri] played the piano and violin,” he said. “There were a couple of fellows out at Cromwell who also played musical instruments. I played the guitar, and so we had a little orchestra. We didn’t charge anything. Everybody could enjoy a little free music.”

The social life of the neighborhood truly centered around the Spadoni home after Marvin helped the family build a concrete tennis court. “They had two gas-powered cement mixers to do the work,” Marvin said. “Lots of people pitched in to help. And when it was finished, Julius and Sig Uddenberg became the best two tennis players in town.”

Marvin and Clara Spadoni in Shore Acres

Naturally, a handsome young man spending so much time with the family led to a few dates with the Spadoni sisters. Marvin smiled as he recalled one evening: “I remember once going out with Clara while she was working in Tacoma and living at the YWCA. When we came back, it was late and the doors were locked. We had to throw rocks at the windows to get one of the other girls to come down and let Clara in.”

Marvin’s presence also worked wonders for grieving Rosina. Every evening of that first summer, Marvin and Rosina would walk about a half-mile down to the Spadoni house to socialize.

“It was uphill going back,” Marvin noted. “Rosina would stop to rest on the way. By the end of the summer, she could go all the way without stopping.”

Learning a trade on the brink of war

After high school, Marvin took a job at a lumber company in Tacoma. Using discarded lumber from the mill, he built his own house just below Rosina’s in 1938, inheriting an old wood stove from her house to heat it.

By June of 1939, the shadow of war was looming over Europe, creating a massive demand for defense labor. Marvin and my dad, then 24 and 25, drove to the Navy shipyard in Bremerton to apply for work. Both were called back that very same day to work as helpers in the sheet metal shop.

“I think they paid us about six bucks a day, which was pretty good pay, because we were coming out of the Great Depression and we didn’t have anything,” Marvin said.

Alongside their grueling shifts, they attended welding school for half a day, five days a week. They also attended “layout school” two nights a week for three years. As Marvin explained, it “taught us to read and draw diagrams, as well as to fabricate and repair machinery.”

They made a perfect team, cementing a lifelong professional respect. “Julius was really good at creating diagrams,” Marvin said. “I would follow his plans and cut out the pieces, so we worked well together.”

Hearing Marvin describe this perfectly answered a childhood marvel for me. It explained exactly how my dad was able to custom-build an “Iron Mike” pitching machine for me when I was in high school. During my freshman year, Dad and I had built a batting cage on our Rosedale property. We borrowed a pitching machine from Peninsula High School for the summer, and Dad quietly studied its mechanics. Using those layout skills from his shipyard days, he built an almost identical machine from scratch for me. I went from batting below .200 my freshman year to leading the team in hitting by my junior year—and I can assure you it wasn’t because of natural talent. It was a credit to Dad’s ingenuity.

The wartime hustle and peacetime success

When the United States officially entered the war in December of 1941, Marvin and Julius commuted to the yard together in Marvin’s 1937 Chevrolet. Because their shipyard roles were deemed critical to the naval base, both were exempted from military duty.

The workload was staggering. “We once worked seven days a week for seven straight weeks,” Marvin recalled. “And sometimes, we’d finish a shift in Bremerton and drive straight to Tacoma to do another shift there.”

Despite the relentless pace, they carved out room for their private lives. Marvin married Marie Brown in 1943, and Julius married my mother, Margaret Wagoner, in 1944.

When the war finally ended, both men channeled their wartime mechanics into the local economy. Marvin founded Natucci Heating & Supply, which became a successful, decades-long staple of Gig Harbor. He also worked on fishing vessels and earned his private pilot’s license, fondly crediting his cousin, Roland Spadoni, with teaching him and Marie how to keep the business books.

My dad did some logging before partnering with his brothers to start a long-lived business of their own—supplying coal and heating oil, clearing land, and building roads. Dad used the money he saved from his shipyard days to buy trucks and heavy equipment, much of it military surplus no longer needed for the war effort.

A thinker and a doer

During the interview, I had hoped to draw out sweeping, colorful stories about my dad’s personality, but Marvin was a man of his generation—uncluttered by excessive words.

“Julius was a serious person, a fairly quiet man,” Marvin said simply. “He was a thinker, but he was a doer, too. He was a great mechanic and a pretty darn good businessman, too.”

In all my years growing up and into adulthood, I had never once seen my father lose his temper. Curious, I asked Marvin, “Did you ever see my dad get angry?”

