New Year 2002

Happy New Year! Our worryingly dry and warm winter continues into the new year. Dazzling sunshine, with a slight chilly breeze and whisps of mist among the snow-naked mountains. 

Ten years ago, New Year 2002. Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization. In Argentina, Eduardo Duhalde was chosen to be president, the fifth in less than two weeks. In New York, Michael Bloomberg succeeded Rudy Giuliani as mayor. Had they been alive, J.D. Salinger, J. Edgar Hoover, E.M. Forster, Joe Orton and Paul Revere would have celebrated their birthdays, and Kiri Te Kanawa and Nigel Mansell probably did. In twelve European countries, millions of people woke up to a new currency. 

In Carmine Superiore, in the bright winter sunshine, two young-ish people paced the tiny piazza, heads together in muttered debate. From time to time, their gaze fell speculatively on one another, then strayed out to the vast expanse of the lake with the mountains beyond. Finally, they smiled, shook hands and embraced. For ten years ago, on 1 January 2002, M. and I took the decision to buy the ruin that fate had dropped into our laps. Come what may.

That decision changed everything. As you might imagine it would. But Carmine Superiore is a mite unusual, and so this was not simply a change of place. It was a change of life, and a change that changed us. In 10 years, Carmine Superiore has knocked me - for I can speak only for myself - into a different shape. The list of things I can now do - don't think twice about doing - that I couldn't do on 1 January 2002 is for me ever-surprising. I can chop a tree down, split the wood and light a fire. I can raise chicks out of eggs generation on generation, and I know how to subdue a rambunctious cockerel. I'm also pretty hot with the coop-maintenance wire-cutters. I can drive a car. On the wrong side of the road. I can speak enough Italian to give birth to two Euro-sproglets, and get them into the school system. I can pilot a boat and manage a knuckle-headed gun-dog, even though sometimes it seems he is managing me. I can raise abandoned kittens and home flightless baby seagulls. I can build vegetable patches and grow produce for Africa. And I can circle them with dry-stone walls of my own creation. 

And please, let's not forget what it takes to conquer The Hill, through the pregnancy days, the toddling days, the tantrum days, the carry-me days and the asthma days. The thigh-deep snow days, the supermarket days, the wine-buying days and the helicopter days. And, of course, the happy day my book collection started to arrive. Forget the gymn. This was body-sculpting Carmine-style. The me of today, admittedly ten years older and very much greyer, is a far-cry from the me that sat day-in day-out at a screen with a view of the Thames. While these days my back may buckle under the weight of two cases of wine, in general I've never been so fit.

Any fear of creepy-crawlies and all things yuk that may unaccountably have survived six months in Africa in the 90s melted away entirely in those magical ten years. Bedroom-sharing scorpions, spiders, beetles and slugs. Cat-kill rats, disembowelled mice and downed birds. And snakes. And let's not forget the things that go bump in the dark. The many nights I've spent entirely alone in a broken-down ruined house in an ancient village with no road, with ghosts medieval and modern trailing their woes around the walls, with the howling wind battering at the shutters and the unimagineable calling from the shadows... That little scared-of-the-dark girl of 40 years ago would stare unbelieving at the middle-aged woman stalking unthinkingly through the woods on a moonless night. 

The decision to take on our Carmine ruin brought with it, of course, the commitment to live among the Italians. I guess being an expat in any country where one is required to live daily life in a different language brings with it its own challenges. In ten years, I have had my fair share of incomprehensible conversations - most notably in the labour room, in radiology, in paediatrics and in gynaecology, with the avvocato, with the maresciallo and with the notaio. Involuntarily, and rather surprisingly, though, I've found myself an expert in the short, sharp denuncia, if in no other skill. While I've suffered regular ritual humiliation on the part of more than one under-educated shop assistant, health worker or common-or-garden racist, I've benefited immeasurably from the patience and understanding of the vast majority of Italians I know. I've ditched my English reserve in favour of communication at all costs, and found that a rueful smile and a talent for pantomime go a long way.

In these ten years I've had occasion to discover the self-destructive power of envy, the ultimate futility of pride and the absolute necessity for patience in all things. I've become intimately acquainted with the wee small solitary hours in which the great Sasso Carmine squatted like a troll in the darkness while I nursed a sleepless baby. Nights when I've reached deep down inside for a reserve of energy I didn't know I had. I've passed many sleepless nights in dark imaginings and many glorious sunny days in simple contentment. 

Who would have thought that a great old house, window frames hanging off their hinges, nest-stuffed chimneys, doors held closed with piles of rocks, and a sieve-style roof...a colony of dung-beetles keeping the entrance-hall clean, a pride of felines making it dirty, and a tribe of dormice scrabbling in the eaves... who would have thought that this great old house would have the power to bring about so much change? 

"Not I", said the cat...

The end of the world as I know it?

A typical autumn day. Coldish. Dampish. With sunshine enjoy at lunchtime and a tittery little breeze to snaffle the leaves off the trees.

alamedainfo.com

In San Jose, California, there is a very strange building. It's known as the Winchester Mystery House, and was built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifles fortune. The story goes that she became unbalanced by the deaths, first of her daughter and then of her husband. A cooky Boston spiritualist (is there any other kind?) explained that their deaths had been brought about by the spirits of all those killed by Winchester rifles, and to avoid herself being the next victim she must build a home for them. As long as this building was under construction, Sarah Winchester would never fall prey to the spirits that haunted her. 

