Up and down the valley

I spent three days this week doing something familiar to any foreigner in a strange land – driving around aimlessly looking for stuff. I needed to find a metal worker to make a door for our pizza oven and to track down a source of lime mortar and limewash. My approach was to zig zag around the complex network of winding country lanes of the Val d’Itrea looking for likely workshops and lime kilns.

On my second day I finally tracked down the home in the middle of nowhere of the company that made the steel shutters for our doors and windows a few years ago. The company sign looked very faded as I drove off the metalled lane onto the dirt track up to the workshops. As I got closer I noticed a couple of Chinese blokes smoking shiftily in the yard and when I got out of my car and walked into the building I was confronted by two or three banks of Chinese women slaving over sewing machines. “Is Cosimo here?” I said to someone who looked like a supervisor. All I got was a blank and mildly hostile stare and something told me to beat a hasty retreat. I felt like I’d peered inside a door that led to the dark and criminal underbelly of Southern Italy, but maybe this is paranoia. Just because the place was in the middle of nowhere with no signs to give away its existence doesn’t mean it has to be an illegal sweatshop … does it?

Anyway, on day three I found a workshop in the backstreets of Locorotondo and the following day the steelworker and his mate came and measured up the oven for its new steel door. I also located a large lime kiln round the back of our local woodyard, where I was able to buy several bags of lime based products to experiment with for a handful of euros. That’s one of the peculiar charms about living in Puglia – you can spend your day going round in circles or you can find exactly what you want, but you will never be able to tell which it is going to be when you stumble hopefully out of bed in the morning.