In our last
few weeks on the Magra we actually got to know more people than in the previous
five months and we even got a few going away presents. Roberta and Marianne gave us a plant, which
Marianne explained was for Sue to put in her next garden, if and when we
finally buy another house. In calm seas
it travels on our cabin roof, lashed to the compass with a bit of elastic. I hope the poor thing survives, but I have my doubts. Roberto is an eccentric former village doctor
(“il Dottore”) and Marianne is a Dutch ex-hippie, a volatile combination. They live in a remote house in the hills with
no mains power and have a charming wooden yacht. Roberto loves to talk about village life and
how when he married Marianne the local men would nudge him confidentially and
ask “do foreign women do it the same way as Italian ones?”
Giovanni
gave us a beautifully designed jamming cleat (a bit of obscure boat gear for
the uninitiated) and an Abalone shell and his wife gave us a cake and his
daughter a CD of the All Blacks chanting a Haka. Giovanni is an ex paratrooper and steel
worker who is renovating an old Sardinian working boat. He speaks very little English and really
helped our Italian. After a days work on
our respective boats Giovanni would look in for a beer and a chat, with our
well-thumbed English-Italian dictionary between us to help things along. One Sunday afternoon Giovanni finally
persuaded me to go to Giancarlo’s restaurant/shabeen in a shack in the boatyard
next-door to the marina. Thank God I
didn’t go earlier in our stay on the Magra or I don’t think we’d ever have
left. For ten euros we got risotto al marinara,
roast sucking pig and chips (including baby pig’s trotters), all the wine we
could drink, plus an evil looking liqueur which tasted like pure alcohol and
condensed milk, all served on plastic plates and glasses. The clientele ranged from a seventy year old
estate agent, local boatyard workers in overalls and a suspicious looking bloke
who claimed to have been President Ceauşescu’s sister’s bodyguard. He added a convincing note of authenticity by
explaining that his bodyguard status was really useful for getting off with
women in the Black Sea holiday resorts in the good old days before the fall of
the USSR.
On the day of
our departure we had a small group to wave us goodbye from the quayside and
Giovanna, the marina owner even gave us a Yacht Club Foce Magra burgee (flag)
and, bizarrely matching slippers.
Previously she had already given us some marmalade made from the fruit
of the marina’s two grapefruit trees as a thank you for doing some translation
for her. She and her ageing lothario
husband Vittorio own a small complex of holiday apartments in Calabria and she
is planning to advertise in English on the Internet. So, if you see an ad for the “Molina sul mare”
(“watermill by the sea”) in Calabria, beware, I think we overdid the
description a bit and we’ve been told by others that the place is actually
falling apart.
As the Magra
disappeared behind our stern we were sad to leave and will retain many good
memories. Overall, everyone dealt with
us very fairly. I spent a couple of
thousand pounds on maintenance and improvements to La Fulica and pretty well
everyone turned up when they said they would, did a good job and charged us a
fair price. The most important
improvement was the fitting of two solar panels. We bought the panels second-hand from Arne
(see earlier newsletters) who “found” them on a hillside in Sicily where they
were part of an acre of panels which had been used to illuminate a hillside
crucifix. I gave him 200 euros, having
beaten him up from his asking price of 150 (he needs the money more than we
do). Toni the mad welder made us special
stainless steel brackets for them for 80 euros (these allow them to swivel
towards the Sun) and Peiter the German electrician wired them up for about
200. So for just over three hundred quid
we have solar panels which are able to keep our fridge running in the Summer.
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