by Annie Hawes
How refreshing it is to breakfast so far away from anxious Italian eyes! After a short battle with the bonfire and Pompeo’s oven-shelf-and-rock arrangement – no point lighting the stove indoors, it’ll take ages to get hot, then keep the room unpleasantly warm for hours – we have succeeded in making and drinking three whole hissing espresso pots of coffee, one after the other, in perfect peace. Although we can already hear the cries of peasants a-peasanting somewhere not too far away, they have no power at all over us up here in our mountain eyrie. Maybe we’ll have a fourth pot, just to prove it. It’s a bit nippy out here this early, and we are sitting right by the fire, waiting for the sun to make it over the ridge behind us and hit the house. It arrives at ten o’clock sharp: suddenly it is absurdly warm and the fire positively unpleasant. Time to get on.
We have decided only to domesticate the upstairs for now, the bit that was originally intended for humans. The byre or cantina below is earth-floored and will have to have something major done to it. We clean, we scrub, we tidy away enormous amounts of ancient rusty tools to the downstairs room, we make up our camp beds (we have turned down an offer from Giacò of a pair of those chainmail ones: we want no more truck with that sort of nonsense, thank you), remove acres of dangling cobweb from the beams, lung-rendingly carry buckets and buckets of water up from the well. We find some wild narcissi on the way, their perfume so strong you can track them down by it, and collect a huge bunch to freshen our new home. When evening comes the place is looking quite presentable, though we haven’t finished cleaning the floor tiles properly. They are pitted and porous with age and seem to have been made by amateurs – odd and irregular, not entirely flat. We haven’t been able to face bringing up the half-dozen more bucketsful we’d need to sort them out, and are beginning to think longingly of taps and plumbing.
Our house-to-be is not a place to sit and admire the intricacies of the superior craftsmanship of days gone by. Its builders have made no attempt to disguise or civilize its materials, and you can see exactly how everything was made, and what from: bits of the surrounding landscape. They have simply reordered its already existing elements to suit their own purpose. I suppose that’s what all building is when you get down to it; but it’s not usually quite this strikingly obvious. You find yourself marvelling at the ingenuity, muscle-power and general heroism of Pompeo’s great-grandad and his ilk. Imagine starting to build one of these massive places, with their great thick walls and their load-bearing arches, in the middle of nowhere, no road, no machinery, just an axe, a shovel, a mule, and your own muscle-power. The wild stones and rocks which lie about shapeless and unwieldy all over the hillside have been miraculously transformed – no cutting, no cement – into vertical, level and straight walls with right-angled corners. Walls which have stood for over a century, and show no sign of giving up. The beams supporting the roof are ancestors of the leafy scrub oaks that straggle up the hillside behind the house, where olive land stops and the steep wilderness of oak and pine begins. The marks of the blade the ancient heroes used to chop them down and strip them, the stumps where branches were trimmed off, are still plain to see. There are even bits of their original bark still clinging to them in places.
Inside the house the chinks between the stones have been filled and smoothed with some kind of mortar whose main ingredient is evidently earth. Just getting that together must have been a labour of Hercules; in a bucketful of what appears to be soil up here, as we have already discovered – we have liberated a few rosebushes from Signor Patrucco to start our garden – a good two-thirds will turn out to be stones. Get rid of those, and you’d only have a few cupfuls of friable stuff you could mix up with water and apply to your walls. Once you’d dragged the water all the way up from the well, that is. Exhausting thought. Even the roof was of stone once, though now the middle of it is tiles with just a fringe of stone left around the eaves. The countryside round here is dotted with slate-grey rocks the size of haystacks, standing like prehistoric altars among the olive trees; the remnants of the one which was used to make the original roof of this house – a section broken off and split with fire and water, making thin slabs which were simply overlapped, no cutting involved – still stands gigantic and gap-toothed by the path to the road. Earth, water, fire and stone. We take our hats off to Pompeo’s great-grandad.
