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...