We had a great time on our fiftieth birthdays. As our birthdays are only 12 days apart we decided to have a joint celebration, along with Meeno, one of Erminia’s sons who had his 53rd birthday around the same time. The night before we went up the road to Meenos for his birthday party and then the next day we organised lunch for 25 under our new veranda. Meeno and his son, our builder Paolo, turned up in the morning with scaffold poles and netting to rig up more shade and help lay tables and chairs. Sue’s friend and teaching colleague Pat came early to help prepare, as did our friends Claude and Jane. The remaining guests were all members of our neighbours Erminia and Paolo’s family. I guess the lunch was our way of saying thank you to all these people for their kindness and generosity. Pugliese people have big healthy appetites and are also particular about their food, not generally liking any kind of foreign muck. Not trusting us to cook anything remotely edible we had a ...

We now have two animals. “Chiaro” the cat was in fact a sitting tenant when we arrived. Chiaro originally belonged to a Calabrian family, who rented our house until a couple of years before we bought it, and Chiaro had somehow stayed, fed occasionally on pasta by Erminia, who like so many country people has a love hate relationship with domestic pets, alternately making a fuss of Chiaro then chasing him with a broom. When we arrived and started giving him real cat food he decided to move back to our house pretty much full time, although the rule is he is not allowed inside. Chiaro is a big tomcat and a kind of sandy colour which matches the stonework of the house. I guess he is about five or six and this spring he had trouble coming to terms with the fact that he may no longer be the toughest cat on the block. Every night we would hear blood curdling yowlings and growlings and other signs of feline mayhem and in the morning Chiaro would come limping for his food, bloody and wit...

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...

One mark of our becoming increasingly established down here is that this month we finally got our Permissions to Stay in Italy. In theory this is more or less a formality for EU citizens, but in practise we had to drive the fifty-odd miles to the Police Station in Bari every fortnight, usually to be told that our documents were not ready. When we did eventually get them, Sue on a roll immediately applied for residency and is now the only English person resident in the Commune of Locorotondo. Which then meant that finally we could buy a car and a motorcycle here. So for €2,000 we bought a ten year old Opel Corsa from a local garage and a little later I walked into the main Moto Guzzi dealer in Taranto and said “I would like to buy an Italian motorcycle”, to an almost tumultuous reception. Moto Guzzi make robust twin cylinder motorbikes that are old fashioned and unfashionable in Italy. I bought a six-year-old 750cc machine that is absolutely perfect for blasting around the count...

This feels strange. I’m sat in my home office, transported at ludicrous expense along with the rest of our furniture from London. In the last couple of weeks the building work on the house has suddenly started to come together and for the first time in three years we are living in relative comfort. The interior of the old stone part of the house is more or less finished and we have an elegant living and dining room with a domed stone ceiling and a fitted kitchen complete with washing machine and dishwasher. There is still much to be done to the modern extension to the house and to the exterior, but for the first time we are able to unpack things and feel more or less confident that they will be staying where we put them.

One morning we were minding our own business on our terrace when Erminia’s daughter in law Palma bowled up the drive with her daughter, also called Erminia. They were carrying a plastic bag. Palma’s husband Domenico and her son Paolo (our builder) had been out shooting and guess what they’d brought for us? I peered nervously into the bag, six lovely dead Thrushes for the table … mmmm. “Er, what do you do with them?” I asked. Immediately, Palma thrust her hand into the bag and plucked and gutted the little fellahs. “Cook them for ten minutes in a little tomato sauce with some pancetta (bacon) and they’re lovely.” As a fully paid up carnivore I felt obliged to cook them, though I did chop the heads off, said to be really tasty, as I couldn’t bear looking at their accusatory little eyes staring out of the pot from their tiny grey lizzard like bodies. Actually they tasted OK, a bit like a cross between chicken and liver, though Sue couldn’t bring herself to sample them. Overall...

