Of Telecom and festas

Ok we changed telephone company, but… Unfortunately Fastweb rents the lines of Telecom Italia, and when something goes wrong with those, I tell Fastweb, they tell Telecom, and one day they may even turn up and fix the problem. As usual the line went down on a Friday, just before the weekend. An engineer turned up after shouting down the line on Monday afternoon (miraculously minutes after I complained. He claimed he’d solved the problem and left. However the problem was not solved and another one was sent. Again, minutes after I complained as to where this new chappie would be, I had a phone call saying he couldn’t find my house. Had he been wandering around the village for hours or had he just stopped at the bar for a few apperitivi I wonder?

Never mind, hopefully this isn’t going to be the pattern of things to come. It’s festa time around here, and we couldn’t miss our favourite ones, even if we are skint. With our Swiss friend Irene and our English friends James and Alison (and Holly), we went on Friday to the Sagra di Ravioli in Arcola. The serve some of the most delicious ravioli there, best served simply with butter and sage or a creamy nut sauce.

Saturday and Sunday we went to the Medieval festa at Santo Stefano. It commemorates the handing over of the keys to the castle of Sarzana by Piero di Medici to king Charles VIII of France in 1495 after France had conquered this part of Italy. Or as one neighbour put it, “I’m not going there, they are celebrating a war we lost!”

Anyway it’s all just harmless fun, with the entire village dressing up in medieval garb and showing off ancient skills. Have a look and a listen at some of the impressions from this year’s fun:

These guys are known as Sbandieratori:

This chap is the notary presiding over the Medieval market

A spectator on daddy's shoulder

These are the keys to the castle allegedly. I always thought they should be bigger

These are 2 dear friends of ours who have a B&B at the bottom of our hill. When they see us starting our descend on our bikes, they ususally insist on inviting us in for a homemade limoncino.

This is Cristina with her wee girl. She plays the Queen every year together with Pino on his horse as King Charles. This year was a special occasion for them, as they got married just a few hours before!

Story time for the kids:

These 2 young ladies tried to lure into their house of ill-repute, but Susan was dragging me back.

Trampling on grapes

Long tome no hear...

Sorry it's been a while, lots has happened since the last post. I'm not trying to come up with excuses, but... Well first of all I was away for a few days at the end of June, beginning of July. Had to take the car to Germany for an MOT. Good news it has passed, bad news it wasn't cheap. I'd rather do wothout motorised transport, but can't quite do without it.

Well then as soon as I had returned we were struck by lightning, which melted my computer monitor and the old modem. I managed to get an old monitor off someone for nothing, but it wasn't worth replacing the modem as we were waiting for a new telephone line from Fastweb with a proper broadband connection at last! Yes we have turned our backs on Telecom, despite warnings from people that you'll never know what service you will be getting with these people. Well I reckoned it couldn't get any worse, and so far so good.

So today a premier for this blog: A moving picture with sound! Last night was the annual Musicalmangiando event in our village, a festa with, as the name suggests, there's food and music, but also art and general merryment. The music was supposed to be supplied by our neighbour Mauro and his band Tandarandan, but for some reason this was changed by the organisers. Instead we had fire jugglers and our friend Silvio with some mates playing Rennaissance music. That's what you can hear and see a sample of above if you have a fast enough internet connection.

The food was as usual the Cusina d'Sa' Steu', the cuisine of Santo Stefano, although Remo, the brains behind promoting the local specialities is getting on a bit and semi-retired, so I felt that the standards were slipping a wee bit. For a start quantities weren't as gut-splitting as usual. Mind you when I mentioned that after the desserts, someone found me another plate of roast rabbit. The other good thing was of course that the man pouring the grappa afterwards gave Susan and me an extra helping calling us the number one and two supporters of the Cusina d'Sa' Steu'. Besides he said, anyone as mad as us riding our bikes up and down our hill is probably in need of an extra helping of strong liquor...

Below you see the antipasti being served on the way up from the main piazza:

And then under the last rays of sunshine we settled down for the main courses on the little piazza in fron of our house. In the centre of the picture with her purple back to us and the bare arms is Susan and opposite her our lovely neighbours Susannah and Marco.

Other updates as to what happened on the land etc. coming up in the next few days.