“I have seen him get angry, but he never expressed it very much,” Marvin replied. And with that, the line of inquiry closed.

I have no doubt that Marvin held countless more memories of the days he shared with Dad. But to him, those moments were just routine life—the quiet, ordinary rhythm of two friends growing up in a different era.

Marvin and Julius stand with Nelda
and Rosina. Nelda was the eldest
sister of Julius. The baby in her 
arms is Jim Langhelm, my first 
cousin, who lives today in his
family's home in Rosedale.

As I look back on that afternoon in 2005, I close my thoughts with a familiar blend of thankfulness and regret. I am profoundly grateful that I finally took action and interviewed Marvin before his passing just two months later. Yet, I am left with the quiet disappointment that I didn’t make a greater effort to spend more time with him—and a deeper regret that I never conducted a similar interview with my own dad when I had the chance.

Our parents’ stories are fragile, existing only as long as the people who remember them. I’m just glad I caught this piece of my dad’s history before it slipped away.

 

The ethical imperative of "Mai Più": Why we visit sites of tragedy

This memorial has been created over the ossuary in Sant'Anna.

Sometimes I wonder about myself. This week, Lucy and I visited the museum at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, where 560 civilians were slaughtered during the waning days of WW2. In previous years, we paid our respects to the 770 victims of a similar slaughter in Marzabotto and another 174 in the Padule di Fucecchio. We have now visited the sites of three of the four worst massacres in Italy that occurred in 1944.

I’m not a morbid person, yet I feel strangely drawn to these sites. Is there something wrong with me? I don’t think so. I just don’t want to forget how fragile peace, democracy, and human decency are. Reading the engraved names of the victims, looking at their pictures, and hearing the details of these tragedies is my way of refusing to let the perpetrators succeed in erasing those people from history. It’s a way to show respect for the victims—to say that their lives were valued.

In this church courtyard, civilians were
rounded
up and machine-gunned to death.

Yes, we were horrified to see the photos of the victims, most of them women, children, and the elderly. The able-bodied Italian men had fled into the hills, thinking that the German soldiers were just coming to round up workers and force them into labor camps to shore up the crumbling Gothic Line. Instead, members of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division surrounded the village, rounded up the remaining villagers, and locked them in barns and stables before systematically gunning them down or throwing hand grenades into cellars. Over 110 children were slaughtered. The youngest victim, Anna Pardini, was only 20 days old. After the executions, the troops used gasoline to burn the bodies.

Eight pregnant women who were killed at Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

Eight pregnant women were among those killed, including Evelina Berretti. She was in labor when SS soldiers entered the hamlet. According to survivor testimonies and forensic documentation later used in military trials, she was brutally murdered, and her unborn child was intentionally targeted and killed separately. Another young mother whose story is intimately tied to the horror of that day is Genny Bibolotti Marsili. While she was not pregnant, she became a central symbol of the massacre’s human cost. Trapped by the SS, she used her final moments to hide her six-year-old son, Mario, behind a chimney structure, throwing one of her wooden clogs at a soldier to distract him just before she was shot. Her sacrifice saved her son.

Antonio Tucci lost his wife and
eight children. What unimaginable
sorrow!

In the years that followed, Mario became one of the primary living testimonies, regularly guiding groups through the very mountains where he lost his family. When people asked him why he would relive his trauma, he explained that he viewed his survival not as a privilege, but as a job. His mother died so he could speak, and his life’s purpose became looking young generations in the eyes to show them the human cost of hatred, ensuring that her sacrifice would serve the cause of peace.

I've read that some people come
to these monuments and read 
aloud every name, to honor 
the memory of the victims.

Another survivor, Enrico Pieri, was only ten years old when he hid in a barn and watched Nazi soldiers murder his entire family. He spent his adult life working tirelessly for European reconciliation. Pieri fiercely believed that remembering tragedy was not about harboring bitterness, but about actively constructing a peaceful future. He frequently spoke to school groups, channeling his grief into education.

“We must remember, but we must not hate,” Pieri said. “Hate leads to more hate. We must teach the young generations about what happened here so they can build a Europe of peace, solidarity, and brotherhood.”

James E. Young, a renowned cultural historian and professor emeritus who spent decades studying Holocaust and wartime memorials, wrote that the true value of a memorial is the interaction between the visitor and the space. When a human walks through a site, the victims are restored from abstract statistics into individual lives.

“The memorial path is a path of return,” Young said. “The monument is a placeholder for memory, but the memory itself must be generated by the visitor.”

