“To beat everyone else looking for mushrooms,” he said. Satisfied with that logic, I wedged my head between the window and seat and fell asleep.

I awoke as we drove into the driveway of his boyhood friend Primo who was joining us in the hunt. I introduced myself, they saluted each other in dialect and we began the hour and a half drive to their secret, undisclosed mushroom bonanza located somewhere in the mountains between Emilia Romagna and Tuscany.

The first stop was as the bar of a nearby gas station for a little breakfast. Not even six in the morning, it was packed with montanari, or men of the mountain, preparing for a day of hunting for cinghiali, deer, or like us, porcini mushrooms. Huddled around the bar with cappuccinos in one hand and pastries in the other, one of the older camouflage-clad hunters recounted his true and less-than-true stories in a thick Reggiano dialect about the ones that got away, turning around regularly with a grin and a wink to make sure we were hanging on to every word.

Porcini mushrooms are the prized culinary ingredient in many Italian dishes. The name literally means “piglet” due to the chubby shape of the mushrooms when they are young and can be found in the wild high up in the mountains throughout Autumn. I was told that only people from this area in Italy are interested in hunting for porcini, even going so far as to tell me of a story of how during a bus trip up to Scotland, the old ladies found fields of untouched porcini because the Scots had no idea they were edible. They spent days picking and drying their find in front of the heaters in their hotel rooms and over the engine of their bus in an effort to preserve the delicate mushrooms for the ride back to Italy. They came back feeling as though they had found D.B. Cooper’s illusive sack of money.

Driving down the last stretch of an unmarked dirt road through the forest where we’d begin our hike, the sun had yet to rise and a ferocious cold wind blew the trees back and forth. The temperature was barely above freezing and I breathed a sigh of relief about having had put on two sweaters and a heavy jacket before leaving this morning. We waited in the car for almost a half hour for the sun to rise and with luck, for the wind to calm down. At least that was a plan, until we spotted three other guys hiking up our mountain at which point we jumped out of the car, strapped on our mushroom baskets and began hiking through the dimly lit forest towards the top of the mountain.

A full hour of hiking and we hadn’t found a single porcino. Tiziano grew discouraged saying more than once, “It’s just not the right time of year.” Primo and Tiziano decided to split up, with Primo going up the mountain and Tiziano and I going down it. We were no longer following any trails and were hands and feet planted to the 45º slope of the mountain that disappeared into a chasm below us. It wasn’t long before Tiziano waved me over to where he was standing, whispering my name as to not alert anyone who might be hidden in the trees, to show me the big porcino he found hidden beneath the grass in a small alcove beneath some stones. He reached over and found another, and another and I scurried over to another patch and pulled the large, sourdough scented mushrooms from the ground. We had found the motherload. We were piling up the porcini in piles, cleaning them off, then carefully placing them in our baskets. We continued up and down the mountain, zig zagging and checking areas the other had already checked to avoid missing even one.

Working up the mountain, sometimes even climbing vertically up rock walls, Tiziano’s basket was nearly completely full and it wasn’t even 10 AM. We followed narrow goat trails deeper into the wilderness but eventually our luck ran out and the porcini became harder to find. Hiking up the next mountain I noticed signs that someone had already passed by that morning since some of the poisonous mushrooms had been pulled out by their roots. We were both tiring and it was getting close to lunch time so Tiziano called Primo on his cell phone to tell him that we were on, “The mountain over by the chasm,” which turned out to be enough information for him to walk right up to us while we were hiking back to the car. The arduous four hour hike up was followed by a leisurely half hour hike down the marked trail that led us right to the car.

We eventually arrived back home where Tiziano, the proud son, handed his basket of mushrooms to his mother, Adele. She pulled out a rusty antique hand-held scale older than herself with a large weight on one end of the fulcrum and a hook on the other. Single-handedly she picked up the basket with the scale and with a big smile said, “Ten kilograms!” I told her she can have all of mine as well since she’d know how best to use them, and she graciously replied, “Then I’ll invite you down when I use them in a dinner.” With only three hours of sleep and a lower body crying out in pain, the only response I could muster up was a deep primordial grunt of joy.

It’s been four years since I sold all and moved to Italy and there is a semi-famous festival nearby that I have managed to consistently miss every year for one reason or another. The Corteo Storico at Quattro Castella, which is very similar to our Renaissance festivals, is an annual festival to celebrate the 1,000 year old cash cow known as Matilde of Canossa. Part of what makes it so well known is the promise of two beautiful celebrities who come to town to play the parts of Matilde and Heinrich IV, King of Germany to reenact his famed trip from Germany to Canossa to grovel at the feet of Matilde and to return to the good graces of the Church. A story that spawned the phrase, “The Walk to Canossa,” used as both a battle cry of the Ottoman Empire to not cow-tow to any outside force and a metaphor for doing penance.

I don’t want to sound sour, but this is one of the very few times I’ve had to buy a ticket to get into a festival, let alone pay for parking outside of one. A Springsteen concert, no problem. A small medieval festival in a town I’ve been in countless times with a “Dancing with the Stars” runner up as the main attraction, my enthusiasm wanes. Do I sound sour?

Arriving about 9pm, most everything in the lower part of the town was closed up, the stage from earlier events broken down and all of the food carts covered over. This was the last day of the three day festival and the main action was was in the field beneath Castello di Bianello. The locals were dressed in period clothing, some as soldiers with weapons and others with the tools of their trades for their characters. The stadium where games of soccer are usually played was overflowing from end to end with spectators watching sword fights and fire dancers in front of a stage constructed for the final scenes with Matilde and Heinrich.

