Flight from Greece

Peter and his wife Jude were going to visit us last August but it was not to be. We had met them in Porto di Roma the previous winter and after leaving Rome they did some cruising around Corsica then headed south. Peter had previously had a brain tumour and was ever conscious that it could recur. They set off from Northern Sicily for Puglia and then Peter starting having fits. Jude sailed the boat on her own for two or three days and ended up in Preveza on the mainland of Greece, basically because that is where the wind took her. She sent us text messages of her progress which confused us, not being aware at the time of the depth of the crisis on their boat. 

They left Preveza in a hurry to get back to the States and to medical treatment. Peter was fined for having an out of date visa and Jude was told that their boat “Flight”, must be out of Greek waters within six months. It was only later, talking to Jude that I understood the full trauma of these events, with Jude having to do what she could to tidy up “Flight” and Peter desperate, knowing in his heart that he would never return to the boat that had been their home for much of the last thirty years and into which he had invested an enormous amount of his personality.

 As Brindisi is only 150 odd miles from Preveza we offered to give Jude what help we could and she decided to come over this August to bring “Flight” to Italy. Peter had only died in February and in an ideal world Jude might have left her for a year or so, but “Flight” was in trouble with the Greek authorities and the boatyard which had effectively hidden her for several months wanted her off the premises. So Jude arrived in August and after a week or so staying at the house headed off for Greece with Sue on the ferry, while I finished off some commitments in Puglia. Jude and Sue spent a week in Preveza sorting out the boat before I swapped with Sue, meeting her for a few hours in Brindisi. Some other friends from Porto di Roma were also there – Graham and Nicola, to provide welcome help and distraction for the pair of them.

After I arrived in Preveza it was agreed that I would crew “Flight” with an acquaintance, Trevor, who lives in Greece and had been a great help taxiing us all by car from the nearest ferry port at Igoumenitza, 50 miles up the coast. So the day after I arrived we launched “Flight” then had a sail around escorted by Nicola and Graham in their yacht “Never Moody”. Next day we made an unsuccessful attempt to leave Preveza, but the day after we set off in the early morning of a flat calm day. “Flight” is a small yacht, just 9 metres long, with only a 10 horse power engine which pushes her along at about four miles an hour. But the weather was kind and we motored up past Paxos and Antipaxos then round the South of Corfu before heading straight for Otranto on the Italian coast. I will always remember bobbing along the Southern tip of Corfu on a beautiful sunny evening while Jude played traditional tunes on her violin with an air of deep concentration and melancholy.

 Next morning we picked up a following breeze which “Flight” enjoyed, riding up and down the following seas towards Otranto. In Greek waters we sailed without a flag, knowing that “Flight” wasn’t meant to be there. When we reached international waters we put out the US flag painted on “Flight’s” wind vane, which we left up for the rest of the trip, knowing that in Italy no one would give a sh**t about her status. That evening we motored into Otranto, one and a half days after leaving Preveza, tired and immensely relieved. The day after we sailed up the coast to Brindisi, where subsequently “Flight” would be craned onto her new home next to “La Fulica”.

Fiftieth Birthdays

We had a great time on our fiftieth birthdays. As our birthdays are only 12 days apart we decided to have a joint celebration, along with Meeno, one of Erminia’s sons who had his 53rd birthday around the same time. The night before we went up the road to Meenos for his birthday party and then the next day we organised lunch for 25 under our new veranda. Meeno and his son, our builder Paolo, turned up in the morning with scaffold poles and netting to rig up more shade and help lay tables and chairs. Sue’s friend and teaching colleague Pat came early to help prepare, as did our friends Claude and Jane. The remaining guests were all members of our neighbours Erminia and Paolo’s family.

I guess the lunch was our way of saying thank you to all these people for their kindness and generosity. Pugliese people have big healthy appetites and are also particular about their food, not generally liking any kind of foreign muck. Not trusting us to cook anything remotely edible we had a number of offers of assistance with the catering. Erminia brought several litres of their home made wine, Palma, Meeno’s wife and Erminia’s daughter in law cooked rabbit and potatoes and Dora, her other daughter in law made trays of foccacia of many different flavours. I barbecued an enormous quantity of meat and Sue made antipasti and a pear cake for desert. It was hard work and more than a little stressful, but after half an hour or so everyone arrived and were happily eating, drinking and talking at the top of their voices.

