SEASONAL EATING IN ITALY: STRAWBERRIES BELONG TO MAY

Client: Green Sea Shells
24 September 2025

Shortly after I moved to Italy from Canada, I found myself in a rural cascina, a farmhouse, hungry for fresh fruit and scanning for strawberries. It was November. In Toronto, I could buy strawberries year-round — pale and watery in winter, perhaps, but always there, wrapped in plastic and flown from far away.

There, in the Lombardy countryside, the farmer gave me a look somewhere between bemused and impatient. “Fragole? Beh, devi tornare a maggio,” he said, as if it were obvious. Strawberries belong to May, not to November.

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