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!