postcard from Italy - 8

Family love
My Italian vocabulary often seizes up under pressure; I needed the Italian term for ‘hay-fever’ (l'allergia al polline = allergy to pollen) to explain why I was sneezing and coughing so violently as my system rebelled against alien varieties of tree pollen; my adorable Brother-Cousin (son of Big Fish and my favourite relative ever) managed to work it out for me. He suffers f too but is irritated by a whole different group of allergens: while I snuffled over ornamental cherries and choked from beech trees, he was affected by olive tree flowers and the like. He informed me that hay-fever was a family trait and that Papa Sangue suffered too. No wonder he was constantly clearing his throat.

I’m always thrilled by any information, no matter how trivial, which reaffirms links with Papa Sangue’s side of my family. Having got over the ‘shame’ of being Italian in my early twenties when I realized that my family didn’t just comprise a bunch of Italian chavs on Mamma Sangue’s side i.e., the ones brought up in Market Town, uncles and aunts who forbad my conformist, uncreative, dullard bunch of cousins from playing with me because I led them ‘astray’; no, in Italy there was another family, a group of educated, funny, independent uncles, aunts and cousins on Papa Sangue’s side whose children, effectively my second cousins, were closer in age to me and were witty, interesting and actually owned books! Mamma Sangue’s family, on the other hand, wasn’t renowned for valuing education. My cousins ranged from those who simply had no clue what I was talking about to those who mocked me for being ‘well-spoken’ and hence a ‘snob’. This is why I like sports; I could play tennis with my female cousins and I was spared the need for conversation; company without the ‘colour’. One uncle chided Mama Sangue for sending me to private school. He opened his tirade with demanding to know who she’d bribed to get me a place (I passed an exam) and then reminded her that to educate your children was a waste of time since they needed to join the work force and bring some money in for the family. You’d think we lived in the third world.

In Italy, my second cousins have degrees or are in further education working towards them; most have moved up North but Brother-Cousin, like his dad, Big Fish, will never move away. He has cornered the market in the village for internet delivery. The Italian, national telecommunications company has refused to get involved in this despite the fact that 80% of the population, hungry for iTunes, YouTube and Facebook, lives in the mountains and can’t get broadband. Brother-Cousin has set up the point-to-point transmitters and receivers in the local area, is working very hard and is doing rather well out of it. He has exactly the same sense of humour as me, the same fascination with local history and loves the traditional dialect and origin of words. Our conversations are vibrant and alive and full of piss taking. I adore him. Unfortunately he has a very grumpy wife who coddles their six year old son in a way that I find bewildering. For example, we went for a long lunch altogether and met at 1pm. I asked if her son was eating and she said,

“No, Little Fish eats at 12.30.”

Oh.

It was one of many memorable and delicious meals. The main meal of the day in Italy is at lunchtime; usually around one o’clock and the world and business grinds to a halt. People have two and three hour lunch breaks to accommodate the trip home, a long meal, a nap and the trip back to work. The rhythm of life is entirely different there. Women rise early, clean the house on just an espresso and set off to get the day’s food and queue in various shops. It always amuses me that if you pick up a child’s vocabulary book in any language, you’ll find the word for grocer, butcher, baker; in England, they ought to replace these with ‘cash-point’ machine, ‘twenty-four hour petrol station’ and ‘Tesco’. In Italy, it’s as if time has stood still; yes there are supermarkets but these are supplemented by roadside vegetable stalls much as you’ll get in multi-cultural central London but not many other places, certainly not in English villages where shops seem to have died a death. In Accadia, for the next few years at least, you can buy fresh-made mozzarella and cheeses, local grown fruit and vegetables and bread straight out of the oven.

Mr Sangue and I stuck to eating our main meal in the evening unless we were out. Nothing can be better than a bitter salad of endive, plum tomatoes and rocket, a thick slice of fresh-made tomato pizza bought by weight at the bakers and washed down with ice cold Peroni followed by a sleep. The baker’s is a sweltering location and it’s impossible to ‘nip’ in and grab a loaf. So people fan themselves and catch up while they’re in line. Weakened by the smell of freshly made biscuits, giant loaves some waxy, some smooth, bread rolls desperate to be filled with provolone and salami, and large round dishes of no-frills pizza that kept coming from the back: onion, anchovy, aubergine…my mouth ached. I looked at the old, blown up photos of the men in the family heaving loaves out of the oven in black and white. The sons still wear the traditional white hat. They’re big on uniforms here; it’s not considered demeaning to wear work clothes which, in many blue-collar quarters in England, have been replaced by plaint-splattered casual wear and the ubiquitous reflective vests worn by everyone from architects to road sweepers.

“You’re Mamma Sangue’s daughter, aren’t you?” Signora Baker said.

“Yes, how did you know?” I had met her before but it had been a few years.

“You talk exactly like her; the same voice.”

