Couchsurfing at the kookiest farmhouse in all of Tuscany | The West Australian

Am I on a train speeding towards my death? This train whizzing from Rome to Florence is taking me to my first couch-surfing destination, and I’m convinced it might be my last.

My companion is not impressed.

“If you didn’t want to do it you should have said so!” she snaps. She organised accommodation for our Italian jaunt through couchsurfing.com, a website that allows you to stay with locals in the places of your choice all over the world for free. It sounded brilliant to me, until I told my mother about it.

“We’re going to a farmhouse in Tuscany and staying with a thirty-something guy in the middle of nowhere,” I said.

There was a heavy silence through the phone.

Then the eruption: ”You’re staying with a strange man miles from help, are you mad? What if he’s a rapist? What if he’s a serial killer? What if he sells you into prostitution? This is insanity!”

All good points.

An abandoned church on the hill above Galiga, which Lillo plans to turn into an art and performance space. He owns half the village.

My friend has told me next to nothing, except that I am shortly to receive a text message detailing where we go from the Florence train terminal.

“Get a train to Pontassieve. There you will meet Silvia. She will bring you to Galiga.” What’s Galiga? Who’s Silvia? Where the hell is Pontassieve? The crypt factor is at an all-time high.

My friend is in a huff that I don’t trust her planning and the image of us running screaming in the Tuscan night from a leering, knife-wielding maniac is on a loop in my mind.

It’s already dark when we arrive in the one-room rural Pontassieve station. A small curly-haired girl is waiting outside, and introduces herself as Silvia. She is so obviously harmless that I begin to feel better. “Hello girls,” she says hesitantly, nervous of her English. “Want to see some music first?”

She takes us to a bar with a large patio filled with young people. On stage, guys in suits are shrieking and flinging cellos around, while charming Italian boys buy us drinks and teach us the finer points of the Italian laguage.

Suitably unwound, we hop into Silvia’s mini and she hoons for twenty minutes along pitch-black country roads, lit only by the pool of light cast by the headlights, taking the bends like a pro. We pull up to a rambling stone house covered in vines, three scruffy dogs barking a welcome.

Galiga, it would seem, is a collection of a dozen houses too small and scattered to be called a village, and where our host resides.A bouncy grinning young man who introduces himself as Giampaolo (“Giampi, please!”) whirls us through the house. Although it is almost midnight, Giampi wakes up the Finnish couchsurfers in the living room, and rouses an Australian who seems to be living there (“Marcus! Look! Two Australian girls! You can be friends!”). He is showing us a bird nest under the stairs when the power fails, leaving the valley swathed in darkness, the moon peeping out from behind a cloud.

It dawns on us, as we use a torch to stumble into bed in the enormous bedroom we’ve been offered, that we’ve landed in some kind of Italian hippy commune.

* * *

The beautiful lake outside of Galiga, site of many a relaxing swim

An incessantly crowing rooster wakes me the next morning. I hop out of the four-poster and walk to the window. I see a sweeping view of the valley, and a chicken coop directly below, home to two dozen chooks and one very self-important rooster. I later find out that they belong to the neighbour, who has “twelve neanderthal sons” that our hosts enjoy stunning with an array of international girls that they send to ask for eggs.

The house is a ramshackle affair. Marcus guides us across the road to Lillo’s house for breakfast. Who is Lillo? Marcus mentions him on and off over a slapdash breakfast of rockmelon, bread and jam, telling us home he came to be in Galiga in the first place.

“I was at the Florence train terminal looking at the boards, trying to pick a train to anywhere; I had no plans. I got talking to some Americans and they said, ‘why don’t you come with us, we’re going couchsurfing.’  The Americans broke up after three days and left, but the gang and I hit it off and they offered me the spare bedroom. I’ve been here two weeks,” he grins. Marcus is using his time in the Italian countryside to get over a nervous breakdown and work out what to do next – a sabbatical of sorts.

Rapid-fire Italian outside signals his arrival and Lillo, the man, the myth, enters the room.

“He farms, he paints, he has a room upstairs filled with clothes that he occasionally sells, he’s a sculptor, a potter, a perfumier… there’s not a lot that Lillo hasn’t done,” Marcus told us. He is the sun around which Galiga village orbits. It is also apparently not uncommon for young girls from Florence’s universities to end up in his bed, looking for a mentor and a father figure. Lillo sounds like an Italian Don Juan, a Giacco of all trades.

