Bel vedere

Warm and sunny. Tree cutting and rose pruning. Outdoor lunching. Spotted the first butterfly of the year, in exactly the same place as last year's first butterfly...there's a zoology thesis in there somewhere.


The tiny piazza beside Carmine Superiore's San Gottardo church offers a magnificent view of Lago Maggiore, the coast of Lombardy and the Swiss Alps. It can't be missed - after all, Carmine has only four 'streets', if you could call them that. 

This viewpoint is famous, and obvious, although I'm always amazed at the number of walkers who shoot straight through the village without locating either frescoes or panorama.

A not-quite-so-famous viewpoint takes in not only the lake and sights beyond, but also the village itself, with its stone roofs and pretty gardens. My neighbour, G., has made a sign so that you can't miss it...

From here, the great spur of rock on which Carmine is built becomes visible. And from here you get a real sense of why, more than 1,000 years ago someone put his hands on his hips, squinted his eyes against the sun and saw that this would be a good place to build a fortress.

Definitely worth the short climb.

Raindrops on roses...

Raindrops on Giovanna's rose. 

I wish she could be here to see the beauty she has left for us to enjoy here in Carmine. 

Forza, amica mia. We're thinking of you both.


For more flowers in the rain, click here.

The world's best jobs No. 1: The man in the woods

This post made Italy Tutto Top 10 Best Posts of the Week. Thank-you! I Thank You!

Morning temperature below 10° again. Cloudy with little blue patches, but never in the right place for sunshine.

Swooping down the hill yesterday afternoon, minus my usually-constant companion, Jakob! Lord of Misrule (sick and feeling very sorry for himself), I came upon a man.

This man was wearing a large fleece, jeans and muddy walking boots. He was sitting, still as a statue, on the damp bank by the side of the sentiero. I wondered what he could be doing. Perhaps he had turned an ankle, or was simply resting. But resting on a cold, damp, mud bank in the cold shadows within sight of a nicely painted wooden bench in the sun?

As I approached, I greeted him and he turned around to face me. He had a shock of white hair, bright blue eyes and sunshine in his face. Conscious (and perhaps over-proud) of my recent Croce Rossa training, I asked, "Sta bene?" - are you alright? He smiled and answered "Si." A moment passed as we smiled at each other, and with the smile my unspoken question fluttered between us. Plucking it out of the air, he said "Sto contando gli uccelli" - I'm counting birds. In his hands lay some gadget, and as he spoke, his eyes flew from my face back to the giant chestnut before us, its branches alive with wings. 

As I bade him a quiet "buon lavoro", and continued on my way on silent feet, his outdoors sunshine smile, his ruddy cheeks and his air of contentment accompanied me in place of Jakob!. And when later I wove the story of the bird-counter I had met in the woods for a group of kindergarten kids, we all agreed that this must be one of the best jobs in the world.

Desperately seeking ... nice neighbours

Only 7°C this morning at 8:30am. Grey and a little rainy. Last night's more sustained rain brought snow to Cannobio's own Monte Giove and all the surrounding peaks. I'm looking sideways at the romaine, rucola and zucchine that I planted amid 25°C and sunshine last Saturday. I'm also looking sideways at the grass that's sprung up in the rain, and thinking about oiling the weed-whacker.

A beautiful Carmine Superiore house has this morning gone on the market. It's a rare opportunity to buy a lovely cottage-style property with two bedrooms, large kitchen, separate sitting room, cellar and a lovely open terrace - of which I'm very envious - with magnificent views of Lago Maggiore and the surrounding countryside. The agent is Marlis Zanetti in Cannero, although the property is so new to the market it hasn't even made it to the website yet. Give them a call - English, French, Italian and German spoken fluently.


However.


Those without Nice-Neighbour Certificates need not apply. In order to qualify for a Nice-Neighbour Certificate you will need letters proving the following : 

• You have passed the International Plumbers' Association advanced septic-system maintenance course and sworn an oath in front of a judge that you will never stuff your toilet with sanitary towels or flush out the shared septic ecosystem that I have spent the last eight years balancing with bleach, lye or caustic potash. 
• Your face knows how to form itself into a smile whenever one of your neighbours passes by.
• You promise to good-naturedly tell hikers the way to Cannobio, Cannero or Viggiona, even if they're standing slap bang in front of the signpost. 
• You have enough money or brawn to transport building refuse down the hill instead of dumping it in the woods. 
• You promise to learn a courteous answer to the perennial tourist question, "How do you get your shopping up here if there's no road?" in at least four languages, including one non-European one, and to always smile while exercising that skill.
• You understand that a continuous supply of freshly-laid Carmine eggs delivered magically to your doorstep can be assured by the occasional bottle of crémant d'Alsace propped by the side of the chicken coop - those bionda piemontese do like a drop of the old fizzy stuff after they've just laid.

