Keep karma

It is with great pleasure that I can announce summer has arrived – we now just have to hope that it will hang around for a while. After a somewhat iffy start to the week, it seemed, on Wednesday, that someone decided to turn up the thermostat; there was a definitely different feel to the air, which no longer needed the sun to make it feel hot. In honour of this, Stephen brought out some of the patio furniture on Saturday and today we did the great wardrobe exchange, packing away the shirts and jumpers and resurrecting the shorts and t-shirts in expectation of balmy days ahead.

Other than increasing temperatures, it was also the week of the two chocolate cakes – which seems like too much of a good thing but hey, we deserved them. The first was on Monday afternoon when Stephen went off on work business with Manuel and returned with an ‘ice cream’ cake from a pasticceria in Sant’Elpidio al Mare as a present for our second anniversary. Actually, calling it ice cream is a bit misleading, what they are really is semifreddo. Now I think that in your average Italian restaurant in the UK, if you have a semifreddo dessert it is more often than not ice cream, but in Italy it is more like a mousse, so that whilst you buy them frozen and you are supposed to eat them at the stage where they are just starting to soften, storing them in the fridge doesn’t mean you end up with an amorphous sludge as you would if they were ice cream.

Other than the cake, we marked our anniversary with dinner at Pomod’oro, (yes, that is the spelling), an agriturismo ten minutes down the road. Marco had assured us that we would not need to book, what with it being a Monday night and no one goes out to eat on a Monday. Fortunately he was partially correct, and when we arrived – at our usual ‘early’ time of 8pm – the restaurant was empty. However, it soon filled up, especially as there was a long table of people obviously celebrated a family occasion, so we were spared the embarrassment of trying to fill an empty room with atmosphere all by ourselves. We skipped desert, having our cake back at home, and we had a generous slice each with a little something for the tonsils while watching an episodes of Friends – and who says romance is dead?

The second cake appeared yesterday evening, courtesy of Oscar and Alessio, who brought it as their contribution to our informal gathering to celebrate the cultural phenomenon that is the Eurovision Song Contest. They came, along with Computer Luca and our friend Sauro, to help keep us awake through the televisual marathon that it has now become, and to offer an Italian perspective on the proceedings. It may come as a surprise to British people, whose fixation on the event and nurturing of perceived slights by any country that steadfastly refuses to give any points to the unending supply the UK seems to have of mediocre songs, that Eurovision is not a big thing here.

The national broadcaster has obviously been trying to big it up, trailing it for weeks beforehand, covering the two semis on Rai 4 (which we watched as part of our Eurovision training regime) and presenting the final itself in Rai 1’s prime Saturday night slot. However, most people I’ve mentioned it to, both this year and last, have, at best, a rather vague notion of what I’m talking about - even given the fact that this year’s Italian entry (and Sanremo winner), Occidentalis Karma has been a massive hit here and the singer, Francesco Gabbani, has been all over the media for weeks and weeks.

Sadly for our Italian guests, who had fostered great hopes that this year would see them walking away with the trophy, the inclusion of a dancing gorilla seemed to work against them, giving a stonking pop song the unfortunate tag of a novelty entry. Francesco could only manage a creditable 6th place, but what did that matter because the evening was just an excuse to get together and eat pizze and chocolate cake, and on that basis I gave it douze points.