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.

Martina Franca

While Sue is away working I mostly lead a solitary life. This is fine by me. For some years now I have lived my life in cycles of relative indolence and solitude followed by periods of more intensive activity and social interaction. When I am working or living among a group or have guests to entertain I spend much of my time having real or imaginary conversations with those around me, so that my life becomes a process of rehearsal and performance. I’m pretty good at it, but it takes effort. On my own the conversations go away and I am more free to be myself, whatever that is.

During these periods of solitude I get the occasional invitation and because of their rarity they loom large. Last weekend I was invited to a fiftieth birthday party in Martina Franca, a nearby town. Martina is an elegant baroque little place full of narrow limewashed alleys. It is packed with charming and expensively furnished apartments and it was in one such as this that the party was held. Climbing the stairs you are transported to a part of the town that the tourist usually does not see – the world up at the roofline full of secluded terraces and ancient masonry with a jagged horizon of chimneys and TV arials. From the balcony of the apartment you can stare down godlike at the ants circling the piazza below.

There were lots of people, Italian and English, guitar music and Indian food. I chatted to a few people I knew and some that I did not. Often on these occasions I find myself chatting to a British ex pat, usually with a kind of horrified curiosity. I don’t think that I am a snob and I like my fellow countrymen when I am in England, I really do. But here in the South of Italy the fixed anglocentric way of seeing things that many of them have seems ridiculous and in the end I fall back on frustrated silence. It was good to catch up with some friends, but in the end I was glad to climb back down the stairs to the chilly and deserted streets in search of my car.

The good earth

One of the great things about living in Southern Italy is that no matter how grey and horrible the weather is, you know that there is always a bright sunny day not far around the corner. A day where, when you can find a sheltered spot, the sun will warm your bones even in January.

The sun has been shining for a few days now and so today the land was dry enough to be rotovated for the first time this year. Timing when to get the rotovator out down here is a real art. If the land is too wet the machine just gets clogged up and you stagger around under the weight of mud on your boots. Leave it too late and the grass will grow too long and you have to chop it down with a brush cutter first, which is more than double the work load.

This time I got it just right and my faithful diesel rotovator cut its way through the grassy clumps like a paddle steamer, leaving the earth looking like moist, freshly ground coffee, under the bright blue winter sky. Looking over our patch of land as the sun began to set I felt a glow of satisfaction, tempered by sadness that our little dog Milly was no longer here to mooch around under the olives as I worked.