Now I know what it's like to live in a house where the building work never seems to finish, but unlike me, Sarah Winchester didn't want the round-the-clock work to come to an end, and in fact she was able to perpetuate it for 38 years. The house is a labyrinth of corridors, secret passageways and apartments. There are numerous chimneys, turrets and towers. There are staircases that go nowhere, doors that open onto blank walls, windows that open, not onto the outside, but into yet another corridor. The house has 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms and 6 kitchens. The whole stands as a weird monument to a woman convinced that her actions could fend off the inevitable.

And so it is here in Carmine. Not with the restoration of this big old house, even though I'm sure there is the odd Winchester or two on the premises. And not with the infestation of vengeful spirits, although after spending Hallowe'en alone here last night, I do wonder. 

No. 

I'm talking about the laundry.

The laundry?

Yes, the laundry.

Laundry, laundry everywhere. My house is full - and is always full - of laundry at all stages of the process. In the dirty baskets and the clean baskets. Wet laundry of every size, shape and colour hanging from every available hanger - and believe me, I collect laundry horses the way Sarah Winchester collected tradesmen. 

What I'm getting to is this. Do you think that if I ever got through the laundry...such that there is not a single sock languishing under a bed, nor a single pair of shreddies hanging limply from the washing line, nor a single shirt in the queue for the starch...if I ever got through the laundry, do you think something dreadful might happen?

Might a great tsunami whip across Lago Maggiore and drown us all? Might Monte Carza suddenly erupt, burying us all in ash and preserving us for posterity? Might this 1,000-year-old house come crashing down around my ears? Might the dead buried not 50 metres away in the piazetta by the church rise up and engulf us?

Might the world come to an end? ...

Tell you what. If I promise not to risk the end of the world by finishing the laundry, will you promise not to look sideways at the overflowing ironing baskets next time you come to my house? 

It's a deal. 

Must be a(nother) milestone

Yesterday, after a restoration project that has so far lasted eight years, I finally sealed the last of the eight new larch floors.

Gimme five!

CS Broadcasting Highlights of the Year 2008

Again, bright sunshine, blues skies and a warm wind. The clouds are trailing up the lake instead of down it, moving south-to-north rather than the more usual north-to-south.

Traditionally in the UK at Christmas time, there's plenty of tv-watching going on. The Brits have several excuses for slobbing out in front of the box at what they know should be a supremely social time of year. Perhaps the weather is awful and a walk doesn't seem too inviting. Or maybe you've eaten too much and can't get off the sofa. Or, better still, you want to avoid a deep and meaningless conversation with champion trainspotter Uncle Reg on the one hand and the more-than-slightly-overweight-and-nuts-to-boot Cousin Dottie on the other.

Much of what gets shown on tv at Christmas is either old stuff that everybody seems to like (Only Fools and Horses, James Bond with Sean Connery, or Cartoon Time with Roy Hudd and Emu) or content that's already been shown at least once in the year, repackaged to look like something different. An example of this is the 'Best of...' or 'Worst of...' or, more entertainingly, 'Out-takes from...'. Let's face it, this last option is cheap, and it's already been road-tested so it can't flop.

There's no tv in the House on the Hill, and given that I'm about as busy as the Boys from the Beeb at this time of year, I thought I'd do my own highlights of the year from CSB Carmine Superiore Broadcasting.


The Funniest Post of the Year (in me own 'umble opinion) : Breakfast time in Carmine Superiore is a time of virtuoso versatility amid a whirlwind of frenzied activity. A time during which Mama wears many hats...

The Most Heartfelt Post of the Year : This year, we lost too many friends and loved-ones. Such life-changing moments tend to put all other human preoccupations into perspective, and in the midst of our grief, it was the children who kept us moving in the right direction - always towards the future.

The Most Read Post of the Year : This post, a personal guide to Carmine Superiore and Lago Maggiore, drew more than 300 views and 60 comments.

My Favourite Picture of the Year : I can't decide. First, are the flowers after the rain, and second are the camellias that I caught doing arty-farty things in the fontana one Sunday afternoon. And then there was this image of the strangest mist I've seen in my few years here in Carmine, and one of the prettiest of the frescoes in the church. Click on the image to see larger versions; it's worth it.

Best Book of the Year : Again, I can't make up my mind. I can't decide between The Bad Girl on the one hand and Runemarks on the other. Or perhaps the best was The Enchantress of Florence, or maybe it was Neverwhere. Oh dammit! You choose.

Best Carmine Quote of the Year : This came from my neighbour, KK, who is well-known for his dry, quick and clever one-liners.

This Year's Greatest Personal Achievement : I know thousands of people do it every day but it meant a lot to me...

This Year's Largest House-Renovation Project : It was finished in time for winter...

This Year's Greatest Leap Forward in the Italian Vocab Stakes : Sadly, it was on the subject of allergies...

And finally... The Most Sickeningly Self-Satisfied Post of the Year : It has to be this one!

Happy Reading!

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

Christmas is a-comin'

Two degrees at 9am and raining fairly hard, as it has been most of the night. Much of the snow has gone, but there's still enough on the ground to show us where a capriolo (a roe deer) daintily trotted down the hill at some point in the night. A good day to drive to Switzerland along the treacherous lake road for a spot of Christmas shopping. (It wasn't, but that's another story.)

Carmine is patiently awaiting its Christmas reawakening.

