Lost property office, Carmine Superiore

Twenty-seven degrees at 10:30am. Overcast. Waiting for rain.

Erm...somebody missing something?

First spotted the night of the annual concert of Baroque music, and still hanging around...

Claim it soon, and I'll be happy to send it on!

In Switzerland

At 1200m above sea level, the Swiss are making hay while the sun shines...

A quick Italian lesson

Looks like today will be a carbon copy of yesterday. Weather-wise, that is.


My Italian vocabulary took another Great Leap Forward yesterday, with the addition of these lovely words :

prurito : itching
lacrimazione : teary
arossamento : redness
starnuti : sneezing
naso chiuso : blocked nose
naso che cola : runny nose
tosse : cough
affano : breathlessness
fischio : wheezing
acari : dust mite

You guessed it. In Carmine today, we're officially allergy central.

And here's a bit of medieval Latin that was already in my vocabulary and quite aptly expresses my feelings :

Oh bugger!

On this day

Thirty-four degrees at midday. Cloudy.


On this day in 55 BC, Julius Caesar invaded Britain

On this day in 1883, Krakatoa erupted

On this day in 1939, the Americans made the first televised broadcast of a major league baseball game

On this day in 1980, Macaulay Culkin was born


Is all history merely a descent into mediocrity, or do I just have PMT?

Style : telegraphic

Weather ditto yesterday. Garden less weedy today.

In defence of office girls

Thirty-five degrees in the sun at midday. Windy. White horses. Azure skies.

One of my neighbours has today been out and about with his bucket of mortar and a trowel, happily repairing stone walls and pavements. His sunny smile and generous ways are always a pleasure to experience. And the small (and not-so-small) jobs he often does around the village are always welcome.

Here in Carmine, the fabric of the village has been constructed and is usually maintained by local people and definitely not by the Comune. The last time I saw a communal tradesman up here was three years ago when one of the retaining walls was damaged and two masons came up to rebuild the dry stone walls and stone path.

The pavement on the tangenziale ovest was laid by F and G, using some extra paving slabs someone had lying around. Same story, different characters, for the lane along the south side of the village. The handrails, bridges, benches, signage, and steps were built and installed by members of the Gruppo Carmenitt. The staircase on the path to the Traversa doesn't flood every time it rains thanks to the work of F and M. And the paths out of the village have until this year been kept clear by us all, notably during the very enjoyable annual pulizia dei sentieri.

If it sounds to you like I'm about to launch into a rant against the Comune, you'd be very wrong. Local authorities can't be expected to be everyone's nanny. And besides, our taxes are better spent doing the things we can't do ourselves as individuals or community groups, rather than clearing up after people and doing tiny odd jobs. In fact I'm going to do the opposite.


In life, there are two kinds of people, I've found. There are those who see a rocking rock, mix up their mortar and spend half an hour fixing the problem. Who mow their own gardens and then take the strimmer out for that extra five minutes to tidy up the communal verges. Who find themselves in giro with a light bulb and a ladder and decide to replace the street light that's been out for a couple of weeks, so that everyone runs less of a risk of turning an ankle in the dark.

And there are those who see an inconvenience to themselves and then call the local authority to demand that "something is done". Angrily. Rudely. And with supporting legal chapter and verse. This type is not very good at getting out there and helping out, but really, really good at making life a misery for the poor overworked office girl at the other end of their many phone tirades.

Who takes the greater pleasure? Who has the higher self-esteen? Who has the thanks and smiles of his neighbours? Answers on a postcard, please.

In 1925, Irish writer and thinker George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote : "If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community". If that maxim had been taken up in 1925, and every child had been taught to take responsibility for his own community, perhaps today there would be more well-maintained communal spaces, more ordinary people bursting with pride at their achievements and fewer harrassed and tearful office girls.

Reported conversations No. 7

Overcast and warm, but not so warm that we can't plant some rather bitter salad, gather in a satisfyingly large harvest of potatoes and prepare the bed for broccoli.

Later...

