I visit Finotello at his farm to see him harvest the castraùre. It’s a muggy day with a hot, salty breeze, and the earth is springy after days of rain. The artichoke plants are slowly opening up in the sun. Finotello shows me how to cut a castraùra gently off the stalk with the traditional curved knife, which he holsters in the pocket of his overalls between rows. The plants used to be fertilised with scoasse (garbage in Venetian dialect), a mix of fish bones and old crab shells. “We can’t do that anymore because there’s too much plastic in the food system,” Finotello tells me, shrugging. “We’d just be feeding the plants plastic.”
When he finishes harvesting the small field, he counts how many castraùre he picked: 105. He then dumps the basket in the back of his trailer and looks at me, grinning. “Now you need to eat some.”
At the farmhouse, his mother, Mirella Bubacco, is holding court in a kitchen busy with the detritus of the recent Italian Easter celebration: chocolate eggs and endless cups of espresso next to slices of colomba, a type of Italian Easter cake. Mirella is warm, businesslike – and very chatty.
“Don’t ever eat it as an antipasto!” she warns me, a paring knife in one hand. “The taste lingers in your mouth, and it’ll alter the taste of your first course.” She insists that it is best eaten in the very simple Venetian style: uncooked, julienned, with a ribbon of light-tasting olive oil, a bit of salt and shavings of Grana Padano. “The earth here on Sant’Erasmo is all the condiment you need!”