Summer just doesn’t want to go away so we caved in to pressure from friends to head for the sea. The sea at Monte Argentario, to be precise. Have I so much as seen the sea this year? (I mean, except Venice of course, which though maritime never really counts as beach for me, however much time I spend on the Lido.) I don’t think so.
At Porto Ercole we pulled on masks and snorkels (good investment – we must have had them 30 years or more) and splashed off around the rocks by the isolotto where the water was clear and full of the usual colourful little fish nosing among the seaweed. On one side was a small beach resort, on the other a minuscule pebbly cove: in both, there were odd scattered groups of people standing immersed to varying depths in the water. Not swimming, not wading: just standing, talking, as if they were in the village square. Odd.
We stayed at the shiny new La Roqqa which L has done some work for. On Saturday they sent us along paths through macchia with a guide to discover a couple of forts. This rocky outcrop is ludicrously over-fortified – against pirati and corsari on the sea side, but also against antagonists just across the lagoon on the mainland. (I’d never understood the difference between pirates and corsari – privateers – until our guide elaborated: the former are just criminals on the high seas; the latter have a license from a crown or state to wreak havoc on anything that belongs to an enemy power, sharing any profits with the entity that granted the license.)
On Sunday on the other hand, we were put in a boat and whisked across the water to the island of Giglio. The inconspicuous yellow buoy marking the spot where the Costa Concordia went down is a monument to gobsmacking homicidal idiocy: how the captain of any vast liner thought he could get that close to shore and not kill people is difficult to fathom.
We didn’t actually set foot on Giglio. We just anchored the boat in a cove round the headland from Giglio Porto. I love the way the cemetery occupies the little saddle between the island proper and a jutting headland, affording its inhabitants sea views in two directions.
There’s a thing I don’t understand about boats. Bumping across a gentle swell, watching the wake unfold behind, can be exhilarating. Seeing a presqu’île like Argentario from the water gives you a whole new point of view on the place.
But anchor anywhere, and as the day draws on you’re bound to find yourself in the company of other boats. And on a lovely blue day such as the one we were there on, lots of boats. They manouvre into the same little cove, stirring up the sand on the seabed and filling the water with whatever yuck it is that boats exude. People chuck food in the water to attract the fish.
Swimming feels dangerous: you don’t know who’s going to arrive and reverse over you. The water is murky. There’s inevitably someone with a loud radio playing music you don’t want to hear; ditto some bloke making obnoxious comments to/about some female who does or doesn’t want to get in the water (it goes with the boating ‘type’). And all the time you know that the people on the land just wish you’d take your boat away and leave them in peace – or at least that’s what I would be thinking. In fact it was exactly what I was thinking down by the isolotto the previous day when one boat pulled in to mar what was otherwise a perfect view: like someone pulling up their lumpy station wagon to park in the middle of a beauty spot.
In my last post I wrote about the quasi-religious processing through town of Romina, Roberto, their market stall and their vegetables. Now disaster has struck. Roberto had been muttering darkly for years about how he was sick and tired of it all. And so they’ve gone. The following week they appeared with a couple of boxes of peaches, some courgettes and a sign saying that after 28 years of schlepping back and forth from Bolsena in fair weather and foul to bring us their produce, they’d had enough.
I still have one of their peaches in the fridge. Will I ever be able to bring myself to eat it? (I did.) I’ve been experiencing this as a true bereavement. Each time I think of it I feel like I’m in mourning. I shall miss them, of course, because they are in their separate and unique ways totally (if gruffly) charming. I’ll miss their veg which were picked the evening before and would happily sit in the larder or fridge for ten days before showing signs of flagging. But I’ll also miss the ritual: the standing in an interminable queue, chatting to the other customers among whom almost inevitably there would be a friend who’d want to go for coffee once purchases had been made. This was my Saturday morning: part social life, part deferral of other more important things I should have been doing in the house or – more particularly – the garden. A whole tradition has been upended. I’m feeling bereft and adrift. And I’m wondering where on earth I’m going to buy my veg from now on.