Those cats in the know about the rich leftover pickings to be had at the Big House have been working their way back into our hearts for the past few weeks, and are now to be found in their own private billets all over the house - on top of Mathilda, in an electrically-heated infirmary nest in the pantry next to the washing machine (absent, understandably, during the spin cycle), among the faux-fur throws on my bed and burrowed in among some real sheepskins in the sitting room.

None of them, it seems, is interested in doing anything about the little nest of mice busy engineering another population explosion in the woodshed. And Mama is looking everywhere for swathes of crimson felt with which to patch B's Christmas sack, which between last year and this has developed a very large mouse-made hole.

The new Mathilda (still unnamed) is being commissioned slowly and steadily day-by-day, with half-loads more designed to hasten the drying process than to actually heat the rooms it was designed to heat. But heat it does, even now, and once you've gotten over the surprise of walking into a bedroom with an air temperature more than a degree above that immediately outside the window, you find yourself getting used to the luxury of it quite quickly.

And with only one more week of kindergarten to go before more than three weeks of Christmas, New Year, Epiphany and Patronal Festival holiday, Mama can see a much needed break from the four-times-a-day route march.

But before we can all settle into a festive season full of extravagance, decadence and the Queen on YouTube, there's plenty of ups and downs still to do - birthday parties, Christmas shopping, concerts, Christmas shopping, AJ's festa di natale, Christmas shopping and just a tad more Christmas shopping - making Mama for one wish that Christmas presents really were delivered by an overweight chappie in a garish suit, ably abetted by six tame ungulates and a magic flying sleigh.

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?

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?

(I love my) Scaldabagno a legna

Fourteen degrees at 8am. Sunny. Clear skies. Always that breeze.

We're now solidly into using our beloved scaldabagno a legna (wood-burning water heater) for the bathtub - in summer we used only the shower. The heater is that long, skinny thing in the cupboard there...

Here are the statistics : less than five kilos of wood, burning for a little under an hour produces 100 litres of bathwater at 80 degrees C. That's bubbles up to your neck and a bit extra for a quick scrub of the kids.

And, as if you hadn't noticed, we're surrounded by woodland offering rubinia, chestnut and oak costing not much more than the sweat of your brow and a certain amount of wood-chopping skill to turn into the pretty little wood pile you see to the left.

Oh, and the water costs about a cent.

No destruction of countryside or 1,000-year-old historic-village streets to lay a pipeline, no fixed monthly cost to pay, no being held to ransom by Russian suppliers of gas.

No contest.

Another rainy day

Four degrees at 8:30am. Raining. Steadily.

Rain. I don’t mind the rain. It’s good for the garden. It’s good for the barrel-principle wooden bathtub. It’s not quite so good for hill-walking, but then again we’re not made of sugar.

Besides we have a roof. A new roof. A 60-tonne granite piode roof.

In October 2003, though, we didn’t have a roof. At least not on two thirds of the house. The old roof had been stripped away stone by stone, the piode that were intact had been handed down three stories through the house and piled in the ever-narrowing street. The detritus of perhaps hundreds of years had been shovelled down three stories (we’d stripped the floors and ceilings out, leaving only the supporting beams) into a glowering pile in what we called the entrata, but which was really just a covered pile of muck with a door. All over the house, props had sprouted to support the internal cross-beams. In the kitchen, in the bedrooms, in the bathroom. At times the place reminded me of the forest of columns at La Mezquita in Cordoba (but perhaps not quite so geometrical).

Covering the whole lot at night were two massive tarpaulins.

In October 2003, Claudio Porta and his team, experts in building traditional piode roofs, had stripped away the old roof, and what happened next? It started to rain. Work stopped. The tarps were secured over the house, and Porta and the gang sloshed down the hill.

It rained and rained and rained and rained. It didn’t rain at weekends, but then the crew didn’t work at weekends even if they’d not been working during the week. M. and I trudged up and down the hill in our waterproofs. He working in Milan. Me taking Italian lessons, also in Milan.

It rained and rained and rained a bit more. We thought we might use all the timber and building equipment there was lying idly around the house to build an ark, but on reflection decided that getting the blueprints from the man upstairs might be a bit tricky. About as tricky as getting our blueprints for the new roof passed by the local comune's planning office.

One Thursday it was still raining. The woods were saturated, and so were Pandissima’s spark plugs (our rusting old car is the essence of Panda, hence the name). She mumbled and grumbled that morning, but after much coaxing she started and we thought no more of her and her mood swings. Off we went on the 45-minute journey to the train station at Fondotoce, and onto the 8am to Milano Centrale.

It was a long day. Some meeting kept M. late, but I waited for him. I waited in the school’s office after my class. I waited in the café next door. Eventually I waited in the rain on a street corner, pacing up and down, my high-ish heels splashing city-oil-slick rainwater up the backs of my city-slick suit trousers. Finally, he arrived and we ducked into a local takeaway pizza place for a bite. Then we ducked into the Metro and onto the last train home, a dank, fairly frigid affair with rainwater spurting into the carriages through gaps in the doorways and windows. It was nice weather for ducks.

The station at this end was awash. The wind was howling down the valley and spitting great gobs of water out into the Borromean Gulf. The car park was an unlit abyss of water-filled potholes and waves created by cars on their way past us. We ran to Pandissima (why is the car always parked in the furthest corner when it’s raining?), and jumped in with relief.

We paused for a moment, looking at each other in sophomoric delight at being in the dry, then M. turned the key in the ignition.

