Rerailed

This has been a truly red letter week for us, as by the end we were 90% towards having our new railings and gates installed at La Casa dei Due Baffi. Marco and his team, which for a large part has included Stephen, have worked hard all week and all that now remains is for the main gate by the bottom of the steps to be put in place. However, before I give you a blow-by-blow account, from my position as interested observer, there is the matter of the dysfunctional phone line to be resolved.

Having had no response to his call on Sunday, Stephen contacted TIM again on Monday morning to bring them up to speed with the latest situation and press upon them the importance that a repair team be sent rather than an engineer to check the box. ‘The line is on the ground?’ repeated the lady (no Francisco this time, so everything had to be explained from the beginning) when Stephen told her that small but immensely significant detail. ‘Yes,’ he replied, which, you would have thought, would have been pretty clear. ‘On the ground?’ she asked again. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘The line is on the ground?’ she asked once more, in a sort of Groundhog Day of the telecom world. Presumably this was a concept that was beyond the scope of her script, or maybe she was just checking that the strange Englishman really knew what he was saying. Whatever the reason, as we very much suspected, this was a new and different fault to the one we reported on Saturday, so the whole process, and the 48 hour waiting time, had to start again.

The good news, to curtail a not very long and certainly far from interesting story, is that shortly after lunch on Tuesday afternoon, two somewhat shady looking characters came a-knocking on our door to tell us they had fixed the phone line and that we were once again in contact with the community of the world wide web. Odd how at that point they started to look increasingly like Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill, such is the power of being the bearers of good tidings.

Anyway, to more important matters, namely our new railings.

Marco the builder appeared shortly before lunch on Monday with a large white container, inside of which was an example of the grey paint that Stephen thought might do for the terrazzo. One look at my face, however, convinced him that the idea was a non-starter. ‘You won’t like it,’ he kept saying while I struggled to find something positive to say about it, not wanting to disappoint him or Marco. Eventually though, it was agreed that we would settle for regrouting the area causing the problem to make it more watertight.

With that decided, Marco also said that he would be back later in the afternoon with Manuel to start dismantling the old railings, as Terenzio had told him that he would be delivering the new ones on Wednesday afternoon. And dismantling them they did, setting to on Monday afternoon and finishing the job more or less before midday on Tuesday. This was, though, both good and bad news. It was good for us as not only was the task completed speedily but also Terenzio was better than his word and when I arrived back after my Tuesday afternoon lessons the railings were being unloaded. It was bad news, however, for Bella and Harry as, with no railings and no gates, they were confined to barracks for the interim, only allowed out under close supervision when no workmen were around and for walks. So much for their gallivanting around the garden.

It was also, as it turned out, bad news for Luigi, who popped down the road on his scooter while we were having lunch to ask what had happened to the old railings. Being one not to miss an opportunity should it arise, he thought that they would be just the thing for corralling his geese; unfortunately, due to Marco’s efficiency the railings had not only been taken down but deposited at the scrapyard on his way home for lunch.

With the railings gone, it was time to turn attention to the tiling on the terrazzo. The first job was to remove the old grouting, and Marco, with his angle grinder whizzing, attacked it on Tuesday evening. This seemed, to my inexperienced eyes, a very efficient machine – too efficient in a way. No one had given us the nod to close the bathroom windows and the shutters were not enough to stop a fine film of red dust coating any possible surface. Oh well, it was due for a good bottoming anyway.

Marco was unable to work on Wednesday, as he had to take his mum to the hospital for her cataract operation, but Manuel not only sorted out the grouting he also went round making good some of the chipped tiles and crumbling plaster, evidence of previous wear and tear on the house. Before he arrived, however, and making use of the morning shade, Stephen shimmied up the scaffolding, which Marco had erected to access the upstairs loft, so he could paint the metal door grey to match the shutters and the garage doors. I say shimmy, but with the scaffolding being far from the most stable of structures (and I should know, I had the job of trying to hold it steady), it was more of a tentative ascent, sort of like if Larry Grayson had climbed Everest. That said, the painting was accomplished in no time and Stephen executed his descent in a much more simian manner – apart, that is, for the trap door on the top platform falling on his head as he slid through it.

There was still no Marco on Thursday as his mother’s cataracts were proving a tad intractable so it was left to Manuel and Terenzio, with Stephen providing extra muscle, to manoeuvre the sections of railings up onto the terrazzo and position them in place. By the end of the day, most of the sections were ‘sited’ but not fixed as Terenzio needed to make sure that everything went together properly and they were, as far as our wilfully irregular terrazzo would allow, straight and level. Friday saw the return of Marco, so Stephen’s role became more managerial, with the odd bit of heavy lifting. They worked until 9pm, when it was just too dark to see properly, but it did mean that all the railings were in situ and the gate at the top of the outside steps had been erected. They had also started on sorting the housing for the main gates at the bottom of the steps, which included digging out a hole and then filling it with concrete to support one of the posts. Unfortunately, as Stephen and I left after dinner to head up to the pub for a coffee and chat with Marco and Maddalena, he failed to notice Bella padding around on the still tacky concrete. I guess we can always make out that it is some esoteric pattern.

Marco and Manuel returned on Saturday morning to complete the job, with which Stephen and I are incredibly pleased. It is quite amazing how much of a difference the railings have made; compared with the old white ones they have really opened up the space, and instead of being a barrier your eye now continues through them, both looking out from and towards the house. As for the gates, it is such a pleasure to have something that opens easily and moves smoothly. And Bella and Harry are obviously pleased with them too and took great delight in chasing each other up and down the terrazzo; but there again, it may have been their release from confinement that caused such elation. Whichever it is, now Harry has an even clearer view of the surrounding area he is finding even more reasons to bark like a lunatic at the slightest provocation.

I don’t want you to think that I was idling my time away while all this was going on, as I had an important writing assignment to complete. Massimo, my student, works for a local shoe manufacturer looking after all things media. He is in the process of creating a short, virtual reality film to place on their website and asked me to check through his English translation before the script, in Italian, Russian and English, went to the production company. Now this sounds pretty straightforward, until you remember three things: (1) by his own admission, Massimo had relied heavily on Google Translate, so the English did, at times, smack heavily of Stanley Unwin; (2) I hadn’t seen the film the script would accompany so didn’t know what it referred to and (3) it was full of technical words to do with shoe manufacture.

Despite this, I managed, after a couple of sessions at it, to come up with something that at least sounded like it made sense before going through it again with Stephen to check the manufacturing process. I suppose it is all a learning curve, and at least I now know what manovia, cardatura and incollatrice mean, though I doubt I will be using them in an everyday conversation. Still, when I sent the revised draft to Massimo, he pronounced it perfect – and who knows, Stephen and I may have found a niche market in translating services, though I don’t expect to be inundated anytime soon.

The weekend finished with us getting the terrazzo back into shape, and Stephen spent a profitable morning today (whilst I was working on my lessons) in cleaning it up and relocating all the furniture. If we thought it all looked good before, it looks even better now with the galvanised metal. So good in fact, that we needed to share it with somebody, and so Marco and Maddalena joined us for a simple dinner to celebrate. I say simple, but Marco did bring us a very fine bottle of Passerina Spumante to toast our latest improvement. I can heartily recommend this wine, being like a cross between champagne and prosecco, though you may have trouble hunting it down in your local Asda. It is, though, something else to put on our list of why living in Italy is such a good idea.