It’s an observation that no one has ever made and it made me feel connected and a bit proud in a way I couldn’t quite figure out. I liked that people knew who I was here. It gave me a buzz knowing that just by saying my surname, they’d know I was Big Fish’s cousin. It didn’t earn me any privileges, and I wouldn’t have wanted that, but it made me feel part of something. Of course, this is me romanticising again; in Market Town, when I was a kid, at least in the road we lived, just about everyone knew me and it felt like living under the Stasi with uncles and aunts reporting back to Mamma Sangue if I ‘got up to’ anything. But, for the few days I was there, I got a buzz.

loosen those waistbands
Big Fish asked us over for lunch one day. He owns a three-story building with a basement, his apartment on the first floor and Brother Cousin and his family on the floor above. The basement comes into its own when he has guests; meals are taken downstairs because its cooler and we ate round a large table, on plastic plates with plastic cutlery and the smell of ripening tomatoes all around us. One room is filled with the booty from Big Fish’s allotment, furniture salvaged from grandparents’ homes lines the walls alongside massive gas burners which can be hauled into service if there are more than twenty dining and the giant pasta pan, large enough to bath a baby in, is needed.



I ‘helped’ Signora Big Fish make orrechietelli, fresh pasta, rolled with your thumb and the edge of a teaspoon, (I made three); she was patience personified but I wondered what the point of having opposable thumbs is if you can’t make fancy food with them. I left her to it went across the road to the dairy to collect mozzarella and ricotta for later. In a tiny sweltering outhouse, over an ancient wood burning stove, while milk heated and curdled, Rossaria, with just a fan pointing at her face, immersed her hands in another hot tub of liquid and twisted and plaited the newborn mozzarella. She lowered her eyes when Mr Sangue took photos, the most flirtatious and coy this very masculine woman, could manage with her calloused hands and sports shirt. I tried one warm, straight out of the vat and it was a bit too much like baby food for me to cope with.



Brother-Cousin watched me intently while I ate mozzarella as my meat substitute at lunch;

“You like those, Sanguelina?”

“Ummm…” I grunted.

“I like them too but I try not to remember where and how they’re made. Once I took a client there; he’d asked me for some typical, local food. His first one he ate with a knife and fork, then you should have seen him pulling them out of the bag with his hands and stuffing them in whole!”



Our meal consisted of many courses; we began with ciambotta, a local ‘mess of vegetables’, courgettes, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, all fried in olive oil and mushy and fragrant. With bread, that’s a meal for me, but here you have to keep going no matter how much it hurts. There was fresh made pasta, then sausages and fried potatoes, bell peppers fried whole – all very simple but intense in flavour, suffused with olive oil, sunshine and garlic. I wanted to say “Lord take me now for I am happy!” but I worried that a straight translation into Italian may not have had the same light-hearted, reverential tone as in English so I just grunted.

Mr Sangue had made the salad and they ribbed him, ‘complaining’ that some of the pieces of cucumber weren’t cut quite the same size as others in the bowl. I love watching the affection they have for him, how they’re a little bit in awe of this tall, modest and polite Englishman and how everyone talks to him all the time in Italian or English remembered from school or used in work online.

Half way through the meal, more relatives turned up, not to eat, just to hang out with their kids. A neighbour appeared with a tall skinny bottle of leather brown liquid. It was a liqueur made from rocket. I loved it! This had to be good for you and contain some magical, anti-carcinogenic properties.

“Here, Sanguelina,” Brother-Cousin beamed his usual mix of proud and self-awareness that these are uniquely Italian quirks, “We make everything into alcohol.”

We tried some limoncella, a liqueur made from another cousin’s crop of lemons in Sicily. It was sweet and sour in a way that short circuited your mind. Brother-Cousin brought out a bottle of the crucial mixer which I don’t think you can buy back home.



This is all you need to make a palatable drink; mush veg or fruit of choice, a tad of water and a few shots of alcohol. Oh, and it needs to be legal. I don’t think it is, at least I think that’s why Papa Sangue used to retire to the bathroom to make Grappa on that weird machine he borrowed off an uncle.

Of course, there was no room for dessert, so we squeezed in a few gorgeous biscuits we’d brought along as a token gift. They were light pastry and filled with dried fruit and made to wash down with heaps of espresso.

After, Brother-Cousin showed us his office; I loved the collection of antique phones as well as computer innards such as 10” floppy discs and data cards.

“Where the hell do you get this stuff from?” I asked.

“Eee-bay. Shall we go and have ourselves a beer?”





It was futile to argue and ten minutes later we were in an air-conditioned bar surrounded by marble and fancy drapes.

Back to the apartment, three hours after we began the meal, Mr Sangue collapsed on the bed and we slept like seal pups.


More on food to follow…

postcard from Italy - 7

The sleepy village of Accadia comes to life once a year for a week with events and entertainment every night.

birra
Our first night in Accadia they had a beer festival; all in honour of the Madonna, of course. She likes a drink.

We had to smirk. I thought a beer festival were a celebration of beers, meant to sample the delights of a variety of beers with kooky names, lovingly brewed by people who treat the production as some kind of art. Accadia’s idea of a beer festival involved barrels of Heineken served from an L shaped bar by volunteers in Heineken t-shirts. That was it; remember, over 2000 people there who generally don’t have anything to do the rest of the year and whose culture does not revolve around public drinking. For one night they could booze al fresco – even the women who generally pretend they don’t touch the stuff, could partake in public without fingers wagging. And how did the organisers respond to the thirsty challenge? Three pumps. And, I know we were up a mountain, but it was odd that gravity seemed to be working against the bar staff for I have never seen anything come out so slowly as that frothy, luke-warm slop; well, nothing that didn’t gasp for air and then cry when it was slapped on the arse.