Mama holds in her left hand a dead mouse with mousetrap still attached, and in her right hand there is a dirty nappy. Wedged under the left side of her jaw is the telephone, into which she is trying to explain that now perhaps isn't a good time for village gossip. B (aged 2) has just misjudged her latest bowel movement and there is a little pile spreading on the floor. A cat is sitting on the threshold of the kitchen, mewing to be fed (not Friskies, and definitely not dead mouse, but salame Milano or grana padano, per piacere) and the pasta water is boiling over...

AJ (wearing nothing but an oversized fur hat, ceases his manic gyrations of the kitchen on his sister's pink wooden Vespa)

"Mama, what is art?"

Of pigs and potties

Twenty-four degrees at 7am and cloudy.

I once dreamed of sophisticated summer holidays in the street cafes, museums and restaurants of the French Riviera, or horseback riding deep in the heart of woody New England, or wandering about in the Scottish highlands and islands. Instead what will I be doing in the next few days?

Shovelling shit!

Yes, while we were busy soaking up a couple of days of high-altitude Alpine sun, the wild boar were busy destroying the terraced meadow in which we keep our chickens, in a summer frenzy for hidden spring bulbs, and I've found myself co-opted into remodelling the terraces they've thrown down.

And B. has decided it's time she was potty trained.

Ho-hum, where's me spade.

Push-pull : the economics of abandonment?

Monkton Farleigh is a small and very beautiful Cotswolds village, just outside the city of Bath in the UK, and very close to my heart. It still has the village pub, the village shop, and up at the Big House they still own much of the farmland roundabout.

Local peope are wont on occasion to take visitors on walks through tiny lanes walled to over-head-height by ancient hedgerows, and to point out, in one of the meadows that rolls down the hill to the east, the faint outline of an abandoned village. The original village, left to crumble centuries ago when the new village was built on higher ground.

I'm sure someone would be able to tell me the reason why Monkton Farleigh No. 1 became unworkable all those years ago. (Anybody? Anybody?). But I wonder if anyone can tell me how the villagers were physically and economically able to relocate. Perhaps the driving force was an altered watercourse that had the effect of flooding the village year on year, combined with an offer of steady work on church land elsewhere, or the development of different skills and new livelihoods perhaps centred on the building of a new monastic institution nearby.

Such combinations of push-and-pull seem to me to have driven population migrations large and small, century on century from time immemorial.

During the post-war years, Carmine Superiore, like many of its neighbours, also came close to being abandoned. Its roofs started to crumble, and very quickly the walls started to cave in. It was only in the 1970s that there was a resurgence of interest in such places, bringing with it the people, the know-how and the money to make sense of owning property here once again.

Several visitors to the village have this summer suggested to me that without modern amenities (gas, sewerage, a road), Carmine might one day soon become abandoned once more, and I started to think about what it might take not only to instill a desire to leave one's home for another, but more importantly, to enable this to become a reality.

Around the turn of the 20th century, many Italians migrated abroad in search of better lives. The push? Grinding poverty. Cramped living conditions. The toughest of livelihoods. Dependence on the caprice of nature and of landowners alike. You name it.

From Cannobio and Cannero, they went to Detroit to work in the car industry, for example, or to London, Paris and New York to work as waiters and cooks, and some eventually to own their own businesses. This area is full of such stories. Stories of men barely in their twenties, and surely speaking only Italian, borrowing what amounted to a year's wages for a boscaiolo, in order to pay the passage to the US. And as is so frequent in migration stories, many sent the money they earned to their families back here in Italy, enabling in some cases the construction of new houses at the lakeside, the purchase of more accessible land at the bottom of the hill.

Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, a boom in the building industry would have lured young men - who would otherwise have remained to eke a living on the terraces and in the woods - down the hill to better lives as building labourers or skilled tradesmen, many in Switzerland. The pull.

These two developments, I believe, would have been important in enabling those who lived in Carmine to move away. Without them, it may be that Carmine would still be populated by vineyard workers, wood cutters and market gardeners.

