A Mass of Odds and Ends

Studying my shopping list you might think me lightly deranged: Maldon sea salt, Colman’s mustard powder, Lapsang Souchong tea, secondhand books, blank index cards - just as well I brought another suitcase. Whilst being reminded of all the things I left behind when I moved to Italy I realise how much of my new life I already take for granted. I’m now too accustomed to silence to cope with the radio, despite my twenty years as a Radio 4 addict and I’ve greeted a couple of startled shop keepers with a cheery “Buon Giorno”. I struggle to sum up what is good about life in Italy for interested friends and acquaintances, trying to put my finger on what it is that makes it work for us all. Meanwhile, back in Mogliano, it’s market day.

I haven’t had time to write anything today, Sam turns eighteen in a few days time and we are hunting for the perfect party venue. One place is too “shabby”, another too “smart”, the one I like (in centro storico) is “too central”. “Everyone will come,” he tells me, “and all the old ladies will know about it.” There’s no arguing with that.

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.

School started this week. We’d seen that some of the trials for the world baseball championships were being played in Macerata so we decided to celebrate the last evening of freedom with our first baseball match. America versus Japan, with Italian and American commentary - it was a pity there was no Japanese commentary as well. But we were treated to the sound of Japanese exhortations and cheering, although sadly their team lost. I always want the losing team to win, peering through the jubilant champions to see how the losers are coping.

Last Monday at midnight the last horses ran past the finish post, and this weekend the Mogliano Beer and Pizza festival signalled the end of summer, even if some inhabitants of this house are in denial. On Saturday we were treated to a Queen tribute band with a lively Freddie Mercury,and then last night an Irish folk band played to a rapt audience of three whilst the rest of us ate pizza and drank beer before realising that the fun had already begun.

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 would be ridiculous to try to give the impression that we are all working away here. No, I’ll come clean, it’s just one festa after another. This weekend it was Montappone, the festa of straw hats, culminating in a splendid display of fireworks, photographed here from the snug safety of a friend’s house -we discovered many years ago that local firework displays have scant regard for regulations and after being rained on by burning bits of firework (an intriguing if hot experience, we hadn’t realised quite how much cardboard there is in the average firework) we now tend to watch at a careful distance. We’ve also been to my favourite jazz festival, Fano Jazz, where I had to overcome my neurotic response to change of any kind, a result I am sure of having changed too many things in my life, so that Aldo left me muttering darkly “last year the wine was OVER HERE” whilst he found us comfortable chairs so that I could take these tastefully blurred photographs…

I have worked just a little bit though, photographing a variety of shoes including one pair with the most irresistible soles on their way to London to seek their fame and fortune.

We spent last week celebrating 1744 in Mogliano. I am ashamed to admit that I have STILL not really understood why, but every year I enjoy it nonetheless. Each district (known as Contrada) has its own taverna, where you can eat polenta, pizza, barbequed meat, and on certain days fish, whilst the streets fill with street artists and local citizens dressed in the costume of the period - not ideal for hot June nights, but very decorative. A drum band march through the streets whilst Jasper eyes them askance, several members are friends of his and he worries that I may begin to get ideas. Sunday was the last night, marked by a huge firework display which set off Sam’s dust allergy (he says he was standing too close…) and now things are a little calmer for a while. We’ve started going to the horse races in Corridonia, every Monday night through the summer from 9.30 till midnight the Ippodromo fills up with families out for a good time, milling about eating ice cream under the lights whilst bugs and bats swoop high in the pine trees, and the occasional horse charges around the track, watched by the desperate gamblers hidden amongst the rest of us.