The fabulous and fabled porcini mushrooms are still being brought down from the mountains surrounding Barga and carried each evening triumphantly into the city to be put in front of the waiting customers sitting expectantly, forks in hand, in the restaurants. In fact it has become almost a spectator sport as the three or four main wild mushroom hunters vie with each other to bring down the best and the most porcini that they can find.
Their arrival in the piazza brings up roars of approval as people rushed to the scales to see just how many kilos have been brought in.
What was once a fiercely protected occupation with precise locations on where to find the best mushrooms handed down through the families has recently undergone a startling new technological change with one or two mushroom hunters using handheld GPS satellite locators to mark when and where mushrooms were found enabling them a precision which up until now had been difficult.
The traditionalists laugh in their face pointing out that the GPS have difficulty keeping their accuracy under trees – exactly where the porcini found.
This week a new figure of folklore was added to this rich tapestry of claims, counterclaims, stories and just downright lies (most mushroom hunters by nature never actually tell the truth on just where they did find their precious porcini – quite often quoting locations kilometers away from the real closely guarded secret finding place.)
Into the piazza walked Roberto Conti with a fine specimen of a porcini mushroom weighing in at 200 g and instead of the long and sometimes exhausting trudge up into the mountains he more or less tripped over the mushroom just 5 metres from the carpark outside Barga Vecchia.
Open mouths and a few disbelieving stares all round the piazza.