If that is so, the museum and monuments at Sant’Anna and the other sites we’ve visited are doing exactly what their creators intended. When looking into the history of these Italian massacres, I worried a visit would offer only despair. But in reading the words of the survivors who built these Peace Parks, I realized these spaces aren’t meant to keep us trapped in grief. They are designed to re-sensitize us.

The Italian phrase “Mai Più” is used constantly at these peace parks. While a phrase like “Never Forget” looks entirely backward toward mourning, Mai Più—never again—looks forward as an ethical imperative. And it is this hopeful perspective, I believe, that draws me again and again to these sites.

Sant'Anna di Stazzema was right on the edge of the Linea Gottica--the Gothic Line of defense (it's the line that looks kind of like a train track).

But Nooooo! Why would I think Italian bureaucracy has improved?

This seems to be my official month of facing down Italian bureaucratic challenges. After our rousing success renewing our identity cards in Montecarlo, and a (hopefully) nearly complete victory securing our local parking permit, I decided to take on an unusual and far more difficult challenge. Now, on paper, it doesn’t seem like it should be complicated. But… well, Italy. What more really needs to be said?

One of the three offices I visited. Three times here
in a single day.
 

To give you some background: When I obtained my citizenship jure sanguinis back in 2011, all four of my children were included. Since then, they have successfully registered their own children for citizenship. However, one of my grandchildren, Ferhan, was registered with an incorrect birth certificate. Ferhan had been an orphan in Ethiopia, and when Dan and Sandra adopted him, officials had to guess at his age and assign a birthdate for the paperwork. Once he arrived in the United States, it became obvious that he was older than first estimated. With the help of an American lawyer and some meticulous paperwork filed in Washington state, his birth year was officially changed to make him one year older on his U.S. records.

Office 2: Protocollo.

Changing his Italian records, however, has been a saga. Sandra has been working on this off and on since at least 2022. Legal advice from lawyers and Italian consulates dictated a strict chain of command: His Ethiopian birth certificate had to be amended first. Then, it had to b
e translated into Italian by a certified translator, and the translation had to be officially notarized. This required the intervention of an Italian lawyer, who waded through a maze of legal obstacles before finally handing off the documents to a highly respected translator in Lucca.

Two weeks ago, I picked up the final package. The Ethiopian birth certificate was a masterpiece of red tape, boasting eight official stamps from both Ethiopian and Italian officials on the back. Attached to it was the Italian translation, sporting two more official stamps. Ten stamps in total. I was armed and ready.

The friendliest office!

I decided to start my strategy by writing a letter. It served two purposes: it helped me organize the highly complicated situation into a logical timeline, and it allowed me to take my time translating it into proper Italian. I used my AI assistant to polish the translation, and the final product looked incredibly formal and impressive. I emailed it to the anagrafe (registry) office on Sunday, confident that someone would read it first thing Monday morning.

My hope was simple. They would respond, invite me in for an appointment to drop off the documents, and tell me to come back in a few days to receive an officially stamped estratto (extract) of Ferhan’s new birth certificate. Then, I could pass it along to Sandra so she could take the next step of updating his Italian passport. I even half-expected to be greeted by a brass band celebrating the brilliance of my strategy, the logic of my writing, and my patriotic service to the fatherland.

Well, guess what? None of that happened.

Instead, I lived out the lines of that famous Simon & Garfunkel song: The Sounds of Silence.

Having received zero response by Friday morning, I went to the anagrafe office in person. Luckily, there was no line. I decided the easiest way to explain the situation was to ask the clerk to read the email, which I had loaded onto my phone. The employee must have been a world-class speed reader. He glanced at my 300-word masterpiece for about ten seconds, looked up, and said that I must first submit a written query to the protocollo (the official municipal logging office) at a different address. I asked for clarification, but he just repeated the instruction.

Fortunately, the protocollo office was only about a block away. Again, there was no line, but the man at the desk looked utterly bewildered when I showed him the letter on my phone. He retreated into a back office, consulted with a colleague, and returned with a new directive.

“You must return to anagrafe and ask for a modulo di richiesta—a request form,” he said.

That actually made perfect sense to me. Based on my recent experience at the Montecarlo police station, they had given me a physical form for my parking pass, which I then took to the protocollo to be officially recorded and stamped before carrying it back. I knew the drill.

So, it was back to the anagrafe office. I had to wait in line this time, but only for about five minutes.

“The man at the protocollo told me to come back here and ask for a request form,” I explained to the clerk.

