A Pretend Peasant is Born

Is it possible to really fall in love with a piece of land? We now own about an acre of Southern Italy and every day, much to my surprise I love it more. We have about sixty mainly mature olive trees and a similar number of assorted fruit and nut trees, including ten fig trees, which over the summer produced handfuls of sticky sweet black and green figs every day. Right up to the end of September I could wander through our grove and pick the Sun warmed fruit, eating samples as I went and dropping the skins onto the rich earth. In late July we bought a second-hand rotovator. In Italian it is called a “motozappa”, a perfect name for a device that is basically an engine which thumps the ground. It’s a heavy old beast with a seven and a half horsepower two-stroke engine. I’ve run the machine once over our acre and it converted the soil into something with the texture and colour of finely ground coffee. I didn’t know earth could look so good. However, the process took four days and each lunchtime I’d emerge from the field covered in brown dust, deafened and shaking like a Parkinson’s victim.

 Every night before we go to bed we see the Sun go down over the nearby hill and watch the shadows lengthen in our olive grove. We can hear the faint jingling of cow bells from a grazing herd a couple of fields away and the occasional thud as some fruit drops onto our terrace from one of our trees. We’re in high country, about a thousand feet above sea level and when I go out onto the terrace in the morning the sky is usually a deep azure. Often there is breeze blowing from the Adriatic which sets up a whooshing sound in the big pine tree which grows at the edge of our terrace and every now and then sends light fluffy clouds spilling over our heads. Now Winter is coming on sometimes the clouds take on a more threatening aspect, dark, heavy and pregnant with rain, moving across the sky like big blobs of ink dropped into a tank of water. In the height of the Summer there were swallows perched on the nearby telephone wires from where they would fly in dizzying circles over our land and down the winding country lane which runs past our house. In August, by lunchtime the temperature usually climbed to around thirty-five or forty degrees Celsius, so there was nothing to be done but to take a siesta inside the cool and thick protecting stone of the house. Now the midday temperature is usually a temperate twenty five to thirty degrees. Occasionally the quiet is punctuated by the whining of a scooter or an Ape (the little Italian three-wheeled trucks) as a local farmer goes home for lunch.

Our First Grape Harvest

Paolo and Ermenia refer to our neighbours, the Bari architects, rather dismissively as the “Barese” (the people from Bari). This is because they are townies who only come down to the house for Summer weekends, are keen to put fences up around their property and are trying to get the locals interested in having mains water connected. By contrast we seem to have been adopted by Paolo and Ermenia and their extended family. I think because we are here most of the time and are willing to get stuck into tending our land, however ham fistedly. The surest sign of this came when we were invited to help bring in Paolo’s grape harvest along with their two sons, their wives and various grandchildren and friends. The grapes were ready to be harvested in early October. Sadly this Summer the weather has been very hot but also quite wet and Paolo’s vines have been attacked by mould and disease and his grapes rejected by the Cantina Sociale, so the whole crop is to be processed by the family for their own consumption of wine and grape juice. We spent a morning in the fields with the family and selected friends, cutting grapes, sampling some and laughing and joking. The harvested grapes were then taken to Paolo and Ermenia’s “cantina” for crushing. We have a “cantina” just like theirs and it was fascinating to see it put to its proper use as a wine-processing centre. Basically the “cantina” is a stone chamber under which there is a large cistern with a grating over it. The grapes are first macerated and then put twice through a grape press, with all the juices flowing through the grating and into the cistern. Afterwards fourteen of sat round for lunch in Paolo and Ermenia’s small living room. Ermenia had prepared a rabbit stew in a cauldron over an open fire. First we consumed the juice from the stew, served with homemade “orecchiette”, a Pugliese form of pasta shaped like little ears, hence the name. Then for our second course we had the rabbit itself, all washed down with beer and homemade wine. Our reward for helping out was several litres of fresh grape juice, which we were told to keep refrigerated and to drink for our health. The first sip is like nectar, unfortunately this is followed by a savage aftertaste of cold stewed tea.

 Paolo and Ermenia’s grandson has now started work on the house and we hope to have all modern conveniences, including two decent bathrooms and a modern kitchen complete with dishwasher early in the new year. Last week we moved “La Fulica” from Taranto the 150 odd miles round the bottom of the heel of Italy to a boatyard in Brindisi, where she will spend the winter out of the water. Also, slowly and falteringly we are beginning to develop ideas for making money. Sue will start to look for teaching work in a few weeks and we plan to turn part of the house into a separate apartment which we can rent to holidaymakers. In addition I am thinking of buying one of the conical Trulli houses to convert into further accommodation for holiday rental. We shall see.