Since moving into the house in August we had been led to expect that the olives would be ready for harvesting in late November or December. We had also decided that we would probably not harvest this year given everything that needed to be done on the house. However, our developing love affair with the land and the enthusiasm of our 78-year-old neighbours Erminia and Paolo soon made us change our minds. In the event, Erminia, who we are also discovering is a bit of a wind up merchant, looked into the sky one morning in early November and said “the harvest is early this year, I’ve made an appointment at the olive mill, would you like me to make one for you too.” So, we found ourselves with an appointment at the Mill for ten days later with no clear idea what to do. Unsure of exactly how much work was involved we invited two Swedish and two American friends who were over wintering in the Venetian Lagoon to come and join us for a few days. Erminia offered to give us some instructio...

Is it possible to really fall in love with a piece of land? We now own about an acre of Southern Italy and every day, much to my surprise I love it more. We have about sixty mainly mature olive trees and a similar number of assorted fruit and nut trees, including ten fig trees, which over the summer produced handfuls of sticky sweet black and green figs every day. Right up to the end of September I could wander through our grove and pick the Sun warmed fruit, eating samples as I went and dropping the skins onto the rich earth. In late July we bought a second-hand rotovator. In Italian it is called a “motozappa”, a perfect name for a device that is basically an engine which thumps the ground. It’s a heavy old beast with a seven and a half horsepower two-stroke engine. I’ve run the machine once over our acre and it converted the soil into something with the texture and colour of finely ground coffee. I didn’t know earth could look so good. However, the process took four days a...

Paolo and Ermenia refer to our neighbours, the Bari architects, rather dismissively as the “Barese” (the people from Bari). This is because they are townies who only come down to the house for Summer weekends, are keen to put fences up around their property and are trying to get the locals interested in having mains water connected. By contrast we seem to have been adopted by Paolo and Ermenia and their extended family. I think because we are here most of the time and are willing to get stuck into tending our land, however ham fistedly. The surest sign of this came when we were invited to help bring in Paolo’s grape harvest along with their two sons, their wives and various grandchildren and friends. The grapes were ready to be harvested in early October. Sadly this Summer the weather has been very hot but also quite wet and Paolo’s vines have been attacked by mould and disease and his grapes rejected by the Cantina Sociale, so the whole crop is to be processed by the family fo...

Having lived here so long Ermenia knows everything about the house and its history. On an early tour of inspection she wrinkled her nose up at the rather naff plastic concertina doors at one end of our kitchen. “You want to get rid of those,” she said, “there’s a nice wooden door that goes there down in the cellar”, which of course there was. She also solved the mystery of our septic tank, in Italian “pozzo nero”, literally “black well”. The estate agents insisted that a rather sad looking stone chamber in the grounds with a broken pipe leading into it was the pozzo nero. In an early experiment we poured a bucket of water down the toilet and waited for it to flow through the broken pipe and saw and heard nothing. I gingerly removed the bit of old tin and pile of stones covering the lid to the stone chamber, sending a horde of small scorpions and wood lice running for cover and found the interior dry and clean. “Are you sure that’s the pozzo nero in the grounds?” We asked Pierot...

Erminia and her husband Paolo, both seventy-eight, live in the house over the road. The second day after we bought the house an aged crone in a floral dress and perhaps three or four teeth, hailed us with a raucous cry. Our Italian is still by no means perfect and Ermenia sometimes speaks in local dialect, which sounds incidentally a bit like Orkish, “Locorotondo” our local town being called something like “Oroondoosh”. But Erminia speaks loudly and clearly on account of Paolo being deaf as a post and I think what she said was something like, “hello, pleased to meet you. You are English? It feels like the whole world is coming to stay in my country (this said with a proud smile). Any time you need anything just pop in and ask. You must meet my Grandson, he’s building the house next to mine to live in with his fiancée. Come and have a look. He’s an electrician and does plumbing and building as well, he can fix your place up no problem.” With that we got the guided tour of the ...

We arrived at the house one morning at the same time as an Enel van. A fat sweaty bloke got out of the van and inspected our electric meter and external wiring. Drawing in a breath he then said the words you never want to hear in Italy: “C’e un problema.” It turned out that the electric had been cut off many years ago and in the interim the house next door had been completely rewired and the old cable running from our house, across the neighbour’s house to the nearest electricity pole had been completely removed. This meant we needed to get the permission of the neighbours to run a new cable and have an external cabin built for our new electricity meter. Paranoia struck again and I envisaged years of bitter argument while we sorted out our power supply. However, despite the power problem we decided to move into the house anyway. We could draw buckets of water from the cisterns and we went out and bought a job lot of oil lamps. This turned out to our advantage as it considerab...

Last time I wrote we were staying with our friends Claude and Jane while waiting to complete on the house. The completion, which in Italian is called literally “the Act”, was finally set for 10am on the 28th July at the Notary’s office in Martina Franca. After the formality of the meeting to sign the Sale and Purchase Agreement three months before, I was a little disappointed to find it was a very casual affair. Pierot and Immanuelle from our Estate Agents were dressed in suits, but the Notary wore jeans and trainers. Mr Convertini, the vendor, was dressed in chinos and a polo shirt and had the demeanour of a man about to receive €66,000 in negotiable cheques. His son came with him, thoughtfully attired in a Union Jack T shirt. We suspected that Mrs Convertini had sent the lad to make sure the old man didn’t do anything impetuous with the dosh before returning to their flat in Bari. We had a different translator this time, a young Swedish woman who rendered the Completion Contr...