People waited stoically, as if they were queuing for bread in the Brezhnev years; it took half an hour to get your drink. Before we even went to the bar, we had to do what they always do in Italy, go through the infuriating routine of you queue up a first time, tell the cashier what you want, pay for it, then queue up again give your receipt to the person behind the counter and they take your receipt, tear a corner and serve you; effectively, you have to queue up twice.

The poor bar staff had to wait in line too. First they had queue for their turn at the pump, then wait for the trickle to fill the plastic cup, then scrape the top off the foam with a knife, then top it up some more, oh so slowly then apologise for taking so long all the while shutting out the downcast expressions crowding their peripheral vision. If it hadn’t been such a beautiful evening in a glorious location and if there hadn’t been barbecued sausages to queue up twice for, as well as an abundance of relatives for me to make jump out of their skin by my mere presence, it would all have been a bit of a damp squid.

Mr Sangue, my hunter-gatherer, spotted someone eating cheese form a take-away plate; it was Caciocavallo , what we call ‘horse cheese’ thus named because a pair of the massive, breast shaped cheeses are tied together and draped like saddlebags, over a pole to mature, ‘mounted’ horse-back style. I’d bloody kill for the stuff and raced to buy multiple slices, guaranteed to strip the lining of your mouth like acid laced sandpaper. With a sore mouth, and some luke warm beer under the lunar shadow of the village clock, I suddenly felt pretty good. I needed cheering up, already I was feeling the strain of having to translate incessantly from Italian to English and back again. It’s like listening to heavy metal and classical at the same time while humming a nursery rhyme.

famiglia
My cousin, Big Fish, had organised the beer festival. I adore my cousin; now in his early sixties, I haven’t forgotten that once he looked like Rock Hudson and I used to have a bit of a little girl crush on him. He’s been involved in everything that’s going on in the village all his life: he’s deputy head at the middle school; once managed the village football team; I think may have been mayor and has one of the greatest lifestyles of anyone I’ve ever met. He’s a big cheese, a big fish in a small pond, entirely honest and respectable, funny and hospital and rarely leaves the village because, well, why would he? In the four month summer break he tends his allotment, has long siestas and passes the evenings with his friends shooting the breeze, playing cards, watching football, enjoying the odd beer. I hadn’t called to tell him we were coming so as I crept further and further up the queue, grinning at the top of his bald head while he took the money and wrote out the receipts, it was lovely to see the unbridled delight when he saw me. It’s not often a human looks so pleased to see another and the feeling is mutual.

We spent a lot of time with Big Fish over the next few days, but it’s never enough. I also have this nagging feeling that I’m pushing my luck accepting such one sided hospitality so many’s the time that I’ll want to go round but I worry his heart will sink at the prospect of having to feed us again so I don’t; I want him to remain pleased to see me. We’ve give up trying to persuade him to visit us in England. I doubt he’ll even leave his local area again unless he has to for things are too good at home. How I envy him. How wonderful to be so popular, to fit in, to be involved in things and feel like a valuable member of society. As a woman, I could never have lived like this in Accadia and while I romanticise his life, there’s always that tinge, that underlying current in Italy, or at least as I experience it, that women, well, they just aren’t ‘allowed’ to do things that men are and that people will gossip about you. Here there’s none of that, leastways if I keep away form my Italian relatives (and there are many) who have colonised Market Town.

processione
The following evening, the people of Accadia did what they did best, form long lines and parade through the town. This time, as part of the festivities, they dressed in costumes reminiscent of the 1400s. They looked wonderful, classic Italian faces with great noses and real swagger, framed against the old village ruins. I couldn’t help enjoying the juxtaposition between their footwear, mobile phones, jewellery and the velvet, stage clothing they’d somehow knocked together.



The most satisfying of these images was this one.



One woman, taken aback by this historical moment, as Accadia celebrated being really brave in some siege or other, wanted to have her photo taken on horseback with her baby on her lap. The horse was the picture of calm until some firecrackers went off in the hills and its ears flipped back. I’m amazed the horse didn’t quite rear up on its back legs. I couldn’t believe the stupidity of the woman.



We were surrounded by village youth dressed in azzuro, getting off on their body guard image. I saw that this was what every presidential body guard was based on, the Italian male in a position of authority in sunglasses. You can’t really look cooler than that. They gestured for us to make way as the horses turned and trotted off down the main street, looking utterly incredible as they disappeared in the gloaming like ghosts from an ancient battle.


mamma and Mecca
The festival rambled over a week or so. In the evenings, we promenaded up and down past the out-of-towner stalls. Among these were families of Africans selling garish bags, ethnic bowls, woven baskets, leather belts and other generic ‘African’ goods. For hours, a mother, striking in her sunshine coloured batik, would guard her stall in the heat with her uncomplaining baby strapped to her back. One night, Mr Sangue and I sat outside a café, drinking a beer from the bottle, and watched one mum gently untie her sleeping baby and lay him under the stall on a cloth, safe and warm under the ‘tent’ while she continued to work into the night. We also saw the stallholders say their prayers among the bustle of the crowds. One couple took it in turns to mind the stall while the other rolled out their prayer mat and bent down, touching their foreheads to the ground, oblivious to their surroundings. I said to Mr Sangue, “Next time I say I can’t fit something in, can’t follow a routine that I normally follow because I’m not at home, remind me of this.” It was humbling.

postcard from Italy 5

Yes, with a nod to Hitchcock, I must say that my life is worth a read with the boring bits taken out.
tarantella
There was live music almost every night on a large stage, in the open air in front of the church: from the teeth grindingly twee bambini di Accadia through cheesy, Euro-pop divas to the utterly glorious folk band whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t catch. They were from Salerno, deep in the South of Italy and home of the Tarantella a dance with a glorious mythology.