'Critical Wine' Tasting

I meant to give you all an update over Easter and wish you all happy holidays, but Telecom Italia spoiled those plans. Yet again we were the entire Easter weekend without a phone line! This time there was a thunder storm just in the vague vicinity and bang Saturday morning the line was down. Of course they don’t work over the weekend, so it wasn’t fixed until Tuesday some time. I’ve had about enough of this company: they can’t do us a broadband connection for our computer and every 6 to 8 weeks at least the line is down for 3 or 4 days. What am I paying service charges for? If anyone knows of an alternative telephone service provider in Italy they can recommend, please let me know.

To all those who have asked about the Abruzzo earthquake, thankfully we were far enough away to not have been affected by it or even have noticed it. We don’t know anyone in the L’Aquila area either, but it does make you think, an event like this. You feel all snug and safe in your century old, solid stone building and there even historic churches fall over like card houses. To those of you who can afford it, do give to the various appeal funds to help the victims who are now staying in tents. We heard reports on the BBC channel that Silvio Berlusconi told those victims that they should see the fun side of it all and treat it as a “camping weekend”. Significantly this wasn’t reported by the Italian media and our neighbours were disgusted when we told them, quite rightly so!

Right, now that I have got rid of my two annoyances of the week, ‘what did we get up to over’ Easter, I hear you ask. The weather has been good despite forecasts to the contrary. Only today the Scirocco is blowing rain in our direction again. We planted out some more tomatoes and we’ve been harvesting our first broad beans, lettuces and radishes (the size of golf balls!). Just in time, before we start suffering from malnutrition.

Good Friday I made my traditional Swabian ‘Maultaschen’, a kind of German Ravioli stuffed with spinach (or Swiss chard in our case, can’t grow spinach to save my life in this climate) and minced meat served in a broth. The Swabians being a very religious, but also very cunning people, try their hardest to stick to lent and not eating meat during the run up to Easter. However by the Thursday before Easter (they call it Green Thursday for some reason) they get quite desperate. So they disguise the meat with the green of spinach and stuff it inside the pasta, in the hope that the Lord above doesn’t see them cheating.

On Saturday I still had so many Maultaschen left, that I took them across to our next door neighbours, Marco and Susannah, and we had them together with them, followed by a secondo of lamb chops. It was a lovely evening and with our and their food combined we had the best meal in a while.

Easter Sunday we went to a wine tasting in Montaretto near Bonassola. The title of the even was ‘Critical Wine – Terra e Libertà’. I wasn’t sue exactly what to expect, but with that title it was bound to have something to do with wine. We took a morning train to Bonassola, a pretty little Ligurian seaside resort on the other side of the Cinque Terre.

From there we could either take the shuttle bus, which winds itself 10km around bendy mountain roads to the village of Montaretto, or we could take the shortcut up a steep 3km footpath. It was a nice day so we opted for the latter. The views became more and more spectacular as we fast ascended above the sea. We heard Montaretto before we could see it. The whole village, a place about the size of our small village, was in party mood. On the outskirts an ad hoc campsite had sprung up on what normally served as the football pitch. A remarkable number of long-haired, flower-power hippy types seemed to be around for this 3-day festival. I was glad I hadn’t donned my business attire for the occasion, I would have looked a right fool.

Despite all that it was actually a serious wine event showcasing mostly organic wine producers and leftish-leaning co-operatives (sometimes combined). Most producers came from Liguria, Piemonte and Tuscany, but other regions were also represented. It was interesting to taste these wines. I must say though that many a small producer uses the tag organic as an excuse for dirty winemaking techniques. Quite a few had a tendency to be oxidised and just lacked definition. Others have produced good wines though, so I shall use some in upcoming tastings. As one of the suggested tastings I am offering is organic and biodynamic wines, as I do get asked a lot about the subject.

To name a couple of the highlights of wines you can also look up on the internet, there were Chianti Montalbano from Fattoria Castellina on www.fattoriacastellina.com, Candia dei Colli Apuani (Just down the road from us) Vermentino (tastes of Banana!) on www.viniapuani.it, Barbera Colli Tortonesi (Piemonte) from the Co-op Valli Unite www.valliunite.com (especcially their Vighét 2005, made from old vines) and a lovely Verdicchio di Castelli Jesi from La Marca di San Michele, www.lamarcadisanmichele.com. In addition to wines, there were offerings of beers, preserves, Sicilian bread, honey, organic beef, donkey salami, sheeps cheeses, etc.

Despite the fact that Susan in the end was a little unsteady on her legs we walked back down along a different, but no less scenic route again.


Maybe next year we’ll return to this event and join the tent colony, so we won’t have to wobble down the steep mountain after drinking large quantities…