Our final stop before Taranto was meant to be Sibari, a six hundred berth Marina and apartment complex where we had more Calabrian adventures. We found the entry channel using our GPS and then slowly motored towards the entrance as depths were reported to be shallow. At the mouth of a canal which leads into the marina we were practically aground, so I called the marina on the VHF, to which there was no response. I then called them on the mobile ‘phone and got a reply. “Where are you?”, a charming woman asked in excellent English. “Outside the marina,” I replied. “Ah, you can’t enter I’m afraid, maybe next week”. It turned out that the port authorities had closed the marina, one of the largest in Southern Italy, because the entrance had not been dredged. This was even more baffling because a number of foreign boats had over-wintered here last year and we had already met one boat on our travels planning to stay this coming winter. “Yup, nothing really does work in Calabria”, I...

We spent three days in Rocella, then headed for our next port of call, Le Castella. There are only a few places to get diesel on the Ionian coast of Calabria and as we were running low I dipped the tank every hour. Unfortunately, my dipstick didn’t take account of the fact that the tank is an odd shape and with ten miles to go to our destination I found we had no more than a few minutes of fuel left. I switched the engine off immediately to give us a small reserve and we got the sails up. It was a hot, hot nearly windless afternoon and it took us three hours to cover four miles. With the sun beginning to set the wind picked up and we started coasting along at four knots. At about the same time Sue noticed some splashing in the water around us and then spotted four Riso’s Dolphins swimming under our bow. These are some of the biggest dolphins in the Med, with big snub noses and white scar-like markings. They were joined by a large pod of smaller dolphins which they chased away w...

One we passed through the Straits of Messina we were in new territory in the far south of Calabria.  There is a saying in Italy that “nothing works in Calabria” and we found plenty of evidence to support this claim.  About twenty miles South of the Straits, at the end of Italy’s big toe is the port of Saline Joniche.  It’s a small industrial port with a railway station, built a couple of decades ago for no obvious purpose other than to provide kickbacks to corrupt politicians and Mafia bosses.  We arrived there on a blisteringly hot afternoon and motored cautiously up to the harbour.  None of the industry is working and the harbour mouth is now completely blocked by a sandbank.  Rather than dredge the entrance some enterprising soul has blasted a hole through the harbour wall to allow passage to the few small local fishing boats and cruisers that use it.  Inside, through the rubble of the improvised entrance it looked hot and dead, so we decided to...

After the Aolies we anchored at the mouth of the Straits of Messina at a fishing village called Scilla, named after the legendary monster with many arms which the Greeks said lived in the Straits and dragged ships to their doom.   It is a heart-achingly beautiful spot.   The water in the little harbour is crystal clear and the old stone houses are set on a steep slope down to the waters edge.   Outside every little terrace of houses there is a slipway with small fishing boats pulled up literally at each front door, with weather beaten old men mending their nets.   Going ashore we walked the networks of tiny alleys, which every now and then gave a view down steep stone steps to the clear water of the harbour.   Like much of Calabria the place has a Victorian juxtaposition between wealth and poverty, with expensive harbour side restaurants cheek by jowl with decaying cottages ripe with the smell of damp and mould.   In the harbour we were able to ...

South of the bay of Naples we visited the Aolie Islands, which are a fashionable watering place for rich Italians.   Because the seas were smooth and the weather settled we anchored one night off Stromboli, the most easterly of the Aolies and an active volcano.   Going ashore we were a little disconcerted to find signs everywhere saying “if you hear the warning siren leave the coast immediately and go to the assembly areas.”   Apparently there is a risk of an underwater volcanic eruption which could generate a massive tidal wave or Tsunami. Next morning we motored slowly around the coast of Stromboli watching the lava flows, before going on to Vulcano, another of the Aolies.   If you ever get the chance to visit this island, don’t bother unless you have a strong stomach.   All over the island are volcanically heated pools in which bloated middle aged Italians cover themselves in green and evil smelling mud.   The whole place stinks of ro...

Being a cruiser is like belonging to a tribe, but there are many sub-tribes. My least favourite sub-tribe is the “CV cruisers”. People who in mid-career take off with a boat for a year or so, get as far as they can and then head back to home waters to resume their old lives. Many in this group bring with them the deadline orientation of their working lives and simply seem to race from one place to another. Their objective is to complete an “adventurous episode” to add to their CV – their focus more on the next thing than the now. My favourite sub-tribe might be called the “so what?” brigade. People who when faced with all or any of the following objections from well meaning friends and family say “so what? – I don’t see why that should stop us going cruising”: • You haven’t got any money. • You can’t sail. • You’ve got a secure job. • She’s half your age. • You’ve only got one leg. Allied to this tribe are what might be called the pure eccentrics – like David and Eli. ...

Now we’ve been in the Med for well over a year I think I can say I’m getting truly acclimatised. This has a downside. I can’t cope with cold weather any more. Italy is at this moment in the grip of a cold spell. There is snow from the Alps to Sicily and the TV news has pictures of frozen tailbacks full of juggernauts from one end of the country to the other. I’m writing this in the early morning in my berth watching my breath condense all over the laptop screen. Our fan heater is going full belt, I’m wrapped in a duvet and I’m wearing track suit bottoms, a sweater and thick socks. Here on the coast the temperature is actually at this moment a couple of degrees above freezing, a normal English winter morning which a couple of years ago I would have thought nothing about. The trouble is ... I’m bloody freezing! When I wrote in October there were thirty odd cruising yachts here already and they continued to roll in steadily through October and November, so that there is now a ...