Eventually, worn out by our cleaning operations, we drag the great heavy table outside and sit at it on Pompeo’s bench in the warm evening under the lemon trees, while the sun sets spectacularly as usual behind the digestion-threatening cherry tree. We eat rolls and goat cheese and Maria’s stuffed zucchini flowers and her aubergine frittata, a kind of cross between a pancake and an omelette, accompanied by Luigi’s wine. Then we attack the torta verde. We gloat about the house, the food, the view, everything, whilst pondering the strange fact that if we saw a representation of this sunset on a postcard we wouldn’t buy it. We would think it was tasteless. Can nature be tasteless? We are overpowered by the wine just as the debate gets interesting. The narcissi turn out to be overpowering too in an enclosed space, their delicious perfume mysteriously transformed into something horribly reminiscent of ancient cats’ piss, and we have to put them outside before we can get to sleep. By the end of the night we have discovered a serious drawback to this 100 per cent natural wholemeal organic style of homebuilding; it is indistinguishable, to many of God’s creatures, from the wild world to which they belong. We will discover over the next few weeks that our home is an integral part of the local ecosystem. Nameless things rustle and scrattle about in the walls and on the roof, while mosquitoes bite and itch. We don’t mind too much for now: they are soon to be our own nameless things, our own mosquitoes, or zanzare as the Italians call them so onomatopoetically. And tonight we wish them well.
At midday, all the clocks of all the churchtowers of all the villages in the valley are clearly audible from up here at the house as they begin to strike the hour one after another. The complicated folds of the hills somehow bounce and baffle the sound so it’s hard to tell which village is doing what. It takes a good fifteen minutes for them all to get midday out of their systems: but how pleasingly romantic are their distant chimings to those of us who have lived with the close-up torture version down at Luigi and Maria’s.
From our cobbled patio-thing we can see right down to Diano Marina and the sea. We sit with our map under the lemon trees checking the place out with Luigi’s binoculars. The higher villages, at our level and above, have ancient grey onion-domed stone campanile; lower down they go stuccoed and rectangular. From its fat little central hillock in the middle of the valley, Diano Castello, leader of the flock, dominates the view, as it once dominated the valley, from amid the remnants of its feudal castle walls. The barons of the good old days certainly knew their way around when it came to choosing a spot from which to keep their peasantry in the right frame of mind; there is hardly a nook or cranny round here from which you can’t see Castello. No skiving contadino can have felt safe from its prying eyes. You can even see it from our earth-closet window.
Almost all the villages are called Diano something or other – Borganzo, Serreta, Borello, Arentino: the whole valley, our Blue Guide explains, was consecrated by the Romans to their hunting goddess Diana. Why the sex change? When the Romans arrived, it seems, the wild Liguri already had their own, male hunting god, Bormano. In the interests of imperial unity the Romans – busy building the Via Aurelia at the time so as to reach their more far-flung possessions in the rest of Europe more easily – simply declared Bormano to be, in essence, the same entity as Diana. The Liguri, we gather, quite liked the sound of the new name, but weren’t so sure about the girly ending. So when, eventually, the Romans abandoned this section of the Via Aurelia – easier to go by sea as far as Marseilles than to deal with these unruly mountain tribespeople – the Liguri celebrated by giving their god back his masculinity – Diano, not Diana. Honour was so thoroughly satisfied that the name has stuck now for a couple of millennia.
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br /> By road the only way to any of these villages is to go seawards right back down to San Pietro, and then turn back up the other side of the valley. We know there must be pathways across country, though. When people used mules, they wouldn’t have wasted all that energy. We pore over our map, stare through the binoculars, trying to work out where paths might pass through the groves. I start agitating for an exploratory walk, but Lucy will have none of it. It’s midday, it’s hot, and if we get lost in all that steepness, which we will, it’ll be torture.
She’s right, of course. But across the valley from us I can see, nearer than the villages, a tantalizing hamlet that isn’t on the map. A dozen ramshackle piled-up houses balanced on one alarmingly tall and narrow arch, which alone seems to be stopping the whole lot collapsing into the ravine below. You couldn’t possibly get lost just going there, I say. And it’s about the same height as us, no sweating up and down, we can just do a loop round the valley, stay on the one level, even if we don’t find a path. The boring sister just gives me an evil look. Mad dog, she says. Can she be addressing me?
