of pears and sagre

Well the temperatures have been rising again and we've been praying for the relief of a nice thunderstorm. It was threatening today, clearly heading our way, but then decided to take a right turn out to sea. I think it's saving up a big one for us. There was the brief cooling of a shower today, but it did not last long. On the land we mostly water now and harvest lots of fruit and veg. We carry a few kilos of pears home each day as we pick them as they fall. Back home we bottle them in syrup as we can't eat them all at once and I can't think of anything else much to do with pears.

I may have mentioned it before, it's festa season and this weekend we visited a couple more. In fact they were sagre. There is no real translation for the Italian word sagra in English, but it is essentially a festival around a particular culinary speciality of a region or village. Saturday we went for the sagra testaroli e tagliatelle at Baccano di Arcola, just a kilometre from our plot of land. Tagliatelle does not need much of an introduction, but testaroli are a kind of thin pancake, which is usually served with either pesto, oil and parmesan or with a mushroom sauce. Susan had the testaroli with pesto, while I had Taglialtelle 'rustico', with a spicy tomato sauce. For secondo we shared an 'asado', Argentinian style slow grilled veal. It was scumptious. The after-dinner music was supplied by a one-man band, but the star of the show was a young Joe Cocker look-alike. He was barely 2 1/2 both in years and feet height, but he was tireless on the dancefloor, getting the Joe Cocker moves just right and asking all the girls his size to dance with him.

Sunday we went to a village called Bastremoli for the Sagra della Torta. We had not actually heard of the village before, but the posters promised music by our friend Riccardo Borghetti. The surprise was that the village faces ours across the valley, we just didn't realise it. It afforded a beautiful view back across to our village as can be seen on the top photo (Ponzano is in the background not the forground). However the food was a bit disappointing, the torte in question being a vegetable pie and a rice tart, both were not exciting. Also the music wasn't great. Instead of playing his own songs in Spezzini dialect, he played cover versions of popular American and Italian songs. He had a good few glasses of wine before he went on stage and did not get much feedback from the crowd, so he did not put too much into his performance. Shame...

Of weather gods, music and soup

Yesterday we brought our newly crowned deities for rain and general plumbing (James and Alison) to the airport. The weather gave them the appropriate farewell as the heavens opened once again with thunder and lighting and the whole show. It even cut off our phone lines again for a day, but as you can see we are back on-line already. Wednesday, the rain stopped for a day, which was just as well, as we had Patrick coming over from London, who is interested in a plot of land our neighbour Carlo is selling. Himself and his wife are interested in building up something over here similar to ourselves, with producing some of their own food, so maybe in the future we’ll be creating a mini-co-op pooling resources. Self-sufficiency is a lot easier to achieve if there are more people working together on the same idea. You only need one lot of various power tools, if you have animals one can look after them if the other is on holiday and during peak times like harvest or pruning time work can be shared as well as the resulting produce. The combined harvest from 30 or 40 olive trees makes a better lot to take to the olive mill than the product of just a dozen trees, which is not enough to have pressed separately. He’s going back to England tonight to discuss things with his wife and, you never know, we may be seeing you again soon over here, Patrick!

Last night we went to see Riccardo Borghetti as announced at the Teatro Civico in La Spezia. It’s quite a large but incredibly drab venue with a huge stage and a depressingly brown décor. It was pretty much sold out though. Riccardo Borghetti is difficult to put into any particular category of music, the closest I can think of is folk-rock. He sees himself as an ageing rocker. He sings in Spezzini the dialect of La Spezia. As he puts it, the language of rock is English and Italian is not very well suited to rock as they insist on ending each word on a vowel, …a, …o, …i, etc. Which is why when Italians speak English they often add colourful vowel endings to English words. However, Spezzini tends to have words ending in consonants, i.e. vino in Italian becomes vin in Spezzin. The strength of his music is though, that there are many more influences than just rock. Some songs have jazzy inflections, others have some Parisian-like accordion sounds, country banjo, oohmpapa or African bongo rhythms. He lists the following as his influences: Influenze: Fabrizio De Andrè, Leonard Cohen, Leo Ferrè, The Beatles, Georges Brassens, Jaques Brel, Charles Trenet, Joe Cocker, Sting, Bob Dylan, Paolo Conte, Tom Waits, Jethro Tull, Ivano Fossati, Sergio Endrigo, Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen, Alan Stivell, Loreena Mc Kennitt, Paul Simon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez e molti altri ispiratori ispirati. He plays with a full band including himself on acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, bass, drums and percussion, a keyboard, backing singers, plus guest musicians on clarinet, banjo and accordion. His voice is distinctly gravelly. Each song has a story as he likens his songs to your conversation you’d have down at your local bar. These chats maybe about the good old days when the streets were still lit by gas lanterns, the way we all age and go grey, our favourite food or about current world affairs like the crisis in Dafour. On his CD he gives all the lyrics including translations into Italian, which makes it a lot easier to understand for us ignorant foreigners and young Italians who don’t speak their own dialect any more. As an encore he played the really rocky anthem to Spezia football club. A really enjoyable evening out. The whole thing was filmed by local TV, so presumably it’ll find itself onto youtube eventually. You can check him out on this link: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=335316302

Finally I’d like to let you in on one of my simplest recipes, my quick Zuppa Lombarda. This is not only cheaper and tastier than an instant soup out of a packet, it’s even quicker. Had it today for lunch. This is what you do:

Zuppa Lombarda

Ingredients for 2:
Olive oil
4 or 5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
8-10 leaves of fresh sage leaves, roughly chopped
1 can of canellini beans
Pepper
2 slices of old bread

Gently fry the garlic and sage in the oil for a couple of minutes. Add the tin of beans with their liquid. Add another tin-full of water. Bring to the boil and simmer for a minute or 2. Season with pepper. Put a slice of old bread into each soup bowl. Pour over the soup e basta!

rain, rain, rain...

