I’ve been having nightmares recently — images of haunted, ancient buildings, scary-looking storytellers with harsh words and amazing powers, “gifts” that are full of trickery and cruel irony invade my thoughts throughout the night. To combat this nighttime onslaught, I’ve been forcing myself to have happy daydreams. Some of my best daydreams involve travel: places I’ve visited and been enchanted by. One such place is southern Italy and a wonderful vacation spent in the area stretching from Naples to Paestum. Apart from the fragrant foods of Campania — ripe San Marzano tomatoes “baking” in the sunshine, limoncello, mozzarella di bufala, pizzas cooking in wood-burning ovens, cinnamon-scented sfogliatella — I remember one afternoon spent at Pompeii, where the air was scented with a combination of sweet smoke (from Vesuvius?) and flowers. For once, the flowers outdid the smoke…because the flowers were ginestra (Genista juncea).

Ginestra (also known as broom) is part of a big plant family — the legume (Fabaceae) group. As I was searching online, trying to figure out the type of broom I smelled at Pompeii, I saw the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi was inspired by broom to write his poem The Ginestra, or The Flower of the Wilderness…

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