Task 2. The tree climbers of Pompeii.
Um, it's another one of my adventures as a tourist, um, finding out things you really don't expect to find out when you went to the place.
I went to Pompeii and of course what you go to Pompeii for is, er, the archaeology.
To see the ruins. To see the ruins.
I was actually seeing the ruins but, um, suddenly my attention was caught by something else.
I was just walking round the corner of a ruin, into a group of trees, pine trees, and I was just looking at them, admiring them and suddenly I saw a man halfway up this tree, and I was looking at him, so all I could see was his hands and his feet and he was about 20 or 30 feet up.
I thought, Goodness, what's going on here, has he got a ladder or hasn't he?
So I walked round to see if he had a ladder.
No, he just gone straight up the tree.
He'd shinned up the tree.
He'd shinned up the tree, like a monkey.
More or less, except he was a rather middle-aged monkey, he was, er, he was all of 50, and, oh, god, what's going on here?
I walked a bit further and I saw other people either up trees or preparing to go up the trees, and then I noticed a man standing there directing them, a sort of foreman, and began to wonder what on earth was going on, and then on the ground I saw there were all these polythene buckets and they were full of pine cones and of course what they were doing was collecting pine cones.
And I thought, well, how tidy of them to collect pine cones to stop the ruins being, um, made untidy with all these things.
Then I saw there was a lorry, full of pine cones, this was getting ridiculous.
They were really collecting them in a big way.
So, I, um, asked the foreman what was going on, he said, well, you know, um, pine nuts are extremely sought after and valuable in the food industry in Italy.
For food, (Yeah), not fuel.
I thought you were going to say they were going to put (burn) them on a fire.
Yes.
Well, they might burn the, er, cones when they've finished with them, but inside these cones are little white things like nuts.
And I realized they're used in the Italian cooking quite a lot, in, er, there's a particular sauce that goes with spaghetti, erm, from Genova, I think, called pesto in which these nuts are grounded up and of course they come in cakes and sweets and things like that.
So it's quite a delicacy.
It's quite a delicacy.
And of course I never thought of how they actually got them, 'cos you can't imagine having a pine nut farm.
So what he said happens is that private firms like his buy a licence off the Italian State for the right to go round places like Pompeii, archaeological sites and things, and systematically collect all the pine cones that come off the trees and the similar in the, in the forest.
Of course, they have to go up the tree because by the time, it's fallen, the food isn't any good.That's right, they're pulling them down and he said they were very good at, um, recognizing which ones were ready and which one were a bit hard and etc.
Each of them had a sort of stick with a hook at the end which they were using to pull the pines off, off the trees but clearly it wasn't enough to sit around and wait till they fell down.
You had to do something about it.
There they were.
So that was, er, the end of my looking at the ruins for about half an hour.
I was so fascinated by this strange form of agriculture.
What you don't intend to see is always the most interesting.
Much more interesting.