Nice-Neighbour Certificates can be obtained from Louise, Carmine Superiore, Italy. Administration fee, a case of crémant d'Alsace, a large carton of Swiss or Belgian chocolate or this year's Booker shortlist in hardback. Applicants with strapping teenage relatives capable of wielding a weed-whacker and willing to do so in return for English lessons will be given preferential treatment.


PS The outgoing owners have enough Nice-Neighbour Certificates to paper the walls of their wonderful little house three times over. We'll miss them!

Tulipa turkestanica

This week of the Easter holidays has been beautiful, weather-wise. Warm - up to the mid-20s I guess - dry, and with warm, open-window nights. B, aged 3, has planted a round of lettuce. The baby chicks, aged now 3 weeks, have learned to fly enough to hop out of their box and explore the ins and outs of the bathroom. Jakob! Lord of Misrule, aged 3 months, has learned to chase sticks. 


Best of all, the tulips, planted five months ago, have started to flower. Thanks again to our friends and neighbours, J & R for the exotic Asian Tulipa turkestanica, which the good weather has brought out of its buds. 

For more beautiful flowers in and around Carmine Superiore, click here. To see some really astonishing flower images from all over the world, visit Macro Flower Shots.

Easter in Carmine

Azure skies. Fast-flowing mountain streams. Blossom on the fruit trees. Camelias red, pink and white. Warm, wet, freshly-turned soil. Eggs under the broody hen. Chicks trying their wings. The Mama cat heavy with kittens. Children smeared with chocolate. The Carmenites in residence. Tourists in droves.


A belated happy Easter from a Carmine sprung to life.

These hands

Brrrrrr! Cold. Damp. Raining continuously. Fourteen degrees at 8:30am. I think it's called autumn.

These hands belong to Carmine's most senior senior citizen. I often come across her in the afternoons, barefoot in the long grass, bent double, sickle in hand, patiently collecting an enormous bundle of greenery for her goat.

Signora Cesarina celebrated her 95th birthday last week.

Jack fell down, And broke his crown...

After the wild and stormy night whipped banshees around the chimney pots, today is blowy but hot, hot, hot.

Today, the kids are singing :

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper
Went to bed to mend his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

Why?

Because today in Carmine our very own Jack took a tumble. Neighbour-of-the-month awards go to S. and F.; S. for leaping to the rescue and F. for getting our wounded and very wobbly soldier all the way down the hill in the midday heat and on to the hospital.

Get well soon, Jack! Hope the vinegar and brown paper works.

Thank-you kind neighbours

Twenty-six degrees in Cannobio at 9:30am this morning as the campaigning for the forthcoming mayoral elections heats up. Bright sunshine. The warm air brings with it the welcome scents of jasmine and honeysuckle. Summer has begun!

Big thanks go to Franco, Giuliano and Livio, who spent their Ascension-day holiday in the service of our community, erecting a new handrail and repairing the path on a particularly dangerous part of the mulattiera, which almost everybody uses to reach Carmine. Also to Signor di Marco, the metalworker who made the handrails, and to Fausto, who I believe helped to organise everything.

As probably the single person who uses this path the most, I'd like to express my gratitude. Where would Carmine be without guys like you?!

Ernst Sr

Today they're saying goodbye to my grandfather-in-law. He was still a young man when his heart broke without warning at the age of 91.

It was a long life, and yet it must have seemed a very short life. A varied life - his childhood begun on the winegrowing banks of the Moselle, 12 years of his youth surviving in a Russian prison camp, his maturity working hard in the family business as restaurateur and wine merchant, and his retirement quiet and long, saddened only by the untimely death of his only son. Ernst was married to Gretel for what has today become an unthinkable 70 years.

