6 March 2024

The burglars, it seems, have moved up the road towards Castiglione del Lago, stopping to wreak havoc around San Fatucchio. This sounds a little like the Trasimene Line, with German troops falling back under Allied fire to Lake Trasimeno and beyond. It was beginning to feel a little like a monumental battle.

Each morning supermarket queues and centro storico bars were a-buzz with bulletins of where the burglars had staged their nightly caper. In Canale (ten houses breeched in one night), in Po’ Bandino: all the outlying CdP suburbs were ransacked. The public outcry grew rapidly louder, the mayor made sabre-rattling declarations, police vehicles with arclights mounted on their roofs patroled the roads around town. All to no avail. These fleet and agile robbers were too canny to be caught.

In the streets, and in the byways of Facebook groups and Whatsapp chats, there was talk of locals taking the law into their own hands, with vigilante posses proposed to chase the varmints down – at which the hearts of many (myself included) sank at the thought of the kind of people who’d be deliriously keen to be out there ‘defending’ us… basically, not the kind to whom you’d ever entrust your safety – or anything else.

Parked prominently : were these alarm-fitters sponsoring the burglars?

Don’t leave car keys in your vehicle? Why? They were burgling houses!

One morning, there were reports of overnight gunshots as police spotted the criminals and pursued them across the fields, only to lose them in the countryside. Were shots fired? It was more likely a car backfiring. But there are a lot of people out there with shotguns just itching to have a go, especially now that hunting is over for the year, and they have plenty of time and itchy trigger fingers. Of course given the haphazard tenor of our hunters, if anyone was going to be shot it would inevitably be the kindly neighbour popping over to enquire after your well-being, and not the hardened criminals after your worldly goods.

So just as well the little rats have moved away. Or have they? They could of course simply be lulling us into a false sense of security, ready to sneak back at any second. Let’s just hope they’ve gone.

My hopes of capturing passing animals on our little cameras mounted around the house have been dashed: nothing at all has shown up. Once, when I was displaying the camera views on my phone to a group of female friends, they were treated to a quick glimpse of L exiting the front door in his underpants. But that is about the most exotic it has been.

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We got back in touch with our Roman haunts a couple of weekends ago, strolling through Testaccio market for the first time in forever and catching a very Testaccio-style exhibition in the Mattatoio – the wonderful old slaughterhouse – about hallowed Communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer. The show was engrossing, and memory-evoking. Berlinguer died just a few months before we arrived in Italy in September 1984. Rome was still plastered with tattered posters hailing him, and “Ciao Enrico” was spray-painted on walls. The dewy-eyed followers who mourned him then were probably the same people wandering through the Mattatoio last week. There was an air of hushed reverence, a feeling of “we’ll never see his like again”. Which is silly of course because there’s every chance that some charismatic leader will emerge once more. Though the Italian left today is far from having anyone of Berlinguer-esque stature.

We stayed in a rental apartment (L was reviewing it) of decor which strayed far to the kitsch (perhaps even tacky) side of luxe. But that was irrelevant. The views. They were unique. The apartment stands of the corner opposite the scalinate up to the Capitoline and the Aracoeli church. It’s on the top floor, with a series of terraces ascending up to a ridiculous little turrety tower. Each time I looked out of a window I was wrapt. Unique.

As part of L’s research we were taken to see another apartment – this one with nothing, and no distance, between its terrace and the Colosseum. Again: a view to leave you gasping. It was a weekend of heart-stopping perches.

We also went underground, beneath the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo on the Celian Hill. This is where the mighty base of the Temple of Claudius stood, and it is through this archeological level that you enter the world beneath: a network of tunnels where tufa was quarried.

The place was a jumble of ages. You could see the evidence of different tools and different techniques. You could see where instead of taking tufa out, the tunnels had been used to dump earth extracted during building projects. A tatty wire running along the walls, attached to ceramic electric insulators, was clearly a remnant of a wartime air raid shelter. The guide suggested the quarry had been remembered and forgotten repeatedly over the centuries. Recently though someone has taken care to clean it up for popular consumption: you just have to think of the Galleria Borbonica in Naples where the poor sheltering souls left poignant remants a-plenty of their hours of terror. In this quarry, there’s nothing of that ilk.

