Stay on a working farm

Each agriturismi stay has offered me a different experience of Italian farm life for a fraction the cost of a hotel; double rooms run anywhere from €35 to €300, but usually average around €55 to €125.

Of course, farmstays in popular regions, like Tuscany or the Piemonte wine regions, are going to cost on average more than those in Apulia or Sicily.

Many agriturismi require a three-night minimum stay (for some, a week).

Roughly half accept credit cards.

Sometimes you get four-star luxury and satellite TV. Sometimes you’re a straw's-width from sleeping in a stall. Most, though, are just what you'd expect from a farmhouse B&B: roomy and comfortably rustic, with simple comforts, solid country furnishings, and rural tranquility—barnyard noises excepted.

The hosts tend to be a sight friendlier than your average hotel desk clerk. Some invite guests to dine with them, family-style, in the farmhouse. One shepherd let me stir a bubbling pot of sheep's milk to help it on its way to becoming pecorino cheese. Vineyard owners love to crack open bottles of their best to guide you through the finer points of wine tasting, which brings me back to that farm in Piemonte.

Even better news is this: More and more agriturismi are opening restaurants featuring wonderfully huge, cheap, and hearty home-cooked dinners.

These usually consist of four or five hearty courses of food fresh from the fields and pastures just outside your window and often ringing it at a mind-blowingly inexpensive €30 to €45 per person for everything, including wine (table wine, of course, but one produced on-site, at a neighbor's, or at least by a member of the extended family).

Even those agriturismi that don't offer a restaurant for dinner almost always do breakfast—usually included in the rates and almost always excellent: a farmer's spread of freshly baked breads and pastries, homemade jams and marmalades, milk straight from the cow (so to speak), fresh fruits, and more

A country-comfy room at an agriturismo in Tuscany's Chianti region.Friendly vineyard owners is how I ended up, at La Cascina del Monastero, sitting on the back patio with Giuseppe and Velda di Grasso until well past midnight, sampling bottles of Barbera, Nebbiolo, and Barolo culled from the ghostly, moonlit rows of vines around us.

Their seven-year-old son played shy until he found out I was from Philadelphia. "Just like the cheese!" He said. His parents laughed, shooed him off to bed, and explained that American cream cheese was a current fad in Italy.

Our talk drifted to the subject of agriturismo itself, how it has become a way for farmers to make ends meet, and how family vintners even in this storied, storybook corner of Italy are having a rough time in this era of shrinking subsidies and growing wine conglomerates. Giuseppe told me of a neighbor who had recently died in a tractor accident.

"The family doesn't know how it can keep the vineyard," he said. Velda said she still shudders to imagine the poor wife, explaining to their nine-year-old son that his father was gone and never coming back. Giuseppe leaned forward in his chair with a sober look.

"The morning after he died, the widow was woken up by the sound of machinery," he said. "She went into the cellar to find her son running the grape press. She asked what on earth he was doing, and he said 'Papá is gone. Now it is up to me to make the wine.'"

Velda shook her head and excused herself. Giuseppe and I stayed up an hour longer, draining the last bottle and talking of happier things. As I climbed the outer stairs to my room, Giuseppe mentioned that he'd be leaving early tomorrow for a business trip, but would leave breakfast out for me.

Next morning, after my clamorous 6am wake-up call, I padded down into the great room to find a sumptuous spread of cheeses and prosciutto, warm bread, homemade marmalade, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and milk so fresh it mooed. There was a clanking noise coming from behind a pair of giant barn doors, and I cracked them open to peek inside.

The Di Grassos' young son was in there, running the bottling machine, making the wine while Papá was gone.

• Agriturismo (farm stays)
• Booking.com
• Hotels.com
• Terranostra.it
• Turismoverde.it
• Agriturist.it