Locorotondo and Saratok - February 2013

Sue and I come from the UK, but in 2004 we bought a small house with some olive trees in southern Italy, in the countryside near the little town of Locorotondo.  This is the place we now call home and to which we return after our travels.

Some of the people who have seen my blog and who come from Sarawak, have asked for more information about our town.  In some ways it is very different from Saratok in Sarawak, where we are currently working, but there are some surprising similarities too.  Locorotondo is a small country town in the southern Italian region of Puglia, which, like Sarawak, is considered to be a remote and under-developed area.  Many people in Northern Italy look on Puglia as a "backward" place, in the same way that perhaps some West Malaysians see Sarawak.

Like Saratok, Locorotondo is in a vegetable oil producing area, although the oil comes from olive trees and not palms.  We have sixty olive trees around our house and when we are home we harvest the olives and make our own oil.  Olive oil has a much stronger taste than palm oil and is very popular for cooking.  But, olive trees are much less productive than palms, producing only one crop per year.  However, unlike palms, olive trees carry on growing almost indefinitely and there are many that are hundreds of years old.  A lot of grapes are also grown around Locorotondo and it is a big wine producing area.

The town is called "Locorotondo" because it has a circular shape and is built on a hill.  Most of the houses in the old town centre are made of stone and are several hundred years old.  The town sits on a limestone plateau which is about four hundred metres above sea level and although Southern Italy has a mild climate the town can be cold in the winter (December to February) and sometimes it snows.

If you look out from Locorotondo at the surrounding land you will see mainly olive trees, vineyards and fields where people grow vegetables.  There is nothing like the tropical rainforest that still covers much of Sarawak.  Once, Southern Italy was covered with thick forest in which there were lots of wild animals including deer, wild pigs and bears, but it was mostly chopped down hundreds of years ago.  Sometimes I get angry when people from Europe complain that in places like Sarawak the rainforest is being destroyed, because I don't think that people who destroyed their own forests centuries ago have any right to point the finger at others.

Like Saratok, Locorotondo has a market where you can buy local fruit and vegetables, meat and other products, although it is only open on Friday, not every day of the week.  It's a great place to buy good fresh food and to meet people.  The climate and the soil in Puglia are good for growing all kinds of fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes, oranges, broccoli, aubergines and cabbages and the produce on sale at the market is abundant and of exceptional quality.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Locorotondo and Saratok is the relative diversity of the inhabitants.  Locorotondo is monocultural - all the people are white, most of them are Roman Catholics and there are very few recent immigrants from other places.  There are no mosques or temples and everyone speaks the same language.  By contrast Saratok has at least three distinct cultures - Malay, Chinese and Iban, each with its own history and traditions going backs hundreds or thousands of years. In Locorotondo there is only Roman Catholicism, not even any other types of Christian church.

I miss our little town in Puglia where the people have taught me a lot about life and good food, but I will also miss Saratok when we leave.