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up in the air on a windy day so that the shaft would fly away and the wheat would fall on the ground. A sieve was used to complete this process. As I mentioned, each family piled its wheat bundles in the shape of a house with a pointed roof to allow the rain to run down.
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This wheat pile was called "met" in dialect, probably from the Latin "meta", a marker and by extension a mound. The boys of the village used to play hide and seek in the narrow alleys among these piles. Then the villagers scheduled the processing of the wheat with the electric combine placed in the middle of Colle Rosso. It was an old machine where the wheat sheaves were fed into an opening on top of the machine where a bladed cylinder span horizontally. In the process the wheat would pour clean from three openingsi n the rear |
of the machine, while the hay was spewed out in the front. The wheat was taken home in sacks by donkeys or carried by men on their shoulders or by women on their heads. The hay was baled into the "rit" (from the Latin retis, net), a rope net attached to two poles, that
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when tied would form a cylindrical bale. These bales were usually carried by women on their heads and taken to hay lofts located above stables. Children loved the task of packing the hay in the lofts, it was a safe trampoline in which to bounce. |
At the end of the day all the participants were rewarded with a huge dinner. The wheat was stored in sacks in cool and dry rooms. During the year it was brought to the mills where it was turned into flour. The miller was usually paid in flour. The flour was used for the two most important staple food of the village: pasta and bread. The pasta was freshly made by the housewives as needed. On special occasions it was made with eggs
and cut by hand as tagliolini or fettuccine, or cut with the famous
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regional "maccarunar", also known as the guitar. This was a rectangular wooden frame with stretched steel wires on top of which the dough sheets were rolled with a rolling pin. |
The pasta that fell through had the typical square shape of the
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