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 ...