Chiaro and Milly

We now have two animals. “Chiaro” the cat was in fact a sitting tenant when we arrived. Chiaro originally belonged to a Calabrian family, who rented our house until a couple of years before we bought it, and Chiaro had somehow stayed, fed occasionally on pasta by Erminia, who like so many country people has a love hate relationship with domestic pets, alternately making a fuss of Chiaro then chasing him with a broom. When we arrived and started giving him real cat food he decided to move back to our house pretty much full time, although the rule is he is not allowed inside. Chiaro is a big tomcat and a kind of sandy colour which matches the stonework of the house. I guess he is about five or six and this spring he had trouble coming to terms with the fact that he may no longer be the toughest cat on the block. Every night we would hear blood curdling yowlings and growlings and other signs of feline mayhem and in the morning Chiaro would come limping for his food, bloody and with bits of ear and leg missing. I really thought he wasn’t going to see the summer, but somehow he pulled through and most of his scars have more or less healed.

 In June Sue was working in her vegetable garden when a small sandy coloured terrier like creature with unfeasibly large ears padded up to her and started to make friends. Sue says that she thought the dog belonged to one of our neighbours so she made friends with it, though I am not entirely sure I believe her. It was, of course, a stray and on closer inspection covered in ticks and quite weak. I don’t have a problem with wild dogs, but I do hate to see dogs that have obviously been domesticated, then cast loose to fend for themselves. Anyway we gave it some food and a tick collar and got our friends Claude and Jane to feed it while we were away in the UK for a week in early July. It was still here when we returned so we took it to the vets where we found out that “it” was a bitch of about two years of age, so we had her inoculated and “done”. She is now an intensely loyal and reasonably happy and well-balanced dog who I must admit to enjoy having around. She, like Chiaro, also matches the stonework. She also looks exactly like almost every other dog in this part of Puglia. A long time ago a corgi must have bred with a dingo with enormous ears and produced a virulent local strain of mongrel.

Padre Pio

Erminia asked us if we would like to go to St Giovanni Rotondo to see Padre Pio. Padre Pio is an interesting phenomenon in Southern Italy and I believe also in Spain. He was a monk who prayed either for the ending of the First World War or the second and was rewarded with the stigmata for his efforts and walked around with bandages on his hands and feet for the rest of his days. After the Second World War he decided to raise money for the building of an enormous hospital for the poor in St Giovanni Rotondo, the tiny hill town in northern Puglia where he lived in the local monastery. His stigmata were regarded I believe with scepticism by the Catholic Church, but he was a friend of Pope John Paul, who ultimately made him a saint a year or two ago (he died in the 1960s). You see Padre Pio’s image everywhere in Southern Italy, in shops and houses, outside public buildings and frequently in the cabs of Italian HGVs and St Giovanni is now a huge place of pilgrimage, full of tacky hotels and souvenir shops.

To me the veneration of Padre Pio is not entirely straightforward, it has something of the popular working class movement about it and there is something almost subversive about the whole business. I think this may be because he is thought of as someone who stood up for the working people of Italy and with some Italian peasants there’s a kind of “no one looks after our interests except Padre Pio” kind of bloody-minded attitude.

Anyway, sometime in April Erminia started to talk to us about whether we wanted to go to see Padre Pio and if we did she would try to get us tickets. We weren’t exactly sure what it was all about, but we decided to go for it. Slowly it dawned on us that what we had actually signed up for was a coach trip to St Giovanni Rotondo (about 100 miles north of us). Erminia also made it clear that in order not to miss the coach we would have to leave home at 4.30am. Come the big day we take the car into Paolo and Erminia’s drive at the crack of dawn to find Erminia in her best frock and Paolo in a natty sports jacket and flat hat. They direct us to a shop in the middle of nowhere to which we have never been, but which is no more than 1.5 miles from our house. Here we realise is where we buy our pannini (rolls) for the journey. Things are very expensive in St Giovanni we are told, so it’s a good move to stock up here. More and more people arrive in the shop and at 5.30am the coach rolls in all the way from Locorotondo, already more than half full. By the time all the folks from the shop pile in it is full and we and a couple of teenagers are by far the youngest occupants. Erminia catches up on all the gossip of the last year and Paolo sits aloof, hands on walking stick.

