Lunch at an Agri-tourismo

Do not move to Italy if you have ever come here on holiday and loved it. If that is the case, Italy is not for you. All the things that you loved about Italy when you came here are the very things you will begin to loathe once you live here.

The Food: Ah, this is actually a whole book in itself. There is an image of Italy as a relaxed, take it as you find it kind of place when in fact the opposite is true. In reality, it is Germany without the clean streets and organised politics. There are rigid and hard-adhered to rules regarding food, the ingestion and digestion of which is strictly controlled. Everyone knows the Capuccino rule (never after 11am), however where else is it possible to not be able to buy food at lunch hour because the shops have shut, it being lunch time? Lunch, or 'il pranzo', occurs between 1 - 3pm and you will generally, outside of the larger towns, not find a soul in the street as they are all at home having lunch. This includes the purveyors of lunchtime fare - well, they have to eat too, right? Dinner is 8pm unless it's a special occasion. Lunch these days is not the long drawn-out affair it used to be, however if you are invited to a birthday or celebration lunch, if you are lucky at an agri-tourismo, this will generally take the same form.

An agri-tourismo is a restaurant in the countryside which provides the kind of food in the kind of setting that liberal media people rave about when they go back to their north London buddies. They can also be bed and breakfast establishments and the best ones are worth the grinding down pot-holed tracks and bramble scratches all over your car paintwork to get there. They will grow and produce their own food, being organic food without the big smug Organic label - it is just how the animals and vegetables have always been grown and reared. There is no menu other than the set menu - you get what you are given and unless you refuse, you are going to get the lot.

This begins with bread, which if you have small children is hopefully placed on the table as soon as possible to stop them moaning they are hungry, and often some delicious dark-green fruity olive oil to dip the bread in. Then come the anti-pasti - proscuitto crudo, cheeses, bruschetta, olives, some kind of cold or warm bean stew - to which you try to restrict yourself to just a couple of spoonfuls - and various other local specialities. This is a trap set for anyone who doesn't realise that they are in for a marathon, not a sprint. You will be delighted with this array of delicacies and will happily be picking away until the many dishes are empty not realising that you will be eating for another three hours when you are already full up after the first dishes - which don't even truly represent a first course. You will live to regret all the bread you dipped in the delicious olive oil before the anti-pasti were even served...

Next the primi piatti - the first course. 'First course' is a mis-nomer. In fact, there will generally be two courses of the first course, which is the pasta course. There will be two different kinds of pasta, for example fettucine with funghi porcini and THEN maltagliatti with chinghiali - pasta with wild boar sauce. Both will be delicious and if you were brought up to eat everything on your plate, then you will be starting to get into real trouble by the end of the fettuccini.

This is a leisurely lunch, so there is no rush - and thankfully for parents of small children and smokers, there are plenty of pauses in between dishes. As the restaurant produces its own livestock there will be plenty of animals to keep the children occupied, chasing the chickens or going to say 'baa' to the sheep, avoiding the anti-social sheep dogs which are like St Bernards crossed with Labradors and rarely respond well to kindness. The agri-tourismi are in the countryside and if you have picked well, there will be lovely views to admire and swings and a slide for the children - often rickety and with exposed nails in unexpected places, however Italy is a land that Health and Safety has not yet breached, so it is up to you the parent to assure your child's safety, which seems a rather savage thing to do after so much hand-holding and scolding from a nanny state.

After your cigarette/ run in the garden with the kids, it's time to go back to table for the next round. The segundi piatti. This is the meat course - and again, there will be lots of it. It could be a slices of beef, or chunks of home-bred lamb, or pork chops - or indeed it could be all three. The waiter will drop meat onto your plate until you ask him to stop. Once he is done throwing meat at you, he will come round again with vegetables, although really by this time your stomach will be protesting so much that the thought of ingesting even one of the fatty roast potatoes, oven-cooked with rosemary, will be just too much.

The ancient Romans must have been eating along the same lines when they came up with the 'vomitarium' - in between courses they would retire to regurgitate all the food that they had just eaten so they could carry on with the feast. Although it is unlikely you will have been served any blackbirds, you will by the end of lunch be feeling that Romans actually had exactly the right idea. Your groaning and distended stomach will be begging to be shown to the vomitarium.

Another pause ensues which should be used for lifting your sated bones into the garden and moving about a bit to start the digestion process - something which is extremely important to the Italians. 'Digerire' is a subject which is talked about at length - everything can be placed either into categories of food which can be digested easily or with difficulty. Even after such a preposterously large lunch, there will still be complaints that this or that is hard to digest. Not the fact that you have eaten enough food to keep a family of four going for a week, of course. That has nothing to do with it.

So finally one or two desserts will be served for the troopers still able to force a mouthful more down and then - the 'digestivi' - a grappa or other such stong liquor will be served 'to aid digestion'. Coffee is also served, tiny tiny mouthfuls, which are also aids to digestion.

You will finally stagger back to your car, several kilos heavier than when you arrived declaring that next time you will not pig out on the anti-pasti. Which, of course, is what you always say...