A Mass of Odds and Ends

It’s market day today. If you look closely at the stairs leading up to our Ospedale (Mogliano’s health clinic) you’ll see the dark blue carabinieri car, an essential part of the Tuesday landscape.  Their presence does not indicate that a crime has been apprehended; only the most persistent and determined criminals get away with it in Mogliano. The reason that the carabinieri are everywhere in Mogliano is because they like going out. They are, after all, Italian, they love gossip, and they all love the bar. 

Despite a completely blameless past I began to feel shortly after I first started living here that the Italian forces of law and order were keeping a very close watch on my every move.  And this was at least five years before I shocked them right down to the tips of their highly polished boots by going into our local caserma to interview them on police procedure for my book. They stopped my car every few days and whilst going through my documents yet again would cast dubious looks through the window at the sea of dogs, boys, building tools and books on the backseat, sure that it was all a front for something.  You can only imagine their delight when they caught me out a few weeks ago. My European drivers licence (issued after a mere ten month wait) registered me as born in Loro Piceno, a village five minutes away. Our Mareschiallo, still frowning disapprovingly at my feeble response to his question “So where is that book, then?”, held up my drivers licence triumphantly, “Do you realise that this is a false document? I KNOW you were born in Cape Town.” Certain that he would follow me around the village until I sorted it out I did so immediately, and this morning I can go into town with my head held high, for the time being on the right side of the law.

One of the treats of autumn in Le Marche is the castagnata, a town party dedicated to the chestnut, with stalls selling roast chestnuts, fresh chestnuts, chestnut jam, as well as other autumnal necessities like knitted hats and gloves. We went to our first castagnata of the season on Sunday, in the tiny mountain town of Smerillo. It’s half an hour away from us along a road which starts out winding through the countryside before spinning into a tortured switchback of hairpin bends going ever higher.  Aldo reached for his seat belt as we sailed past a carabinieri road block, me asking sotto voce who had fired the starters gun, before we parked kilometres away from the town in a long line of two thousand other cars. As we climbed the steep hill we passed a Pugliese farmer with a small lorry loaded with grapes, who begged us to bring him back a sandwich (”I’ve been here since seven this morning and not eaten a thing”) and then a Senegalese vu cumpru selling knock off winter jackets laid out on his blanket on the road side, before we arrived, gasping and panting, at the festa. Hot chestnuts and mulled wine have never tasted so good.

Whilst the countryside around us puts on a brilliant autumnal show Mogliano has started its programme of winter intellectual activities. This weekend the tiny and perfect Theatre Apollo hosted three days of words and music, and we went to Saturday night’s performance, the local jazz group with mellow versions of all time classics alternating with readings of 20th century Le Marche poetry. An intellectual gentleman fired with Roman oratory zeal introduced members of the local literary society,  expressing his joy at sharing the poetry with us all, kindly resisting the temptation to reprimand the woman in the eighth row who had her eyes shut more often than could be considered polite. The woman in row 8 came away worrying that she had made a serious error agreeing to join the literature group.  The academic year dictates a punishing timetable of early mornings and late nights so all I’ll bring to the group will be a sleepy presence, with no trace of oratory zeal.

Thunderstorms have been rolling around our hills for days and this is the time of year when I realise how many other creatures have been looking forward to getting cosy in the autumn, with our house in mind. Not just the cats draped over every surface at the slightest touch of chill outside and Night the dog tucked away under Jasper’s bed terrified by the thunder, but also shield beetles buzzing around the lights, paper thin moths decorating the walls and millipedes rushing frillily into corners.

I’ve been spending some time waiting recently - every day I wait indoors for this unseasonably hot weather to realise it is now SEPTEMBER and time to pack up and leave, I wait during the daylight hours for the cool of the evening and supper on the terrace, and yesterday I waited at the doctor. The lack of a receptionist means that the assorted patients form a self governing queue, an unnerving concept in a country famed for its lack of interest in queueing. First we had a small revolution when an elderly gentleman in a flat hat pushed in front of everyone in the scrum at the door. He moved surprisingly quickly, beating three people who had been there for sometime before he arrived. One of the bystanders, someone I had just met called Secondo,broke off his diagnosis of my stiff neck to point out that perhaps the gentleman thought the rules changed for people over ninety. Sesto, one of the injured parties, didn’t feel this was sufficient excuse and accused the queue jumper of ungentlemanly behaviour when he came out. The ninety two year old chose to be deaf and flashed a brilliant smile at us all before staggering slowly towards the stairs. We all watched him go and then Secondo asked me whether anyone in the UK has managed to come up with a pill to prevent ageing. He said he’d like to stop the progress of time but Sesto snorted with disgust at this idea, pointing out that it might have been worth it twenty years ago before Secondo became a portly septuagenarian. When we met up again in the nurse’s office they were discussing the pros and cons of resurrection, and whether it would be advisable to try a change of sex.

It’s nearly that time of year again, when birds and guests head home, and ordinary life starts up with a jolt. I’ve been asked to be tactful and stop using sentences which combine the words END and SUMMER, as both boys insist that there is yet more stretching ahead. But the sun is rising later, the birds are gathering and work looms. In the meantime we have suffered a terrible tragedy in the henhouse, losing five of our pretty chickens and eight Christmas capons. I’m trying to feel philosophical and imagine all those happy baby foxes, whilst Aldo has chosen the darker side and is planning revenge.  And we are steadily working our way through bushels of tomatoes, so I will post a selection of tomato bottling recipes in the next few days, choosing the easy photographer option and thereby avoiding too much of the work.

Yesterday’s work is done and it is market day today so they are back at their posts, observing the world going by.

One of the most noticeable features of life in a small Italian town is the collection of elderly men who fill the benches on our main road into town. They keep an eye on everything, which is very useful if you’re looking for someone, but perhaps not quite so useful for anyone undertaking any work in the area. Our election day is drawing nearer and there are earnest clumps of people on corners talking politics, whilst these two men in their orange outfits (to distinguish them from the more numerous bystanders) spent most of this morning arguing through every detail of how to put up the boards for the election posters.

I’m not sure how landscape photographers manage to avoid accidents. I nearly went off the road a couple of times this morning on my way to San Ginesio, spotting just the right view to photograph the remains of the snow on the mountains and failing to find a safe place to stop the car. My unamused travelling companion, Sam, showed remarkable restraint by confining himself to the occasional deep sigh as we lurched from one side of the road to the other.

This morning I was walking at the Abbadia di Fiastra, trying to photograph the swallows swooping over the fields of wheat, when I spotted this far rarer migrant flock. Strangely, for a Cistercian abbey, we hardly ever see monks, so I skulked in the shrubbery some distance away taking photographs.