Author: msmarche

Summer seems especially reluctant to hand over the baton to autumn this year. While the days grow ever shorter, they remain deliciously warm, with a honeyed sun smiling down from cloudless skies, whose blue is softened by the finest veil of haze. And following sunsets of smouldering copper and crimson, the correspondingly longer nights are still mild enough to be filled with the gentle chirruping of the crickets, and then give way to hushed dawns that are the very essence of Keats’ “mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

It’s true it is now cool enough not to have to take refuge from the heat on the shady northern terrace , but this means we now spend more time on the main east- and south-facing sections where we continue to make the most of the golden warmth, admittedly no longer in shorts and T-shirts, but certainly not yet in pullovers. And as we look out over the sun-filled valley, the hints of bronze and amber slowly spreading across it are almost the only evidence of autumn’s arrival.

The strongest evidence of autumn’s arrival is, in fact, in the supermarket where the passage of the seasons is always clearly visible. For seasonal produce is a given here, a way of life. It isn’t a trend or a fad or part of the latest celebrity diet; it isn’t considered ‘cool’ or even especially ‘green’. It is simply an integral part of the food culture that is central to Italian identity, and whose century-old traditions are still adhered to. Essentially, if a particular fruit or vegetable (or meat or fish, come to that) isn’t in season in Italy, it isn’t automatically imported from some faraway place where it is in season; it just isn’t available, except perhaps in the largest and poshest supermarkets, but it’s not guaranteed. Take artichokes, a highly-prized local speciality: for a couple of weeks back in May there were great mounds of them in the shops and people were buying dozens of them at a time, but just a few weeks later there was not a single one to be found. The thing is, though, there was clearly no expectation either from consumers or from shops that people’s voracious appetite for the greeny-purple thistle-like vegetable could (and even less should) be satisfied by extending the season with imports flown in at great cost from half way round the globe. The season was over, as simple as that.  And it had been exactly the same with the asparagus, which is a vegetable that both Mr Blue-Shirt and I adore and will happily eat every day of the season given the chance, but which had disappeared from the shelves before we had had a chance to get through our list of favourite asparagus dishes. And we couldn’t have continued working our way through our list using asparagus flown in from Peru (even if we had wanted to) because there wasn’t any: the season was finished. Consequently, peaches, nectarines, apricots and water melons have – naturally – now given way to squash, pomegranates, figs and grapes, and the pop-up shops selling nothing but Sicilian citrus fruits have just re-opened for their customary four-month season.

We have no sense of ‘making do’ with whatever is available, though, as if there is some lack or shortage. In addition to that vast and ever-changing cornucopia of seasonal produce in the peak of condition and packed with flavour, there is always a huge array of exclusively Italian-grown year-round staples like tomatoes (of course), courgettes, aubergines, peppers, apples and pears thanks to Italy’s remarkably varied climate and terrain which extends from the Alps to just short of Africa. Consequently, there is always something new to look forward to – and, therefore, nothing to get bored with either, like those insipid, pallid strawberries found in the UK all year round that are not so much cultivated as manufactured, and whose very ubiquity ceases to make them special. The strawberry season here, by contrast, lasts only a couple of months, but in the few weeks that strawberries are available, they are divine and we devour them by the kilo, relishing their intense flavour and deep colour. And because such seasonal delights are by definition transitory, each succeeding fruit or vegetable feels precious: it is something to be celebrated, often with a food festival, or sagra, and respected, with simple, unfussy cooking. 

So even if we are still in shirt-sleeves and sandals, it must be autumn because our neighbouring village has just held its annual mushroom and chestnut festival.

Title taken from Pete Seeger’s song ‘Turn, turn, turn’, whose lyrics were taken from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and which was recorded by The Byrds in 1965.