Several times.

He pulled out the choke and tried again.

He paused for a moment and this time we were looking at each other in dismay. Pandissima, who never liked the rain, was having the car equivalent of PMT.

So in full city regalia, I grabbed my waterproofs, jumped out and started to push. As I touched the car's filthy rear end, water instantly ran up my sleeves, saturating my jacket and my blouse. Don't you just hate that?

Luckily (ha!) the car was in the furthest corner from the station buildings, and the furthest corner happens to be the highest point of the car park’s fairly steep incline.

Pandissima started sulkily. I jumped in sulkily – my high-ish heels were slopping with muddy water and my hair was plastered to my head. Under the dim street lights, little Pandissima trundled through Verbania. The streets were quiet under the thundering downpour. No sign of intelligent life. Only the really stupid people were out that night.

M. put his foot down as we left the city behind and started to manage the many curves of the strada statale to Carmine. Soon, though, he was putting his foot down (carefully) on the brake as we realised that we weren’t so much driving home as aquaplaning, and there was a distinct possibility that we might take a bend the wrong way in the darkness and aquaplane right out onto the lake without noticing, the water was so high. The words 'lake-road, road-lake' ricochetted around my tired mind.

Slowing right down to a crawl, we inched our tentative way back to Carmine Inferiore and parked up. From the car park I could see our boat, Fulmina, dimly outlined where we had left her on the beach below. Fulmina disappearing and reappearing as the waves crashed over her bow filling her full with every wave. Then I saw M. disappearing and reappearing, his yellow waterproofs flapping in the wind as he crashed down the unlit rubble path through brambles and across precarious patches of corrugated iron to get to her.

M. turned the boat over with superhuman effort (considering he’d only eaten a single slice of pizza since lunchtime, and no spinach at all) and in total disregard for his shiny city-shoes and his made-to-measure tweed suit. The boat emptied of gallons of rainwater, he proceeded to drag it as far up the beach as the beach went up and to tie it with double, triple and quadruple knots to a tree.

Coming back up to the car park, he was besmirched and bedraggled and squelching about as much as me. We now turned our faces up to the little church on the outcrop 100m above us. It drifted meaningfully in and out of the low cloud and occasionally disappeared behind a sheet of rain. M. waggled his eyebrows at me somewhat less meaningfully, we took a deep breath in unison and started upwards.

After a couple of minutes it was clear that if the strada statale was awash with water, then the mulattiera (the twisty-turny unpaved remains of a mule track that leads up to Carmine Superiore and home) had become a river. No-one had had a chance to dig out the old gutters that would have directed the water into gulleys, streams and down to the lake. Instead, the water directed itself with some force down the path, at some points cascading down from outcrops, at all points dribbling off the tree branches. We waded up in grim silence. It was gone midnight.

Reaching the forest of scaffolding that was the path directly to our door, I fumbled for the keys and we tumbled into our building site. I reached for the lights. Nothing. As so often during adverse weather, the electricity had gone out.

We shook off our waterproofs and felt for the candles. M. lit a fire in the hearth – the first hint of comfort after a very long day. Slumping down on the twin inglenook benches, we started to unwind with glasses in hand.

In the candlelight quiet that followed, we both listened to the insistent patter of the rain and the thundering of the rivers down the valleys on either side of us.

Drip, drip, drip.

I think we both heard it at the same time.

Drip, drip, drip.

Not outside but inside.

Bloody hell! It was raining inside!

On investigation, every room in the house seemed to have sprung a leak, and some places were becoming muddy with rain. In the makeshift lavatory, a particularly spiteful leak dropped headlong onto me as I took a pee in the darkness. Upstairs, the walls of the room we were hoping to turn into a bathroom were, appropriately, running with water. The cement floor in Ezio’s old kitchen was awash. In Luigi’s kitchen, a stream of water from the ceiling plink, plink, plinked onto one of M.’s large cast iron frying pans and then plop, plop, plopped onto the jar of Nutella that had been there since 1994 (but that’s another story).

Wearily we staggered to our feet and started a tour of the house with flashlights and receptacles of all kinds, locating leaks and placing buckets, potties, saucepans under them. We sopped up puddles and moved bedding to drier spots.

At about 2:30am we were back at the inglenook, with the second bottle, and some bread and cheese. We were exhausted, damp, tired beyond sleep. We stayed up, staring into the fire, until four. Companions in adversity.

When I finally carried my candle up to the dripping bedroom, I sent up two prayers to any of the Carmine gods who might be listening : the first was a prayer of hope that this would prove to be the worst day of our renovating lives; the second was a vote of thanks that we were not, after all, made of sugar.

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

New year greetings

One degree at 8:30am. Sunshine and some hazy clouds.

The picture below was taken close to Carmine Superiore on New Year's Day 2002, the day we made the decision to buy our house here. The tree is no longer upright, but after six years work, the house, we hope, will be standing for a good few years yet.


Happy New Year. Whatever your goal for 2008, I hope it brings you solid ground to build on, pleasing materials to work with and the health and vitality to enjoy the results.

Talking Italian No. 2 : It does what it says on the tin

It's actually Tuesday, 4 December : six degrees at 8am and white-horse windy. A spiteful little rain shower accompanied our happy band on the morning descent for kindergarten, but now we're blessed once more with sunshine. Powdery snow on the hills on the south side of Valle Cannobina.