It is named after Taranto in southern Italy, and is popularly associated with the large local wolf spider or "tarantula" spider (Lycosa tarantula) whose bite was allegedly deadly and could be cured only by frenetic dancing (see tarantism). One variation of the legend said the dancer must dance the most joyous dance of her life or she would die, another says the dancer will go in to the most joyous dance of her life before she dies. In actual fact the spider's venom is not dangerous enough to cause any severe effects. The spiders, far from being aggressive, avoid human contact. (from Wikipedia)

The music is extraordinarily passionate and guaranteed to whip you up. It’s impossible to listen to without at the very least tapping your feet; a huge portion of the audience was less shy than Mr Sangue and I and let go; alone or in pairs, free forming, nodding, jumping and turning, whirling, spinning in thrall to the wild violin and baying, gypsy vocals. At the front of the stage, a skinny little woman wearing a fringed scarf around her hips and waving scarves or playing a tambour danced as if she truly was being exorcised. Incongruously she wore little spectacles as she cowered, jumped, twirled and swept the stage and threaded her scarf through the air. At one point, a member of the audience leapt on stage to dance with her. They were in perfect symbiosis, hands on hips, chests close like mating birds, their unexpected communion almost erotic in its fit. He stayed for the whole number then disappeared back into the crowd. (videos are shot by Me Sangue)



A few minutes later I saw his girlfriend walking off in a strop and he chased after her, to reassure her that it meant nothing. Oblivious to this little drama and stoned on endorphins, the diminutive dancer, arched her back and bucked and kicked while the violinist attempted to chase the ‘demon’ out of her. Extraordinary.



There is school of thought that the tarantella was a socially acceptable way for women to work off their sexual energy. Maybe this was why I’d never heard this music in my house growing up; yes, there was plenty of folk music but not this bacchanalian wail.

In front of us, old ladies, children and more surprisingly, young people got on down to this ancient and traditional music. I was taken aback; years ago folk music would have played to tumbleweed in the square but, not before time, Italy has rediscovered her roots and the tarantella is experiencing a renaissance.

cimitero
Papa Sangue’s last resting place is in Accadia. The cemetery is a small, cramped and dusty site, filled with monstrous, marbled, early-seventies style mausoleums and giant walls full of coffin sized shelves in which the deceased are piled high, one above the other like so many rabbits in stone cages. I hate these things but Italians seem inordinately fond of them and the practice has now taken off in Market Town with its massive Latin population. I have made it absolutely clear that when I die I want to do down the Victorian route, thank you very much, horse drawn carriage, black feathers, priests and incense. Oh, and there has to be Mozart at the service and an angel on my grave. This is non-negotiable and if someone should see fit to cremate me I will come back and haunt them, so help me. Papa Sangue made it absolutely clear that he wanted to be brought back to Accadia and, at great expense, that’s exactly what happened.

I felt duty bound to visit him. What began as a chore on a very, very hot morning - spending any time with Papa Sangue has always proved stressful - turned out to be an exceptionally moving experience. I’d bought some Padre Pio candles on the way to make the experience feel ironic and hence manageable but, when I found that we couldn’t reach his ‘spot’ about 20ft up, I could feel the tears begin to well up.



A widow working on the block next to this one, brushed and wiped her husbands grave. In Italian I asked her what I should do. She put down her watering can,

“Put it there, on the ground in front. It doesn’t matter that it’s not right by him, it’s all the same, it’s what’s in your heart that counts. “

“Grazie, Signora…” I managed to choke and translated for Mr Sangue who lit the two candles - one for Papa Sangue and one for my granddad; I’d accidentally on purpose forgotten that Big Mamma Sangue was parked up there too – and positioned them way below them. Surprised by himself, and half-embarrassed, he muttered that he felt quite choked up,

“Yes, he always liked you.” I nodded. “Way more than he ever liked me.” I tried to chuckle but I just wanted to get out of there.

I told Mamma Sangue back home and included detail about the helpful widow.

“She stoopid cow. She there all day, every day.” Mamma said, ever warm hearted.

Fuoco

Italians love their fireworks and the display on the last night of the festa is always fantastic, with absolutely no regard for safety of subtlety every colour in the paint box is tossed up into the night sky and exploded at maximum volume. For days we’d been rudely awaken by three loud bombs much to Mr Sangue’s rage who almost suffered spyncter collapse,

“I bet it was supposed to be at 8 not 10 to…” he growled.

I wonder how all the domestic animals put up with it. Certainly by the end of the firework display they must have all had heart attacks unless they’d become entirely desensitised after years of exposure. I’m the one who holds all the anxiety genes in our relationship but even the sanguine Mr Sangue looked a little concerned as we followed the village to the outskirts of town for the essential, dark backdrop without light pollution which is necessary to the most satisfying pyrotechnic displays.

