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.