I didn't know him well - my German came too late for our relationship to blossom - but I understood his uncomplicated affection for me and what seemed his continual joyful amazement over his great-grandchildren. We would have been good friends, I'm sure, in other circumstances.

Ernst Sr kept a fairly untidy but always fruitful garden, so as they toast him over there, I'm looking at all the things that are growing in the woods and in the realm of chaos I call my own garden. I'm remembering him in the promise of beauty and fruitfulness of this late-spring day. And these words seem apt :

"You find a flower half-buried in leaves,
And in your eye its very fate resides.
Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;
Soon enough, you'll sweep petals from the floor.

Terrible to love the lovely so,
To count your own years, to say "I'm old,"
To see a flower half-buried in leaves
And come face to face with what you are."

Han Shan, circa 630 CE, trans. Peter Stambler, Cold Mountain Buddhas, with thanks to Michael P. Garofalo www.gardendigest.com.

Love and the boys

Eighteen degrees at 10am. Blue skies. One might even say it was hot in the garden this afternoon...

If you have read this post, or, indeed, this post, you'll know that this writer is a dualist at heart. I'm a real sucker for the black-or-white, the either-or, the if-not-then. Happily for me, in my rather chequered experience of men, I've found there are only two kinds. There are those who live life for the love of women and those who would always prefer an evening at the bar with the boys.

The other day for tea we entertained several guests, including two chaps who had both spent some time in Finland. They were happily swapping memories, when the subject of Finnish arose. Both, it seemed, had learned only one phrase in that most remote of languages. The first, recently and very sadly widowed, but still managing a twinkle for a pretty girl, declared in Finnish : "I love you" (I won't try to do it in Finnish, I don't trust Google Translate). The second put down his cup and chocolate cake, dredged his memory and, with a delighted smile came up with : "Two beers, please".

See what I mean?

Springwatch 2009

Three degrees at 9:00am. A beautiful bright and sunny day. Looking good for Children's Day at the Cannobio Carnevale. (Why are we doing carnival when the rest of the world is already on a chocolate-free diet? Click here.)

There! I've said it. That word..."spring".

Ezio, Carmine's timekeeper and oral historian, who remembers every important date in the last 60 or so years, who comes and goes by the ringing of the church bells across the lake in Macagno, always reminds me that spring doesn't actually start until March 21st, but I can't resist a 'spring-is-coming' post.

Carmine's meadows are covered in little flowers - scilla, primula, crocus and the occasional periwinkle. The narcissi are very much in evidence, and for a while now we've been eating sprinkles of wild garlic chives in our winter soups and omelettes. The spring bulbs are starting to show their noses above the soil, and my camellias are finally beginning to unfurl. The glorious variegated camellia at the bottom of the hill near the chapel has been in full bloom for the last few days.

The sun is rising before seven now, and it's still light just after 6pm. The sun bids farewell to Carmine after 2pm. The importance of this to Carmenites (especially we sun-lovers) is clear if you remember that the village faces east, and behind it to the west is a line of hills - the feet of Monte Carza. This means that we are left in the shadows when the sun drops behind the ridge. In mid-winter, this happens at about 1pm. In mid-summer, it happens at about 5pm. Many of our winter-time excursions into the woods south of Carmine are to seek out spots where the sun shines a couple of hours longer than in Carmine. I sometimes miss the evening sun, but I think myself lucky, when I talk to people who live in Traffiume, Cannobio's extension into the Valle Cannobina, which gets not a single ray of sun all winter. When it finally rises high enough to illuminate this part of town, Cannobio is flooded with smiles.

The chickens are also now smiling. And laying. Their annual fallow period came to an end about 10 days ago and now they're laying like crazy. (Anybody want some fresh, organic eggs?) As sometimes happens in politics, there has been a U-turn in our policy towards the bully-boy cockerel. He pecked me once too often and despite having at first elevated him to supreme power, he turned out to be recalcitrant and became the first object of my newly-implemented zero-tolerance attitude towards bullying. He's now in the freezer. The old guard has been taken out of retirement and is once again happily crowing in the coop. His generally pacific view on life enables me to delegate grain-feeding to B, who is the same size.