Today's Carmine proprietors are different animals altogether. Eighty-five per cent of Carmine houses are second homes, many bought by appassionati and restored, most with their own hands, from their own research, with their own learned skills, with money earned elsewhere, year by painstaking year. They chose to become lovers of Carmine; they were not born, kicking and screaming, into its relative isolation and its poverty (for poor the village decidedly was), and they did not grow up in search of that single elusive opportunity to leave.

Carmine has thus become something other than a patch of land with houses on it, valued as a place capable of offering a livelihood or of offering proximity to livelihoods. And it is not in the minds of 95% of the owners here a place that might offer an opportunity for property speculation.

Today's Carmenites and potential Carmenites value ancient, wild and semi-wild places for the many contrasts they offer to life in the big cities and towns of Europe. And so, from being a place to be shunned for its poverty and discomfort, Carmine has come to be desired for its aesthetic and therapeutic qualities.

And although some may choose to give up their Carmine homes in their old age because they prefer no longer to struggle up the hill with a gas bombola, or to worry about where the next cubic metre of firewood is coming from, it would be ridiculous to think that they will simply walk out of their houses and never come back.

To my mind, there are three possible scenarios. First, the property will be passed on to younger generations. Young people now in their 20s, 30s and 40s who have themselves become lovers of Carmine. Who are able to come here for longer periods or might even contemplate living here full-time thanks to the growth of internet and flexible working. Who want to offer their children the same magical adventures that they themselves experienced as children of the 1970s generation.

Second, they will simply sell their property on to a friend or relative. For whatever pressures the credit crunch might put on us and on our ability to maintain our jobs and homes in other places, it's my belief that the property market in Carmine will remain immigrant and not emigrant for a good while yet.

Third, they will get together and come up with new, modern, communal ways of overcoming Carmine's difficulties. Which are not, after all, so difficult to overcome.

No push. No pull. The economics of re-population are, for the time being, working in favour of Carmine. The economics of abandonment are, happily, a long way in the past.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Autumn amid the summer

Even in mid-summer, there are signs of autumn. Carmine Superiore, August 2008

After the rain

Granite piode rooftops after the rain

In the entrance

In the entrance, Carmine Superiore, autumn 2007

On Feragosto

At 8am, the weather is windy and cold, with a temperature of 18 degrees in that sheltered spot I was telling you about. The Alps are obscured by roiling clouds, which give out the occasional rumble, the remains of last night's pretty serious thunderstorms. But there are patches of blue sky, so perhaps the mid-summer holiday will be fine after all.

And there's a lone deer in Ezio's garden.

Un'accademia per Dresda

Last night, the tiny Chiesa di San Gottardo here in Carmine Superiore received a visit.

Not quite by angels, but by perhaps the next best thing in the form of the Duo Sans Souci, all the way from Padua, playing 17th/18th-century German composers (Falckenagen, Weiss, Hagen, Telemann, Baron and Heinichen) on period instruments, oboe, oboe d'amore and tenor oboe, lute and archlute. What 'period instruments' actually means, I'll leave to the experts. The duo is part of the 5-man Ensemble Sans Souci, but I guess getting a full-size harpsichord up here would have been beyond us all.

In my metropolitan days, I would fall out of my office and into concerts of baroque music in the 18th-century St Paul's in Covent Garden, and was captivated by the way the music became of a piece with the architecture of the era that produced it. (I wonder if anyone has studied the phenomenon of how period instruments and music work with period architecture and acoustics?)

It's truly a heart-lifting experience to hear the unmistakeable harmonies of baroque and rococo drifting out of our church to mingle with the distant rumblings of thunder across the lake. It would be even more marvellous, perhaps, to hear some early medieval music, music that perhaps the likes of Carmine would never have heard in its time, but certainly which would chime with the medieval architecture.

And if that happens, perhaps we can get a baby-sitter so that I, too, can go into the church and listen, instead of chasing noisy children round the churchyard, hissing like a goose.

Thank-you to Guiseppe Nalin and Pierluigi Polato for hauling their instruments up the hill and making such a memorable evening for us all. And to the Comune of Cannobio and the other sponsors for sponsoring and organising.

