Fings to do with figs

It's getting towards the end of August and our land is looking parched and tired. When I walk around to inspect the olive trees, dry and brittle weeds snap under my feet and a fine brown dust works its way into my sandals, making my feet itchy. But while everything else wilts under the flaring August sun, our fig trees turn into fruit producing machines. Had I the energy I could drag a bucket of figs back to the house every morning.

Six years ago I don't think I'd ever eaten a fresh fig. Now we have ten trees of different varieties and they are like old friends. Some produce an early crop in June, some don't. Most bear green figs but some have a rich dark purple fruit. Some make fat moist figs and others smaller intensely sweet ones. I usually wander around the trees in the morning picking and eating the sun-warmed fruit for breakfast. I break open the fig with my fingers and inspect how moist it is before popping it into my mouth and chewing slowly on the sweet sticky pulp and firm skin. This is the closest eating gets to sex. Milly often follows me in anticipation of being given a fresh fig or two straight from the tree.

By the first week or two in September the crop is pretty much finished, but the taste lingers on for the rest of the year in the various fig products I make: dried figs; green fig chutney; and fig jam. Milly has her own preservation technique: "fig a la tarmac". First let the figs fall onto a handy road, then leave to dry and get run over by passing cars and trucks for at least a week or two. They are then ready to be peeled from the road surface with ones teeth and chewed vigorously for several minutes. These are abundant until Christmas, but if you keep your eyes and your snout open you can often find the odd one as late as the following May. "Boun appetito!"

To beach or not to beach ...

We finally got it together to go to the beach a couple of days ago. We live on a limestone plateau about one thousand feet above sea level, but it's only a twenty minute drive to the Adriatic. Most days I run or walk along the edge of the plateau and look down across the coastal plain to the sea. In the Winter the sea is often wild and steely grey, with a white fringe at the shoreline as it roars onto the beaches of the deserted little towns and holiday resorts. But in August it is nearly always calm and azure blue, blending at the horizon with an equally blue, equally serene sky. You can practically feel it calling you, "come on down, I am cool, come and lie on the beach next to me, come and jump in." But, it takes a lot to overcome the torpor that descends in August. There is the car to pack, stuff to find, traffic to be negotiated. It all seems too much.

We went to our favorite spot, a little resort which has grown up around an old Watch Tower. We rented two sunbeds and an umbrella and it was so crowded that we had to follow the beach attendant for a couple of hundred meters before he could find a big enough space to set them up. Even then some people complained that they had already claimed the spot. The Attendant smiled at them and said "there's loads of room, you can all pretend that you're one big family." Then we settled down to read and sunbathe. Later on we swam and then ate lunch in one of the little Lidos on the edge of the beach, actually more a collection of shacks decked out for the Summer. I had barbecued fresh octopus in a bread roll, deliciously tender, the oily marinade dripped onto my T shirt as I bit into it.

With so many people around it is actually easier to be anonymous than when there are just a few. There is no room to pose or to stake out much territory, there is just room enough to be. In true Italian style some families are preparing three-course lunches amid the throng. Young women work on their tans, men play cards, babies cry, old ladies adjust their hats and hitch their nickers, all part of one great clump of humanity.

One person seems apart from the rest of us. A black man in bright African colours wanders the beach weighed down with hats, sunglasses and trinkets. His is the only black face on the beach. He probably makes a pittance, paying over most of his takings to some petty criminal. Not wanting to buy anything I avoid his gaze and let him pass on, as does everyone else. I feel a vague sense of unease before I return to the paperback I am reading.

Bloody tomatoes

It's that time of year when all self-respecting Italian peasants must make tomato sauce. Not the thick acidic stuff that people squeeze onto hamburgers, but the simple tomato pulp or "passata" that is the basis for so many Italian pasta sauces and stews.

In the photo Erminia is preparing her boiler, which is sited about ten meters from my bedroom window. In late July and early August there is a fire burning in this thing from about six in the morning, filling our house with the smell of woodsmoke. Erminia is not too fussy about the fuel she uses and this year happily broke up and consigned to the flames an old melamine chest of drawers, which made a thick black sooty mark up the side of her whitewashed kitchen wall and left our house reeking for days of burned plastic. When I went round to investigate, Erminia was crouched over the boiler as black and sweaty as the Chief Stoker on a steamship. "Is it making a smell?" She asked, innocently. "No, it's not a problem," I said, as always.

