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My human mom told me we were going to meet a new kind of animal in Piedmont. I had to be on best behavior, she said, because dogs are not friendly to these other creatures, and we can pay a prickly price for our intrusiveness.
Our destination was Centro Recupero Ricci “La Ninna” in Novello, a village about 40 kilometres northeast of Cuneo. I didn’t know what “ricci” (hedgehogs) were but my mom told me I had encountered one near Mantova years ago. I didn’t remember because she had pulled me away before I got too close. The car ride took us about two hours from our home north of Milan.
Novello is a tiny hillside community of squat stone structures, burnt sienna tile roofs, and squared towers. Its origins are Roman, so parking on the narrow streets was challenging. My mom parked near a caffé and we walked a block to a three-story building dating from the 1700s. It had a wooden door and a metal plaque on which the name, Centro Recupero Ricci “La Ninna”, was engraved.
Even from the outside, I could smell fascinating new odors — earthy, pungent, slightly acrid. When the door opened, we found ourselves in a room crowded with stacked cages hosting bristling black balls, and a man sitting at a table with his back to us. He was feeding one small black ball a beige puree with a metal spoon. The tabletop (or maybe it was a desk) was covered by a…