“Hai ragione,” said the exact same man I had spoken to just ten minutes prior.

What the heck? Hai ragione means “you are right.” If he knew this was what I needed from the very beginning, why didn't he just give it to me during our first conversation? Stifling my frustration, I took the modulo di richiesta. He told me I could go home and fill it out “con calma”—at my own leisure.

But I was not exactly calm, and I certainly didn't want to go home yet. I walked back to the protocol office and showed the man the blank form, determined not to waste time filling it out if it was the wrong one. The official, who possessed infinitely more patience than the guy in the registry office, assured me that if that’s what they gave me, it must be the right one.

I started filling it out at a desk next to the counter. It had two pens on it and seemed explicitly placed there for this exact purpose. However, the official quickly informed me that only one person was allowed inside the office at a time, and someone was already waiting outside the door.

Banished to the street, I sat on a public bench to finish the form, only to realize I had no pen. Luckily, the office right next door had a sign reading: Pescia per tutti: Sportello del Cittadino URP. I recognized this as the Citizen’s Relations Office—a place explicitly designed to help locals navigate government bureaucracy.

A very friendly lady greeted me with a warm smile, offered me a pen, and pointed me to a desk with a comfortable chair. After I filled out the form, I showed it to her and explained the situation. After complimenting my Italian, she confirmed it was filled out perfectly. She even proactively made a photocopy of my carta d’identità, knowing the protocol office would inevitably demand it.

Armed with my completed form and ID copy, it was back to the protocollo for the third time. This time, success! The official took my request, made his photocopies, exercised his rubber stamp, and filed the form away. He then stamped a sticky note, scribbled a five-digit case number on it, and handed it to me as my official receipt.

I foolishly assumed I could take this receipt straight back to the man at the anagrafe, show him the proof of filing, and finally hand over the Ethiopian birth certificate.

Instead, he made me think of the comedian Bobby Finn, who went viral for his skits about the English language. You know the line: “Nooooo! Why would you think…?” And when you question the logic, he shuts down the argument with absolute circular reasoning: “It’s because… that’s why!” paired with a bewildered, “You don’t see how?!”

Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh, but I was completely shut down.

“You have to come back next week,” the clerk said. When I looked confused and asked him to explain the process, he grew impatient. Spotting my hesitation, he switched to English, assuming my issue was a language barrier rather than sheer disbelief. “Next week. Four, five days. Come back,” he said with obvious exasperation.

I checked back in with my new friend, the helpful lady at the Sportello del Cittadino, and she confirmed that this was, indeed, standard procedure. The internal mail system meant it would take a few days for my request to physically travel from the protocol office across the courtyard to the registry office. It made sense on a structural level, mostly because the protocol official had kept my form instead of stamping it and letting me hand-carry it back.

And so, I walked away, still holding the Ethiopian birth certificate and its translation, with those ten official stamps mocking me from inside my folder. It feels mind-boggling that I had to jump through so many hoops just to earn the right to get back in line a week from now.

I’ve heard the legendary horror stories about Italian bureaucracy for years, so I shouldn't be entirely surprised. Yet somehow, especially after my incredibly smooth experience with the municipality in Montecarlo, I truly thought things had modernized.

But nooooo! Why would I think…?

-----------------

Followup: Before I could return after four or five days, I received a written response to the email I had sent earlier. It said that making a major change such as a different birthday would require a court order. So instead of going back to Pescia, Lucy and I drove to Pietrasanta to deliver the documents to the Italian lawyer that Dan and Sandra are using. She will start the process for the court order, which could take . . . well, I don't even want to guess how long.

 

Diary of a Wimpy Expat: The Montecarlo parking saga continues

Will I ever actually hold a Montecarlo parking permit in my hands again?

Today marked my third consecutive Thursday pilgrimage to the local police station. As you may recall, this sanctuary of administration opens its doors to the public for a grand total of three hours a week—from 9 a.m. to noon. I marched into the Municipio feeling optimistic. In my hands, I held my beautifully filled-in, officially stamped application, and the hard-fought printout of our car’s carta di circolazione, courtesy of some heroes at the Florence airport.

I arrived to find the office entirely dark and firmly locked.

Please, just give me one of these!