In Italian, it seems that some objects are named according to what they do. A verb shmushed together with a noun is a familiar form. Asciugamano, for example, is a dries-the-hand, a towel. Likewise, an asciugacapelli is a dries-the-hair, a hair-dryer. And the marketing men have chosen to call Italian kitchen paper towel asciugatutto, which is perfectly pertinent, I guess - tutto means everything.

Then there is the good old aspiropolvere, the sucks-up-dust, the vacuum cleaner – much abused in this house in the days of builders’ dust everywhere. In fact, I managed to kill stone dead three vacuum cleaners in the course of a single year (one, a delicate pink item, clearly unsuited to the rigors of a house in mid-renovation, caught fire in spectacular fashion one day in my frenzy to clean up prior to the arrival of our first house guests). After the third was laid to rest (vacuum cleaner, not house guest) we bought an aspirotutto, a sucks-up-everything - a dustbin with a motor and a tube attached. And it does, really, suck up everything, including stray corks, socks and teddy bears. I haven’t tried small children yet, but there’s always the possibility if they continue to find switching it off in mid-vacuum entertaining…

Indoors, there are the tagliaunghie (cuts-the-nails), the tagliacarte (cuts-the-paper) and the object lying undisturbed in the dust on the mantelpiece since M. (supposedly) gave up smoking, the tagliasigari (cuts-the-cigars).

Outdoors, we find the taglialegna (cuts-the-wood), the tagliaboschi (cuts-the-woods) and the tagliafili (not a son chopper, but a cuts-the-wire). Venture beyond the tranquil confines of Carmine Superiore as far afield as Milan (God-help-me) and you will need to take care lest you fall prey to a tagliaborse (cuts-the-purse), the Italian pickpocket.

But what if people also had such labels? What if, in the immortal words of the Ronseal adverts, we all did what it says on our tin?

AJ would of course be labelled mangianiente – eats-nothing (see November 2007, Parenting Problem - can you help?).

And B would likewise be labelled mangiatutto – eats-everything.

M. would have a wide variety of labels and none of them would do him justice, although perhaps cucinatutto (cooks-everything) would be a good start, and portatutto (carries-everything) would run a close second.

And Mama?

Well, she would have a great big label on her saying puliscepoupou (pulire = to clean). And, what with AJ's newfound love of hotching his full potty around the kitchen, B and her teething tummy, the chickens and the un-house-trainable housecats, you can be sure she spends most of her time doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Tell me, though, what would it say on YOUR tin?

References: http://www.ronseal.com/

Ecco Mathilda!

Today Mathilda is burning!

Now before you get any strange ideas about autumn burnings of Catholic effigies in thinly-veiled pagan rituals, let me explain that Mathilda is a wood-fired oven. The nearest thing to central heating we have. Having said that, the first time we light Mathilda each year does perhaps amount to something of a pagan ritual, ushering in the colder months with much careful preparation of cut firewood and kindling, much organisation of firelighters and matches out of reach of little hands. Much oohing and aahing over the creeping warmth.

When we first came to Carmine Superiore, the house was in fact two houses. It had been owned by two sides of the same family, the last inhabitants being Luigi Zaccheo and Ezio Geninazzi. There were two kitchens, and we decided to turn Ezio’s kitchen into a sitting room and Luigi’s kitchen was to remain in use as our kitchen.

The only heating equipment in the place (apart from two open hearths) was an ancient 1930s-brown Zoppas wood-fired stove. It stood in one corner of Luigi’s kitchen, and its exhaust pipe crossed the entire room lengthwise before being stuffed into a hole hacked into the front of the otherwise stately chimney breast. It smoked from all its joints, gave little heat and ate up all the oxygen in the room.

Evidently, something had to change.

Summers at the Lake are mostly hot, and the house acts like an old church, chilling the warm air as it passes the three-foot stone walls, making life, especially in torrid July, bearable. But winters can be unhappy. While they say that Lake Maggiore and its immediate environs can be thought of as the northernmost tip of Africa, and while all around one sees various species of palm and cactus thriving among the firs and the chestnuts, winter in a stone house without heating really isn’t a laughing matter. When we first stayed in Carmine in winter (not in this house, but renting a neighbour’s), the water in the lavatory froze. Our first winter in our own house, a shirt of mine famously froze five minutes after hanging it to dry in the makeshift shower we’d rigged in the lean-to lavatory. I had showered there only 10 minutes before.

Our first decision was, for the time being, not to heat the bedrooms. We were supplied with four bed-flasks – flat oval, copper flasks to fill with hot water and put in the bed – and that was that. Speed dressing and undressing became a necessity and then a sport accompanied by hysterical giggling when the going got really tough. Unhappily, some of our visitors didn’t find it so funny, and one or two of them haven’t spoken to us since they experienced a Carmine winter first hand.

Our next decision was not to rely on electricity. In line with the thinking that we should try to build in low running costs, electricity for heating seemed too expensive. Gas was not an option – we didn’t fancy lugging 50-kg gas bottles (gaily termed bombolline) up the hill more than once a year – and despite the contunuing rumours, it seemed as if the gas company was unlikely to go to the expense of connecting us to the municipal gas supply until the end of the next century. Four years and one village petition on and the gas company is still curiously silent on the subject. I can’t imagine why.

Our solution was to use wood (of which there is an abundance right here on our doorstep, if you can be bothered to cut and dry it) as our main fuel. We started to look for wood-burning systems that would ideally use the wood efficiently, heat more than one room at a time and require as little tending as possible (my fire-tending pattern being erratic if I have something else to do and positively absent-minded at certain times of the month).