What there is though is a couple of little lakes. Charles Dickens was taken down there, our guide informed us, but didn’t really think much of these small ponds in points beneath the level of the water table. He of course didn’t have waterproof torches to illuminate them from beneath the water. Lit up, they glow eerily in the penumbra.

At one point the guide invited our group to turn off their torches and spend a few seconds in silence and utter blackness. You can’t get much blacker than unilluminated tunnels well below street level: the pressure is almost physical. I’m not sure I could have stood more than that handful of seconds: already being underground was making me nervous. But I think I put of a fair show of calm. All around me, I could feel the utter terror of some of our fellow explorers: the air was quaking with their panic.

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Just as we’d like to be thinking about spring, it’s wet and really rather cold – not because of the temperatures because in fact they’re not low, but due to the damp and the wind. Quite horrid. I’m waiting for the new moon on March 10 so that I can begin sowing my vegetable seeds but I’m not really feeling enthused about it: it simply doesn’t feel like there’s anything vernal coming towards us, and I’m very very wary of the sting in winter’s tail.

Still, my qualms haven’t stopped the almond tree and the magnolias blossoming, and I noticed some bursting buds on the apricots as well. But pruning the Concord grape vines up in Pieve Suites the other day, I saw that not a drop of sap was running, so some plants are definitely not being fooled.

11 February 2024

I was pushing my bike up the lane the other day as Sergio was driving down in his battered Fiat Panda. Sergio was born in our house . His mother died towards the end of World War two as a result of a grenade hit in what is now our carpark.

I stopped to say hello and enquired what he was doing in these parts, seeing as the boar hunting season is over. Poor Sergio is often one of the outliers – the older hunters dressed in hi-vis and dumped for hours on the edges of the hunt to make sure that no boars skip off in the wrong direction and no hapless hikers wander into the line of fire.

He explained that he was just coming down for a moment to his luoghi natii – his native places, the place of his birth. It really was a moment: he had turned around and come back out in the other direction before I’d even reached the paved road. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him do that: he drops by quietly and frequently. Does he come to commune with his mamma I wonder? I rather suspect he does.

In this brief exchange, he informed me that his uncle Gigi had passed away recently, not long before his 100th birthday; and then Gigi’s wife, a couple of months later. I thought of the occasion when jovial Gigi – who used to visit regularly and tell us tales of life in our house before the War – brought his wife down here and stood with her up by the gate (though there may not have been a gate then, these being the early days). I was out with my strimmer and he was jubilant. “You see, I told you,” he said to Mrs Gigi. “She does use the decespugliatore!” They both looked at me as if this woman who used garden power tools was a creature from another planet. Mrs Gigi was absolutely thrilled.

As always I took the opportunity to pump Sergio for information about our property. There was a good hectare of orto (vegetable garden) he told me, from the southern end of the house right along the level where the old water tank is, as far the spring; and the same again on the level above. They would water one level one day, and the other the next. The orto kept three families going, and left enough to take up to town to sell in the shops. “There were proper shops then,” he said: Sergio clearly doesn’t think much of supermarket chains.

I tried to quiz him on the now-wooded spaces down at stream level, which were clear and farmed until the 1970s and perhaps later, but I don’t think he really remembers. Just corn and maize he said, but without much conviction. There were far more olive trees when he was a child he said, and great expanses of uva francese – whatever “French grapes” might mean. Each year they produced 60 quintals of wine. He announced this as if it were a huge amount but I’m really not able to judge. I wonder where these vines were planted? Are the few strands which pop up down on the bank beneath the big walnut tree relicts of that production? Maybe.

After each of my chats with Sergio I kick myself for not having asked about photos. Are there photos of our house from his childhood? Probably not: life was one huge struggle to keep food on the table then – no time or funds for photo frivolity. But from the 1950s and ’60s, perhaps. I must remember to ask.