But I wasn’t discouraged. This is Italy, after all; a locked door at opening time is practically part of the charm. I took a seat on a wooden chair in the hallway and pulled out a book I currently have on loan from the Montecarlo library: Diario di una Schiappa: Una Vacanza di Panico. For the uninitiated, it’s the Italian translation of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series—where absolutely everything that can go wrong for Greg Heffley and his family does exactly that. It is right at my Italian reading level, and a devastatingly fitting analogy for my epic quest to obtain a laminated piece of dashboard plastic.

About 10 minutes into the story of Greg’s holiday panic, the hallway lights flickered on, followed by the glorious, metallic rattle of a key turning in the office lock.

I entered and was greeted by a completely different poliziotto than the officer who had previously given me the solemn lecture on the legality of my glove box. Not wanting to get bogged down in the messy history of my previous struggles, I kept it simple: “I’ve come to get a parking permit.”

He looked over the papers, nodded sagely, and delivered the classic line: “Everything seems to be in order. But you need to take this to the protocol office.”

“Ah, but I already did!” I replied, pointing triumphantly to the page. “See the official stamp?”

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, entirely unbothered. “Then it is all okay.”

“Excellent,” I said, sensing victory. “So last week I didn’t have the carta di circolazione, but here it is. Can I give you that, along with the application form?”

“You can keep the application form,” he replied breezily. “That is your copy. The protocol office already kept one for their records.”

Fantastic. Except he didn’t seem to grasp that I had been turned away seven days prior precisely because of the missing registration. I wasn’t about to let a rogue piece of paper break this fragile chain of custody. I gently but firmly urged him to take it, insisting he keep the application too, so there would be no cosmic doubt that the two documents belonged together.

“Va bene,” he sighed, finally accepting them both.

I took a breath. “Great! So... can I get my parking pass now?”

“Oh, torna giovedì prossimo. It should be ready by then.”

Mamma mia.

Next Thursday. If my math is correct, that will mark exactly three weeks since I first crossed this threshold—plus a few extra days, considering we arrived on a Tuesday. But what choice did I have? You do not argue with the people in charge of the laminator. I smiled, accepted my fate, and prepared to make my exit.

But then, a lingering anxiety stopped me. “And where am I supposed to park in the meantime? Only outside the city walls?”

He shrugged, offering a casual, quintessentially Italian wave of dismissal. “Oh, non ti preoccupare. Don’t worry about that. You won’t be fined.”

Well, admittedly, he’s probably on point there. In our time living in Montecarlo, a police parking ticket is about as uncommon as a bad meal. On the legendary handful of occasions where the police do go on a rare ticketing spree, they do a thorough job and ticket every single offender in sight. When that happens, about 25% of the cars wind up with tickets—meaning the other 75% are law-abiding citizens who actually have their passes. The remaining quarter of drivers are simply gambling on the fact that the officers almost never issue tickets. It’s a beautifully lax approach to enforcement that everyone understands.

So, armed with nothing but the verbal blessing of a shifting Thursday police guard, we are officially back to parking right outside our front door—provided there’s a space available, of course. The exile outside the walls is over, even if the paperwork isn’t.

And maybe, just maybe, next Thursday will be the charm. The tragic irony, of course, is that the car is due back to the rental agency the following Monday. If all goes to plan, we will have exactly four days to enjoy our hard-fought, hyper-exclusive parking privilege.

If that isn’t a chapter straight out of Greg Heffley’s life, I don’t know what is.

------------------------

Update: The chicken did not hatch the following Thursday, either. The officer on duty sorted through a small pile of parking passes and told me mine was not there. Can I come back later? Next Thursday, he said. I was only mildly surprised, but not terribly dismayed, since we have been parking inside the city for the past two weeks, and as promised by the officer, I was not ticketed.

From bins to liquid gold: A day at the Frantoio Sociale del Compitese

The day after we finished a memorable and sensory experience of harvesting olives on the steep hillsides of Vorno, we experienced another thrill: a high-tech grand finale of seeing our olives transformed into savory, spicy liquid gold.

We share a special moment with Shandra

We loaded up the crates and drove along winding roads to the Frantoio Sociale del Compitese in Pieve di Compito. Founded in 1976 by a small group of 45 local growers, this cooperative has grown over the last 50 years to include more than 1,300 members across the Lucchesia region. Walking into the facility—a beautiful piece of modern architecture that respects Tuscan tradition with its exposed brick and massive wooden ceiling beams—you immediately feel the buzz of a community deeply connected to the land.

This is where the olives are placed first, leaves
and twigs included. Then a shaker removes the
residue and sends the olives on their way to 
another bin, where they wait to be pressed.

