Cannons and Corn

Our country home in the Lunigiana is quiet and peaceful. Mostly. They even turn the church bells off at night.

But in Fall, when the corn becomes ripe, cannons blast a single shot every half hour during the night.

When I asked neighbor Enrico about the noise, he waved me off and said, "It's just another of Bush's wars."

After we laughed a bit he got all serious on me. "It's to scare the wild boar away from the corn."

You see, the corn isn't for animals, nor is it to be eaten by humans after boiling a bit. It's flint corn for polenta. Folks around here dry it on their patios and wait for the rains to come so that the 300 year old water-driven mill and its basalt wheels can grind it into polenta. It's not an industrial crop. It's something that comes out of people's gardens and, as you might expect, is much more intensely flavored than the industrial polenta selling for a euro per half-kilo in the stores.

The thing is, the wild boar love the stuff. They come out of the darkness to mess up the fields and eat the corn. Evidently the occasional noise from a cannon makes them less likely to steal corn.

So remember to eat your polenta with wild boar sauce. It evens things out.