How terribly depressing it is to see in the Guardian that our air in this gorgeous green valley is really pretty grim. Do I believe this? I’m presuming that wherever the measurements were taken it wasn’t out in this neck of the woods where we have nothing but verdure.
Except of course when I’m bucolically mowing my lawns, petrol fumes drifting up towards me. Or even when we’re cozy inside our house with particulate-spreading wood stoves blazing cheerily.
Hottest July on record. By far the hottest September on record. All these things could throw one into the deepest planetary-scale depression. Were it not for the occasional little news snippet on local radio which gets equal billing with imminent meltdown and must surely be invented to distract us.
Such as the situation in some town called Valenza somewhere near Terni (which incidentally is a terrifying shade of dark=filthy on that Guardian interactive map). In a lengthy section on RaiNewsUmbria the travails of the local god-squadders were given top billing.
There have been protests and sit-ins and acrimonious confrontations between clergy and parishioners on the church steps, all because the new parish priest has told local youngsters that going to mass on Sunday will do nicely: no need at all for catechism classes during the week. Do people really still get riled about such things?
Yes. Shock. Horror. For the group who have been keeping the kids on the straight and narrow with catechism classes, this obviously means assured societal breakdown. There were been calls to the bishop to intervene, but the mediation failed. The priest, we’re told, states “this is my parish and I’ll organise it how I want.”
The voice which is deafeningly silent in all this is that of the kids. What do they want? Do they want their evenings gnawed away by rote-learning of Christian principles, supplemented by life lessons from religious vigilantes? Or would they rather hang out in local parks and bars, pretending to be 18 to purchase alcohol and spray-painting Valenza’s walls with offensive graffiti?
It’s probably pure prejudice on my part but I’m kind of guessing that the catechism controllers may belong to the same demographic to which Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing Lega party, is directing his insistent insinuations about how Everyman is being made to pay – quite literally – for the baseless climate scaremongering of the lefty liberals. Something which his party fully intends to reverse. (He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s in fact in power. But powerless to do any such thing.) He belittles pesky building regs forcing Italians to conform to environmental standards which, he maintains, have no effect on the climate at all. He moans about the ‘pointless’ phasing out of fossil-fuel-fueled cars. He stooped to a whole new low on Tuesday when he reacted to the deaths of 21 people in a coach accident near Venice by saying that the bus wouldn’t have burst into flames if it hadn’t had an electric engine. Really? A diesel vehicle falling 30 metres on to train lines below wouldn’t have had any chance of blowing up? But people who have been groomed to see anything “green” as inherently threatening lap up that kind of stuff.
Here in CdP we have town council elections coming up in spring. Spring isn’t far away really. But so far only one candidate for no particular party has put herself forward. On the Whatasapp group of our local Partito Democratico all we’ve had is recriminations. That one out-of-the-closet candidate – once a party member if I’m not mistaken – was immediately dubbed “our adversary”. How does someone become an adversary without even saying what they stand for? Long standing grudges play a large part in local politics. Then there’s the hand-wringing over the party’s total immobility: much self-blame which is obviously an underhand dig at others. Some group members, I notice, are leaving – clearly to throw their hand in with the platform-less “adversary” after all. All in all, there’s a feeling of total disarray. But the old-timers continue to run things as if it’s the others who are getting it wrong, not the party.
CdP until very recently was a staunch bastion of the centre and left: solidly Communist when the PCI existed, solidly Partito Democratico afterwards. Our current mayor – also once a PD supporter – was elected with the support of the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, the party of our not-so-delightful prime minister. What will happen in next spring’s vote? It’s anybody’s guess but a divided centre-left will certainly not triumph over a united centre-right.
A brief stay near Pienza, at the new Casa Newton hotel (so new that its website is still not functioning). The stairs, the chapel, the pool. And some very unsuitable shoes for prayer in the church in nearby Montichiello.
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