It's the season of fairs here in northern Tuscany. The summer tourists have gone away and the beach clubs have all rolled up their umbrellas and stacked the deck chairs for the season. The boys at the pub have switched from cold white wine back to red and have moved their card game from the table outside under the shade tree to one inside. The wood-burning stove has not been lit yet, but it will be soon. The chestnuts have started to fall and we will need somewhere to roast them.

And every weekend now, there are little fairs in the towns and villages. Last weekend we went to a chocolate fair in Lucca and then to the book fair in Pisa. We foolishly restrained ourselves in Lucca (not wanting to buy too unseemly an amount of chocolate) and now we regret it. The book fair was a larger version of the Scholastic Book Fairs of my youth, with the same air of quiet excitement and discovery and the promise of staying up too late lost in reading something entrancing.

This weekend was a pepper fair in Camaiore and we bought four different kids of crushed hot peppers, a jar of tiny hot peppers stuffed with tuna, a long garlic braid, a jar of honeysuckle honey, two bottles of salted caramel rum, and two buddha hands -- the only time we've ever seen them in Italy -- and the buddha hand vendor gifted us a kaffir lime, which smells like heaven.

There will be lots of fairs now -- chestnut fairs and wild game fairs and medieval fairs and panettone fairs and olive fairs -- that will last until the Christmas fairs start in December. The choral society in Capezzano Monte is already practicing for their holiday concert.