This is possibly the longest stretch of unsettled weather we’ve experienced since we’ve come to Italy almost 4 years ago. Ever since James and Alison arrived last Sunday we haven’t had a day without rain, some of it heavy with thunder storms, hail and all. It hasn’t been particularly cold though, so everything got a real growth boost, especially the weeds. The day before the rains started I strimmed the top 10 terraces at Arcola almost back to ground level and in 9 days the grass has grown back by about 2 inches and as for the bamboo… I have heard that bamboo is the fastest growing plant on earth and I can well believe it, up to 3 foot in a week!

So what were we up to in the last week? Saturday we were invited to a book launch. Our neighbour, Mauro Manicardi, who I have mentioned previously in this blog for playing traditional music with his band Tandarandan, has finally after 8 years of research finished his book on the music of the Lunigiana and the Val di Vara. The traditional music of the region has not very many proponents any more and Mauro has interviewed many of the older folk in the villages and recorded many of their tunes and songs (both in print in this book as well as on CD with his band). There are also articles on the carnival traditions and dance steps to accompany the music. The launch took place at a museum in La Spezia and of course it included some musical samples and some aperitivi. Here is a link to the official website of Tandarandan: http://www.tandarandan.it/. This Thursday both Mauro and our other neighbour Marco will be playing in a concert with Riccardo Borghetti again. Remember we saw them playing at his official launch of Riccardo’s new CD. This time it’s going to be a proper public concert at the Teatro Civico in La Spezia. So, something to look forward to.

Yesterday James, who is a bit of a whiz kid when it comes to plumbing, came out to our plot in Arcola. We always had a water tap out there, but could never quite work out how to get it properly connected. So we kept either borrowing water from the neighbour or carry some up in large canister’s. This was not nearly enough during last year’s extremely dry winter and summer. In the pouring rain yesterday we bent over a manhole in the road looking at some seriously corroded piping and dodgy connections. After a lot of experimenting around we finally got all 4 valves between the main pipe and our tap open and hallelujah, there was water! James from now on will be venerated as the water god by us. Not only did he fix our water connection, but whenever he is in Italy, it’s raining. Next time we are threatened by a drought we’ll just pray to him to come over…

Today finally it stopped raining for long enough to do some work on the land. We sowed some runner beans (dolico), parsley, rocket and 2 types of lettuce (green and iceberg). In the flowering cycle the sweet cherries and pears are now finished and the apples (above) and sour cherries are in flower.

Quando ‘r pèo I fa ‘r grizin

Quando ‘r pèo I fa ‘r grizin
Lascia ‘a môssa e date ar vin
(When the hair turns grey,
Leave the women and date wine)
Riccardo Borghetti


Just as I thought I’m getting the hang of Italian we get invited to the launch of the latest CD of local hero and troubadour Riccardo Borghetti, who sings all his songs in Spezzini, the dialect of La Spezia! Women instead of donne become môssa. ‘k’ sounds become slurred ‘g’ sounds (as in the g in George when you’ve had a bit too much to drink). ‘tch’ sounds become ‘ss’ sounds and a load of other confusions. Everything becomes softer, a bit like Portuguese in sound, although influences are more French apparently. Riccardo Borghetti is the most famous current musician in the province, his greatest claim to fame being the fact that he wrote the supporter song for Spezia football club, after they got promoted to Serie B last season. We managed to get an invite to this exclusive event, because, in addition to his usual band he needed an extra accordion player (our neighbour Mauro) and a banjo player (our neighbour Marco). Incidentally, Marco reckons with me and him both playing the banjo, Ponzano Superiore possibly has the largest concentration of banjo players in Italy.

The music? Well his voice is certainly distinct, especially after several cigarettes and glasses of red wine. Folk-pop probably describes it best. Bits of Country and even rock come out in between, certainly a sense of humour, no… it sort of grows on you. The man doesn’t have a web-site as far as I can see, otherwise I’d direct you towards it for a sound sample. After the show there was traditional food: farinata (little chickpea fritters) and mes-ciua (a soup consisting of chickpeas, cannelloni beans and farro) and wine from the nearby Cinque Terre. And afterwards we went to Ali’s Pub next to the market in La Spezia with Marco and Susana and their parents. Really nice evening out!

Susan in the meantime has nearly finished her first week’s teaching. And it hasn’t turned out as bad as she had feared. She takes 10 different classes, which means she only has to prepare one lesson a week. I told her it would be good idea to start with a sporty theme in her first lesson to get their attention, as most Italian kids are sports mad. So as there are the 6-Nations on at the moment she tried to interest them in some rugby: Contrast and compare football versus rugby. Amongst the things we came up with was in football they dive and feign injury, but if a rugby player stays down he’s broken a leg! Anyway, some classes seem to have been better than others, but certainly manageable. Next week she’ll do Irish music. I on the other hand will be away from Sunday to Wednesday or so for a couple of wine tasting events in Germany with one of my clients.

On the agricultural front, we haven’t done much on the land, but I sowed a lot of things indoors. Here’s the list: peppers, cucumbers, 3 types of tomatoes, melons, aubergines, chervil, basil, savoury, tarragon, dill and chillies. If only half of this takes we’ll be well supplied over the summer and autumn.