There's no place like home

After a rather uneventful time last week, these past seven days have been brim full of action – well, almost. The painter is still awol; there has been neither sight nor sound of him and the house is starting to look a little woebegone in its scaffolding shroud. Elsewhere, however, after a short ceasefire with the Comune the recent acquisition of our house documents has resulted in fresh skirmishing while, more positively, things with the lotto/veg. patch are looking promising.

The lettuces that Stephen planted a couple of weeks ago had seemed somewhat lost, not just because they only occupied a small area of the lotto but also because of their dwindling numbers. Stephen’s latest theory for this is that some renegade rabbit is lurking in the grass before making off with its ill-gotten gains under for the cover of darkness Whether or not this is the case, we are now down to about half the number we started with, though the parsley and sage that were planted at the same time have remained untouched. Obviously our midnight marauder has a very limited palate. Anyway, Stephen returned from the MSP market on Monday morning with an assortment of plants, including courgettes and aubergines, three different types of tomatoes and three types of peppers. It looks very much like we will be feasting on ratatouille for a great part of the summer.

On Tuesday, having girded our loins and clutching all possible documents relating to our house, we went to the Commune to spend some quality time with Fiorenza, whom we had sadly missed seeing for the past few months. Needless to say, she was her usual charming, elegant self and greeted us like long lost kin. She seemed, moreover, delighted to know that we were now able to register ourselves as citizens of Monte San Pietrangeli – that is, until we told her our address: Contrada Forone 7.

It’s not that she didn’t know where we lived; as I’ve mentioned before, most of the town know more about us than we do ourselves, such is the celebrity of being British and enjoying an alternative life style in parochial Italy. No, what brought a frown to her face was when she went to check on her computer and found that number 7 was already registered to a different name and there was no record at all of what the number for our house should be. It perhaps indicates the disjointed nature of Italian bureaucracy that for the Comune our house doesn’t seem to exist but yet the postal system and the various service companies recognize us as number 7.

I do, though, have to point out a slight complication here. Up until we bought the building and had the plans redrawn by the surveyor, it was classed as two distinct properties: the upstairs, number 7, being for domestic use and the downstairs, which seemed to be number 20, being used as a factory. Unfortunately, Fiorenza wasn’t able to find any record of number 20 either, which left her very perplexed. She made a couple of phone calls and enquired of any passing colleague it they had any knowledge of the matter, but no one was able to help. Eventually, in order to get a resolution, she said that she had to speak with a man upstairs (?) who would be able to decide what number our house was but had to wait for him to finish a meeting.

She asked us to take a seat outside her office and wait but after ten minutes or so said that it would be better if we returned next week. The meeting was still going on and, besides, it would give time for further investigations and a decision to be made. What we didn’t realise at the time as we were packing our documents safely back into their wallet, was that one of dynamic strategies they were going to employ was for Fiorenza to phone our neighbours, Mario and Luigi, and ask them what the number was. Well, it seems perfectly in line with the apparently ad hoc way civil matters are conducted that rather than get the mysterious Mr Big upstairs to make a decision you might just call up a couple of the locals to see what they think.

When I told Giordano, my student, about our problem in the afternoon, he sadly shook his head before going on to explain that he is constantly having difficulties with house numbers in the course of his work. He said that the Comune has a habit of changing house numbers in their records but not telling anyone or changing the physical number on the property itself. Consequently, when he is dealing with house matters, more often than not there is are discrepancy between the various official documents and records with which he has to deal and the number the client gives him. Moreover, he said that if there is new property built on a patch of land between, say, numbers 5 and 7, the new house will become number 7 while what was previously 7 will become 9, and so on sequentially down the line. How’s that for a system designed to cause confusion?

So what else befell this week?

After purchasing the plants on Monday, Stephen then took delivery of a set of bamboo canes on Wednesday when Giordano (the ironmonger, not to be confused with the above mentioned) turfed up with them in the back of his transit van. Then on Saturday, Nazareno, who obviously thinks that Stephen is not really to be trusted in these matters, came with his son Mirco to supervise the planting before leaving Stephen to erect the canes all on his own on Sunday. Stephen had been out to dinner with them on Friday night (yes, without me for the first time since we took up residency at LCDDB) when talk of things horticultural gave them the heads up that Stephen was about to bed out his plants and set off the alarm bells in their heads.

Not that Stephen was the only one engaged in domestic matters, for this week saw me, at long last, actually get round to a spot of baking. I know this doesn’t sound like all that much of a big deal, but I have been wary, as, like I’ve mentioned before, British recipes don’t dovetail with what is available in the shops. For my first attempt, however, I played relatively safe and made one of my old standbys, the lemon cake from my Hummingbird cookbook. Actually, I made two, taking one to Marco and Maddalena when we went for coffee after dinner on Thursday, who both pronounced it bellissima. With such success, I won’t have to leave it so long till I get round to a follow up.

Which brings us to today and our first wedding anniversary. Stephen presented me with red roses and prosecco, but he will have to wait for his present as it is still finding its way through the British and Italian postal systems. We celebrated quietly ‘a casa’. After such a momentous year and with so many changes and goings-on it seemed the right thing to do, just to savour being together and what we have achieved so far. And where better to mark the occasion than here, together, in our very own Italian home; after all, there’s nowhere we’d rather be.