On a sun-roasted hillside we passed two old men making hay, turning the cut grass with long rakes. We stopped to talk with one of the men, Ugo, who was in his late sixties. The other man was his older brother. Ugo had cows. Each cow consumed 13 kilos of hay a day. Each bale of hay weighed 18 kilos. The hillside they were working probably produced about 50 bales. The rest of the animal feed was bought. Ugo went on to explain that they harvested hay four times a year from the field. There was even a harvest in early November, around the feast day of San Martino, when a dry wind blew down from the Valtellina and across the lake. It was hard work under that roasting sun. I imagined that this was work that had been done for centuries. It was clear that nobody would take on the task once Ugo decided to hang up his rake which, in turn, meant sadly that the landscape would change. Ugo pointed out, though, that twenty years ago the field had been covered in vines. They had been grubbed up and the field given over to grass because viticulture was too labour intensive. So the landscape had in fact changed in the recent past. It was the same up in the forests in the valleys. Francis (Jacobs) pointed to the terraces, hidden by undergrowth, that had once been cultivated, the unruly ash trees that had once been regularly pollarded to manufacture charcoal, and the ancient chestnut trees, their trunks strangled by undergrowth, that had not so long ago been tended and harvested to manufacture flour.