Fifty-two-year-old Lillo is wearing ratty shorts, a singlet that has seen better days, and a long thin earring that he has woven through the four holes in his right ear. His eyes sparkle as we are introduced.

Lillo's 'cock moment' table centrepiece

Marcus tells us that you’re an artist, we say. What kind of art?

“All kinds,” he says. “For example, right now, I am having a cock moment. Like Picasso’s Blue Period. But different.” He plonks a saucepan down on the table. Arrayed around it are two clay penises and a clay vagina.

“And look outside!” he exults. Along the low brick wall a penis produdes from a cement panel, something I first mistook for a tap.Lillo leads us upstairs to show us his expansive living room, complete with a stuffed stag’s head over the large triangular fireplace. Against one wall are two enormous antique birdcages. Inside one, perched insouciantly, is another clay vagina. In the second, a penis.

“Is funny, no?” Lillo beams. “It is a joke! Ha ha! In Italian, ‘bird’ is another word for the private part! I have bird in a cage!”

Without giving us time to muse upon this pun, Lillo sweeps his arm towards a shelf arrayed with row upon row of tiny glass bottles.

“Also, I make perfume!” He reads out the labels: “Jasmine… lemongrass… stag… skunk…”

Skunk?

“Oh yes. It is very powerful for the love.”

I take a whiff of the eau de stag. It stinks.

“You like?”

Uh, I think I might prefer a floral. He shrugs; clearly it’s my loss.

The 'bird' cage

At lunch Lillo shows us how to make pesto sauce, with fresh ingredients from his herb garden. It is delicious.

Marcus takes us for a walk down the tree-lined road, no cars in sight. Off to the east we can see the hills undulating like a postcard. We arrive at a lake, which is hidden in fields of wheat and accessible by a tangly forest trail around its edge. We spread out towels on a spot by the water’s edge. Marcus dives in and lazily backstrokes. Beetles whirr. The air is heavy with summertime sun. It is bliss.

* * *

In the afternoon, Lillo announces that we’re going plum-picking. We are required by Galiga “law” to ride in the front tray of his truck, and he careens through the long prickly grasses around the vegetable patch as we cling on for dear life. Jerking to a halt by the plum tree, Lillo raises the tray so we can stand and reach plums on the highest branches. He laughs uproariously at our protests.

Giampi is home from work in Florence and joins us. We ask him how many couchsurfers have passed through Galiga.

“Oh, two or three hundred,” he says. “We like the distraction; it’s entertaining.”

Have you had any bad ones? we ask.

“Oh, not really… One guy stole a computer and some money. But he had to carry it to the next village which is two hours’ walk away, and they caught him.” Giampi laughs. “We also had a nymphomaniac one year. That got awkward.”

The biggest problem they have with guests, however, is that they fall in love with Galiga and don’t want to leave. “People say to us, ‘great news, I’m staying!’ and we say, ‘no no, you have to leave, you can’t move into our home.’”

I look at my friend. It’s understandable, we’re both thinking.

Giampi and Lillo take us to dinner in a neighbouring village. We drive down winding country roads in the dappled evening sunlight. Lillo is strumming a guitar and he and Giampi sing a folk song about a man in love with his donkey. We don’t understand much, except the refrain: “Eeee-awwww! Eeeee-awwww!”

Tuscan dining

We arrive as the sun is setting. We sit outdoors under a trellis covered with creeping vines, along a long table eating lasagna and salad, drinking wine. Marcus strums the guitar and four weeks-old kittens frolic in the grass around the table, chasing fireflies.

Giampi’s girlfriend Giada lives here, and Lillo delights in propositioning her every opportunity he gets.

“I am like the hyena behind the lion,” he says of Giampi, casting his friend a sidelong look. “I wait until he is finished and then – POW! – I jump.” Giampi laughs. Giada rolls her eyes. She’s heard this before.

* * *

At breakfast, Lillo announces to my friend that last night he dreamed of her.”It was very erotic,” he says. “We sat on the bed and began to make the love, and in the corner there was a boy, he was watching us.” My friend is appropriately disturbed. All the Italians roar with laughter.