Staying with the fauna, the last case of cat 'flu seems to have cleared itself up (although the patient seems to have come to like sleeping on the end of my bed and now follows me home in the evenings in order to sidle through the front door and on up the stairs). Last year's female kitten has been safely spayed and her stitches are gradually disappearing. She's also decided she likes being indoors (as well as the rich diet of fish offcuts and rabbit bits to be had at our hearth). The old mother cat is once again pregnant - she was too smart to walk into the trap I patiently baited every day for a fortnight recently, and so has escaped the vet's scalpel for another year. I shortly must gird my loins and take the wonderfully fluffy Trouble (last year's male kitten) to be castrated, otherwise he will be off 'in amore' as they say here. I have more trouble (excuse pun) castrating the males than I do spaying the females, but I guess 'twas ever thus with Mamas and their boys.

Wood-cutting this year has been truncated by bad weather at the waning moon in December (apparently the optimum time to cut for firewood). We're still putting 15 kilos into Mathilda every day, but only once a day. Supplemented with the warmth from Edna (brand name Etna...) the cucina economica (a woodfired oven almost totally unlike an Aga), or from the Charnwood woodburner in the sitting room, and we're cosy. The wood floors seem less than icy to the tootsies now, and the cold water that comes out of the taps direct from the lake seems less cold.

More springtime firsts : at the weekend we saw our first butterflies. Yesterday I saw the first scorpion (where's me scorpion kit?), and today I see that the bees are once again busily in and out of the stone walls of Carmine's houses looking for good places to build. A couple of weeks ago I spotted a bushy-tailed squirrel moving into a tree-hole pecked out by a woodpecker last year, and talking about holes, I see that another of my rugs has fallen victim to the nest-building mice.

Most important of all, though, it seems that as February (the Italian translates as "the fever month") wanes so does the seemingly endless stream of coughs, colds, fevers and stomach upsets that keeps all the kindergarten kids in a limbo of under-the-weather-ness at this time of year. AJ and B haven't been sick for almost a fortnight. And neither has Mama.

Now that can't be bad.

Shivering with pleasure

The sun is rising glorious gold over the mountains. The wind that dropped so considerately yesterday morning to enable me a spot of garden construction, got up again in the afternoon and howled all night around the granite eaves and in among the trees. The result? Zero degrees at 8am, and twig debris everywhere.

Nadia's sedums, shivering with pleasure in the winter sunshine.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Today in 2008, No. 2

Three degrees in the shade at 9am. Still windy. Bright sunshine and blue skies. Yesterday afternoon there was a deer in Ezio's garden for the first time since last year's hunt. B will be pleased that her friend the 'goat' has come back. And today I will be working in our garden for the first time this year.

Today in 2008, Ezio was well into his late-winter chores, chores that he's only just beginning this year because of the bad weather. And Mama was extolling the virtues of the humble willow...click here for more.

A distinguished guest

Four degrees at 10am. Grey and drizzly.

I know a woman who always has a sour, disapproving look on her face. Rain or shine...the look is sour. As if she smells something that disagrees with her. As if life has given her a bitter taste in her mouth that won't go away despite any amount of mouthwash. As if, forty years ago on her wedding night her happily-ever-after farted under the quilt, she wrinkled up her delicate virgin's nose and at that moment the wind changed. My father would refer to it as a 'face like a wet week', and we all know what that means right now.

The reason I mention this vexation to the spirit is that the cats of Carmine are this week wearing the self-same expression with whiskers on. They're crowded on the pantry windowsill craning their fluffy little necks to catch a glimpse of something they definitely don't approve of. Wherever I go, I'm preceeded by hissing and growling. Wherever I look there are cats' tails like toilet brushes hanging from the trees, wedged under bramble bushes, dangling from rooftops.

In Cannobio, there is chattering among the gossips in Guardian Angel Square and in the corridors of the scuola materna, and new vocabulary crashes over me at two-minute intervals like verbal labour contractions, as I pass along the town's charming medieval streets. Words like : morde? (vt. does she bite?); guinzaglio (nm. lead); scooper del pooper (n. as in 'you'll be needing one'); and pulce (nf. flea - normally only heard in the plural - as in 'you won't be needing them').

Worst of all, the kitten's place on the sofa as celebrated recently (click here) has been usurped by something altogether more smelly, which snores while I'm trying to read and/or write and gradually inches its way onto my lap as the evening progresses. And the kitten's looking at me like Judas is my second name.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured this week to have Lady Diana as my houseguest. Lady Diana, I'm sure you've guessed is a dog, a 10-year-old German shepherd to be exact. Her name is pronounced the Italian way - Deeeeeanna, and no, she's not staying (somebody get that hard fact through to the cats).

