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...