Since moving into the house in August we had been led to expect that the olives would be ready for harvesting in late November or December. We had also decided that we would probably not harvest this year given everything that needed to be done on the house. However, our developing love affair with the land and the enthusiasm of our 78-year-old neighbours Erminia and Paolo soon made us change our minds. In the event, Erminia, who we are also discovering is a bit of a wind up merchant, looked into the sky one morning in early November and said “the harvest is early this year, I’ve made an appointment at the olive mill, would you like me to make one for you too.” So, we found ourselves with an appointment at the Mill for ten days later with no clear idea what to do. Unsure of exactly how much work was involved we invited two Swedish and two American friends who were over wintering in the Venetian Lagoon to come and join us for a few days. Erminia offered to give us some instructio...

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...

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 ...

We arrived at the house one morning at the same time as an Enel van. A fat sweaty bloke got out of the van and inspected our electric meter and external wiring. Drawing in a breath he then said the words you never want to hear in Italy: “C’e un problema.” It turned out that the electric had been cut off many years ago and in the interim the house next door had been completely rewired and the old cable running from our house, across the neighbour’s house to the nearest electricity pole had been completely removed. This meant we needed to get the permission of the neighbours to run a new cable and have an external cabin built for our new electricity meter. Paranoia struck again and I envisaged years of bitter argument while we sorted out our power supply. However, despite the power problem we decided to move into the house anyway. We could draw buckets of water from the cisterns and we went out and bought a job lot of oil lamps. This turned out to our advantage as it considerab...

Last time I wrote we were staying with our friends Claude and Jane while waiting to complete on the house. The completion, which in Italian is called literally “the Act”, was finally set for 10am on the 28th July at the Notary’s office in Martina Franca. After the formality of the meeting to sign the Sale and Purchase Agreement three months before, I was a little disappointed to find it was a very casual affair. Pierot and Immanuelle from our Estate Agents were dressed in suits, but the Notary wore jeans and trainers. Mr Convertini, the vendor, was dressed in chinos and a polo shirt and had the demeanour of a man about to receive €66,000 in negotiable cheques. His son came with him, thoughtfully attired in a Union Jack T shirt. We suspected that Mrs Convertini had sent the lad to make sure the old man didn’t do anything impetuous with the dosh before returning to their flat in Bari. We had a different translator this time, a young Swedish woman who rendered the Completion Contr...

Our final stop before Taranto was meant to be Sibari, a six hundred berth Marina and apartment complex where we had more Calabrian adventures. We found the entry channel using our GPS and then slowly motored towards the entrance as depths were reported to be shallow. At the mouth of a canal which leads into the marina we were practically aground, so I called the marina on the VHF, to which there was no response. I then called them on the mobile ‘phone and got a reply. “Where are you?”, a charming woman asked in excellent English. “Outside the marina,” I replied. “Ah, you can’t enter I’m afraid, maybe next week”. It turned out that the port authorities had closed the marina, one of the largest in Southern Italy, because the entrance had not been dredged. This was even more baffling because a number of foreign boats had over-wintered here last year and we had already met one boat on our travels planning to stay this coming winter. “Yup, nothing really does work in Calabria”, I...

A couple of weeks ago we hired a car and drove down to Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot) with Claude and Jane, a couple that we have become goods friends with. Jane has worked in Taranto helping to project manage the development of a big new Container Port there and so has good contacts and is interested in buying a house in the area. Puglia is the market garden of Italy, being its largest producer of wine and olive oil, as well as having a big fishing industry. It is also the home of the Trullo – little round stone houses with pointed roofs which are built in clusters and are becoming very fashionable with holidaymakers and foreign investors. They are cute little buildings which often verge on the impossibly quaint – the town of Alberobello has thousands of them and frankly looks like nothing more nor less than Hobbiton. Our time was spent in an exhausting blur of house viewing and sightseeing, followed by leisurely debriefings over dinner in local restaurants. Parts of...