I get ready to leave anyway; I shall, I announce, intrepidly explore alone. Following the example of Frank the Knife I take one of Pompeo’s sickles with me for clearing the Dirt from any useful muletrack I may come across. And for keeping away any junkies or rampant socially deprived underfed cowherds I may meet. I sling the binoculars round my neck for good measure, and, full of daring and enterprise, set off. Lucy sniggers and settles back with her book in the hammock strung in the shade of the lemon trees.
About three hours and an awful lot of leg scratches later – I have encountered some particularly vicious sloe bushes when an irresistible footpath turned into a goat track and then into nothing at all, by which time it was too late not to go right down into the bottom of the valley, cross the river by a tiny rushing waterfall, and then drag my superheated chest-heaving way back up the other side of the hill – I finally arrive, sweatily scrambling out of a clump of bushes on to a dirt track. A rotund old lady dressed in the usual assortment of tubular garments, with a face like a babushka doll and the obligatory hanky tied over her hair, jumps at the sight of me heaving into the road, tousled and bloody, binoculars flying, clutching my sickle. She is busy piling a bundle of greenstuff as big as herself on to a large piece of sacking. Her sickle, I am pleased to see, matches my own perfectly.
Buongiorno! I say.
Salve! says the old lady, already over the shock and getting on with tying up the corners of her bundle.
In those days I used to think they did it on purpose – whatever salutation you tried, they had to say something else. Trying to work out what time of day you’re supposed to swap from Buon giorno to Buonasera was hopeless; between midday and four in the afternoon, whichever I said, I was sure to be answered with its opposite. Then there are the salves and the ciaos. How to tell which is which, when and why you’re supposed to say one rather than the other? Now more mature, I see that this is quite normal; in my own land, I might say Morning! for example, and the person I address might say All right? or Hello! But the insecurity of a foreign language gives this sort of thing a flavour more of annoying perversity than happy diversity.
Salve, I say grumpily, thinking I’m being corrected.
Straniera? she says; foreigner?
Well, that wasn’t too hard to work out. Look at the binoculars. Look at the broiling sun. I’m obviously an Englishwoman.
She clucks over my bleeding ankles and forearms, and beckons me to come with her. Vieni, vieni, she says. I don’t care what I do as long as it involves sitting down and liquid refreshment. This looks hopeful. She sticks her bundle on her head – does she think we’re in Spain or something? I haven’t seen anyone doing this sort of thing round here before – and leads me down a steep skiddy stony path round the back of a house and into a courtyard with rushing squawking chickens all over the place: I go over to the low wall at the other end of it, the side facing down into the valley, aiming for the slate seat built into it under a vine-leaf pergola. Leaning over, I see we are balanced directly on top of the tall thin arch arrangement I spotted from the house. I haven’t really got lost at all, then. I knew I wouldn’t. I also discover that the vine in whose shade I am standing has its roots miles down below in the riverbed. How long must it have taken to get up here? How determined people are to have a grapevine pergola round here! Everyone except Pompeo, that is. Thanks to his and his forebears’ negligence ours is the only place without a beautiful shady vine-leaf roof to gloat under in the whole valley – possibly in the whole of Liguria. I look down to the vertiginous depths below the arch to see how on earth they attached it to the rock and wall on its way up. No sign. The perch I’m on looks about as scary as it did from across the valley, and its continued existence even less explicable. Not a scrap of mortar between those huge stones, and the arch below me horribly out of true. The fact that it has clearly been here for a century or three – maybe even longer, they started terracing these hillsides when the olive first arrived here around eleven hundred AD – somehow counts for nothing. In fact, it is so old that it’s practically bound to collapse under my weight at this very moment. I back slowly and carefully away from the precipice, avoiding any sudden movements, and sit down instead on the side of the yard nearest the house. We swap names; she is called Erminia. I am called Annie. And where am I going, she wants to know. Nowhere, I say, I was just having a walk – a passeggiata.