“I’m not being funny,” he said, taking my elbow, “but can we not watch it so close to the petrol station?”

The display was the opposite of subtle, the antithesis of classic, it was an unabashed display of Italian blingo that had you looking at your watch and wishing the pyrotechnician would come too soon. It put me in mind of that Truman Capote quote,

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go

By the 22nd of August, night after night of celebration. I’d had enough. See, the good thing about Christmas, there’s only one. The festa, on the other hand, at least every five years, probably goes on a bit too long and you find yourself fantasizing about a quite Sunday afternoon with the papers.

postcard from Italy - 4

The British have only just cottoned on to the region Puglia. The few times I’ve driven through the infinitely more popular Tuscany since Blair put it on the map I can see what the fuss is about, rolling hills, vineyards, little villages…but, as I wrote a while ago, that sums up pretty much all of Italy. Lowly Puglia, while it can’t compete with the well-watered countryside (it does rain in Italy, at least in the north) still has its own charm. You just have to know where to look. Puglia doesn’t have the money and only recently discovered air-conditioning. In the past there wasn’t a lot of water about either. But, as Mamma Sangue has been known to say,

“If bastardi in North divide country, they starving.”
It may not look it, but Puglia is the garden of Italy and, yes there is a semi-popular political movement in Italy which preaches the permanent separation of the rich North from the poor Mezzogiorno, the scruffy, peasant south, my homeland. The posh Northerners won’t get anywhere with that one; you need a TV company under your belt if you want political success in Italy and where would they get their tomatoes from?

Ah, tomatoes…now there’s a funny old business. The poorest Italian will have a tomato plant growing on his balcony or in the bathroom but if you try to grow them on a large scale anywhere else but Puglia, you can run up against obstacles. Crossing from Campagnia towards the Adriatic and Puglia, every few hundred yards we passed a massive truck on its way back from delivering plum tomatoes to the canning factories by the Med. They’ll be full going one way and empty the other. You simply won’t see laden trucks going the other way. See, all the tomatoes are grown in Puglia but canned in Campagnia, so Papa Sangue told me; once, a bright spark thought how about putting a canning plant in Puglia, think of the money you’d save? Well, the plants just kept burning down. A week later, on our way home, so going the other way, we noticed that where the tomato trucks had taken the sharp bends off the motorway, hundreds of stray tomatoes had been dislodged and scattered. They lay along the edges of the soft tarmac like denuded insects, unintentionally sun-dried; it was sad that no one would ever enjoy them.

My parents left Italy for Turin and work in the 1950s and later to Market Town when Papa Sangue got a contract at the brickworks for £7 a week. There’s no money in Puglia but Papa dragged us back every year. I never considered why he might do this, why he wanted to go their so bad, but this year I understood. It’s a feeling. The place feels right. I was born in England, brought up here, I think and speak English but somehow, I feel whole when I’m there. No doubt this is a sentimental affliction akin to that pastoral bollocks in the 18C when aristocratic females dressed as shepherdesses, flounced about and heaved their bosoms, later going back to their soft, comfy beds and lice free palaces. I don’t question it too much because, once there, it soon wears off; a week and I’d had enough, but while I’m there it’s idyllic and intoxicating, the heat, the sounds of the crickets, the rhythm of the every day – everything feels as far from the rat race as it can be.



My dad lived in the Old Village till he left in his twenties. Over the years Accadia, population 2500, has extended further up the mountain turning its back on the old village very much worse for wear suffering earthquakes, landslides and general disrepair. The peasants would build their homes over deep cellars gouged straight out of the mountain side and as the years passed the two roomed homes fell in over the great holes and it’s all become quite unsafe. The locals call it I Fossi ‘the holes’ and try to talk you out of walking round there in case the road collapses under you. Most of the houses, which naturally had no running water or electricity, have survived in some sense, but really, Pompeii is in better nick.

One by one, each family was re-housed higher up and the old village was abandoned. As a child, I remember one or two die-hards staying put, still drawing their water from the fountain in the square, some still kept goats in the downstairs room, but no one lives there now. My dad, because he’d left town, didn’t take up his allocation for an apartment till the late 80s. Until then he bought a rough and ready, dark two room affair in Via Borgo, with walls a foot thick with no bath just a tiny loo, wood burning stove and a balcony overlooking the main road. If you opened the bedroom window you could smell mule shit from the lane below. We’d stay less than a week once a year for the festival of the Madonna of Carmine at the end of August. The rest of the time we’d stay twenty miles away in a very pleasant apartment in the big town of Foggia so we had access to the beach and civilisation in general.

My mum has spent a fair amount on renovating the old place but I feel very uncomfortable there; too many ghosts (not real) sit in every corner and I only have to put a foot through the door and I regress to the sulky, fat, miserable and ugly kid I was. Mr Sangue and I stayed for two nights until we could get the electricity issues sorted out at ‘my’ apartment in Via Masselli. It’s not really mine but I’ve just stuck my flag in and no one is getting me out of there. This is the apartment due to my parents; Papa almost doubled the allocation and had a big upgrade so that he landed a third floor, two bedroom, spacious, airy place with a view to die for. He passed away before he could stay there. Mamma can barely manage the stairs and my little brother gets that I’ve marked my territory and stays away. It’s worth tuppence-ha’penny; hard to get to from the airport, basic furniture and we still haven’t sorted out the hot water, but I love it so much it hurts. It’s mine. I love to sit on the balcony, breathing in the nutty smell of ristoccia the stubble burning, and just stare at that view. I only have to look at it for five minutes and I feel peaceful.