The stufa in maiolica was the best solution we lit upon. It’s essentially a wood-fired storage heater. Made of clay bricks, it’s built into or against an internal wall. About 2.5 metres tall, our stufa was inserted between Luigi’s and Ezio’s kitchens. On the side of Luigi’s kitchen, it is about 80 centimetres wide, making a tall, thin shape (suggesting, to me at least, the name Mathilda). On the side of Ezio’s kitchen, where it is the only heating aparatus apart from the fireplace, it expands to a width of 2 metres. On both sides, the edifice is topped with huge grey granite slabs (to match the roof, we thought). At the foot of the tower on the side of Luigi’s kitchen, a black ironwork door opens into the firebox.

The deal is to make a large and hot fire that rages for an hour or so, using about 12kg of wood chopped very finely. When the fire dies down, the door to the firebox is closed, and the hot air makes its way up the tower, through a labyrinth of flues, heating the many clay bricks as it goes. Over the next few hours, the oven walls become gradually hotter, radiating a gentle heat not unlike the warmth of the sun. Slowly, the tower cools down again, and after 12 or 24 hours, depending on the temperature, a new fire is laid, starting the process all over again. I like to think of it as Mathilda breathing.

Mathilda is designed to create a background glow, raising the base temperature of the room, so that it is closer to comfortable, further away from bloody freezing. It’s never stuffy, and there is little chance of poisoning from fumes, so the effect is better for the inhabitants. The other advantage is that you have to make the fire only once or twice a day, rather than having to constantly tend a wood-burning stove like a pot-belly or a furnace.

M. began researching maiolica ovens in the winter of 2002-3 when he moved into Carmine and realised exactly how cold it could be, even during a relatively mild winter, and especially without his compagna to keep him warm at night. He eventually found a supplier he was happy with. He liked the look of the preventivo, and liked the look of the man.

We realised that we would require helicopter services to transport the materials, and so timed the building of Mathilda to coincide with the building of the roof, in October.

In September, Oreste Ferrari, our most dedicated builder, swung his sledge hammer and his by then familiar “Madonna!” cry rang out. After no more than a few swipes at the wall, his face appeared, covered in plaster-dust, grinning.

“Ho fatto disastro!” A favourite saying of his. Our Oreste, not so much a builder as a one-man demolition squad, even with a brutal hangover, which was often.

Our very first, very game guests, Ilse and Jan, leant us their elbow-grease to carry away the rubble. After that, we lived with a hole in the wall for several weeks. It’s interesting how unsettling it can be to live on one side of a hole, where everything is hunky-dory and fairly civilized, but to be able to look over your companion's shoulder at supper, through the hole in the wall and to discern in the half-light piles of old concrete, discarded buckets, and a layer of builder’s grime everywhere. It’s rather like looking through a mirror into some insane world where the ghosts of all the unpaid builders in history (starting with the builders of the pyramids) are able to take revenge. Eventually we covered up this dreadful vision of hell with an old curtain (70s trendy, a donation from our neighbour Gunhilt, and while being mighty useful, was itself a vision of textile design hell). When the weather started to turn colder, and the wind started whipping across the supper table, we plugged the gap with the enormous cardboard box in which Edna, our wood-fired cooking stove had arrived (another item with many uses and very much worth preserving, all renovators take note).

Eventually, everything came together. The helicopter scythed over the ridge behind Carmine, the fumistas puffed up the hill, the materials landed in a storm of rotor blades, and soon we were the proud owners of an elegant stufa in maiolica, plastered white in rustico style (as the Italians commented, disdainfully – like many cultures, they seem to have abandoned knobbly-wobbly walls when breeze blocks were invented).

At this moment, surveying the new heart of our home, we are delighted.

Two problems.

We are deflated.

Mathilda is wet. When new, stufe in maiolica contain some 150 litres of water, we are informed. We would need to wait at least two weeks for it to dry before lighting it.

And she is also what you might call sottosviluppata - under-developed. She has a flue, but it isn’t connected to a chimney, because we as yet have no roof. So we wait. Because as soon as the old roof is torn off (that in itself a fortnight’s work), the heavens open and it starts to rain.We wait through the workdays with dreadful weather and the weekend days when the sun shines with ironic abandon. Eventually, as the roof is completed, the flue is connected to a lovely copper pipe and we feel the excitement rising.

We survey the work again. There is now a very smart matt black tubo exiting the granite slab on top of Mathilda, penetrating the kitchen ceiling and making a somewhat startling appearance through the floor of the bedroom above. 70s clunk meets millennium city warehouse sleek. From there it continues upwards, through the ceiling, narrowly missing a major beam, and through the floor of the sottotetto, the attic. Here it does a dog-leg to avoid the main beam of the new roof, and at the same time joins the tubo for the Zoppas – our lovely ancient brown Zoppas, miraculously ascended to the heights for use in some glorious future when we get around to populating the upper rooms.

This is where it all goes wrong.

There is no dog-leg.

Signor Cattaneo, our diabolical plumber (diabolical because he reminds me of no-one more than Robert de Niro as Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987), has ordered one from the local fabbro, and it won’t be here until the very last minute, you can lay bets on it. Still, he has rigged a stop-gap ensemble resembling one of those flexi-tubes that come with some tumble-dryers – the things that are used to conduct the moisture-laden air out of the nearest window, and that, we are told, should do the trick. Instead of being happily reassured I find myself wondering what hapless housewife will find herself with a new tumble dryer frustratingly minus its flexi-tube, having borne it home from Cattaneo’s shop full of jubilant expectation.

