I spent three days this week doing something familiar to any foreigner in a strange land – driving around aimlessly looking for stuff. I needed to find a metal worker to make a door for our pizza oven and to track down a source of lime mortar and limewash. My approach was to zig zag around the complex network of winding country lanes of the Val d’Itrea looking for likely workshops and lime kilns. On my second day I finally tracked down the home in the middle of nowhere of the company that made the steel shutters for our doors and windows a few years ago. The company sign looked very faded as I drove off the metalled lane onto the dirt track up to the workshops. As I got closer I noticed a couple of Chinese blokes smoking shiftily in the yard and when I got out of my car and walked into the building I was confronted by two or three banks of Chinese women slaving over sewing machines. “Is Cosimo here?” I said to someone who looked like a supervisor. All I got was a blank and mildly...

While Sue is away working I mostly lead a solitary life. This is fine by me. For some years now I have lived my life in cycles of relative indolence and solitude followed by periods of more intensive activity and social interaction. When I am working or living among a group or have guests to entertain I spend much of my time having real or imaginary conversations with those around me, so that my life becomes a process of rehearsal and performance. I’m pretty good at it, but it takes effort. On my own the conversations go away and I am more free to be myself, whatever that is. During these periods of solitude I get the occasional invitation and because of their rarity they loom large. Last weekend I was invited to a fiftieth birthday party in Martina Franca, a nearby town. Martina is an elegant baroque little place full of narrow limewashed alleys. It is packed with charming and expensively furnished apartments and it was in one such as this that the party was held. Climbing th...

One of the great things about living in Southern Italy is that no matter how grey and horrible the weather is, you know that there is always a bright sunny day not far around the corner. A day where, when you can find a sheltered spot, the sun will warm your bones even in January. The sun has been shining for a few days now and so today the land was dry enough to be rotovated for the first time this year. Timing when to get the rotovator out down here is a real art. If the land is too wet the machine just gets clogged up and you stagger around under the weight of mud on your boots. Leave it too late and the grass will grow too long and you have to chop it down with a brush cutter first, which is more than double the work load. This time I got it just right and my faithful diesel rotovator cut its way through the grassy clumps like a paddle steamer, leaving the earth looking like moist, freshly ground coffee, under the bright blue winter sky. Looking over our patch of land as the s...