I receive a most suspicious and disbelieving look for this. Should have said I was looking for mushrooms. Still, I don’t look like a potential marauding junkie either, with my respectable sickle and my stylish binoculars, and she doesn’t look like a woman who’d be scared of cowherds. I can see her slowly deciding to give me the benefit of the doubt.
I gesticulate and gibber in my daft foreign way, trying to communicate where I’ve come from, pointing to the other side of the valley. ‘Besta,’ I say. No, ‘Beshta.’ Great confusion ensues; she only speaks dialect, there are no translators around, and she seems to be insisting that this place, the place where we are now, is Besta. There are, she says, no houses over the other side of the valley. I am momentarily nonplussed. Have I somehow walked in a circle? Are there loads of hamlets balanced on dodgy arches round here? Then I realize that of course Erminia, being a Ligurian, won’t think of a rustico as a house. A rustico, I say, and the penny drops, although I get another of those funny looks. With both of us working hard at the language problem, the mystery is soon unravelled. Both sides of the valley are called Besta: this is (in dialect, naturally) ‘Besta de’ Ca’’, Besta of the Houses. The hill opposite, where I’ve come from, is ‘Besta de’ Fascie’, Besta of the Strips. ‘Fascia’ is the word for a terraced strip of land. Or for a bandage, just to make life more interesting.
Anyway, if names are anything to go by, after all that torture I am in what amounts to virtually the same place I started from. I am appalled. Erminia potters off busily into the house and comes out not with a drink but with a bowl of water for my scratches. A big chunk of slimy looking greenish-grey soap sits in it toad-like on top of a grubby rag. I eye it squeamishly. Another trip indoors, and this time a better result; two glasses and a jug of white wine. Once poured, the stuff turns out to have an overpowering bouquet of rotten eggs. But to a woman with a bad thirst on, this isn’t too hard to deal with. I’ve solved it by the second swig; just make sure to breathe in deeply, well away from the glass, before taking a mouthful. Once the bouquet is eliminated by this method, it tastes fine. Has an egg from one of her chickens somehow fallen into the barrel without her noticing? Comforting myself with the thought that alcohol is a disinfectant, and that she, an aged and presumably wise peasant, is drinking it too, I sup busily away.
Sulphurous stinkiness, I now know, is a common feature of home-made white wines round these parts, and locals seem to think nothing of it – in fact they appear actively to prize it. You will find yourself with some knowledgeable person who is fussing ov
er wines in a restaurant, about exactly which goes with what food; the proprietor will reveal that they have some of this white vino d’uva (in recent years, the manoeuvre is always done in sotto voce mutterings – the tax people have decreed that any wine not in a bottle with a government sticker on it cannot be sold to the public, so a complicated farce goes on where everyone agrees that it’s a free gift in exchange for a large tip), the connoisseur will go on about how we must taste some, and this fart-flavoured stuff will be brought out and send everyone into paroxysms of delight. Mysterious. It has a kick like an ox, though.
I rest, we drink, and Erminia tells me lots of things I mostly can’t understand except by deep guesswork. She is starved of company, it seems; once upon a time there were thirty-odd people in this hamlet, but now since her husband died and her son left there is only her and one other family – but they don’t count as company because they are from Calabria. I’m not really sure if this is what she’s saying though. Maybe no one speaks the same dialect? But then if I can understand her, they must be able to.
What happened to the other Ligurians, anyway? Did some catastrophe happen that drove everyone away? Was it at all connected with subsidence and dodgy arches? Erminia and I end up laughing matily, probably about completely different things, and prodding one another gaily in the ribs. And we move imperceptibly (to me at least) back to the topic of the soap and water. She is very keen for me to clean my wounds with it. I, on the other hand, think it looks a lot dirtier than the thorns on the sloe bushes did, and would rather avoid it if possible. She made the soap herself, she is saying, with her own olive oil. It does smell of olive oil, too. What are all these little scratchy bits in it? I ask. Answer incomprehensible.