A Mass of Odds and Ends

The academic year in Italy is relentless, with so few holidays that odd stolen day off is a great treat.  Two friends were visiting from Ireland this week so I dropped all responsibilities and headed to the coast with them, to the Porto San Giorgio market. The streets around the main square are lined with stalls dedicated to clothes, shoes and bags,  the sort of market that I imagine haunts most men’s nightmares. We dallied happily over brain crushing decisions, and came away with wonderful colourful dresses from Custo, (reduced to such amazing prices that I was tempted to buy one for each day of the week) coats, bags, boots and sore feet. Shopping was followed by a delicious fish lunch and then we wandered along the deserted beach wondering if life could get any better.

Perhaps not useful, though. We’ll start those projects on Monday.

There is a wonderful logic to eating habits here, which after a few years no longer seem oddly out of sync with the modern world as they did initially. Fish is eaten on the coast, and meat inland. This is then reinforced by the idea that local restaurants and inland eating are for every day, but fish suppers are for celebrations. Aldo and I celebrate our birthdays with a fish supper at some point in the fourteen days that fall between them so last night we went to Civitanova. I forgot my camera, but inspired by Chase Jarvis’ Iphone photos and Ken Rockwell’s exhortations that the camera doesn’t matter I used my phone. We could see the sea from our restaurant window and follow the lightning across the water, whilst the palm trees bent and swayed. The fish was, as ever, delicious, and soon we can begin to forget that we are a year older and go back to normal life.

The photo: if you look carefully you’ll see three furled umbrellas and two lines of white poles going down to the thin white line of surf at the water’s edge. The clouds menacing above are lit on the left by a flash of lightning.

This morning we went to the seaside and I declared the beginning of summer by choosing an iced coffee. Nothing could be more delicious - take one espresso, add a teaspoon or two of sugar, and some cubes of ice. The bubbles are an additional extra - produced by shaking the whole lot in a cocktail shaker. You can produce much more glamorous versions,  Sam tinkers with the recipe every summer, producing thick creamy results that are more milkshake based, with vanilla ice cream, ice and coffee, but this simple kind is just right for a break on a Saturday morning, sitting and looking out over the ocean.

We went to the seaside at Civitanova yesterday afternoon where they are building a new bicycle track running along the beach. I love the idea of cycling from Venice to Bari along the Adriatic coast (once our cycling skills are more finely honed) but of course some parking spaces have had to be sacrificed. After a short discussion revealing the differences between our culturally dictated vehicular priorities I went to the water’s edge to photograph pebbles.  Aldo sat in smug safety on a piece of driftwood as I danced about in the waves, my shoes filling with water, then pointed out that we needed more evidence that we had actually been at the beach, so I photographed a wave as well.