If you can't stand the heat...

What else was there to do last night but to go to a pizza party, organised by some of the workers upstairs on the production line? Obviously, the answer’s not a lot, so Romolo, as if he had not done enough taxiing around, took us to a remarkably large house just a couple of hundred metres from the factory – large because, in the best Italian tradition, it is inhabited by various branches of the same family whose interweaving Stephen found too complicated to unravel.

We arrived just as it was starting to spit with rain, so those who were on time moved the chairs, benches and tables from under the trees to the covered parking area while the pizza team got on with conjuring up 60 (yes, 60) pizze from the outside wood fired oven.

It was a jolly occasion, and I did my best to look like I knew what was going on as Stephen good-humouredly ferried pizze from the oven to the table, stopping to divvy them up on the way – and if you were wondering, Italians do use pizza wheels, so they’re not just Lakeland’s invention.

I think I passed muster for the evening with the workforce, helped not a little when one of the daughters of the house thought it would be a good idea to shunt the trestle table down a bit, causing a bottle to topple over into my plastic cup and sending the contents cascading over my lap. I smiled even more than usual and sort of said in a language with some bearing to Italian that all was well and it was all right. Fortunately, I was drinking water – to which I had reverted after trying what I believed was gassosa from a large plastic bottle. I should have been wary when I saw the colour, which was a light shade of urine, but I thought it must be a bit like the traditional lemonade they sometimes fob sweetened carbonated water off as in Britain. When I found out later from Stephen it was actually their own homemade wine, I realised I had not be that far out when assessing the colour.

We left after a couple of hours, when nearly all the pizze had been made and my head had taken all it could of several conversations going on at the same time and trying to tune in to one of them and follow something of what was being said. A pleasant walk home in the warmth of the night, a coffee and digestive on the way were my reward for my endurance.

As for today, we had a trip up to Ancona to visit Ikea with Marco and Maddalena – which was a good call as there was an almighty thunderstorm while we were inside. Luca, in Civitanova, messaged that his life had been in danger and just made it in time to Cuore Adriatico – though I think it may have been lack of food rather than celestial pyrotechnics that were threatening his existence.

The good thing about visiting Ikea is we think we’ve found a potential kitchen for upstairs in the new house (black); the bad thing is that once inside and trapped on its yellow brick road you could be anywhere in the world. This store had exactly the same layout with exactly the same goods as the last one I visited in Cyprus, selling the Scandinavian lifestyle supplied by manufacturers in China. Still, why change what works – and seeing as we’re set to buy into it, it seems somewhat churlish to complain…but I do wish they had the meatballs by the entrance so you could just bob in and out.