For the last few years, we have rather lost our way with holidays, Mr Blue-Shirt and I. Historically, a holiday always meant visiting unfamiliar places in foreign countries, preferably where the traffic is terrifying, where shopping is conducted through a combination of mime and guesswork, where ordering a meal often means a gastronomic leap in the dark, and where you actually have to read the banknotes and coins to understand how much money you’re handing over. These criteria gradually became diluted, though, as from about 2007 we repeatedly found ourselves gravitating to Italy, albeit to different areas, and eventually the idea of actually moving here took root. Then once we had committed to living in Italy permanently, our holiday destination became defined by our latest house-search area, which grew smaller every year, and by about 2010 our entire trip would end up consisting almost exclusively of bumping down white roads somewhere in central Le Marche in order to poke around yet another ivy-and-bramble-choked ruin in the hope that it would be The One, the wreck that we could turn into the home where we could enjoy La Dolce Vita.

However, even though it is now five years since we found The One, our holiday mojo has been slow to return. While we made several trips back and forth across Europe in the summer we moved in, they were in no sense holidays as their sole purpose was to transport all our worldly goods from Lincolnshire to Le Marche as quickly and cheaply as possible in our noisy, hot and extremely uncomfortable MB van.

It was a similar story the following year: another overland trip to England, but this time to loosen some of our last administrative ties with the UK. And what made it even less of a holiday – in the sense of rest and recuperation – was the excruciating trapped nerve in my neck caused by all the driving that eventually required medical intervention, and then arriving home to find that we had had a break-in and that Mr Blue-Shirt had had every one of his tools stolen from the pigsty that he used as a workshop.

The year after that, we were simply too scared to go away until we had got a security system installed, having experienced a second and more serious burglary in the spring. The best we could do was three days away at a favourite blacksmithing event in Tuscany, but only once the system was up and running.

In 2020, and almost paradoxically as we squeezed it in between the first and second waves of the pandemic, we did manage something that came pretty close to what we consider a Proper Holiday when we took the ferry over to the Adriatic and spent ten days in Croatia. The trip certainly gave us some of the holiday vibe we craved – exploring unfamiliar places, trying unfamiliar foods and experiencing unfamiliar cultures. But our whole stay was spent in the ominous shadow of Covid, from which at that stage – several months before vaccines became available – there was little protection other than masks and social distancing. So it was very difficult to relax and enjoy ourselves fully, especially as we had to keep a constant ear out for changes to travel rules, paperwork requirements and testing regimes.

By summer 2021, Covid-induced inertia had set in. Although most restrictions had been eased if not lifted in most of the places we might otherwise have wanted to visit, we had simply become too weighed down by apathy to organise a Proper Holiday for ourselves. All that we managed was a 3-day stay in Arezzo tagged onto our customary trip to the blacksmithing event that we’ve been going to since 2007: hardly our most imaginative or adventurous trip – even if Arezzo was a complete revelation.

This year we finally cracked it, though, and sorted out a Proper Holiday. What’s more, as well as meeting our traditional criteria, it also met a couple of new ones we decided we wanted to introduce when we moved here, namely visiting parts of Italy that we had never been to before, and travelling overland to places that it would have been much harder to reach by car from the UK. Thus, having spent several wet Sunday afternoons in spring poring over maps, guidebooks and countless Booking.com and Airbnb entries, we put together a trip that involved taking the overnight ferry from Rome (ie Civitavecchia) to Sardinia for four days in Alghero on the north-west coast, then taking the day-time ferry right across the Mediterranean to Barcelona and five days taking in as much Gaudì as our senses could bear – something that had been on our ‘to do’ list for years – followed by a leisurely drive back along the Côte d’Azur, around the Gulf of Genoa and then home via Tuscany and Umbria.

And I have to say, we got it spot on. Sardinia was unlike anywhere else we have ever been in Italy, with its dramatic, spaghetti-western-style landscape, rugged coastline, pearly-white beaches, Bronze Age settlements and, on the Costa Smeralda, glamourous marinas packed with eye-wateringly expensive yachts. Gorgeous though Sardinia was, however, it did effectively turn out to be just an appetiser for the main event: Barcelona.

