Life in Ameglia

We’ve been in Ameglia for three months now and membership of the local Blockbuster has been just one more step down a road of increasing domestication.  On our return from Cologne we finally acquired an Italian mobile ‘phone and on the 9^th January after much ringing around and comparing of prices we travelled back to Milan by train to pick up a small blue hatchback which we are renting for two or three months.  Driving back from Milan we got a real insight into a Northern Italian winter as snow and sleet lashed against the windscreen.  Travelling in darkness over the range of hills that overlook the gulf of La Spezia the temperature was well below zero and the snow was starting to settle on the autoroute.  Fortunately the coast is milder and we lost all trace of sleet and drizzle as we dropped down into our local town of Sarzana.

Having had a car for three weeks now it has changed our lives and given us an even better feel for the local countryside, which is growing on us more and more.  One major discovery is that in addition to picturesque decay, food and hanging washing another thing that the Italians do really well is hill villages.  Around here we cannot move for stunningly photogenic little communities clinging to the sides of every available slope and promontory with a decent view.  Including Ameglia itself there are seven or eight really attractive medieval villages, most with their own castle and fortifications, within no more than a ten-mile radius of our mooring.  We tend to visit them on bright sunny winter days when they are empty and mysterious places full of light and shade and nothing to disturb the quiet other than the howling of the wind.  Walking the narrow mazes of lanes one can turn a corner and be met with a Genovese watchtower, or a small piazza from which one might see a wide sweep of the deep blue Ligurian Sea and the Tuscan coast arcing south and sometimes, on the horizon, the distinct grey hump of the island of Corsica, nearly seventy miles away.

I think my favourites so far are Montemorcello, Nicola and Colonnata.  Montemorcello sits on top of the spine of hills that divide the Magra Valley from the Gulf of La Spezia.  It’s only visible from close to and we had driven past it a couple of times before we really noticed it.  Then we walked to it from the Magra on a footpath which took us up through a cool pine wooded gully right into the centre of the village.  It’s more light and open than many of the villages and a little more ordinary, but it feels to be loved and cared for by its inhabitants, who at first sight appeared to be a pride of well-groomed cats.  There were cats everywhere, staring at us from under hedges, down alleys and on balconies and windowsills.  Food and water bowls too were dotted all round the place.  After wandering around for a while we dropped into a small cafe which by contrast was run by two dogs.  It was on the edge of the village and had a large garden with a dilapidated collection of rustic wooden furniture.  A wire-haired mongrel was lolling around outside and another dog answering to the name of “Dingo” and looking remarkably like one stood guard by the door.  “Dingo” reluctantly deigned to let us in where the elderly nominal owner of the cafe took our order of coffee and focaccia and informed Sue that the wire haired one was called “Napoleone” or “Nappo” for short.  We sat outside and drank our coffee and watched the sparrows while “Nappo” divided his time between being stroked by Sue and having his forelock trained into a punk hairdo by a young workman.  Judging by the state of “Nappo’s” forelock this was a popular pastime among the local youths.  In the meantime “Dingo” tried to maintain a studied indifference, but eventually she couldn’t resist coming for a stroke followed by some bickering round the back of the garden shed with “Nappo”.  We finished our coffees, gave the owner a large tip, which pleased him greatly, said “arrividerci” to “Dingo” and “Nappo”, which pleased him even more and walked on, strangely uplifted by Montemorcello and its four-legged inhabitants.

Nicola is just plain gorgeous.  More of a hamlet than a village it sits on top of a steep conical hill on the edge of the Alpe Apuane, the small mountain range which stretches from one side of the Magra Valley down the Tuscan coast to Pisa and Lucca.  At the summit of the cone is the church and a tiny piazza, below which are two or three tiers of tall stone houses linked by winding cobbled lanes with every now and then a view down the steep hillside to the Magra Valley or the Tuscan coast or up to the snow dusted Alpe Apuane.  We visited on yet another bright sunny day with the air full of the sound of canaries trilling away in two cages on a balcony near the church, despite their feed trays being raided by several local pigeons.  Exploring the cobbled lanes Sue turned to me and said, “this is it”, partly I think to tease me and partly to see how the words felt once articulated.  I don’t think we will try to buy a house in Nicola, but we could keep La Fulica on the Magra just fifteen minutes away and those views ...

