I’ve never been hunting before, and it’s even more macho than I’d feared.

I’m with Luigi di Lello in the backwoods of Abruzzo, scratching and stumbling across a murderous slope on the jungly fringes of his farm.

More than once I lose my footing and go skidding past him through the sweet peas and the brambles, grabbing at tree trunks and desperately dodging the rocky patches.

“Don’t tread there,” Luigi shouts. “Snakes!” I wouldn’t mind, except that I’m clutching a short, scarily sharp knife. One tumble and I’m more than capable of bayoneting myself.

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Abruzzo is an underrated Italian region squeezed between the Apennines and the Adriatic, just across the mountains from Rome. My guidebook says that bears wander here — wolves, too — and wild boar is on the menu at every village trattoria. But our quarry today isn’t quite as dangerous as that.

“There’s one,” Luigi yelps suddenly. “There, under that bush. See it? See?”

I do, I do... and with one slash of the knife, it is writhing in my satchel — a slinky green stem of wild asparagus, a treat so prized by the locals that they stage annual asparagus-hunting cham­p­ionships, awarding a cup to the person who stalks the most stalks.

An hour or so later, when we mosey home through Luigi’s tidy grapevines, I’ve got two bags full of spears, two shins full of scratches and a sweaty sense of achievement.

Cookery holidays aren’t generally as extreme as this. I’ve come to Abruzzo to sample a new, horny-handed take on the foodie break, where you don’t just prepare your meals, you go out and farm or forage the ingredients. Today we’ll be making lessame, the venerable veggie stew of the Abruzzo peasantry, scrambled together from the hedgerow each spring to stave off hunger until harvest.

Fattoria dell’Uliveto has been in Luigi’s family since 1604, and it can’t have changed much in the meantime — unless you count the swimming pool that shimmers beside the chicory patch, installed a decade ago when the di Lellos branched into agritourism.

Around their farmhouse leans a half-collapsed assortment of pigeon coops, henhouses and pens. In one, a nanny goat with the same beard as Luigi supervises her many kids. In another, a pheasant squats on her eggs.

We pause to breathe the jasmine blossom spilling off the barn and gaze back across the grape fields, shagpiled with scarlet poppies. “When I was young, people made tea from the poppy petals,” Luigi says. “They thought nothing of it. They gave it to the children to make us drowsy.”

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