Things have changed in the old village; there’s evidence of a very expensive but abandoned renovation or building project. The dilapidated, damp buildings have been re-tiled, plumbed, wired up but it’s a project sparked off with vision and ending in the usual shit-stained Italian bureaucracy. They lie abandoned, doors flapping in the wind, windows broken and rabbit shit and litter on the marble floors. So much loving work had gone into rebuilding the roofs in the original Roman red tile design so beloved still in the south of Italy and they could have been beautiful homes yet because of disagreements as to what should become of them, they lie waste.



Part of the modernisation programme has been the resurfacing and making safe of the road down the hill – but it’s a road to nowhere. They must have spent a fortune on the street lighting so that the locals can enjoy their evening walk or passegiata there, but there weren’t exactly hoards just us and an occasional visitor taking photos.



I nearly pooped myself when, with my back to what I merrily described as, “The most haunted place in the village.” The abandoned church, it’s courtyard that one concealed the millions of bones underground in the ossarium, now overgrown with weeds, I heard a movie-style, sound effects door creaking. I froze. There it was again. On a high balcony, the door swung open, creaked, swung back. Over and over again. Horrible. Like something from a ghost-train or I’d imagine because I’m way too much of a wuss to have ever been on a ghost train. After that we went back in daylight!

postcard from Italy - 3

Day three of our trip and we passed the morning on the beach soaking up the rays and reading – just as well we had that meditative time.
Mr Sangue pleaded the case for what he assured me would be a mere forty-five minute diversion; he envisioned a relaxing drive along the scenic Amalfi Coast, sunglasses gleaming, exchanging movie-star smiles as Louis Prima blared from the iPod followed by a smart turn inland towards the Adriatic coast and Accadia, my homeland. He showed me the route on the Hertz map,

“It’s not far…”

I squinted at the meaningless squiggle and read it like a doom-laden palm; I saw a treacherous chariot ride skittering around hair pin bends, my eyes on stalks, my stomach in my throat, and my pants soiled but I conceded with a pout because why miss the experience of a lifetime because I’m a wuss? Neither of us were right, of course but I’m thrilled we did it. It took about three hours and was breathtakingly beautiful.

The entire length of the coast is so windy that I’ll re-name them as spaghetti bends – their isn’t enough unpredictability in the term ‘hair-pin’ to cover the sudden lurch as the car changes angle again. We didn’t dare play music – it would have been over stimulating and I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was alive or dead without my frequent hiss and sighs of horror, disbelief or joy. After an hour or so I think Mr Sangue began to enjoy himself and get the hang of driving like a native; it’s all about timing and gear changes. My sphincter was aching before we pulled over for a delicious lemon granita, freshly made lemonade, lashings of sugar, poured over crushed ice by the farmer himself who was so sun-baked he looked like a tortoise in a straw hat. We gulped it down, squinting in the African glare, trying not to get ice-cream headaches and averting our eyes from the plastic cups, condom wrappers, cigarette packets and butts at our feet and wondering if the beautiful village below was just too damn pretty.

The entire length of the coastal road, we didn’t see a parking space for about four hours. This was the busiest holiday weekend for Italians and families had made for the beach and wedged their cars or motorini bumper to bumper for a mile or on the road in and on the road out of the numerous villages we drove through.

Others had taken the bus: I would have taken my hat off to these blue-uniformed drivers by way of saluting their calm and bravery if I hadn’t had to keep both hands clamped to dash-board. How did they remain so calm? How did they not grind their teeth as they negotiated the spaghetti bends and their tail-ends momentarily flipped over the cliff edges? How did they not burst into tears each time another Vespa overtook them and just managed to avoid being crushed by oncoming traffic? For our part, Mr Sangue and I were appalled at the reckless, fearless risks taken by an endless stream of youngsters on Vespas and Lambrettas; they sometimes drove side by side with another motorino, passengers clinging to the drivers shoulders, many helmet-free, clad in beach wear, their golden bare skin and sandal-clad feet looked so vulnerable but they smiled, chatted across the small gap between the two vehicles, doing the whole Italian hand-gesture thing.

On one occasion we screeched to a halt as a bus turned a corner and suddenly loomed towards us. We had no choice but to concede right of way on the road. It made sense to us but not to the nutters behind. Two Vespas, unaware of the concept of danger, overtook us, one from each side of the car in a pincer movement, once past us swerving and wobbling like boats on rough water, righting themselves and squeezing round the side of the oncoming bus oblivious to the fact that they might have been crushed in a breath. The driver didn’t even blink. I guess they all understood that these kids needed to get home for lunch or their mammas would have been upset.