Meteorological caprice

The temperature this morning has dropped to a shocking 19 degrees. Overcast. Damp, threatening more rain. But feeling capricious...

And this afternoon we have sunshine and 28 degrees.

Carmine quotes No. 11 : The cat and the rain

Giovanna, friend and neighbour. Fount of knowledge for all things child-rearing and great for odd snippets of Carmine lore :

"When the cat cleans her ears", she said, "the rain is coming."

The cat cleaned her ears and the rain is falling.

In the depths of summer

Something has changed. In the very early mornings, when I am wont to wander about Carmine like a ghost, I now need an extra layer of clothing. And in the dead of night when all are abed and I drift from doorpost to garden gate like a wraith looking for home, I need shoes.

In the depths of summer, autumn is in the air.

Carmine's little secrets

Twenty-eight degrees at 10am. Sunny.

The 7am sunshine illuminates this corner of Carmine.

10,000 clicks

To celebrate your clicking through this weblog 10,000 times, here's a list of 10 10,000 things, some weird, some wonderful...

10,000 spoons
10,000 BC
10,000 steps
10,000 girls
10,000 maniacs
10,000 virgins
10,000 monkeys & a camera
10,000 women
10,000 takes
10,000 birds

Thank-you for reading, thank-you for contributing, and thank-you for egging me on. If I keep writing, will you keep clicking?

Identification needed No. 2

Rain overnight, with even a little rumble of thunder to make vindicate the weather forecasters. Sunny but windy this morning.

In the gardens of Piemonte a beautiful plant is flowering.

And I want one.

For 20 Carmine points, can you tell me what it is called and what its habits are? And how can I propagate it?

Motherhood means...No. 6

Thirty-two degrees, and sunny.

Motherhood means...

...measuring your children's development on the paper-towel scale. My neighbour, for instance, with her four beautifully disciplined children aged 5 to 12, uses but one roll per week. I, on the other hand, would get through one roll a day.

At least.

Post No. 300 : An Enid Blyton summer

Hot and heavy. Thunderstorms tomorrow, I think.

As the summer ticks on from July to August, it takes on an Enid Blyton air. The place is dripping with children, all industrious with something. The bigger ones are up in the bamboo woods, cutting off boughs (there's too much of the damn stuff anyway), making swords and lances, portable flag poles and long fans to keep us all maharajah-cool. The middle-sized ones are running barefoot, digging and building, damming the streams and chasing one another with homemade water pistols. And gamboling from one group to another is an ecstatically-happy mongrel dog called Tapo.

And every afternoon they make their way down the hill, colourful as a line of bunting, to the little pebble beach at the foot of the hill, strip off their clothes and head for the cool water, splashing, gasping, giggling and diving. Over the fence hang the Italian ladies with the big black dog, who keep enormous rabbits out back, calling "Ciao, bello" as Italian ladies should.

Personalities come and go as the weeks pass by. The 12-year-old hero who can dive off the creaky old jetty and come up 10 metres away gives way to the gaggle of 8-year-old blondies lounging by the fontana in their bikinis or parading around, arms linked in their flowered summer dresses. And two lanky teenage cousins pop up from nowhere to help with kick-abouts, building fantastical castles from sticks and stones, and teaching the younger members of the family how to make farting sounds with pieces of grass.

And in the late evening, when the sun goes down, those not under curfew don their headlights, synchronise their walkie-talkies and head out into the dark to a make-believe world of cops vs robbers. Or perhaps wizards vs the undefined forces of evil. Or perhaps just to scare the life out of each other round corners, up stone staircases and under bridges.

An Enid Blyton summer. With homemade lemonade and ice-cream, fruit-juice lollipops on the steps among the oleander flowers and lemon cake baking in the oven.

An Enid Blyton summer. Helping to feed the chicks, watering the garden, learning how to twist off the tomatoes and dig in the soil for potatoes. Finding the new litter of kittens in the wood pile.

