Winter on the Magra

It’s around midnight and I’m typing this lying in bed in “La Fulica’s” forward cabin.  There is no natural light in this cabin which is effectively a “V” shaped metal box.  Most days it is very quiet here, but sometimes if the sea is very rough the swell makes its way the mile or so up the river Magra and sways the boat from side to side making her jerk up and down on her mooring lines and rub fenders with the neighbouring boats.  It’s just such a night and from inside my metal box I can hear the mooring lines creaking and straining and feel the boat rolling from side to side like a baby’s cradle.

Although it’s a month since I last wrote, La Fulica has moved precisely nowhere and for much of the time Sue and I have been hibernating.  It’s hibernating weather.  Down here the days are even shorter than in the UK – by four o’clock in the afternoon the Sun drops below the spine of wooded hills which rise high above us on the other side of the Magra and we enter the twilight zone.  Also, November is the rainy season, or so we have been told by Giovanna and her German “boy”`Arne, and I hope to God they are right.  We have had days and days of rain of every description from monsoon to light drizzle.  The really heavy rains makes a loud drumming on the steel deck above this cabin, emphasising the warm and cosy burrow like atmosphere within.  Some days the cloud base is so low that it clings in wisps to the wooded hills and hangs only a few hundred feet above the nearby hill village of Ameglia (pronounced like the girl’s name Amelia).  Usually every three or four days the Sun comes out for a day or two and we emerge from our den blinking like moles in the sunlight.  The sunlight here is so warm and golden, like high summer in England, that it fetches out the whole population of this charming valley. It also fetches out the washing to be aired – the flying of sheets, pillowcases and tent-like knickers in the most conspicuous possible places seems to be regarded as a fundamental human right in Italy, rather like the bearing of arms in the States.  On La Fulica we have enthusiastically joined in with this tradition with socks and T-shirts hanging everywhere, like bunting on a flag day.

For the first time in years I actually feel I have time on my hands rather than no time at all.  Sometimes I feel a vague sense of guilt that surely I should be doing something.  If we were broke and in need of work it’s a type of existence that could drive one mad with envy, frustration and boredom.  But because we have some means, this life is an incredible luxury for which I try to keep reminding myself to be grateful.  So apart from sleep late and eat biscuits, what have we actually been doing with ourselves?

Our first couple of weeks were spent getting the feel of the local area and the marina and sorting out logistics.  The marina has so far proved to be all that we hoped it would be – quiet and undemanding but with enough activity to make it interesting.  We have established that Maria/Giovanna Gatti is called “Giovanna” by everyone.  She is here frequently with a distinguished white haired middle-aged man who we are fairly confident is “Mr Gatti”, her husband we presume although he could conceivably be her brother.  The Moroccan “boy” is actually called Mustafa, not Mahmud, as I reported last time.  “Boy” is a euphemism as both Arne and Mustafa must be at least pushing forty.

Arne has good English so we know something of his story.  He says he came here ten years ago in a truck en route to Africa and just stayed.  The truck, olive green ex-British army, is in the boat park rusting and gathering weeds and has been given a surreal edge by the addition of a naked child’s doll sat on the cab roof.  Arne has, I suspect, a dope smoker’s attitude to the passing of time, so he could have arrived anytime within the last five to fifteen years.  However, he has a daughter who looks to be around ten who spends part of the week with him on his boat and part with her Mother.  He comes across as a decent guy who will do his best to help anyone.  In our first few days here he tried to get us a car – a Lancia Thema Estate which one of the boat owners was actually planning to scrap, however we gave up on the idea because of the paperwork.  Arne rides a motorbike and when he learned I was a rider his immediate reaction was “anytime I don’t need it feel free to use my bike”.  Giovanna has been similarly free with her old car which we are welcome to use for shopping.  Being English and worried about things like insurance and imposing on people’s good nature, we haven’t actually taken these offers up yet.

