Spring in Italy Begins with a Poppy

What is it about poppies ?

From my earliest childhood I have loved them, even though they have for decades eluded me when I have tried to plant them on my terrace. I have in fact given up entirely, and now just wait, as late winter gives way to early spring, then late spring, to my first annual spotting of a spontaneous poppy somewhere in Italy.

I always write the day down, and the place, just as I do the first day I hear the haunting cry of the swift in the sky. Some years that first poppy has been May 2, at Trajan’s Forum in Rome…

one year at the ancient Roman site of Carsulae in Umbria, on April 27.

One year was at Paestum, on May 14.

Another year was at Selinunte, in western Sicily, tucked into an ancient Greek temple base, on March 30.

Whenever and wherever, my heart is full, and only recently have I wondered why this is. Is it because papaver rhoeas, common corn poppies, like hollyhocks in England, or capers or fig trees or other ancient and magnificent self seeders, find their way so effectively into cracks of stone, or bases of ancient walls, or places where it seems so impossible that they might be so well suited, and spring forth, singly or in flushes, so joyfully, so irrepresibly ?

Might it be my earlier Italian childhood memories of early summer picnics, and, when the food was all gone and my parents lazed on the picnic cloth, drinking wine, and I, wandering off, would pull up poppies by their surprisingly sturdy stems and rub the velvety, richly red petals along my cheeks creating a memory that remains fresh as if it were yesterday ?

Or was it that the first song I ever learned, sung again and again in my Montessori nursery school, the San Remo 1952 winner, Papaveri e papere, a joyful tune full of tongue twisters that took me several years to master, and that for all of its sunny imagery and the delightful duo of an enamored duck and poppy, has a melancholic finish. Still, whenever I, as a small child, completed singing all of the verses and my heart felt a little heavy to consider the threshing of the poppy, I would begin singing it immediately again and be transported straight back into the sunny fields and the happy presence of the protagonist duck and poppy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBAqqF3IjCk&ab_channel=NillaPizzi-Topic

Insider’s Italy spring and summer destinations will bring you to many of my favorite poppy locations. None is more beautiful than the Piano Grande plateau, 4200 feet above sea level in the central Italian Apennine mountains and very close to the border with Marche.

The wild flower show is of a beauty not fully describable, but must be seen — with the purply grey lentil flower playing foil to the blue gentian, buttercups, asphodels, clovers, wood sorrels and of course the vivid red poppy.

My mother, with her long memory reaching back to years well before the War—and before herbicides—used to say that Italy was once one great flush of poppies, bursting into bloom as soon as the weather turned warm in Sicily. The poppies would appear first in the south and then, over the course of spring and summer, move steadily northward — rolling wave-like through the country, all the way to the mountainous Trentino-Alto Adige and Piedmont.

They were her favorite wildflower too, and as she would say, who could resist a poppy—especially an Italian one ?

www.insidersitaly.com