The man who installed Mathilda is a square nice-looking fellow by the name of Ferro. For a week he dropped his kids off at school and then made the 90-minute journey from Oleggio to Carmine Superiore to build our stufa. In comparison to our butch, burly roofers and muratori, Ferro and his nameless colleague, in their pink-and-turquoise fleeces, gilt half-moon spectacles and hush puppies, appeared almost housewifely. Together they spent all day every day bickering over the design and building of Mathilda. The foundation looked like tiramisu; the curved corner bricks were the texture of ice-cream-cones, coloured pink; the smell of the water-cooled brick-cutter, similar to the acrid smell of burning metal, pervaded the whole house, and got about in the village a bit, too.

At the end of the week, Ferro left us with a prescription for Mathilda’s first days, which resembled nothing more than a plan for weaning a child.

Or a formula for raising evil spirits. You know the kind of thing: take the eyes of two frogs, pickle them and bury them for five years under your neighbour’s compost heap…

Which one you perceive it to be depends on your outlook on life.

Or on how cold the weather has turned and how cynical you have become.

First, we were instructed to leave the door to the firebox open for several weeks, so that the clay inside would dry. Not something we did religiously, I am bound to admit.

We were to acquire a supply of good quality wood, dried for 18 months out of doors under a protective cover and for a further 6 months indoors.

Luckily, M., (who would have made a good Blue Peter boy had he been English) had some he had prepared earlier. About 10 years earlier.

The wood must be hewn and chopped to a suitable length, and stacked in a square formation inside the firebox, with the kindling leaning against it in a half-teepee shape.

(It quickly became clear to me that I was going to have to learn the near-culinary skill of producing wood suitable for Mathilda, and, after having completely screwed up my right elbow by trying to wield an axe that was too heavy and too dull, I found something more suitable for a woman of five-foot-nothing and became pretty good at turning majestic acacia trees into julienne strips. And now find this heinously destructive activity a serious relationship-saver. Try it, girls – it works.)

In addition, we were to acquire environmentally-friendly, odour-free, pressed-wood firelighters. Not paraffin firelighters. And we must definitely never use newspaper, or junk mail or proof copies of M’s doctoral thesis, incendiary though some have called it.

The first eight accensione (twice-daily doses, morning and evening, before meals) were to be effected with only half the regular amount of wood – some 5-6kg, a basketful – and leaving the door open to aid drying. For the next eight accensione, we were to step up to the full amount of wood, still leaving the door open. Finally, on the ninth day, the full 12-kg fire would be lit, and when the inferno had passed its zenith, the hermetic door was to be closed and sealed, preserving all that lovely heat.

Thursday night in mid-december. The ambient temperature is hovering around freezing. We have pelted back from Milan, narrowly missing a railway-workers' sciopero, due to start at seven o’clock. Even so, we are affected by what seems like a rather spiteful preliminary action – the train carriages are without light and heat the entire journey. M. conducts what is to my medieval mind a miraculous transatlantic telephone call from the dark of his train seat. Eventually, after a chilly stop-start journey we arrive home feeling fairly miserable, and we make one of those snap decisions - to inaugurate Mathilda.

The fumista has laid the first fire, and I insert the duly-acquired firelighters. I light them just as M. pops a bottle of méthode champenoise. All appears well for a couple of minutes, the flame leaps from the firelighters to the kindling. We sip our wine and sit back in self-congratulatory manner.

And then Mathilda begins to belch. She belches and farts. She coughs and splutters.

Smoke.

Great yellow clouds of poisonous, disgusting woodsmoke. She vomits a stain all across her beautiful, white rustico front.

What to do? We summon up our best chimney-physics. On the assumption that extra oxygen arriving at the mouth of the firebox should encourage the smoke to rise through Mathilda’s internal labyrinth, we open the window. (It also helps us to breathe.)

Still she belches.

M. removes the panel that seals the main chimney, across the room, to provide more oxygen.

Still she vomits.

I open two of the three doors leading out of the kitchen – a cardinal sin in a house where every iota of warm air has been bought with much sweat and occasionally some blood. And still she coughs, splutters, farts and retches. She dribbles streaks of water onto the ironwork of the firebox. She’s still wet.

M. gets on the phone to Ferro. I head upstairs in search of my turbo-charged Italian hairdryer in the hope of being able to at least clear the air a bit – the pall of smoke now has a cloud base of about a metre.

Ferro, he of the hush puppies, informs us that this disgusting behaviour of Mathilda’s is normal for the first accensione. Thanks for telling us, dude.

“The clay’s still wet, and until the stufa is dry, it won’t draw properly.”

“But you said it would take only a fortnight to dry, and it’s been drying now for two months!”
“Si,” he replies patiently, “but don’t you remember that three-week spell when it rained non-stop and you couldn’t see the lake for fog?”

“Oh, yes, that three weeks when the laundry wouldn’t dry – like a monsoon but without the mould…”

“If your washing won’t dry, it stands to reason that your stufa isn’t going to dry. Oh, and by the way, the fetching tumble-drier ensemble in your sottotetto may also have something to do with it…Ciao!”

M.’s face is like thunder. His brows are knit and his jaw juts in what I’ve come to know and fear as his angry face. Then, as we gaze at each other through the haze, I see his angry face become what I’ve come to know and fear as his I-have-a-plan-face.

