In cheese we trust

Living in a country that is all about eating local sometimes we want to run wild and eat things that aren’t produced within 50 miles of where we live. I’m sure this is not a problem in faraway, exotic places like Rome or Milan, where I bet they can buy whatever they want, but in our rural village, to pick an example, our cheese choices are restricted to fifty shades of pecorino. A nice French-style goat cheese? No way.

My summer adventure introduced me to how great a real fontina cheese can be—produced by a certain breed of cows eating native grasses in the Val D’Aosta in only select pastures, with the cheese created in the hallowed, ancient tradition—and we decided to try ordering some from the tiny cheese shop we’d found in Aosta, Erbavoglio, that said on their website that they do mail order.

John jumped into action and was emailing back and forth with the cheesemonger. He was in the middle of telling me that he needed to write to the store again as he hadn’t heard back about the order when the doorbell rang.

At the front gate was a large package. From Erbavoglio. The puzzling thing is that we hadn’t given them any payment information at all. But here was our cheese.

John emailed them yesterday to ask how to pay. They haven’t gotten back to us yet.

We did a documentary for HP interviewing a bunch of people who had worked directly with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who created one of the greatest company cultures of all time. One story that has always stuck with me was that Bill insisted that the tools were left unlocked and available 24-hours a day. People thought he was nuts—employees will steal stuff. His response was that of course a few would, but the pleasure and creativity that the rest would have from being able to test out ideas (and the resulting products which made them hugely successful and profitable) would more than outweigh a few bad eggs. My favorite local linen maker ships all over the world and is giving Itch readers a 20% discount. And a great moment with cheese.

Our experience in Italy, which granted is a rural one, is that payment almost always works on trust, and more often than not we have to ask the dentist, or the carpenter, or in this case the cheese store, for the amount and how they want to be paid. These moments fill me with delight. The extraordinary sense of trust that people will do the right thing, and by god I am sure they usually do.