I am into my third week at my Tuscan home….and I can’t decide whether I have been here for just a day or already for a lifetime. It is that sort of place…..timeless, endless bliss, nothing and everything. It is indeed my paradiso.
Twenty four years ago about now I stood on the crumbling wreck of a terrace overlooking a crumbling wreck of a 10th century fortress and declared “If you can’t catch a dream once in a lifetime, why are we here?”
It sealed the fate of this crumbling ruin and fortunately over the past years the other, on the hill opposite, has also been restored. European Union money paid for it, such a significant monument it is thought to be. Some say it is the backdrop for the famous Mona Lisa painting. The EU purse was needed to restore this one too, but they were not looking our way at the time!
Much has changed in my life in those 24 years: but here not much. Some of my older neighbours are now in the sweet little village cemetery but not before their time. Teresa next door was interred last summer at 104 ½ which in anybody’s terms is a bloody good innings. I was fortunate to be at her 100th birthday party where she drank champagne, made a speech and received a beautiful gold necklace from the entire village, all of whom were present.
The church bells still ring daily although not so often. The farm machinery is about the only other sound you hear until hunting season when the dogs are on the go, straining to find something to kill.
There are again birds singing through the day. Given the Italians’ propensity to shoot everything they can, for years there was little birdcall and much on the table. Now it is more regulated and I am awakened each morning by the sound of birds and the sight of the swallows frolicking around in the sky.
Last week I saw a pair of pheasants in a neighbour’s field strutting their stuff; a marmot for the very first time, a deer or three and I honestly don’t know if it was in my imagination or not but I feel I saw a couple of young fox cubs playing near the roadside. Let’s pretend it was this year even if it was not.
The only time I’ve seen cinghiali live, after whom the villa is named, was the day 24 years ago when we said “yes” to our expectant agent. These wild boar are plentiful in the hills above the house and hard to see: perhaps it was an omen that we saw them that morning, a mother and 3 or 4 cubs, making that decision to say yes so much easier.
Oh and of course because it’s high summer we are blessed to witness the magic of the fireflies. They appear at the end of the day, even before the sky turns dark about 9.30 or 10pm and they flit in and out of the rooms lighting themselves up as they move. Sometimes in my almost slumber after the light is out I see them flying around my barn offering a magical end to my day.
The economic situation here is disastro my neighbour and villa manager Anna tells me. Certainly I have made it my business to pay everyone who needed to be paid since my last visit in October: the painter who has repainted the entire villa, the carpenter for his three new windows, my mechanic for lovingly attending to my car, and my insurance man to whom I pay an outrageous sum for my car and half the price for my entire villa. They don’t want to do credit anymore because times are tough. And because it’s the biggest black community in the world (money under the bed that is) I can only imagine that the suitcases are getting thinner rather than fatter.
For me with gin at 4 Euro something, I am in bliss. Vino is still only a few Euros a litre and the best to be had is the bulk wine in my town…which tastes much better than all the regular bottles on the supermarket shelves. A morning at the market gives me all the freshest vegetables I can possibly want for 10 Euros and that includes mouth-watering tomatoes, peaches, nectarines and melons….none of which when I buy in Australia taste anything like these gems. Another reason for making this my home! Not forgetting the mouth watering dolce latte or gorgonzola that only costs me a couple of Euros.
My focus is very much on food here only because it is amongst the best and freshest on the planet, often coming from the next field or certainly the next village in the case of cheese. I took my PhD class there when we had our meeting here last week and we dug in and actually helped make the day’s cheese which was a first.
I went back to the Comune yesterday….the Town Hall….with papers in hand to become an Italian Resident again….hopefully. I left with a stamped piece of paper and the promise of the policeman coming to see if I really live here!! A decade ago we all did it…painfully lining up with all the African boat people at the Police Station in Lucca but because I have an EU passport it seems it will be much easier. At least then my taxes and utilities will be halved so whatever hassle is well worth it.
I’ve upgraded some of the entertainment systems….egged on by a guest on his 4th visit who decided to buy me a flat screen tele in the villa so HE could stream his favourite Aussie programs. So a new Hi-Fi came yesterday, Sky TV and a DVD has been added to the barn and I wonder why I bother!
I have bothered, however, to do what I can about Wi-Fi….and after several hours of the technician drinking my wine, it seems to be behaving better. One never knows if it will continue to work in my absence but let’s hope so. It is, after all, a long time coming…..two years ago I was still on dial up….can you believe that???? The world leader in fashion and lagging far behind in technical stuff. Perhaps it says a lot about the people who live in these hills….they live a life here today, planting their vegies, drinking their wine, chatting with their neighbours, going to church for a social catch up if nothing else and so on … the technical stuff is of less importance to them. I think they have it right!
In the heat of the noon day sun I came in from the terrace to try the Tele out. 999 Channels offering sex “Hot”, “listen to two for the price of one”; much jewellery, and much god, furniture, food (of course) how to get rid of fat or pests (presuming they are different), fortune telling, although the Nostradamus channel was actually a hot girlie site where girls in street attire were half heartedly blowing up blue balloons (I’m afraid I missed the point if there was one!), and sport…cycling and soccer, the two national pastimes of the Italians, and for the other few, fishing and yachting. And there were grey men talking politics from Sri Lanka to the Middle East and particularly in Cairo where the election results took hours to be announced and I went back into the sunshine before I heard the final celebration! The not so great news is that the local TV channels, RAI, encode all the major sporting features….like the soccer, the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Grand Prix’s etc so you can’t get them on Sky and you have to get yet another decoder and pay RAI another hefty fee. Forget it! I can read the results on the internet….now I have it!!
It is wonderful to be back. I so love this place. It is ever green, the hills are blue and green and both close and distant. There is peace and quiet apart from the church bells and the birds. Oh, and that damned wasp that bit me the other day. I was glad to find his corpse almost out the window…I wanted to see him dead after inflicting some, only minor thankfully, pain on me.
Anyway I now know the antidote to the sting of a wasp. Go down the valley, meet with a friend for coffee and have two glasses of prosecco instead. Finito. Done. No wasp sting. Gone. Only a bit of an itch for a couple of days and the knowledge gathering was invaluable!
And so today is my last day here for a while: tomorrow I move out so another group of 4th time visitors can take over the entire premises and hopefully work the internet.
I head to Paris to learn French. God knows why when I should be working on my Italian but I had a whim to do this madness and it seemed like a good idea. I am reluctant to leave this haven but I must for the moment, and for July. I will be back in August for the figs on my heavily laden tree and the harvest of my walnuts and the apples and the nespole….which I bought and planted years ago thinking it was a nectarine..which is in fact a pesche noce…a peach with a nut!
Meanwhile, I shall trade my farro salad and cheese from the next village for a good baguette and some brie; my cheap Italian vino for some probably not cheap French vino, and my Buon Giorno to Bonjour. It will be fun.
Next time from there.
A bientot I think is the phrase!
With heart….
Buzz