Mustafa speaks no English and so is more of an enigma.  He has a gentle nature and kindly eyes and is a dogged communicator who will always have a crack at a conversation in Italian, English and sign language.  Mustafa lives on the site somewhere, unless he sometimes comes to work in his dressing gown, but we are not entirely sure where – Sue and I have our different theories.  Sue came across a mysterious Moroccan looking bloke smoking in the toilets a few days ago who seemed embarrassed about being seen by her and whom she speculates is Mustafa’s lover.  Could he be the owner of the old blue Mercedes parked in the yard?  Perhaps we will find out.  Mustafa and Arne work together around the marina at odd hours, generally when it is not raining.  Giovanna supervises, sometimes with the aid of a megaphone which is mounted threateningly outside her office window and through which she occasionally calls “Mustafa, Mustafa”.  I get the impression that Giovanna is most definitely the boss and that she knows what she wants, but not always how to get it.  Arne and Mustafa are treated like family and clearly like Giovanna although her demands often seem to provoke an exasperated smile.  Mustafa and Arne seem to work happily together although Mustafa can be ham-fisted, in Arne’s words he is “not practik”.  Mr Gatti’s role is less clear, but he is clearly respected, maybe he has retired from some other profession.

Mustafa has, however, had slightly more success in helping us with transport.  Partly I suspect at Giovanna’s prompting he undertook to supply us with two bicycles for the princely sum of 100 euros (about sixty five quid).  This process took about three weeks.  First Mustafa sold us one bike, an old one of his own I think, for fifty euros, which we paid on condition he fixed the front lamp.  Then he used some of the fifty euros to buy the second machine, an elderly mountain bike.  This turned up after about ten days and when I tried it the chain promptly fell off.  At this stage we had one bike paid for waiting for Mustafa to repair the lamp and one not paid for waiting for the gears to be fixed.  During our frequent but good-humoured conversations in pidgin Italian, English and sign language the word “domani” would feature heavily – the Italian for tomorrow.  Eventually both bikes got fixed after a fashion and Mustafa even give us an impromptu ten Euro discount on the second bike. 

We’ve started to get to know our neighbouring boat owners, on one side is Oscar, an intense Italian Swiss who according to Arne manages pub rock bands.  Some years ago he sailed all over the world on his boat which he clearly loves and comes to visit from Switzerland every two weeks.  He welcomed us with a bottle of wine and tries to entice us to go to Giancarlo’s, a small shabeen in a neighbouring boatyard – “for ten Euros you get two courses and all you can drink”.  Arne’s view is that Giancarlo’s food can be very good “but when it is bad it is awful and if you have to work in the afternoon, well ...”  So far we haven’t summoned up the courage to go.  On the other side is a sailboat owned by two brothers who race every weekend with a crew of guys, including two charming old chaps, who come from all over North Italy.  They’re a decent and unpretentious bunch.  Last weekend was the last race of the season and they were determined to compete although their engine is very poorly.  Anyway they limped out under power, had a good days sailing which secured them third place in their class for the season and then had to be push-towed back up the Magra by Arne in the marina’s tender.  That afternoon they shared cheese, wine and homemade apple pie with us to celebrate.

The other marina characters we have got to know are Bronzina and Gadafi, the two dogs.  People around here don’t seem to go in for burglar alarms much, but everyone seems to have at least one dog trained to bark aggressively.  When  we go out walking it’s not uncommon for us to start a chain reaction of barking dogs all the way up a hillside as one animal starts another off then another to a chorus of Italian swearwords for them to shut the **** up.  Most seem to bark because it’s their job rather than because they want to and some even do it lying down.  I’ve seen several bark very heroically whilst discretely backing away from us towards the safety of a stout fence.  Bronzina and Gadafi go in for this obligatory barking, but when you get to know them are actually two old tarts.  Bronzina is a rather dim-witted and very elderly Spaniel who hobbles about the place and doesn’t understand that she isn’t cute any more.  Gadafi is a mongrel and seems to comprise the ugliest features of a Bulldog and a Chihuahua.  She’s actually very intelligent and Sue’s winter project to befriend her was accomplished in about two hours.  Now she comes to greet us when we enter the marina and follows us around.  When we get on the boat she sometime sits on the quayside looking at us longingly – however, dog fleas and boats are not a good combination, so on the quayside she must stay, I think.

While waiting for the bikes we explored the local area on foot and by bus.  Amazingly, Ameglia, a village of maybe two or three thousand inhabitants has its own tourist information office, staffed in the mornings by three young women.  When we visited it took them some time to overcome their shock at seeing two customers, but after that they were very helpful, one speaking to us in reasonable English and the other two looking up ‘phone numbers in the Yellow Pages.  From them we got the local bus timetable and armed with this and a couple of books of tickets from the bus station in La Spezia we were away.  The rural buses are not very frequent and they don’t run after about seven o’clock in the evening, but they do at least run on time.  They are used by school kids and housewives and the odd man, in fact some of the men are very odd.