An Enid Blyton summer. But perhaps my two will wait a few years before they follow trails down tunnels, get wedged into partisan holes and solve mysterious riddles scratched on ancient parchments to foil the plotters and still get home for tea.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Seagull stories

I had a visit last night on this weblog from a Canadian who asked Google if it's possible for a young seagull to recover from a broken wing.

I don't know if you'll come back, but if you do, leave a comment and I'd be happy to share with you what we learned from our own seagull experience.

The temperature's rising, it isn't surprising...

Thirty-five degrees at 8:45am. In the sun. In a sheltered spot. Elsewhere the breeze is blowing and, for now, we're all happy bunnies.

Forty degrees at 10:00am. In the sun. In that sheltered (perhaps ill-chosen for scientific veracity) spot. Where'd that breeze go?

Book Notes No. 9 : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Oh.

Solzhenitsyn is dead.

I came to Solzhenitsyn through a rather roundabout route. Living in northern Nigeria, in the Muslim emirate of Zaria (fantastic mud-built emir's palace - deliciously cool inside - but that's another story). I shared a house with a Fulani lawyer who had only two books on his shelves. A copy of the precepts of Shariah law and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

During the impossible days before the rain came, a chameleon shed its skin on the windowsill, and the driver took off in the night back to his family in Niger, my head ached if I moved and I was pinned to the spot with lethargy. It was during those days that I read every word Solzhenitsyn wrote in this monster of a work.

It's scary stuff, and every 18-year-old should read it. And when you're done reading, washed out, exhausted with the sheer terror of it all, you may want to join those who believe that because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived, the gates of the gulag are less likely to swing open again.

Solzhenitsyn is dead. Long live Solzhenitsyn.

The year of the bugs

Thirty-two degrees at almost-midday. Mostly overcast and generally sultry. Waiting for the rain.

I declare this to be the year of the bugs. Normally there aren't any mosquitoes or such-like biting bugs in Carmine Superiore. The breeze, perhaps. Or perhaps there are better pickings in the woods. But this year we're being bitten to bits by all sorts of creepy-crawlies (and not only those with six legs).

I blame the mild winter.

Or perhaps Gordon Brown.

Continuing hot. With thunderstorms. And with Carmine's blessed breeze to keep us all sane.

Carmine is virtually full.

Two days ago : Orta and Sizzano

To Lago d'Orta and the beautiful borgo vecchio of Orta San Giulio, with its frescoed meeting-house. Amid its stone roofs and medieval alleyways we felt very much at home.

And the pretty boats tied up on the hard were perfect for tourist shots.

The inevitable pizza was consumed at Ristorante Venus (get there before midday), with a view of the beautiful island of San Giulio and its 6th-century basilica.

We didn't take the boat across - more pressing matters to attend to, including, for the six children in our charge, gelato at Arte del Gelato, on via Olina (homemade, so they say, delicious whatever).

The important business of the day was, though, cheese- and wine-shopping in the slightly-more-distant Valsesia region. Cheese from the Caseificio Franco Paltrinieri in Prato Sesia : unprepossessing premises right next to the dairy, but magnificent gorgonzola and a toma di Valsesia that will make your mouth water (choose between pasteurised and unpasteurised, old and young).

At Lorenzo Zanetta in Sizzano, we acquired a quantity of their Rosso Colline Novarese, a satisfying bonarda-nebbiolo mix. €1.50 for a litre. No 5-litre containers allowed. We staggered away (and later up the hill) with 95 litres - a stock of table wine to last about 7 months and some for a friend.

We also came home with one cold, one migraine and a case of mild heat exhaustion.

Day of storms

Yesterday's reported high was 36 degrees Celsius. Today at 11:45am we're looking at overcast and 34C/94F.

August 1st is the day the Swiss celebrate the formation of the Swiss Confederation in 1291. It's a holiday in Switzerland. And last night, extravagant firework displays across the border kept us all up into the wee hours.

Half an hour ago, Ezio eyed the black clouds bearing down on us from Viggiona over the ridge, and noted that there's always a storm on August 1st. Now I'm indoors, sodden, while the rain crashes down and all the internal doors in the house are propelled closed at once by the wind.