“You two girls, you are like the sun and the moon!” Lillo crows. My friend had incredibly pale skin and I am tanned, which is where this comparison stems from. But oh, it goes further. “I would like to go to bed with the moon and wake with the sun,” he leers at us. This being part of the obligatory daily come-on, we pay no attention.

My friend and I have been spending the days in a stupor, enjoying the ringing noises and silences of the countryside, hanging around the house and soaking up Galiga’s unique charms. We stir only for lunch, of salad, grilled zucchini and eggplant from the garden, and spaghetti flavoured with truffle oil. The Italian diet agrees with us.

Lillo, along with being a farmer/artist/fashion designer/perfumer, also makes his own alcohol, a potent 45 proof blend that he refers to as “the elements.” Alcohol with one ingredient, such as lemongrass, is called “the first element.” Two ingredients, lemongrass and mint, is “the second element”, each bottle building on the previous ingredients and adding one more, all the way up to the fifth element. To drink properly, according to Lillo, one must begin with a shot of the first element and work one’s way through the rest. Today I manage to get to the fourth element, but the alcohol is so potent that I fall asleep immediately after lunch.

* * *

Plum-picking from the raised tray of Lillo's tractor

“I have been married four times,” Lillo tells me one afternoon. “I would like to marry again, but I have a phobia of odd numbers. I think an odd-numbered marriage would not succeed.” He looks forlorn. I want to ask about his even-numbered marriages not succeeding but this seems cruel.

“The women, I love them,” is his explanation. Of his five children, the eldest is named Darwin and is obsessed with animals. The two youngest are aged five and seven and live in Galiga with their mother, the fourth wife.

“My wife, she leaves me for the plumber. They run away with the children. And I told her, ‘the children, they need both parents. Don’t be silly. Come home with the plumber and we can raise them together.’”

Now his ex-wife and her new partner live in the house next door, and Julia Luna and Lupo (Julie Moon and Wolf) run back and forth, oblivious to their unconventional living arrangements.

Lillo disdainfully refers to the plumber only by his job title. He takes my friend and me to meet him. Francisco seems like a nice enough man, and he gets up and shakes our hands. Not speaking Enlish, the conversation is brief.

Outside, Lillo rubs his hands together in satisfaction. “Did you see how he jump-ed? When I introduced him to Marcus he did not even get off the couch, but to meet you girls, he jump-ed up!” He is gleeful.

The way Marcus explains it, Lillo loves to parade nubile young couchsurfers past the man who took his family. “It’s like he’s saying, ‘well you might have my wife and kids, but look what I’ve got!’”

Galiga is beautiful but cursed, they Italians believe. No couple that has ever come to the village has survived. Its charm has a dark edge. None of them have had successful relationships since moving there. Lillo uses himself as a prime example. We are dubious.

* * *

The marble slab that welcomes passers-by and residents alike to Galiga

Marcus and Lillo have a special friendship. Left to their own devices in Galiga while the others work, they have formed a bond that most ofen involves sharing a footbath scented with Lillo’s perfumes, star-gazing and roaring with laughter. I can’t imagine a better cure for life-weariness.

Today, they have cooked up a project. Marcus is a stonemason by trade, and Lillo has found a huge slab of white marble. He directs Marcus to carve an Italian expression on the stone. All afternoon he chips away, and then a chuckling Lillo gathers us all together to see the masterwork unveiled.

The large slab of marble has BECCO CHI LEGGE engraved on it.

“It means, ‘he who reads this is a cuckold!’” Lillo chortles. It is the Galiga motto.

Together, he and Marcus use the tractor to transport the slab to the foot of the driveway that Lillo shares with his ex-wife and the man she left him for. They pour out cement and leave it there, covered, to set. By the time the couple returns, it’s permanent. They are not amused.

* * *

My friend and I were supposed to spend only two days in Galiga, but we stay five. Our last day we realise we had better see the city, so we spend the day eating our way around Florence. We want to buy the Galiga residents presents to express our extreme gratitude. This takes up the entire day.

By evening, we are desperate to escape Florence and get back to the farm. We haven’t visited a single museum or art gallery, and we could care less. We have a final dinner outside under the stars, and the Italians serenade us with a long song with multiple verses, none of which we understand. And when we leave, it feels like leaving family.

This story was published by Reportage Online and The West Australian.