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.