Diana knows Carmine intimately. Her padrone, Bruno, was one of the first friends we made here apart from immediate neighbours and professional colleagues. He made us laugh with his unlikely stories of the enormous fish he and his brothers caught and grilled, the gargantuan wild boar they wrestled to the ground with their bare hands and ate in a single day of culinary debauchery, or the Baroque feasts with which they buckled the knees of the kitchen table back home in Sardinia. He was also always prepared to don a pair of overalls and help us out with a particularly nasty bit of d-i-y plastering, window-mounting or demolition if he dropped in to find us struggling pathetically (in return for one of M's famous Sunday lunches and a luscious bone for Diana).

This week, Bruno is in hospital (good luck, dude), and Her Royal Highness is residing in Sasso Carmine.

As I was saying, Diana is very much at home here, and trots up and down the blessed hill with me and the children (oh yes, the mulattiera's still there, folks, despite the best efforts of the weather to wash it away, click here) as if she didn't really live in an apartment in a place that's named after a brand of moped. She keeps her eye on the stick-in-flight, even when surrounded by gaily clucking chickens, as if gaily clucking chickens were her daily companions. And despite all the rumpus among the feline population, she continues calmly eating her food even though Trouble-the-Intrepid (click here) has also got his nose in the bowl.

Diana is the first dog I've ever had in my care, and despite wishing for one recently (click here), and despite Diana's excellent training and gentle disposition, I think I won't be signing up at the dog refuge after all.

And you know why? It's not the dog hairs on the sofa. Or the scattering of heart-shaped doggy chow on the kitchen floor. Or the fact that I have to carry the cats through the kitchen, spitting and scratching, to get them to where they want to be in the house. Or even the popping in and out of the front door like a demented weather man to see if the whining means she wants to go pee-pee.

No.

It's simple really. You know, not in a million years would I be able to bring myself to go to the local hardware store and ask for a 'scooper del pooper' : Signor Albertella (of whom more shortly) would know for sure I'd finally cracked! And besides, I think Babel Fish Translations made it up.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Carmine quotes No. 13 : the wood in the woodshed

The temperature's dropping. Slowly, slowly, degree by degree. In the big house in Carmine, the tension is rising. We've started lighting a fire in the evenings, the chimneys are swept and Mathilda is standing at the ready. I see that M. is starting to look a bit fish-eyed : he has one eye on the thermometer and one eye on the woodshed.

Regina, Montessori teacher, polyglot and Carmine appassionata opined the other day :

"There are two types of men in this world, those who think the wood in the woodshed is going to be enough, and those who think it isn't going to be enough, even though they're looking at the same pile of wood..."

I wonder if our little stash will see us through, cooking, water heating, two stufe in ceramica, wood-burning stoves miscellaneous and one open hearth...?

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

The Sala Natale Mystery

Holding steady at 12 degrees at the 9am time-point. Cloudy and feeling damp.

In Carmine, what goes up doesn't necessarily always come down.

This is the case in particular with bulky stuff such as furniture, which is generally used until it falls apart and then burned. Two alternative solutions occur to me.

First, when you have decided you don't like the furniture and appliances you bought in your first flush of home-ownership-delight, you can always put the house on the market complete with all the bits and pieces that have come to embarrass you or that don't work so well any more.

A less drastic option would be to give away the bits and pieces you don't want to an unsuspecting neighbour who is too polite to say no, and they will either knock themselves out renovating them or take them down the hill to the dumpsters for you. (Only kidding, guys!)

When we bought the house we have now almost finished renovating (after only six years, two children, three (make that five) cats, gallons of chicken soup, etc., etc.,) we were surprised to find it still mostly furnished when we moved in. One bedroom was completely furnished, and the chest full of immaculately-stored linen. So accomplished were the previous owner's linen-storing abilities that when we moved in after the house had been uninhabited for more than 10 years (and this particular room for much, much longer), we would have been able to make up a bed with snowy-white handmade sheets and hand-embroidered pillow cases without needing to wash them first.

