A wind of change

This week started where last week ended, and I don’t mean drinking sparkling wine on the terrazzo. Not that I’m knocking the idea, it’s just that Monday mornings with the sun shining and the promise of a new week is a time for getting things done.

So it was that our little team regrouped early doors to finish off installing the main gate at the bottom of the stairs. As before, Terenzio took great pains to make sure that everything was as precise as possible, while Marco tried to move the job along so he could be done and dusted before lunchtime. Which indeed he was, and when I returned from my morning lesson it was to see Terenzio giving Stephen careful instructions on opening and closing the gate. These, for those of you needing a course in gate management, were: (a) always remember to hold the handle down when closing so that you don’t wear out the latch bolt and (b) don’t open the gate too forcefully so it hits the wall and scratches. Right. After he got Stephen to repeat these to me in English, he seemed happy that his work here was finished and followed Marco, who had already left, up the hill and home to lunch.

And that is about as exciting as the early part of the week got. Stephen played with his compressor, one of his manly toys, on Tuesday, using the air jet to clean out all the zanzare screens and blow the dust accumulated from the recent work off the shutters. If only he’d known that a renegade squall of wind was going to whip up suddenly and violently and cover the screens and shutters with almost as much debris as he’d not very long before removed. Still, the unexpected gust also did us a dubious service in dislodging from the tree behind our house a branch that had been hanging on by an arboreal thread since a storm earlier in the year. If only, Stephen muttered, it had happened when Marco was still working on the railings, he could have borrowed his electric saw to chop it up for winter firewood. Well, we can still use it for firewood, only one of us will have to do it manually; won’t you, Stephen.

Things got busier at the weekend, which, disappointingly, coincided with a downturn in the weather - not that it was a total washout, just not the guaranteed blue skies and sunshine one would have hoped for with a hectic social whirl in the offing.

Friday we had Computer Luca and his brother and partner to dinner, our first proper grown up event on the newly revamped terrazzo. We’d had to rearrange it from the previous week, as we felt that having Marco et al busily working on installing the new railings wasn’t exactly conducive to a sophisticated social event. Unfortunately, the forecast was for thunderstorms, but the weather app kept changing its mind as to when they would happen. We pressed on regardless, however, in the hope that it would keep fine and I spent a not so happy afternoon trying to make aïoli.

Should you ever feel yourself inclined to have a shot at presenting a bowl of your very own garlic mayonnaise, let me give you a spot of advice: don’t believe the recipe if it says you only need two egg yolks and 300ml of oil, because by the time you get round to your fourth attempt you’ll have used much more than that. However, with Stephen’s calming influence and the help of a gaggle of ladies in Sigma where he had gone to buy more ingredients (“Mayonnaise,” said one with a sharp intake of breath, “on a cloudy afternoon?” as if the very idea were enough to send you hurtling to culinary purgatory) the fourth lot turned out to be nigh on perfect, as well as a fabulous ochre colour thanks to the eggs recommended by the ladies. As they say, if at first you don’t succeed, just get a jar of Hellman’s.

As for the dinner itself, despite the forecasts the sky cleared and all looked set fair. That was till we sat down to our antipasti, which was when the wind, for the second time this week, decided to enliven our lives by blowing leaves across the table, extinguishing the candles and lifting up the table mats. Remembering the advice about discretion and valour, we decamped inside, just in time to avoid a brief but heavy shower. We still, though, had a very pleasant evening, and even managed to venture back onto the terrazzo for coffee and limoncello – though by now the temperature had plummeted to 22C, prompting our Italian guests to resort to jackets while we Brits braved it out in shirtsleeves.

It was another evening for the less hardy of the locals to wrap up yesterday when we joined Marco and Maddalena at MSP’s Festival Beer Park, 2016. It was the third night of the jamboree, and from what I can gather, the least popular due to lunchtime thunderstorms and lingering clouds. There were still, however, plenty of people and the Negramaro tribute band pleased the crowd. Maddalena had warned us off the pasta and arrosticini, which had been less than satisfactory for them the night before. We went for pizza instead, provided by our local pizzeria, Mascalzone Latino, which had shut up shop and decamped to the park for the duration.

The event itself was much as last year, apart from the helpers’ polo shirts being a different colour, oh, and it all happening in a different location. This year the stage had been built in front of the church, which meant the closure of one of the roads round the town. The resulting layout, though, made for an effective amphitheatre, funnelling people in past the food and drink kiosks to the seating area and the tables lined up towards the stage. The change of venue, it seems, was due, as these things so often are, to local politics (with a small ‘p’) and a difference of opinion over the purveyance of alcoholic beverages. Ah, the demon drink, responsible for so many of the world’s troubles. As it turned out, I thought the new setting was an improvement; at the campeggio last year you could have been anywhere, but the church and old buildings of the town centre gave a distinctive backdrop firmly locating the event as belonging to MSP.

As if that was not enough excitement for one weekend, Stephen took me this evening to the 53rd Sagra dei Maccheroncini at Campofilone, a town near the coast about 40 minutes south-west from here. It is yet another charming town, with narrow streets of honey coloured stone buildings, famous for the production of maccheroncini, a remarkably fine, thread like pasta, the thickness spaghetti would be if Mattel made a Barbie Italian food range. At the sagra, there are three stations where you can buy your maccheroncini, each manned by a different local producer of the pasta. However, having been before with Computer Luca when they were given a tip-off by one of his students who lived in the town, Stephen took me to the very last one as offering the most pleasing aspect, being situated in a grassy space behind the church, shielded by old town walls and with a panoramic view of the valley below.

Being British and of a certain age when things like parking easily and avoiding the rush are of prime importance, we got there early in the proceedings and had claimed out seats a good fifteen minutes before the food kicked-off at 7pm. Not that we were the only ones, and Stephen still had to join the queue well before service started. It was, when it arrived, a delicious plateful, proving that mass catering doesn’t mean pandering to the lowest common denominator as long as you care about the quality of the ingredients and the way they’re cooked. I suppose it also helps to have a team of volunteer townspeople, especially a cohort of women skilled in the art of mixing the maccheroncini and ragu as everyone should do it: on a table.

As we left, the streets were beginning to fill up and we had to squeeze our way back down through the town, stopping off to buy some maccheroncini of our own (from a man who, strangely, spoke to us abruptly in Italian until he found out we weren’t tourists but actually lived in the area, when suddenly he switched to fluent English) and a linen tea towel finely edged in crochet by a lady who’d set up a small table of her work at the side of the street. It was just after 9pm when we eventually left, one of the few cars heading down the hill as opposed to the tidal wave heading up towards the sagra. It made us think that maybe we had been a bit previous in our timing; maybe next year we should try to savour more of the atmosphere in the glamour of twilight and maybe we might consider arriving as much as thirty minutes later - but where would we park?