By contrast, Collonata is high up in one of the main valleys from which Carrara marble is quarried.  Getting there is a steep drive up from Carrara through an increasingly scarred and industrial landscape, for much of the time stuck behind huge bulk carrier trucks grunting and grinding their way up the slopes spewing clouds of white dust.  Everywhere there are signs to marble quarries and marble shops, usually tacky affairs set up in sheds and Portacabins with rows of midget “Davids” posing punily in the windows.  Collonata itself is a few hundred feet above the tat zone, a disarming cross between a medieval Italian hill village and a Welsh Valleys mining town.  By my reckoning the place is at least two thousand feet above sea level and the air is cool and clean.  The village itself is much like the others we have visited, except its piazza is paved in marble and there are unexpected marble details in its stone houses.  Outside the church there is a striking marble statue of a cloaked figure staring skywards which is, I think, a monument to the local quarrymen (“cavatore”).  The village’s surroundings are stark grey mountains, scarred here and there with white quarry workings and rusted old arial runways.  The place has a peaceful atmosphere, notwithstanding the rumble of the trucks from the road in the valley below and the distant noise of tumbling marble which sounds like a continuous controlled landslide, or the mountains grinding their teeth.  In addition to quarrying and tourism the village economy is based on the production of a pork product called “lardo”.  This stuff looks exactly as the name would suggest, like Parma Ham but 90% fat rather than 90% meat.  Quite tasty, but I would advise having one’s personal physician on hand in case it induces an immediate heart-attack and definitely not for the seasick.  We returned to Carrara by a different route which took us through more quarries and a narrow winding tunnel through the mountains with no lights inside and sandwiched between two enormous trucks. 

As well as collecting hill villages we’ve now had a couple of walks in the Cinque Terre – having sailed past them once and travelled by train through them four times we really had to fill in the gaps on foot.  Basically the Cinque Terre are five ancient villages perched on a rocky coastline.  Before the twentieth century they earned their living from olive groves and vineyards set in steep, rich soiled, south-facing terraces and from fishing.  Life’s luxuries were provided by the odd bit of piracy until the Genovese put a castle or two to the torch and built watchtowers.  Before the building of the railway and new roads they were accessible only by boat or mule or on foot.  They are now a World Heritage site and one enormous tourist attraction.  What can I say about them?  -  If when God was creating the Earth he’d commissioned a really gifted landscape gardener with a design brief to create the perfect coastal walking country, then the designer might well have come up with the Cinque Terre, although God might have rejected the plans as being “a bit over the top”.  There are ten miles of perfect rocky coastline with a village every two miles or so, some with small fishing harbours and some perched on the cliff tops.  The whole area is laced with a network of mainly cobbled paths linking the villages and climbing at right angles to the hills above. The coastal path ducks in and out of indentations in the coast, over tiny keystone arched bridges across clear streams and giving new views at every turn.  Every now and then there is a small farmhouse with no obvious means of access with an old couple tending the terraces and an excited dog barking away.  Here and there the path is crossed or bounded by toothed monorails.  Tiny single seat trucks climb up and down these rails to collect the harvest and deliver materials – a mechanical replacement for the mules I guess.  Winter is a good time to visit as the villages are not too packed and if I have any complaint its that the whole area is just too perfect.

We’ve also been attending to culture by visiting a few of the local historic sites and ancient monuments.  The Villa Gorzoni lies between Lucca and Florence and has the most amazing seventeenth century garden.  We had some trouble finding the place on the outskirts of Collodi, the small town where Pinocchio was created and the Attendant seemed quite surprised to see visitors and after taking our money she returned to doing a bit of weeding.  Inside the rusty old wrought iron gates the garden unwound in front of us up a steep south-facing slope.  Two geese in an ornamental pond started honking loudly at our entrance and a few cats ran for cover.  The garden is set to one side of the Villa, a magnificent seventeenth century country house covered in scaffolding.  Our 1996 guidebook said the House was closed for restoration which appeared to be ongoing in 2003.  The gardens themselves are formal and gently decaying and at their heart lies a cool subterranean grotto, damp and moss lined, with statues of Neptune and various sea creatures, the centrepieces of fountains which were turned off when we were there.  All around the gardens are statues of nymphs and Gods and people all spattered with lichen, some with their faces half eaten by decay or with most of an arm missing apart from a rusted stump of iron reinforcing, making the limb look like a rotted prosthesis.  The whole layout of the garden is clearly based on a complex language of symbols, but the short pamphlet given to us by the Attendant did not give us the key.  As well as the scaffolding there was other evidence of work going on, hedge clippings, a new chainsaw lying on the ground, but not a soul in sight other than the Attendant.  The whole place had the air of a country estate from which, in the middle of an ordinary day, everyone had suddenly fled, perhaps from an advancing army.

Two or three miles from our mooring are the excavated remains of the Roman town of Luni, once a substantial settlement and port at the mouth of the Magra, which died with the slow retreat of the sea and the waning of Roman power, leaving it stranded in the fields a mile or so from the current shoreline.  The site is now a lonely outpost of the National Archaeological Museum.  There is a small museum and bookshop on the site and a marked path around the extensive excavations.  Judging by our visit the National Museum uses it as a dumping ground for their least helpful Attendants and Curators and as a place to dull the enthusiasm of new recruits to the Museum Service.  Some of the museum buildings were closed and we were hurried out of the main building so the staff could have their lunch, despite the fact that the published hours showed it to be open all day.  One of the display cases was being used as an impromptu clothes rack with a leather jacket draped across it.  We were told that the Amphitheatre, about a mile from the main site was closed until three thirty, but that we could come back and see it then.  So we went off for some lunch and came back to find that, surprise, surprise, the gates to the Amphitheatre were still firmly locked.  Still, the place did at least give one a feel for the scale of a medium sized Roman town and a sense of the continuity that exists in Italy, much more than in England, between the ancient world and the modern in a country that the Romans never actually left.

