Erminia asked us if we would like to go to St Giovanni Rotondo to see Padre Pio. Padre Pio is an interesting phenomenon in Southern Italy and I believe also in Spain. He was a monk who prayed either for the ending of the First World War or the second and was rewarded with the stigmata for his efforts and walked around with bandages on his hands and feet for the rest of his days. After the Second World War he decided to raise money for the building of an enormous hospital for the poor in St Giovanni Rotondo, the tiny hill town in northern Puglia where he lived in the local monastery. His stigmata were regarded I believe with scepticism by the Catholic Church, but he was a friend of Pope John Paul, who ultimately made him a saint a year or two ago (he died in the 1960s). You see Padre Pio’s image everywhere in Southern Italy, in shops and houses, outside public buildings and frequently in the cabs of Italian HGVs and St Giovanni is now a huge place of pilgrimage, full of tacky hot...

Every May a plaster Madonna from a local church does the rounds of our parish or “contrada”, spending a night in each house.  Each night the locals gather to say their “hail Marys” in front of the Madonna, before she moves on to the next house.  When it was our turn we tidied up the dining room and put a nice tablecloth on the dining table along with some flowers and a couple of candles.  Then most of the women of the contrada and their children came along from the previous house, perhaps twenty people in all, to see the Madonna installed for the night.  She is a plaster figure maybe two feet high, with, rather touchingly, one finger missing and a white plaster scar where the finger should be.  I quite liked having her around for the evening and bravely resisted taking a photo of her in dark glasses or with a cigarette trailing from her fingers.  Call me superstitious, but I also bought a lottery ticket that night.  Next day they all trooped round f...