The journey North is interminable, with toilet stops every 30 minutes. As we get closer to our destination the boredom and bum ache is broken a little by someone reciting “Hail Marys” over the coach’s pa system: “Madre di Dio prega per noi peccatore ….” Etc, etc. For most of the journey my face is fixed in a smiling rictus I reserve for situations where I haven’t a clue what is going on or what people are saying to me. Then after what seems like hours we turn off the motorway, but not for St Giovanni. Eventually we pull up at some sort of shrine where there are already a couple of coaches and we cram into a little chapel for a service given by some kind of lay preacher. Then we cue for an hour for what appears to be a small bottle of holy olive oil. This is dispensed in another chapel, next to the first one, by a big, unshaven villainous looking man. I can tell by the huge pile of discarded leg irons, wheelchairs and other apparatus for people with disabilities that this is a serious shit sort of shrine. We rumble off on the coach with our little bottles of holy oil, me none the wiser.

After another hour we reach the Gargagno, the mountainous spur of the Italian boot and climb up and up to St Giovanni. When we get there it’s a kind of religious version of Las Vegas, full of hotels and cheap tat for religious maniacs. Our coach parks on the outskirts of the town where parking we are informed is much cheaper than in the centre and we all troop off to the outside tables of a nearby restaurant. Here we realise that the organisers have pulled another stroke to save money by agreeing with the management that we can eat our own rolls and drink our own drinks, provided the odd table orders a plate of chips. So we get the rolls out and Erminia pulls out a bottle of wine. I drink from a plastic cup while Paolo swigs the bottle, poking Erminia from time to time with his stick if he can’t get her attention. This gets a predictable 100-decibel response from Erminia.

After lunch Erminia goes to the loo and Paolo decides to set off for the town centre while we wait for her. It’s at least a mile away and is a strain for more than a few of the octogenarians on the trip. We catch up with him just as he reaches the great big hospital built by Padre Pio. We decide to walk on to the new church, built by the architect Renzo Piano. Paolo decides not to go in the new church as it doesn’t have Padre Pio’s tomb, which is still in the old church (and perhaps also his feet are hurting). The new church is a great dome of wood and concrete and steel and very impressive with great views over the Gargagno and it is said the biggest organ in Europe. We leave the church and catch up with Erminia and Paolo and I ask if I can get a photo of them and Sue. Sizing up the shot with all three of them smiling into the camera I realise: “This is Erminia and Paolo’s big day out of the year. They are intelligent, subtle and humorous people, but their tastes really are this simple. What’s more they are delighted to be sharing the day with us and showing us things of which they are genuinely proud. These people love us and we love them.” I felt the tear well in my eye and thought what a long way from Blackheath we were.

The day wound on in its interminable way. The coach journey back was of course hell and we finally delivered Erminia and Paolo to their doorstep at 8.30pm, sixteen bloody hours after we left.

The Madonna Comes to Visit

Every May a plaster Madonna from a local church does the rounds of our parish or “contrada”, spending a night in each house.  Each night the locals gather to say their “hail Marys” in front of the Madonna, before she moves on to the next house.  When it was our turn we tidied up the dining room and put a nice tablecloth on the dining table along with some flowers and a couple of candles.  Then most of the women of the contrada and their children came along from the previous house, perhaps twenty people in all, to see the Madonna installed for the night.  She is a plaster figure maybe two feet high, with, rather touchingly, one finger missing and a white plaster scar where the finger should be.  I quite liked having her around for the evening and bravely resisted taking a photo of her in dark glasses or with a cigarette trailing from her fingers.  Call me superstitious, but I also bought a lottery ticket that night.  Next day they all trooped round for the Hail Marys, which Sue now knows in Italian but not English, and then whisked her away to the next house on the tour.  Through the process Sue got to know almost all of our neighbours and their taste in interior decoration.