We arrived at our 12:30 PM appointment to find an orderly, lively line of cars and trucks waiting to unload their precious cargo. Being third in line, our group leader, Shandra, found out it would be a short 30-to-60-minute wait before our olives hit the machinery. We happily passed the time inside the frantoio’s spaccio aziendale (company store), enjoying fantastic, locally sourced panini at a great price while surrounded by shelves of regional wines, honey, and cured meats.

Then, it was showtime.

When the workers gave us the word, we were allowed into the heart of the pressing area. Thanks to a recent €500,000 technological upgrade, the facility features a state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled continuous system that processes up to three tons of olives an hour. Bins stood lined up in a strict queue, each clearly marked with a specific number and digital tracking label. Because our final harvest weight hit roughly 280 kilograms, we comfortably cleared the mill’s strict 250 kg minimum requirement for an individual pressing (frangitura singola). This meant our olives wouldn’t be mixed with anyone else’s; we were getting 100% of our own oil.

As our number came up, we watched the computers shift the production lines. Shandra slid a shiny, pristine metal lattina (oil canister) right under the output spout. She opened the valve, and out poured a vibrant stream of freshly pressed “liquid gold.” We all stood around, grinning broadly, snapping photos to capture the culmination of our hard work.

The first canister filled all the way up to its 30 kg mark. Shandra quickly closed the valve, swapped it out for a second container, and opened it again to catch the final, rich streams as the spout eventually slowed to a steady drip, yielding another 10 kg.

All told, our 294 kg of olives produced nearly 40 liters of fresh extra virgin olive oil (about 36.6 kg). In the olive world, mill output is everything. Our harvest resulted in a 12.46% extraction yield, meaning our novice crew landed squarely in the middle of the classic Tuscan average of 12% to 13%. It was the absolute sweet spot of quality and quantity!

“It’s one of the best ten experiences of my life,” Shandra said. “I never dreamed that I would have my own oil from olives we picked by hand. The satisfaction of working together, of thinking of the spiritual implications of the harvest . . . of the work we’re putting into it and how it relates to the villa—all this made it a great and joyful experience.”

While Lucy and I haven’t had the chance to taste the oil just yet, its destination makes it taste sweet anyway. Every single drop of this premium oil is being dedicated to Villa La Fonte—the historic former convent in Vorno that Agape Italia is beautifully restoring into a pilgrim hostel along the Via Francigena. The oil will be proudly served at communal tables to weary travelers next spring and shared as a thank-you to the project’s dedicated supporters.

Knowing that our sore muscles and the laughter we shared across the branches resulted in literal fuel and hospitality for future pilgrims is the ultimate reward. We fully intend to keep donating our labor to Villa La Fonte in the years to come, and we can’t wait for the day we finally dip a piece of toasted Tuscan bread into the fruits of our very first harvest.

 

Raining olives and a shared table: we savor our first Tuscan olive harvest

Agape staff member Michea Giuni knocks olives
onto the net with the mechanical shaker.

For more than a decade, autumn in Tuscany has meant a familiar, beautiful view for Lucy and me. Every fall since we bought our Montecarlo home in 2015, we have driven past rolling hills covered with hundreds of silver-green olive trees, watching from a distance as groups of people knocked down the autumn fruit into bright green nets spread wide across the grass. We always wondered what it felt like to be part of that timeless Italian tradition. Last week, we finally found out.

For two beautiful half days, we traded the view from the car window for a spot right in the middle of the grove, participating in our very first Italian olive harvest.

Shandra prays as we thank God before lunch.

Our workspace was a stunning, steep hillside just above a historic former convent in Vorno, located about a half hour from Montecarlo. The property is currently being converted into a hostel for travelers walking the ancient Via Francigena pilgrimage route—a wonderful project by Agape Italia (an affiliate of the Ame
rican Christian organization Cru) that is set to open next spring. As friends of the Agape staff, we were invited to join a crew of nine other workers and volunteers to tackle the property's 150 olive trees.

The work was an absolute sensory experience. We began by dragging and spreading the heavy green nets across the sloped earth under the branches. Then, the harvest began in earnest. Armed with long rakes and a rented mechanical shaker, we set to work.

It truly rained olives. A steady shower of fruit, silver leaves, and the occasional surprised insect rained down right on our heads. For the lower, heavy branches, we used a traditional technique called “milking”—gently pulling our hands along the branch to strip off the olives.