I wish I had a euro for each time Mr Sangue said, “For fuck’s sake!” on that drive yet we saw no evidence of road rage at any time over our ten days in Italy despite the most annoying and dangerous habits: on motorways, drivers rarely indicated before changing lanes or if they did, it was a split second before they lurched out – bit like the driving in Withnail and I. With two lanes on the autostrada, it was common to see some monster car appear in your mirror and tail gating you until you leapt from their path and allowed them to snarl past, the driver as ever unblinking and sedate, only one hand on the steering wheel, elbow out of the window and foot on the floor. On La Costiera Amalfitana, we witnessed the not so funny practice of drivers taking the racing line into oncoming traffic and leisurely pulling back into their own lane at the last minute. Why save time and fuel by doing that when you are in danger of losing many years of your life?

Watch this and you’ll feel like you are there!

postcard from Italy - 2

Holiday’s start the moment you leave home, not when you reach your destination. Airports are the surreal, strip-lit environment where bleary eyed travellers are thrust together in long queues to begin the transition from the every day to something, they hope, will be extraordinary. Leaning on our luggage at an unfeasibly early our, gazing into the middle distance, wondering whether we dared nip to the loo or risk losing our check-in position, Mr Sangue and I began the process of summoning the mental where-with-all to feel like explorers and not refugees.

In the car, on the way to the airport, I recalled Rachel North’s book about the July bombings; she described the moment when she emerged at Russell Square nursing a minor injury, waiting to get her bearings, to do something and she saw a woman covered in blood, wondering about, angry, repeating over and over, “But I’m supposed to be going on holiday today…” I didn’t share this with Mr Sangue, I didn’t want to jinx the trip (not that I believe in this stuff) but I thought about how we can’t travel now without thinking about terrorism, bombs, disaster…I hate them for that.

Mr Sangue and I huddled over our coffees in the café at East Midlands; I’d resisted the impulse to buy out the perfume counter and, still a little guilty from buying an entire new wardrobe before we left, I whimpered internally at the assault of inappropriate music canned from all directions; 5.30am, under an aggressive tannoy, assaulting us with Andy Williams and Doris Day, it was like a medley for suicide

The posters demanded we ‘Free the Latin within’; beautiful people who hadn’t been forced to rise earlier than the birds, laughed at the camera, their fillings air-brushed out, women leaning towards the camera, revealing slight, tasteful cleavage, men laughed with them, gave them actual eye-contact – how different the reality would be! First of all, where are the cigarettes? How I’d love to interfere with these images and insert my brothers in their vests eating spaghetti glowering like Jake Lamotta and the bearded aunt’s I was forced to kiss as a child. And who ever in Italy sat down for a coffee?

I scrutinized other passengers’ carry on luggage; happy to generalise and judge how well a person organised their life, how much money they had, how streamlined or high-maintenance their needs were; – little square bags label you as a practical and unfussy traveller while the enormous, Accessorise holdall in classy jungle leaf pattern, (an item I’ve coveted for some time) I was thrilled to see doesn’t look quite so bloody cool when it’s full of stuff and weighs a ton and you actually have to lift the darn thing. My own carry on was a large, leather man bag that I simply couldn’t leave behind at TK Maxx; it performed quite well despite the lack of inner pockets which meant I couldn’t find anything small in it - this bag spoke of a person with no will power who always crumples when confronted with the dilemma of style over substance.

Security was very stringent with cops bearing heavy weight guns and staring stony eyed at people who went ping through the metal detector. We couldn’t see why one guy’s had gone off,

“Probably wearing a cock ring…” I whispered to Mr Sangue.

At Ciampino airport, Rome, we collected our hire-car; mortified when it turned out to be some class of Ford when we’d wanted a zippy Fiat; when did you ever get what you asked for from car rental? Once Mr Sangue had adjusted to driving on the right and breathing at the same time, we cruised South to Amalfi, a three or four hour drive made unnecessarily longer by the Blackberry sat-nav just disappearing. Poof! as they say in pantomime. Mamma Sangue’s voice ringing in my ears, I bitched along the lines of what-do-you-expect-in-this-corrupt-country-someone-must-have-hijacked-the-frequency...We never did find out why it refused to work here when we actually needed it while everywhere else in Italy we were guided by the dulcet tones of a computerised English voice.

For now, we had the immediate problem of navigating to our hotel using just the complementary Hertz map. And we couldn’t get the bloody iPod to work. One through-town was an endless wasteland of litter, swirled around by the oven-hot wind and closed shutters as people slept through the heat of the day. The area around Naples is very poor and crime is rife and I worried about asking for directions, breaking down and also running out of water – all the shops were shut too! Camels and Bedouin robes would have been more in keeping.

When we finally reached our destination we couldn’t find the hotel. You shoot past a turning in Italy and the roads are either too narrow to turn round in or you risk life and limb through hesitation. The secret of Italian driving seems to be to never catch another driver’s eye – shove your sunglasses on your face, your elbow out of the window and follow your instincts. Driver’s bear the calm expressions of hardened assassin’s as they barge onto the autostrada; no one ever pull’s over for you or slows down to let you in but somehow it all works. The secret is to not feel intimidated – this is why I leave the driving abroad to Mr Sangue: firstly, I can’t forget that we are soft little objects strapped to bullets and secondly, I can’t even parallel park if a cat watches me from a garden wall:

“Bastard mog’s licking its arse – I’d like to see him park a Beetle – the visibility’s terrible.”