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Sergio’s car is welcome down our bumpy track. But we’re all a bit paranoid about traffic at the moment. There has been a spate of burglaries in CdP over the past few months. Last week they came our way. In the space of one afternoon at least five properties in the immediate vicinity were broken in to. Whoever these criminals are, they work fast.

They’re only interested in portables – cash and jewels… gold preferably I should imagine. But in their search for it they trash your home. In one earlier incident nearer to town they took a sledge hammer to a wall safe but failed to dislodge it before the owners came home. Now those poor people live in terror of the burglars coming back to finish off the job… though I have to say that if they’re stupid enough to have left anything in the safe after the first onslaught then they perhaps deserve whatever’s coming to them.

I say we’re on the look-out for strange cars but in fact these characters seem to appear on foot – though there must be someone somewhere looking out for unexpected returns, ready to whisk them away once they extricate themselves from the target property. And we suspect they drive by in order to do their homework: they really know wheat to aim for. They shimmied up a drainpipe to a first floor kitchen window in one case; in another they descended on a house just as the owners nipped out to the supermarket for a Friday evening shop. 

Our local Carabinieri – so obliging in many ways – have not shone through this recent ordeal. They never bothered to visit the scene of any of the crimes around here. As I recount events to other locals, the policing picture becomes bleaker. When one friend went to the police station some years ago to report a burglary, the officer taking her statement was less interested in the crime than in informing her that his wife had an alarm-installing business. Though she said no thanks, the alarming wife dropped round the next day and insisted on providing a quote. Another friend called the police 12 years ago to report a newly arrived neighbour breaking into his garage: “12 years later I’m still waiting for them to investigate,” he said.

So here we are, the blessed un-burgled, with this nagging worry that we’re on the list, but have been postponed till a later date. It’s not comforting. People often ask me – especially when L’s away – “but aren’t you scared out there all by yourself?” The answer really is no. It never occurs to me that I’m anything but safe here in my home. And I continue to feel that way now. But. But. But… if they do come back? Do I want to come home one afternoon to find strangers going through my underwear drawer?

What I am though is not scared. What I am is angry, furious, hopping mad. We’re not starry-eyed: when we go out we lock up; we know that unfortunate things can happen. But that a few thieving little shits should force us to spend enough time to think about keeping our property intact that we’ve even invested in security cameras… that really is a massive imposition. The only advantage being that now we’ll get to see passing nocturnal wildlife. There’s always an upside.

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A friend called the other day and said “Anne, can I ask you a personal question? You don’t have to answer obviously.” This friend is active in the local cell of the Partito democratico, of which I’m a very inactive member. I told her to ask away.

Everyone in town is saying that Anne Hanley has abandoned the PD and thrown herself behind a rival centrish leftish candidate in this spring’s mayoral elections. To which… what could I say? It wasn’t so much the idea that I could find the energy to throw myself behind anyone at all: just going out to vote on the day of the elections is more than enough for me. What I couldn’t get my head around was the “everyone in town” bit. Even allowing for wild exaggeration, this had me bemused and very amused.

Who on earth is interested enough in me and my wishy-washy politics to start spreading such rumours? And why on earth should this matter to anyone? And how many people even know who I am? The ways of local politics and local politicking are infinite and very odd. Best to steer clear of it I reckon. And no, I haven’t changed horses. That would be far too exhausting.

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Is it possible that bees are drugged by the nectar of Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’? My plants – abundantly in flower right now – are full of great big furry bees who seem to be glued to the blooms. In sunshine and rain, they’re lethargically but systematically dipping their snouts into each tiny trumpet. Nothing can distract them, not even me slipping down the slope as I try to photograph them. They are so beautiful and so single-minded.

The bitter oranges…

… have become marmalade.

Though obviously the marmalade isn’t from my own very few oranges. Once again I have to thank the ever reliable Azienda Sebastiana Scollo for the many kilos which went into that.