Midway through, the battery-powered shaker stopped working. While the sudden breakdown slowed our progress, it turned out to be a hidden blessing. Without the mechanical noise, the grove grew quiet, opening up the space for easy, laughing conversations across the branches.

The work wasn't grueling, but it certainly made us use muscles we forgot we had. After hours of beating and raking the branches, my hands and arms definitely felt the cramp of honest labor, and we had to carefully watch our step on the steep slopes. Lucy, who took on the vital job of sitting on the ground to sort out stray twigs and broken branches from the piles, caught a bit of an autumn chill from the damp earth, but the camaraderie kept our spirits incredibly warm.

Without a doubt, the heartbeat of the experience was the community. Getting to know the dedicated staff and fellow volunteers felt effortless while working side-by-side. That bond carried over perfectly into the afternoons, where we gathered around a long table outside the convent for lunch. We feasted on traditional Tuscan meals, savored rich pecorino cheese, and washed it all down with fresh spring water, local wines, and shots of hot espresso.

By the time we bundled up the final nets and scooped the last fruits into our cestini (baskets), our eleven-person crew had gathered nearly 300 kilograms of olives.

The next day, our Agape friends hauled the crates off to a local frantoio (mill) to be pressed into fresh, vibrant olive oil. We returned home with tired arms, full stomachs, and the immense satisfaction of knowing that the next time we drive past the Tuscan hills in autumn, we won't just be looking at a postcard—we will be remembering a tradition we finally call our own.

 

Part 2 of parking saga seems hopeful, but I'm not counting my polli yet

When I last left you, I was trapped in an Italian bureaucratic limbo. My rental car was missing its vital carta di circolazione (registration certificate), the local police had warned me I was technically driving illegally, and I was forced to park outside the city walls of Montecarlo. I had just spent twenty minutes on hold with a centralized customer service line, receiving a polite promise that a copy of the document would be emailed to me.

I told you not to hold your breath. I was right. Two days passed with nothing but radio silence.

The view from exile—parking outside the
walls while waiting for the polli to hatch.

With Thursday fast approaching—the one day a week the local police handle parking passes—I knew I’d need to get proactive. Since I am returning the car to the Florence Airport branch in November, it occurred to me that the destination desk had a vested interest in my contract. Plus, I’ve always had excellent service at that office. I ran the idea by my AI digital sidekick, who enthusiastically approved, and we collaborated on drafting a polished email to the Budget customer service office, sending a cc to the Florence office.

The contrast in responses was a masterclass in modern customer service.

First came the corporate response from Budget’s centralized system. It arrived almost immediately, proudly bearing a disclaimer at the bottom: “This response was generated with the support of AI to help address your inquiry efficiently.”

Efficiently? Not exactly. It was a spectacular display of automated blame-shifting. Instead of helping, the corporate AI loftily informed me:

“The vehicle should include the registration certificate and mandatory safety documents, and your rental agreement also states that you should ask for the vehicle condition report to be corrected if the vehicle registration or other mandatory documents are not present in the vehicle... Given the police instruction that the vehicle should not be driven without the document, the safest next step is to remain parked...”

Right. Because who doesn’t love conducting a multi-page legal document audit while trying to navigate traffic outside Milano Centrale? Their grand solution to their own missing paperwork was to tell me to just leave the car parked and call another premium-rate hotline.

But then came the human heroes.

Just 40 minutes after sending my email, a real person at the Firenze office responded. No automated delays, no “we will look into this” promises—just the finished job. Attached to the email was the exact, beautiful PDF of the carta di circolazione. They saw a loyal customer in a pinch, bypassed the corporate red tape, and solved the problem in record time. Highest praise to the team at FLR!

The story isn’t quite over yet. Having a PDF on a computer is one thing, but Italian bureaucracy thrives on physical paper. Next up on my itinerary is a trip to the local cartoleria to get the document printed out. Then, this Thursday, I will march back up to the police station, stamped paper and printed certificate in hand, to finally claim my dashboard prize.

However, this could be wishful thinking, because based on my previous experience with the police office, just receiving the application doesn’t mean they will immediately hand me a pass. It has to have the car’s info filled in, and then it has to be laminated. But I’m hoping that if I arrive when they open at 9 am, at the very least I can pick it up before they close at noon. I’ve learned not to count my polli before they’ve hatched.

----------------------------------

Update: The chicken did not hatch this Thursday, either. The officer on duty sorted through a small pile of parking passes and told me mine was not there. Can I come back later? Next Thursday, he said. I was only mildly surprised, but not terribly dismayed, since we have been parking inside the city for all of the previous week, and as promised by the officer last week, I was not ticketed.

