Motovun is famous for truffles. And for the barking of truffle dogs, caged around town in tiny chicken-wire kennels. There are about two-thousand such dogs in the area, and about one-thousand people dedicated to truffles. One often hears that there are too many dogs and people in this lucrative trade. The woods around Motovun are being depleted. Every year there are fewer and fewer truffles. This season the price of this delicacy has reached almost three-thousand euros per kilogram. “This is our just desert,” say many people in earnest. Everyone I know tells me that they have had no luck this month, which is supposed to be the best. They found nothing at all. Zilch. Simply put, it is high time to regulate the overheated market. But when I mentioned all this to some friends from abroad, who had lived here for years, they laughed: “The story is the same each and every season.” “But,” I interjected, “even my closest friends tell me the same thing.” “Everyone lies about truffles,” the argument went. “Why?” “Because the best dogs are regularly poisoned and the best kennels have a habit of catching on fire.” Poison and arson… I could not but think of my mother, who loved to say that Istrians were the mildest people of all.

Addendum (October 10, 2003)

“Remember,” writes one of my friends from Motovun upon receiving this piece as an electronic postcard, “there are few real Istrians in our town.” True enough, almost everyone here came by bus from Međimurje and Slavonia when the Italians left in droves after World War II, although the proportion of indigenous Istrians is considerably larger in the surrounding villages. My mother would have been relieved. No, she would have been elated.