Permissions to Stay

One mark of our becoming increasingly established down here is that this month we finally got our Permissions to Stay in Italy. In theory this is more or less a formality for EU citizens, but in practise we had to drive the fifty-odd miles to the Police Station in Bari every fortnight, usually to be told that our documents were not ready. When we did eventually get them, Sue on a roll immediately applied for residency and is now the only English person resident in the Commune of Locorotondo. Which then meant that finally we could buy a car and a motorcycle here. So for €2,000 we bought a ten year old Opel Corsa from a local garage and a little later I walked into the main Moto Guzzi dealer in Taranto and said “I would like to buy an Italian motorcycle”, to an almost tumultuous reception. Moto Guzzi make robust twin cylinder motorbikes that are old fashioned and unfashionable in Italy. I bought a six-year-old 750cc machine that is absolutely perfect for blasting around the country lanes, even if I do have to stop from time to time to go back and pick up a bit that’s fallen off.

Progress

This feels strange. I’m sat in my home office, transported at ludicrous expense along with the rest of our furniture from London. In the last couple of weeks the building work on the house has suddenly started to come together and for the first time in three years we are living in relative comfort. The interior of the old stone part of the house is more or less finished and we have an elegant living and dining room with a domed stone ceiling and a fitted kitchen complete with washing machine and dishwasher. There is still much to be done to the modern extension to the house and to the exterior, but for the first time we are able to unpack things and feel more or less confident that they will be staying where we put them.

Bon Voyage Peter

A good friend, Peter, died this week. Most of you won’t know him. We met Peter and his partner Jude in Porto di Roma last winter. Jude is an artist and teacher and Peter had been many different things in his life, including a great swimmer, potter, teacher and financial products salesman. He and Jude had crossed the Atlantic twice in their small eight-metre yacht “Flight”, which they have owned from new for the last thirty years. Even in his fifties he had the curiosity of an eight year old and the guts to look into the abyss and say “hmm, this is interesting”. Peter and Jude were due to visit us in Puglia in their yacht last August, when Peter had a seizure and they had to fly back to the US for treatment. Peter had been living for a couple of years with the knowledge that he was slowly dying from a brain tumour. On returning to the US he declined quite rapidly. Jude documented their trials in regular emails to their many friends around the world. From the mails it sounded as if Peter kept his spirit and dignity to the very end, surrounded by loving friends and family. Bon voyage Peter, if you have to go there are worse ways to do so, but it’s a crying shame you couldn’t have had longer, you had so much to give.

Songbirds for Supper

One morning we were minding our own business on our terrace when Erminia’s daughter in law Palma bowled up the drive with her daughter, also called Erminia. They were carrying a plastic bag. Palma’s husband Domenico and her son Paolo (our builder) had been out shooting and guess what they’d brought for us? I peered nervously into the bag, six lovely dead Thrushes for the table … mmmm. “Er, what do you do with them?” I asked. Immediately, Palma thrust her hand into the bag and plucked and gutted the little fellahs. “Cook them for ten minutes in a little tomato sauce with some pancetta (bacon) and they’re lovely.” As a fully paid up carnivore I felt obliged to cook them, though I did chop the heads off, said to be really tasty, as I couldn’t bear looking at their accusatory little eyes staring out of the pot from their tiny grey lizzard like bodies. Actually they tasted OK, a bit like a cross between chicken and liver, though Sue couldn’t bring herself to sample them. Overall, I think I can take or leave protected songbirds for supper.

Similarly, three out of four things that Erminia brings us to eat on a daily basis taste truly wonderful. Fresh eggs, fresh ricotta, tomato sauce, homemade wine. But inevitably the fourth one tastes like absolute shit to our picky northern palettes. A few days ago she brought round a pot of yellow stuff, yet another cheese product. It’s really tasty spread on a slice of bread she said. After she’d gone I unscrewed the lid and was a confronted with a smell that I can only describe as concentrated essence of rancid old sock (a subject on which I pride myself I am something of an expert). “Thanks Erminia, but I think I’ll pass on this one.” Actually, I haven’t got the heart to tell her how horrible this stuff takes, so I will discretely dispose of it in the waste bin, like the other disgusting fourth products.