Ameglia our local village is divided into two, the main hill village which is an amazing jumble of medieval houses and alleyways built around a small castle and a community of more modern houses, shops and a supermarket on the main road.  About four miles away is Sarzana, our nearest town.  Such is the wealth of Italian culture that although it has a near intact medieval centre, fine piazzas, town walls and a castle it doesn’t even rate a mention in most guidebooks.  In one of the piazzas is a large statue of a naked man, I’m not sure what he commemorates, but I think he’s Mussolini era muscular fascist and I’m sure he is meant to look stern and marshal.  However, either the artist, the model or more likely both were gay as there is something rather camp about the stance, emphasised by rather pert little buttocks and a very foppish hairdo.  I could imagine them laughing about the commission in the artist’s studio, maybe their joke on Mussolini or what they may have looked on as this rather dull little provincial backwater.  We admired the buttocks from an outside table of a nearby cafe which did a very decent lunch.

About three weeks after our arrival on the Magra, Patrick, our friend from Worcester, came to stay for a few days.  We hired a car for the week and picked him up from Pisa airport, where we made the obligatory visit to the Leaning Tower in the Field of Miracles.  The Tower itself seemed to me a very ordinary building compared to the much more monumental cathedral and baptistery, but ones eye is irresistibly drawn to the tower’s gravity defying lean – a good example of how a cheap theatrical trick can upstage the most accomplished of performances.  For me the most remarkable thing about the whole site is how new all the buildings look.  Because they are faced with white Carrara marble the details of the arches and statuary look as crisp as when they were made, like ivory carvings.  Surrounding the Field of Miracles are the usual souvenir shops.  Why is it that only the truly great historical sites attract the most tawdry and tasteless tourist crap?  Sue took a particular fancy to a white plastic Leaning Tower table lamp.

Patrick brought with him some vital supplies – two learn Italian courses with tapes and CDs, two very large jars of Marmite (which mean that the only Marmite problem we now have is whether Sue will be able to eat it all before its 2005 “use by” date) and, joy of joys, an emergency curry pack comprising of twenty or so spices and a stack of Indian cookbooks and recipes.

During Patrick’s stay we looked in on Florence, which we had all been to before, but wanted to take another look at.  We only had an afternoon so we “did” the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi.  Maybe it’s old age, but I just don’t seem to have the stamina to walk an entire gallery these days, by the time we reached the room full of Botticellis I hit cultural overload.  However the view of the River Arno from the Uffizi’s corridor is a wonderful tonic and the troops of Japanese tourists were fascinating and scary.  A party of thirty or forty Japanese sweep through the museum about every fifteen minutes, stopping at the thirty or so most famous pictures (the Birth of Venus etc).  Each party has a Guide who uses a microphone which transmits to small earpieces worn by each member of the group.  Usually one cannot hear the Guide so one has the impression of a party of Japanese robots who arrive in a room, move up to the “famous” picture, then all turn round and look at something else at precisely the same moment, then all walk out together.

We also revisited Genova, about which Sue and I have become even more polarised.  She now hates it with greater passion while Patrick shared my fascination.  We arrived in a rainstorm and parked in a cavernous multi-storey car park which is built into a hillside and is part of a large office complex which seems to include the Ligurian regional local authority’s version of an English County Hall.  The place was instantly recognisable by the ranks of bored people in cheap suits staring blankly at computer screens – the face of bureaucracy the world over.

When we weren’t sightseeing we seemed to be cooking.  Patrick and I had so much fun in La Fulica’s tiny Galley that we didn’t actually get round to eating out.  Patrick cooked us a curry (followed by many more after his departure, thank you, Patrick) and we cooked a few Italian recipes together from Marcella Hazan’s cookbook.  Sue is beginning to get jealous of Marcella as I seem to spend more time with her than I do with Sue.  High spot of our culinary adventures was a Zuppe di Pesche (actually more of a fish stew than a soup).  For this Patrick and I drove to La Spezia and cruised the market, which has a great atmosphere.  My theory was that the biggest, ugliest mother****ing fishes should be the most tasty as no one would want to sell them on the grounds of their good looks.  In the end we compromised and bought one monster and one quite good-looking fish.  I hadn’t realised however just how expensive fresh caught fish is and these two large beasts cost us fifty euros.  Still the fishmonger did scale and gut them and throw in the head of an even larger and uglier mother****er for the sauce.  That evening La Fulica smelled and looked like a Russian fish factory ship as we cooked up the fish heads and stripped them of their meat before making the rest of the Zuppe.  Washed down with good local wine it was quite a meal, although I suspect Sue wasn’t entirely convinced it had been worth the money, plus a whole days time and effort.  Sue has the pragmatic attitude of the naturally thin that food it there to be eaten when you are hungry, that you stop eating when you don’t feel hungry any more and that, well, that’s about it really. Strange.

