(Sculpture by Dorino Ouvrier)
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The chestnuts were eaten roasted or boiled, or alernatively dried with wine or milk, and with their flour a great number of dishes were cooked( bread, focaccias, soups, chestnut cakes).
From the tannin rich bark a decoction was extracted and used as an astringent for blushed skin, while the product that was obtained from the trashing of the dried chestnuts was shedded on women's hair to make copper-coloured
dyes. The chestnut husks and leaves were stacked, covered with earth and then slowly burnt down; the earth and the ash that remained were scattered in the cornfields before the sowing, and so they were used as a corrective for
the ground.
The wood was used to built agricultural tools, vineyard stakes, floors, beams for roofs, doors and windows, and also tables ond other furnitures. And moreover, before the synthetic hide tanner was in use, it was used in chemical
industries to tan hides to make leather. Today, the use of chestnut wood is drasticly reduced; it's still used for the stakes and for little assortments, chip panels and sometimes it's carved to create great sculptures.
In Vallombrosa (in Mugello, on the Appennines near Florence) there was the tradition, for the birth of a child, to graft some chestnut trees with quick growth essences to be able to use the wood of those trees to built the furnitures
for his marriage.
In Valle d'Aosta the woody excrescences of the stumps or of the trunks of fruit bearing chestnut groves are used to built "fiolet", "tsan" and "rebatta", which are the spheres used in the
homonimous traditional games. |
