I visited our old friends Carole and Kevin in Nocera Umbra last weekend. There must be hundreds of such hill towns in Italy that would not be out of place nestled in the background landscape of the Mona Lisa. Their street plans are all similar, spiraling around a strategic hill like hunkered down snails, dark, introvert and defensive.
This one got a nasty shake in an earthquake in 1997 and is still getting itself back together. A massive renovation is now finally creeping towards completion and wandering round the pristine but largely empty streets the place seemed like a symbol for Italy as a whole. There is so much beauty here and history mixed up with so much ugliness. A lot of the town has been beautifully restored, but there is plenty of jerry building and incompetence as well, so that after fourteen years there is still no clear end in sight and only a fraction of the former inhabitants have moved back despite the injection of millions of euros of public money.
The town comes into its own after dark. Walking the deserted streets you can half see and hear the ghosts and like Italy itself, when the gloom hides all the crap you can almost pretend that the place is perfect, until a sudden zephyr of chilly mountain wind blows at you down a stone alley and provokes an involuntary shudder.
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