Meanwhile back at the Antica Compagnia Della Vella life goes on at the same old pace.  We were shocked to learn that “Bronzina” is actually “Bronzino” – a boy dog, or an old man dog at least, but it’s hard not to think of him and “Gadafi” as “the girls”.  One night we caused great excitement by returning to the boat with a roast chicken, while at the same time Mustafa must have been late home and hadn’t fed the animals.  As a result we were greeted by two hungry dogs and a cat  sharpening its claws in anticipation.  The deputation followed us down to the boat where the cat jumped up and down on the quayside and the dogs looked on longingly.  Gadafi was the most persistent, staying on the quayside and barking throughout our meal.  On two or three occasions she looked to be tensing her short stumpy legs to jump for our bowsprit and I kept an ear open for a loud splash in case she decided to go for it and missed the mark.

Later that same evening our neighbouring boat owner, Renato, introduced himself and his friend Lorris to us.  They had driven over from near Padova (Padua) for a weekends sailing.  Lorris keeps a small boat at Choggia on the Venetian Lagoon, but Renato prefers the Ligurian to the Adriatic Sea and so is prepared to put up with the long journey.  Inevitably we joined them for a “quick drink” at a local pizzeria followed by drinks on “La Fulica”.  Renato is, or was, a dentist now bizarrely working for the EU in Mozambique.  By an odd coincidence we learned that his boat’s name “Linea D’Ombre” is a translation of the title of a Joseph Conrad story “the Shadow Line”, which Sue and I had just finished reading.  Late in the evening Renato lamented the mystery of Italian women.  Sue and I had already noticed that though seemingly a sturdy and tough bunch (we have frequently been overtaken on our bicycles by septuagenarian old ladies on rusted machines loaded with shopping), Italian women rarely set foot on their husbands boats, preferring to sit on the quayside knitting or reading and barking the occasional comment while the old man is doing something important with the engine.  Sue is very unusual around here, because she actually lives on a boat, and the Italians can only cope with her by treating her as an honorary bloke.  Renato reinforced our observations with his own complaint that he wanted to give up work and go sailing, but there was no way his wife would even think about it.  We parted with undertakings of undying friendship and as Renato staggered across to his boat he offered us a parting observation, looking around with rolling eyes:

“Italia, the most beautiful country in the world – only one problem – the Italians!”

“Linea D’Ombre” left the Magra later than expected next morning, not that I noticed, lying in my bunk nursing a mother of a hangover.

Now the days are getting longer our preparations for the new sailing season have begun, albeit falteringly.  The woodwork has had a new coat of oil and we have agreed with Paolo the crane driver that “La Fulica” will be lifted out of the water in late February or early March for bottom cleaning and a coat or two of anti-fouling paint.  We also now seem to have become very much part of the furniture in the marina as the only people living on their boat.  For most people I think we are the funny English couple who appeared from nowhere and who it’s best to just nod and smile at.

Arne, Giovanna’s German “boy” and his ten-year-old daughter Althea came round to the boat for supper a few nights ago.  We mainly cook Italian food these days, but we thought we should make an effort and try to produce a meal with at least one English dish on the menu.  In the end we settled for a Cottage Pie, which both Arne and his daughter seemed to like very much.  Arne thought it was a very German type of dish and christened it “Pizza Tedesco” (German pizza), a name which I think we will now always call it by.  Arne is very good and witty company and we had a pleasant sociable evening.  He’s a bright guy, seemingly fluent in five or six languages and well travelled.  He arrived on the Magra about twelve years ago as an itinerant juggler, met Althea’s mother Barbara, started doing jobs around the marina and bits of boat restoration and just sort of stayed.  Although he looks the laid back ex-hippy, at heart he seems to be a frustrated family man stuck in an unhappy situation for the sake of his daughter and with the clock of his life ticking away.  Arne says Barbara is mentally ill and has been unemployed for some time and presumably living on benefits.  He seems to have an on-off relationship with her, unable to break completely or to live as a conventional couple.  Althea spends part of the week with her mum in a flat in Ameglia and part on Arne’s boat which has been out of the water for the last two or three years awaiting a new engine.  Arne would like to rent a house to give Althea a better environment but can’t really afford to on his casual wages from the marina and other odd jobs.  On top of that Arne is very dependent on Giovanna and her husband who own the marina, as he keeps his boat here rent free as well as his old truck.  Mustafa is the paid hand around the place while Arne is casual, which means Arne effectively has to work to Mustafa, although probably more skilled and experienced.  I hope he finds his way out of this mire someday.

To end on a happier note, we received a letter and photos from our German friends Thomas and Nicole today.  In the letter they have asked me to be young Joshi’s Godfather.  I feel very proud and honoured, especially as I know they take the finding of Godparents very seriously.  Utte, an old friend of Thomas’ has been Joshi’s Godmother for some time, but until now they have been unable to find the right sort of person to be Godfather.  I am tempted to write back immediately accepting their offer, but they are asking me to take on an important responsibility, so I will reflect on it for a few days.