In 1853, in Budrio, a town outside Bologna, a seventeen-year-old named Giuseppe Donati was trying to build a cornet out of clay.

It broke.

He kept what was left. Cut ten holes into it. Named it in Bolognese dialect after the animal it resembled.

Ucarèina. Little goose.

Clay whistles had existed for thousands of years before him. China, South America, Africa. Beautiful objects. Toys, mostly. None of them could play a proper scale, which means none of them could play a proper song.

Donati's could.

By 1863 he had a quintet performing Verdi and Rossini on clay geese. By 1869 they were playing Bologna, then Paris, Vienna, Moscow. The little goose left Budrio and kept going.

It reached Japan in the following century and settled into Japanese musical life so thoroughly that by the time Shigeru Miyamoto was building the biggest game of 1998, the instrument felt like it had always been his.

His words: "I really wanted to put in an ocarina. It seemed really Zelda-esque."

Nintendo has been quietly Italian for a long time, and not only through the plumber. Take Super Mario Sunshine. The whole island runs on our language. Bianco. Ricco. Sirena. Pinna. Pianta. Corona. Delfino.

So somewhere tonight a twelve-year-old is playing the Song of Storms from memory, with no idea that the object making that sound is named after a goose, or that in Budrio there is still a workshop where a man named Fabio Menaglio has been shaping them by hand since 1989.

That gap is the entire reason I do what I do.

Italy is not short on things to look at. Italy is short on people willing to walk you into the room where the thing is still being made, in Italian, on a Tuesday, and let you stay long enough that the man inside starts talking to you like you belong there.

Seeing the workshop gives you a photograph.

Being expected at the workshop gives you something else.

That is the difference I build a year around. And because every year is built around you and the things that you actually care about, an ocarina maker outside Bologna only appears in your year if the ocarina means something in your house.

If your obsession is bread, or boats, or church organs, or the exact reason Sicilian marzipan looks like fruit, that goes in instead.

Here is the part I have to be straight about.

I take ten people or families a year. Ten is not a marketing number, it is a capacity number, and one of the ten is already taken.

Autumn is the right moment to begin. The country goes quiet, the workshops open back up, and if we start now, by spring you are not arriving anywhere. You are returning.

If you want to hear more, reply here and tell me one thing your year would have to include. One line is plenty. I read every one myself.

la Capitana

I run one thing. The Belonging Year, ten a year, and yours would be built around you.

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