Normally we make our tomato sauce with Erminia and her family. This means having to get up at five in the morning and be shouted at a lot by Erminia. This year for the first time we decided to go it alone, so we could make about half the quantity considered essential by Erminia and complete the job in relative tranquility. To give her credit she coped pretty well, lending us a big saucepan and dropping in to check on us only four or five times. It's a simple process in which the tomatoes are boiled and then run through a machine which separates the pulp from the skins and the pips (hence "passata" as the tomatoes are "passed" through the machine). Then the pulp is loaded into jars which are boiled to sterilize them. We bought about eighty kilos of fresh tomatoes from our local market and after a hot and sweaty days labour we ended up with about the same number of half kilo jars of tomato sauce.

Obviously we made a massive saving on buying passata from the shops. Well no actually, the cost per jar of the tomatoes alone was more than than the cost of a jar of passata from our local supermarket, not counting our labour and all the equipment and materials we needed. This fact rather begs the question "why??" To which any Southern Italian will give you an unhesitating answer:

"Because, it's ours, we made it, we know what's in it, we know that it's good and we know that we've got enough of it to last us all year, whatever other shit may happen to go down."

Welcome to Puglia.

Erminia

Returning from a cycle ride this morning I surprised our neighbor Erminia as she walked up our drive. "Docco!" She exclaimed with a broad smile. For Erminia my English name "Doug", ending as it does in a consonant, is profoundly unsatisfying and so I have been "Docco" practically from the moment we met six years ago.

Suddenly our dog Milly trots out of the house barking hysterically whilst wagging her tail - her normal reaction to Erminia. This in turns brings Sue onto the terrace fresh from the shower with towels draped around her head and body. "Ciao Erminia" she cries, "how are you?" Erminia stumps her way up the drive with her old walking stick, falls onto a bench and gives her standard reply - "tired!"

Erminia is in her eighties and has lived in our little hamlet since she got married more than sixty years ago. Her husband Paolo died a couple of years back, but she is the matriarch of a large family who all live nearby. It's our good fortune that not only is she a genuine "contadina" or peasant farmer, but also a woman of great intelligence who takes a real interest in the peculiar foreigners who have come to live next door. She has taught us an enormous amount about life and good food, while in turn we have taught her a few things too. It was, for example, a bitter pill for her to swallow to learn that after sixty years of marriage there are men who actually take their own boots off.

Today, as ever, we talk for a few minutes about the weather, the vegetable patch and the latest death or disaster. Then she demands that I take her blood pressure as she usually does about once a week. I tell her to keep quiet and not to look at the dial as the cuff is pumping up around her wrist, but she always ignores me. "What does it say?" she asks, though I'm sure she can read the thing just as well as I. "Err ... 140 over 80" I say. "Hmm ... not bad", she replies. Suddenly, she raises herself to her feet with a grunt of pain and says "I must go"before stumping back down our drive with a cry of "ciao!" "Ciao Erminia!" We cry.

La Pizzica

Sue took this picture last night at a beer festival. A local folk group is playing a highly amplified Pizzica - a traditional dance of Puglia. The band have attitude and perform with a tight, intense rhythm. The dancers are a mix of locals and tourists and mostly they bounce up and down to the insistent beat in a variety of styles.

The couple in the foreground are different. They give the impression of having come here solely to dance the Pizzica and to have been dancing it all their lives. Their steps are precise and they are wholly focused on each other and the music. Sometimes their faces nearly touch and their arms intertwine, but they never actually make physical contact. Some other people in the crowd have noticed the nature of their dance and are watching or taking pictures, but the couple are oblivious. They are serving the dance not the spectators. They seem to be tapping into the ancient and ecstatic roots of the Pizzica. This is, at least, the impression they create.

Here in the South of Italy the past is never far away and it doesn't always have an easy or simple relationship with the present. For centuries the people of this region were mainly oppressed and landless peasants and the Pizzica speaks of this time. Today Puglia is part of a prosperous "modern" democracy, but the transition has come within the memory of those who are only in their thirties and forties. The local teenagers and twenty somethings recognise the dance as part of their heritage, but they don't know the steps and are more comfortable with the music played on MTV Italia. They join in the dance with their own freestyle or look on ambiguously from the fringes.

And what of our middle-aged couple? I feel sure they do come from Puglia, but they are far more likely to be schoolteachers or lawyers than subsistence farmers. And there is a good deal more self-consciousness to their dance than the romantic in me wants to believe. But the beat of the band drives on and on and more people throw themselves into the dance as the night draws in. Maybe it's the beer or maybe something ancient and half-forgotten really is being stirred in our blood.