Eventually we found our hotel situated in a glorious bay straight out of The Talented Mr Ripley, with air-conditioned rooms, its own beach, an outdoor swimming pool and most importantly, a bar. Our first two Peroni’s were medicinal.

Mr Sangue for all his road-trip mentality, needed to lay off the driving for a couple of days. We stayed put in Vico Equensa for two nights, took the local bus up to the main village to buy supplies (wine, beer and razors), ate heartily, drank heaps, swam and sunbathed and didn’t miss home in the slightest.


it’s a tough life


did I mention – that’s a volcano!


this wasn’t out debris, but I just loved all the glass on this nearby table in a restaurant – so much bonohomie

Postcard from Italy - 1

No wonder Italians wear sunglasses all the time.

Despite umpteen trips to Italy over the years, this time it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. An unusual effect of this was that I produced my crappiest bunch of photos in years. It may have been the hazy light, the bleached landscapes or the piles of litter but I think it more likely I was dazzled. The experience was akin to that moment when you stand whimpering in front of a hundred and one brands of soap powder and you want to howl “But I just want something to wash my clothes!” If there’s one thing wrong with Italy, as with detergents, there’s just too damn much of it. It’s a crumbling kaleidoscope of postcard geography, stunning historical buildings, beautiful people – and that’s just the visual element – add the ever present and often intrusive smells of garbage, animals, flowers, espresso, the sweet smell inside bars, an occasional intrusive underarm, the comfort smell of pasta cooking, pungent, vomity pecorino, basil by the bucketful, the cool must of old buildings, dust caked into bedding untouched for four years, fresh bread, biscotti and pizza, for once not piped for customers in a supermarket but weaving through the beaded curtains onto the street, olive oil heating in a pan… and don’t get me started on the sounds…point is, blinded thus, I somehow ‘lost’ my photographer’s eye; gone was my ability to zoom in, to see things from an unusual perspective and I resorted, in most cases, stunned by the scenery, unable to take that dispassionate breath, I resorted to recording that things were there.


The view from where we took breakfast in our hotel in Vico Equensa, Amalfi

I had certainly forgotten how utterly beautiful Italy is despite the thousand and one quotes from the famous and not so famous about this. The reality sank in on the last evening in Frascati on the outskirts of Rome. We took the shuttle from our grand hotel into town for a pizza where we ate al fresco with Rome twinkling below almost as beautiful as the night sky; then we strolled to the main square and sat on the steps with the many Italians taking the evening air for their own intense moments with an ice cream. Enjoying my wine buzz, it seemed that from every angle there was yet another extraordinary building or church, another tanned, glossy haired beauty, more incredible patterns and textures of marbled floors and cobbled streets and more street theatre notably from the very cool traffic cops who cruised up in their violet monster car, in matching uniforms and guns. They swaggered to the ice cream shop, licked them into submission then lit each others cigarettes in an unselfconscious homo-erotic moment before disappearing into their Alfa Romeo. A neon sign reminding us they were Italian and proud would not have been out of place. Mr Sangue insisted on taking a photo of the car – we waited till the cops weren’t looking or they’d have had us spread-eagled over the bonnet of the car.



And as for the geography, everywhere you look the natural beauty crowds in on you; when we drove the 40 or so kilometres of the Amalfi coast I’d remarked, “ For goodness sake, how many times can you say ‘God that’s so beautiful’ in one day?”



I hadn’t realised how mountainous it was, how gorgeous the trees were, especially the ancient pines in Frascati and opposite our apartment in Accadia, I couldn’t get over the fact that there, right in front of us, within the view from our hotel in Amalfi – that was a volcano!


The view from my balcony in Accadia, my home town; if I’ve ever been asked to recall an image of a place I’ve been happy, this is it. This is what I see.

And Mr Sangue is right, the way to see the country, if you can handle the raised blood pressure, is to drive; we battled through Neapolitans driving home for siesta through the lava plains of Campagna, landmarks of cornfields, primeval tobacco plants hanging in sheds, past the AGIP service stations with their she-wolf of Rome logo, squealing each time we saw a Fiat 500 through the higgledy piggildy land, powering down the autostrada with its central reservation packed with azalea bushes past cities with names I could hear in Papa Sangue’s voice.

As I took it all in, parts of my life floated back that I didn’t even know had gone, many uncomfortable memories that I won’t go into here but I re-focused and saw that it’s also true that Italy can look ugly, in a certain light, at a certain time of day, when you’re stuck in traffic or struggling up a shadowless street with luggage or lost and with few clues as how to get where you want to be. The heat destroys everything and the apartment buildings’ bleached paintjobs, bubble and peel like unprotected skin; and where the paint sticks, graffiti smothers it. There’s not much grass to be seen and the roads are dusty, dry, gritty. In beautiful Frascati, at every hairpin bend, in every lay-by, wherever you could pull up on your Vespa and enjoy the romantic scenery, there was a pile of litter like an exercise in bio-degrading; you just knew no one would ever clean it up. And just as balconies dripped with hanging plants, palm trees laden with dates swayed in the strong breeze, all public toilets stank of piss and every communal bin hummed.

A land of contrasts…corny, but true.


Outside an ordinary ol’ cafe – currently my desktop