Then I realise he’s eyeing my hairdryer.

I am evicted from the room. “Take your wine outside!” Lying on his side so that he is below the cloud-base, he begins to dry the stufa’s hair – he aims the hairdryer at the smouldering wood in an effort to bring the fire back to life, bellows-style. I flash in and out from time to time, a wet rag over my mouth, trying to protect what’s left of my lungs after 25 years as a wholehearted smoker, but my eyes are streaming as if I had just peeled and chopped a dozen onions, and rubbed my eyes with chillie-fingers to boot.

“Darling, get out!” Such endearments.

The wrestling match goes first one way and then the other. The fire takes hold, and M. emerges onto the terrazzino with his glass in his hand. Then another gob of smoke bubbles out, and the fire is all but extinguished, and M. is forced to resume drying.

Eventually, eventually, Mathilda starts to warm up, and then the fire takes and holds.

“She goes!” I hear through the distressing pall, and for once I ignore the grammatical infelicity.

We look for any remaining wine with which to celebrate – there isn’t any.

I look for my hairdryer, but find only a white plastic thing, sadly wilted. Melted in the line of duty.

I’d like to say that this is the end of this particular episode. But it isn’t. We lit Mathilda regularly for four or five days as instructed. Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forrid, some days she was, good, and then she was very, very good. Hardly any smoke at all. And some days she smoked and then she was truly horrid. In fact, she smoked more often than not, and my hairdryer was pressed back into service and we became rather tired of having to open all the doors and windows, and of worrying about whether our clothes were starting to smell like smoked haddock.

So.

Despite really quite liking the background heat that was starting to build up, we screwed up our courage against the cold and resolved not to light Mathilda again until Signor Cattaneo had finished the chimney.

M. called him. When could he come? Tomorrow. Tomorrow came, but it appeared to have left Cattaneo at home. The next day, and the next day. Still no Cattaneo. The days lurched closer and closer to Christmas and Cattaneo’s definite domani’s become provo’s. Christmas is a deadline in anyone’s book, even an Italian plumber’s, believe me, and it seemed that everyone in the neighbourhood wanted their pipework completed before the merriment began. As foreigners, seemingly at the end of every queue, it looked for a while that we would be without Mathilda for the festive season.

Then, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Cattaneo’s wonderful jackrabbit assistant, Ivo, arrived, panting, carrying pipework, short and stocky copper tubes with conical hats on them (reminding me instantly and rather unexpectedly of the Flower-Pot Men), a bucket-load of tools and, oh joy of joys, the dog-leg. He grinned, forced out a quick “ciao” between pants and, as I had come to expect, disappeared onto the roof through the nearest upper-storey window. About an hour later our Lucifer himself arrives, inspects the work and spins off back down the hill. His final words: “There’s nothing more I can do. Light the damn stufa – if it doesn’t work, you must call the fumista! Buone Feste!”

With trembling hands, we build a pile in Mathilda’s firebox, following all the instructions we can remember. We light it and are momentarily jubilant when the fire seems to take first time. But with by-now tedious inevitability the belching soon starts again, and we are truly, heart-breakingly disappointed.

No Mathilda for Christmas.

No Mathilda for Christmas?

M. won’t accept it. He is on the phone to the fumista. For a while. I sidle up, listening. I admire what to me sounds like fluently cutting Italian. Then I realise he's begging.

Christmas Eve, they arrive. Both of our hush-puppied fumistas with their pink-and-turquoise fleeces. They leave their poor families at home during the festive season to answer our plea - I'm impressed. They spend two hours trudging around our house, insulating everything in sight, it seems. Smocked tubes of white fleecy stuff appear wherever there was once a super-cool matt-black iron tubo. So much for style.

We stand in our coats in Luigi’s kitchen, looking up, knowing which room they are in by the bickering, now louder, now softer, now nearer, now further away. Next, Ferro appears in Luigi’s kitchen, and dons a rather worrying pair of surgical gloves. He gets to his knees in front of Mathilda in what at first sight seems like an act of prayer. In one hand is a mirror, in the other a small pair of pliers. No, an act of dentistry. Then, in a trice, he is up to his shoulder in our Mathilda in what can only be an act of veterinary proctology.

A valve, he explains over his shoulder, to be adjusted.

At last, the necessary adjustments complete, I lead the fumistas in procession to the wood shed, where they select the finest julienne strips my axe could produce. In an atmosphere of growing religious awe, they build the pile. Between minor skirmishes between themselves they impart to Michael in rapid and fervent Italian many of the Mysteries of the Maiolica, speaking both at once in their zeal, gesticulating wildly, eyes flashing with the erudition of their chimney-physics.

We hold our breath as Mathilda lights. A small amount of smoke billows out. Uncharitably and over-hastily, I think, “There! I told you so!” But the flame catches and holds, then grows, and my cynicism is overcome by hope and then joy.

Like the three kings, Giacomo, Franco and Wolfram mooch in at that moment, hands in pockets, to behold the miracle, and it’s caffè and grappa all round.

Piano, piano over the next few days and weeks, we light Mathilda, tend her solicitously and gradually she dries. In return she stoically provides a gentle radiant heat, making us more often comfortable and less often bloody freezing.


Heartily recommended : Lino Ferro, details here.
More information : Italy's national association for people who make you feel warm, ASSOCOSMA.

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