Our neighbors down the street still cook with wood, and, we suspect, heat their home with it as well. Their chimney tells the tale, no matter how warm the day. Even this week, with temperatures at 37 C, brushing 100 F, the mid-day smoke has appeared.
We don’t know these neighbors, but every now and then we see them. She is elderly and plump and wears long skirts and a wary expression. He motors ever so slowly up and down the hill in his aged ape, frequently carrying precariously balanced fruit boxes with him, fuel for the stove. Where does he get them? I wish I could ask him, but they seem wary of strangers, and to them I suspect we are the strangest of the strange.
Other neighbors farther down the street seem to be laying in a good store of wood for the winter ahead. At least we are unable to think of any other reason for this massive collection of wooden pallets.
I can’t imagine having to struggle up the narrow stone stairs on the left to carry fuel to my home (if, in fact, the collector lives up there). In fact, I can’t imagine cooking and heating using fruit boxes and wooden pallets for fuel. But our neighbors do it, and I admire them for it – no doubt it’s the way people cooked for years, using whatever fuel was readily at hand. What a great way to recycle what otherwise might end up in the dump.
An Ex-Expatriate 
we live in an old stone farmhouse. we use a pot belly stove as our only heat source in our little house & reuse any wood we find to burn either for the stove or for our large fireplace in the kitchen of our agriturismo & the cook over it with a handy grill or the rotisserie! You tend to burn anything you can find to throw in there! It is fantastic way to use the resources around you! And who doesn’t love a crackling fire!!
That is wonderful – and amazing! Our house here is stone, too, and we have a little stove, but it in no way warms up the house enough in the winter. Do you get cold?
37 C????? Ouch….that blisters.
Living further north I’ve gotten quite familiar to the populace using wood on an every day basis — for example, the pizzaiolo would be scandalized if he made pizza in other than a wood-burning oven. The family of that same pizza boy also sells wood during the winter for residents in town – in nero.
Our neighbor across the street has a wood business as well as his trattoria; he sells mostly to the pizza shops, I think. But at least it’s real wood, not peach boxes and pallets!