Last weekend, we finally decided to move the wardrobe and chest from this suite from the bedroom where they had stood for so long into our dressing room. We needed the storage there, and the new stufa in ceramica meant that the bedroom no longer worked with the old furniture in it. While moving them we found on the back of both items stickers with the following words : Signor Sala (or Fala) Natale, Corso Vittorio Emanuele 118, Cannobio.

"Who is Signor Sala (or Fala)?", we asked ourselves. The previous owners of this part of the house were named Zaccheo (a pretty illustrious name in these parts, I understand). Could Signor Sala (or Fala) have been the owner of a shop that commissioned furniture from local cabinet-makers? Could he have been a previous owner of this furniture, who sold it to the Zaccheos? Or am I completely wrong to think this is a person's name? Exactly how many generations does this furniture go back?

Answers to these questions could perhaps help us to date the furniture, not for reasons of avarice, but simply for reasons of social history. A quick shufti around the local second-hand stores reveals that plenty of furniture in this style was made (and nobody except us wants it any more). It's very square and quite stolid, but with surprisingly lovely ironwork reminiscent, in my mind at least, of the art nouveau style. The monumental wardrobe, which we had to un-wedge from under the ceiling beams, came with a chest-of-drawers, a bed and two bedside cabinets, and they must have been hell to get up here in the days before the helicopter was invented.

Anybody? Any ideas?

In memoriam

Warm, dry and sunny. Great weather.

Today, the bells of San Gottardo rang to call friends and neighbours to a memorial mass for our lost friend, Bruno Albertella.

It was well done.

Mama gets a faint sense of deja-vu

Fourteen degrees at 8:30am. Dull and raining. Spotted the first fire salamanders of the year this morning. They'd better move a little bit faster. Carmine now has 18 cats, all kicking around like truanting adolescents, looking for some diversion.

I've been rather fire-salamander-sluggish with my posts in the last couple of days, partly because the whole family has been struck down with a virus, and partly because I've been dashing away, not with the smoothing iron, but with the aspirotutto, a wet rag, a mop and bucket (with a hole in it), a broom, and a dustpan and brush. And with more than a faint sense of deja-vu.

Yes, the builders have been back, and when they finally dropped the house keys into my hand and called "ciao" after a fortnight beavering away, they left behind them a thin film of white dust. Everywhere. As builders will. As builders always do, despite their greatest care and attention.

I'm not complaining though. (No, really.) For this was a slick operation. An in-depth reccie a couple of months ago, followed by a meticulous computer-aided planning phase, and one Saturday all the materials swung up the hill in Franco's motocariola, a kind of motorised wheelbarrow with caterpillar tracks. The following Monday, three chaps were knocking on the door and two weeks after that they were heaving their equipment down the hill, following a job well done.

And we have been left with two new stufe in ceramica (or stufe in maiolica or kachelofen with an umlaut, or stufe alpiker, take your pick). They have white rustico coats and antique piode tops (sourced from a dusty pile discovered in the corner of the cellar). Two new companions to our old friend Mathilda. As yet unnamed, they will, we hope, handle the night shift, warming both the children's winter bedroom and the bedroom closest to it. When they're dry, that is...

Thanks to Franco for his Saturday and his patience. And to architect Lino Ferro and his team for great stufa-building, for dowsing the bedroom (where can I get one of those rods, by the way?), and for some interesting insights into the making of the church frescoes. It was a pleasure to have them here (the fumistas, not the frescoes), and they are heartily recommended. If you like the technology, but prefer a modular, rather than a built-in, version, see here.

Could this be the end of the builder's dust and undressing at high speed?

Motherhood means...No. 7

Twenty-two degrees in the sun at 10am. Breezy and sunny. There are two kittens skittering around the kitchen under the watchful eye of their once-more-pregnant mother (oh dear!). B is ecstatic.

Motherhood means...Not being in the least little bit surprised when it takes Mama and two under-4s two hours to get from Carmine Inferiore to Carmine Superiore. This is signposted as a moderate walk of 15 minutes, but today it involved 19 slugs (live), three slugs (dead), a handful of wild thyme, helping Signora Cesarina collect food for her goat, going to the toilet twice, trying not to scare off a deer, retrieving a lost musical instrument from a terrace six feet below the path, cutting down every tree in sight with a plastic chainsaw and celebrating the return of the prodigal cat.