Smooth sailing: Renewing the Italian Carta d'Identità in our Tuscan home

Yesterday, I promised you a triumph—a rare, refreshing encounter with Italian bureaucracy that actually went off without a hitch.

It all started when I noticed that my carta d’identità (Italian ID card) was set to expire in January, with Lucy’s following just a few months later. Recognizing that the clock was ticking, we decided now would be the perfect time not only to renew them but to finally upgrade to the sleek, electronic versions (CIE).

With a little help from my trusty friend Google, I discovered that the path to success led through the Comune di Montecarlo Servizi Demografici (the local municipal registry office). The checklist was specific but manageable: each of us needed a fresh passport photo, our codice fiscale (tax code card), our expiring physical IDs, and €21 in cash.

I sent an email to the office on Wednesday, braced for a weeks-long wait. Instead? I was pleasantly shocked to receive an appointment for the very next morning.

We gathered our documents, marched up to the office, and the entire process—digital fingerprinting included—took a mere 40 minutes for the two of us. The clerk was efficient, the system worked, and our shiny new physical cards are already en route to our mailbox, complete with the security codes needed to activate our digital identities online.

Experiencing this firsthand makes you realize just how much credit Italy deserves for its massive modernization leap over the last 25 years. Gone are the days of cash-only mandates; credit cards are now accepted nearly everywhere. Our utility bills slip quietly and automatically out of our checking account each month. I can transfer funds from the United States to Italy instantly with minimal fees, and booking train, bus, or theater tickets is a simple matter of a few clicks on a smartphone.

While the ghost of old-school inefficiency still haunts the occasional police station or ufficio di protocollo, those agonizing bottlenecks are slowly becoming the exception rather than the rule. And because the system actually worked this time, this story is delightfully short and sweet. May we always be blessed with such smooth sailing!

The price of living in paradise (and it requires a stamp and certificate)

 The bureaucracy in Italy is famously slow and cumbersome, and today we had two distinct occasions to face the beast. One was a triumph; the other, a masterclass in administrative gridlock.

First, the failure.

The last line is important.
The restrictions don't apply
if one has a parking pass.

I set out to get a resident parking pass for our rental car so we could park inside the city walls, right next to our front door. We had a pass, but it was tied to our previous rental. Having danced this dance before, I really should have been better prepared. But I completely forgot that the police require the carta di circolazione (the official vehicle registration document, often part of the libretto) which is supposed to live in the car’s glove box.

The process is heavily complicated by the fact that the local police office only handles this paperwork one day a week, from 9:00 AM to noon. I waited patiently until Thursday and presented myself at the station. I surrendered our old pass and was handed a fresh form to fill out. Next step: climb up to the first floor and have an employee manually log the form into the ufficio di protocollo (the official registry office).

However, the office was a ghost town. Maybe the clerk was consulting with a colleague in another room. Maybe she was enjoying an extended espresso break. Chi lo sa? (Who knows?)

This is what I need to put on
my dashboard, with the targa
of my current rental car.

Running out of time that day, I admitted defeat and returned the next morning. Success! She entered my information into her computer and stamped my form with authority. But because it was now Friday, I was stuck in a bureaucratic limbo: I would have to wait an entire week until the following Thursday just to bring that stamped paper back to the police.

In the meantime, I made copies of the only documents I could find in the glove box. When Thursday finally rolled around, the police officer took one look at them and shook his head—wrong form. Sure enough, the header read certificato di assicurazione (insurance certificate), not circolazione. The officer explained that without the registration card, his hands were tied. In fact, he added with a solemn look, it was technically illegal for me to even be driving the car on public roads without that original carta di circolazione on board!

So, it was back home to dial the number for Budget. After enduring 20 minutes of elevator music on hold, I was connected to a wonderfully helpful agent who graciously let me explain my plight in English. She promised to contact the Budget branch in Milan where we originally picked up the car and ask them to email me a digital copy of the missing certificate.

Should I hold my breath while I wait? Absolutely not. I fully expect I will be calling them back in a few days, though I would love nothing more than to be pleasantly surprised. To be continued...

Meanwhile, I’ve been without a pass for about a week and a half, forcing me to park outside the city walls. But honestly? It’s not a major crisis. It is a very minor tax to pay for the absolute privilege of living in a paradise on earth.

And as for our big success story? You'll have to wait for my next post.