The amazing adventures of Pig Boy

Our lovely Italian villa was not actually a villa but a converted 400-year old water mill, built by monks to harness a mountain spring at its source to mill grain. It is high on a hillside outside of Orvieto, near a little townlet called Rocca Ripesena, which is notable enough to appear on the map of Umbria in the famous Map Room at the Vatican, thanks to an alleged stopover there by Lars Porsena of Clusium, an Etruscan king of the Romans.

But I digress.

One of the things that surprised me about Umbria was how much of it is still forrested, given that people have lived there for thousands of years. One day, Enrico hiked up the path into the woods behind our house, and returned with an amazing tale: He had encountered a wild boar, complete with tusks and a gaggle of little boarlets.

This is not Wilbur we're talking about here. Wild board have tusks, and are ill-tempered. We'd seen the tusks on the stuffed boars displayed outside butcher shops up in the walled town, purveyors of the regional speciality, boar sausage.

Enrico froze on the trail, admiring the piglets, until the mama appeared and let out a bone-chilling squeal-roar. Enrico looked for a tree to climb. But Mama Boar took off, followed by her many offspring, and Enrico hightailed it back to the villa, where he regaled us with this story.

The next day, I saw the proprietorof our house, Signore Bianco. Signore Bianco's father was an architect who had purchased the abandoned mill in the 1970s and converted it into a house, so S. Bianco had been playing in the stream and walking the woods since he was a small child. Is it common to see wild boar up there, I asked? He looked puzzled, so I explained about Enrico's meeting with the boar. We were speaking Italian, and his puzzlement was such that I confirmed I was using the correct word - cinghiale.

He shook his head in amazement. "It is rare, incredibly rare, to see cinghiali. Especially with babies, that many young, it is totally unheard of. For many years there was a famous boar hunt on this hill, and people came from all over Italy, so the boars are fearful of people." He himself had been charged by a boar on a coule of occasions over many years, and although he was on a mountain bike and was able to escape unscathed, the experience was frightening. He politely and delicately inquired as to whether my husband was, perhaps, prone to exaggeration? Quite the contrary, I assured him. Well, he said, he would pass on news of the sighting to a friend in the wildlife division who was tracking the return of the boar to the area. But this was a highly unusual event and we should not fear to hike up the trail.

The next day, Enrico hiked up again - and again, he encountered a boar. The next evening, he spotted one of the babies in our driveway right outside the house. Either the boars had become a lot less rare, or Enrico was a certifiable boar magnet.

The next time I saw Sr. Bianco, I updated him on the additional boar sightings. He shook his head in astonishment. "Truly, this is very, very rare." We were speaking English this time, and Sr. Bianco struggled to find the right words. "Your husband, he must have...how do you say...the capacity of stop."

I laughed. It was an odd phrase, but I knew exactly what he meant: The ability to be quiet, still, non-disruptive. "Yes," I confirmed, "my husband definitely has the capacity of stop."

Funny thing is, before all of this started, we were all sitting on the terrace with our delighful Orvieto Classico Superiore wine and debating what role we would want to play on the reality TV show we would develop, in which everyone would live a medieval-style life on a single self-contained Umbrian hill for several months. Without hesitation, Enrico picked the role of Pig Boy. "The pigs are important to the community, so everybody needs Pig Boy," he explained, "but nobody bothers him because of the smell." Little did he know how apt that designation would prove to be.