While we had the car we made as much use of it as possible.  This included a visit to Gerardo Mobili. Gerardo has a large furniture (mobili) store in Sarzana and one in Viareggio and advertises heavily using his own face on the roadside posters.  He looks pale and pockmarked, wears a loud check jacket and has the haunted face of an over-geared chain-smoking neurotic.  How could we resist?  His Sarzana store did not disappoint.  As well as a shed full of MFI type junk there is a whole warehouse devoted to pound store type cheap tat, arranged in isles where every item is a standard price from two euros to about ten.  The high spot of our visit was a stack of plastic mouldings of the last supper, hand-painted to give Jesus and his disciples strangely Asiatic faces.  They were all knocked down to five euros as each little plastic tableau had four of five of the disciples heads missing – maybe at some point they had been stored next to some little plastic Roundheads who had gone in for some late night iconoclasm in a dark Shanghai warehouse.  To top it all, on our way out we actually saw Gerardo himself in a long dark raincoat trying to slip into his own store unnoticed.  He looked rather older and more haunted than his posters.  IKEA have just opened a store in Florence and no doubt he is anxiously scanning the papers for the planning application for IKEA La Spezia which will drown his business in a flood of cheap but fashionable Scandinavian tat.

Having a car again made me realise just how dependent on them our culture has become.  If the Blair government wants a real measure of social exclusion they could do worse than car ownership.  Without a car you are cut off from the out of town shopping malls that are the true repositories of our Western cornucopia and ones’ ability to act on the consumer impulse that drives our economic growth is dramatically restricted.  The car also punctured one of my Guidebook-driven pre-conceptions – I think I wrote in an earlier newsletter that supermarket culture hasn’t caught on so much in Italy.  This is true to a certain extent, but with a car one quickly sees that Mall culture is growing and that hypermarkets are springing up all over the place.    

Given our years of indoctrination into the culture of buying “nice” things for no obvious purpose it is perhaps not surprising that that having dropped Patrick off at Pisa Airport we were drawn like addicts in search of fix to the new IKEA outside Florence.  It turned out to be a strangely emotional experience.  No doubt as a matter of strict company policy it turns out that every IKEA store from Gateshead to Naples has an identical layout and sells identical stuff at identical prices.  La Fulica having been partly equipped from IKEA we were able to buy more striped cushions and add to our store of cutlery with identical items.  Because the stores are so alike wandering round actually made me feel quite homesick, as patrolling IKEA for no obvious purpose had been one of our major leisure activities in the UK.  It also led me to play a familiar mental game of inventing names for new IKEA products – “Bollux” – the moulded rubber table lamp that bounces when you knock it over and “Krap” – a range of picture frames woven in a raffia-like material made from recycled plastic shopping bags.

And another thing .... No, I think that’s enough of a rant for one day.

Anyway, the car went back after a week and now we’re happily wobbling around the place on our second hand bicycles.  We have now had news from our various fellow travellers of earlier in the year.  Thomas, Nicole and Joshi are still safely in Barcelona, although they have had major engine problems.  They return to Cologne soon for a couple of months and have invited us to stay, an offer which we have gladly accepted, hopefully for Christmas.  Bernie and Sarah are in Winter moorings near Montpelier with Bernie investigating a problematic gearbox and Chris and John have reached their planned Winter destination near Rome from whence they are flying back to the UK for a couple of months. 

Gradually our winter is beginning to take shape.  On Monday we are off to Venice by train for ten nights in a four star hotel.  Last we heard St Marks Square was under a metre of water, but frankly if the beds are soft and there is a large shower and a bath we will be happy.  Then perhaps we will go off to Cologne for Christmas and after that friends and family will be visiting and the boat will have to come out of the water for two or three weeks for bottom cleaning and anti-fouling and all that stuff and then of course there’s the big carnival in Viareggio ...  Makes me feel tired just thinking about it.  I think I’ll snuggle up and go to sleep, we have a busy day of not doing very much ahead of us tomorrow.