I wandered the mercato in the street below the stadium whose vendors peddled handmade goods of the period such as armor for knights, swords, handmade clothing, pottery, toys and beer. Well, no, the beer wasn’t handmade but it was the only thing I bought. Having explored the streets, I walked back up into the stadium just as the “Parade of 1,000″ began, which was a procession of around a thousand locals dressed in costume walking out onto the field grouped by their individual communities. It’s not uncommon for summer festivals to run late, and this was no exception. Already after midnight the reenactment of Matilde and Heinrich wouldn’t begin for another half hour.

Eventually Matilde and Heinrich walked onto the stage and sat in their wooden thrones while the famous European story was recited by a faceless actor with a deep booming voice. And he recited. And he recited some more. My Italian has improved, but long periods of passato remoto make my eyes cross so I unfortunately missed a lot of the story, but Wikipedia saved me in the end. Apparently after Heinrich begged for forgiveness and his excommunication from the church was lifted, he returned to Germany only to lose his throne to evil Saxon warlord, David Hasselhoff. Oh Wikipedia, ever the source of accurate information.

Looking as far over as Bologna one festival caught my eye — Le veglie di Bacco (The Vigils of Bacchus). Located in the mountain-top borgo of an ancient abbey that sits above the town of Monteveglio, it was a good two hour drive away on the back roads through three provinces. But since it was a beautiful spring day, that was no problem at all.

The two hour drive turned into three as I wasn’t in any particular hurry and turned off the main road whenever I would see something interesting off in the distance. One of those stops was at the fortress in Bazzano, which happened to be completely empty during my visit. Walking through the large gate I found myself in a grassy courtyard surrounded by the outer walls and a view of the town below. The fortress, now an architectural museum, stood quietly with a sparsely decorated church and clock tower visible to the town beneath.

Finally pulling into the festival close to 9pm, I grabbed a bite to eat at the only food stand around. They had a choice of crescentina, known in our area as gnocco fritto (fried bread), or a single tigella with prosciutto, coppa di testa and/or a local cheese inside. I picked the crescentina with coppa di testa and cheese and wandered around a bit through the market. Coppa di testa is made up of little pieces of meat from the head of pigs and possibly other parts I shouldn’t share with you and has a really strong taste that takes some getting used to. I should’ve gone with the prosciutto.

Not much was happening in Monteveglio so I grabbed a ticket for the bus that would haul me up the mountain on a road barely wider than itself to the Borgo dell’Abbazia. It’s a 1.5 mile trip and the many signs announcing that the last bus down will leave at 10pm let me know that I, along with most others, would be hoofing it down the mountain in the middle of the night since that was when the festival was scheduled to end.

Before entering the festival, every visitor was stopped at the gate and asked the simple question, “Red or White?” The answer determined the color of bandanna you were handed for what was explained as, “The Final Battle.” Dum dum duuuuuuuuum.

Inside the festival were blacksmiths, weavers, thatchers and pottery makers dressed in period clothes demonstrating their various trades. Others walked around dressed as nobles, squires, lepers covered in bandages and other random villagers. The best costumes I saw were of a group of men with long beards dressed as friars mingling with the crowd. Back when I went to the Renaissance Fair in Texas, I always dressed as a friar and so I noted how authentic their costumes were. I walked towards one of them to ask for a picture only to quickly realize — they weren’t costumes.

At the far end of the borgo where the abbey sits, they had a jousting arena and games for kids. The inside of the church had the same fascinating architectural style as the duomo at Modena with the sanctuary one flight of stairs up and a crypt directly beneath it one flight of stairs down. I tried to sneak a photo of the inside, but one of the (real) friars was giving me the evil eye and I deftly put my camera back in my pocket.

I slipped into a line at one of the food stands to try out one of the desserts available and met the Irish university student, Vincent, and his Italian girlfriend who were in line behind me. They later introduced me to a group of their friends who came down from Pavia to stay in one of the apartments inside the borgo and I hung out with them for the rest of the evening. We watched a performance of a mythological story very similar to what I saw at Brisighella with dancers on stilts and fireworks strapped to every appendage of their bodies dancing around each other lighting the occasional spectator on fire. I thought about explaining the story as I understood it explained to me, but even now I’m still confused. Something about Zeus, women in plastic bubbles and fire breathing cows. Or as we like to say in Austin, a Tuesday night on 6th.

It was near midnight and tension filled the air, bandannas fastened tightly to our foreheads, menacing growls on our faces. We were outnumbered at least 2 to 1. The final battle was imminent. We took our weapons in hand, the ever dangerous and highly volatile foam balls in socks, and stood shoulder to shoulder against a greater foe. “VIA!” In less than a second the air was filled with crisscrossing red and white spheres flying aimlessly towards the opposite sides of the field. Vincent hurriedly organized groups of fighters to stave off the incoming attacks and I was using my patent-pending throw-like-a-girl tactic to win sympathy from the enemy. But alas, our efforts were in vain and my shoulder giving out on me forced me to the sidelines.

Leaving about 1am, I started walking down the mountain in the pitch black without even the moonlight to show me where I was going. I heard some noise around the corner and caught up with another group ahead of me with torches in hand singing Bella Ciao all the way down the hill. The streets were empty and the stands were closed and I hopped in my car for the two hour drive back home.