the clump of fungus (about the size of a garlic bulb) is shaved over a steaming plate of fettuccine in sweet butter or a puree of wild mushroom soup with roasted barley. Caught in the steamy vapors, the truffle’s aroma enchants the nostrils with an otherworldly quality, at once sublime and disturbing. In some cases, a deep whiff or mouthful of fresh truffle has been known to cause women of weak constitutions to faint and men to awkwardly contend with a sudden bastone tenting up their trousers and colliding against the underside of the dinner table. In fact, the age-old Tuscan adage for good luck—Tocando Legno (knock wood)—was widely believed to have originated with ancient truffle hunters who equated good fortune with truffle-inspired erections knocking against wooden tables.

In order to maintain the truffle’s elevated allure and price, truffle hunters have historically exaggerated both the mysteries of the fungus and their own prowess to excavate it. But, in truth, a truffle hunter can only be as good as the pig he has trained. Pigs have extraordinary olfactory capabilities, and well-trained truffle-hunting sows, like Benito’s, are skilled enough to locate the faint gaseous aroma of a ripe truffle from five hundred paces out, all the more impressive considering truffles grow an average of six inches under the forest bed.

Benito’s call of “Tartufi!” shot through the forest and pierced the bull’s-eye of Giuseppe’s ire. The animalistic echo of his underling’s voice startled Giuseppe and his toes instinctively clenched inside his boots. This slight, near imperceptible twitch of muscle and tendon aroused Giuseppe’s gout and sent a painful spasm up his nervous system. His trigger finger quivered at the worst possible moment and he watched his ivory-tipped bolt 4—purchased in Pistoia at some cost—miss its target and lodge irrevocably into the thick bark of a chestnut tree.

“Vaffanculo!” Giuseppe murmured unpleasantly as he lowered his crossbow and watched his would-be prey bound into oblivion. “Benito.” Giuseppe said it like a curse word. It was bad enough to lose a good kill and the opportunity to torment his stepdaughter by forcing her to skin and roast a rabbitte bunnio; but to waste such a fine and costly arrow was especially irksome.

“Merda,” huffed Giuseppe as he finally relented in his struggle to remove the impacted arrow when something caught his eye. “Merda,” Giuseppe said again, this time with an inquisitive tone. There, just to the side of the tree, basking in a slender stream of sunlight and growing up from the loose, decomposed forest bed, sat an enormous patch of some two hundred mushrooms. “Sacra merda!” By their shape—slim two-inch stems and smallish, wavy caps—he knew precisely what he had found.

Giuseppe removed a small cloth from his pocket and spread it on the ground. He hadn’t seen this type of mushroom in years, but remembered it well and knew this patch he’d come upon, once extracted of its toxins, would make enough poison to turn half the village into a drooling mass of idiots. Giuseppe reached inside his right boot and removed a gleaming, ox-bone-handled seven-inch dagger. He used its sharp tip to loosen the soil under the mushrooms, pluck them up and set them on the cloth.

While these particular fungi had not the gastronomic value of the truffle, they were still quite valuable. Fungi di Santo, they were called: Saint’s Mushrooms. The name, rightly or wrongly, was attributed to a sect of 12th-century Gnostic monks, Il Ordo Fratrum Risata, Order of the Laughing Brothers, who were believed to use the mushrooms as part of their religious practices. The fungi were a poison of sorts, and while not wholly lethal, once ingested they brought on visions and dementia, fits of laughter and a special kinship with nature. The intoxication typically lasted six or so hours; but a highly concentrated dose, by Giuseppe’s recollection, could severely alter the mind for an extended period of time and, in certain instances, cause permanent derangement.

As a teenager in Rome, Giuseppe had helped his uncle use Fungi di Santo-tainted wine to turn a cadre of pompous French diplomats into a choir of giggling girls. On another occasion, he and his uncle used the same fungi-laced wine to transform a reserved and ruthless bishop into a babbling fool before the Pope. However, when the irate bishop discovered the whereabouts of the boy who’d delivered the tainted wine, it was a fifteen-year-old Giuseppe who took the fall for his uncle and the Meducci Cardinal who hired them. For the offense, Giuseppe spent two years