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...

We spent three days in Rocella, then headed for our next port of call, Le Castella. There are only a few places to get diesel on the Ionian coast of Calabria and as we were running low I dipped the tank every hour. Unfortunately, my dipstick didn’t take account of the fact that the tank is an odd shape and with ten miles to go to our destination I found we had no more than a few minutes of fuel left. I switched the engine off immediately to give us a small reserve and we got the sails up. It was a hot, hot nearly windless afternoon and it took us three hours to cover four miles. With the sun beginning to set the wind picked up and we started coasting along at four knots. At about the same time Sue noticed some splashing in the water around us and then spotted four Riso’s Dolphins swimming under our bow. These are some of the biggest dolphins in the Med, with big snub noses and white scar-like markings. They were joined by a large pod of smaller dolphins which they chased away w...

One we passed through the Straits of Messina we were in new territory in the far south of Calabria.  There is a saying in Italy that “nothing works in Calabria” and we found plenty of evidence to support this claim.  About twenty miles South of the Straits, at the end of Italy’s big toe is the port of Saline Joniche.  It’s a small industrial port with a railway station, built a couple of decades ago for no obvious purpose other than to provide kickbacks to corrupt politicians and Mafia bosses.  We arrived there on a blisteringly hot afternoon and motored cautiously up to the harbour.  None of the industry is working and the harbour mouth is now completely blocked by a sandbank.  Rather than dredge the entrance some enterprising soul has blasted a hole through the harbour wall to allow passage to the few small local fishing boats and cruisers that use it.  Inside, through the rubble of the improvised entrance it looked hot and dead, so we decided to...