Barcelona was everything we had hoped it would be, only on a much grander, louder, more flamboyant scale. Having lived in semi-rural locations for the last twenty-plus years, we find any large city pretty full-on, but nothing could have prepared us for the all-out assault on our senses that Barcelona treated us to, especially since we made the architecture of Antoni Gaudì the focus of our visit. The city has long been the epicentre of Modernisme (the Catalan version of Art Nouveau), stunning examples of which we stumbled across everywhere we went. However, Gaudì’s curvaceous, colourful and utterly surreal creations pushed this late 19^th century school of design to its limits and beyond. Gaudì’s masterpiece – and unquestionably the highlight of our trip – is, of course, La Sagrada Familia, the mighty (and still unfinished) cathedral with its multiple bell towers and highly decorated façades that totally dominates the cityscape. And it is no exaggeration to say that it is the most remarkable building either Mr Blue-Shirt or I have ever seen; we were both practically overwhelmed by both its sheer scale as well as its other-worldly magnificence and spent nearly the whole day there marvelling at its splendour. Indeed, I was almost moved to tears by this most extraordinary manifestation of human endeavour, vision and creativity.

After such a spectacular, rich and spicy main course (that naturally included quite a lot of yummy tapas as well as all the Gaudì delights), our overland return trip made the perfect light, fluffy dessert: a lovely, gentle bimble from Barcelona, into France, and then, after an overnight just outside Nîmes, right along the Côte d’Azur. Muscular, forested hills rising up to the left, sparkling Mediterranean Sea to the right, the autoroute followed its sinuous course along the sun-drenched coast, taking us past or through all those places that have long epitomised glitz and glamour: St Tropez, Fréjus, Cannes, Antibes, Nice and Monte Carlo. Then it was back over the border into Italy and an overnight stop in the grand, elegant resort of San Remo that is now best known for its hugely popular annual Music Festival.

Our feast of experiences concluded with a satisfying digestivo. Like a sharp swig of Grappa, this started with the dramatic drive around the Golfo di Genova (Gulf of Genoa) along the autostrada that, with its many tunnels and vertigo-inducing bridges, threads its way through the Maritime Alps, high above the glittering waters of the Mediterranean. It then mellowed to a gentle afterglow as we turned inland near Pisa, then drove across Tuscany, past Florence before finishing in Arezzo for our last overnight stop together with the very dear friends who would be spending a few days with us as soon as we got home. Which we did the next day, feeling contentedly replete.

I think it is safe to say our appetite for holidays has returned with a vengeance.

Image: selfie of us in Alghero, sharing a ride on an e-scooter.

Well, it’s been quite a hectic couple of months, during which we have enjoyed visits from four different sets of wonderful friends. A couple of very dear pals who we know from my singing days in Lincolnshire arrived, just over a week after we bade farewell to my nephew and his partner, for their second trip of the year. Less than a fortnight later they were followed by a former teaching colleague and her partner, who also house-sat for us while we ourselves went away for a couple of weeks. They left the morning after our return, leaving us just a few hours to turn the guest room around in time for the arrival of our very old friends with whom we shared our time in Brunei at the turn of the millennium and who broke off their touring holiday to spend a few days with us. Then after a weekend-long pause, our even older friends whom we have known since the early 1990s when we all lived in Germany, also included a few days with us in their touring itinerary. ‘Old(er) friends’, by the way, refers to the length of the friendship; we ourselves, of course, all remain as young as ever…

And what an absolute delight it has been to welcome every one of them and to have the house filled with their voices and their laughter and to eat, drink and make merry with them – all of it exactly what we dreamt of when we moved to Casa Girasole, our own version of ‘La Dolce Vita‘.

Consequently, with so much catching up to be done, so many sights to see, and so many places to go (as well as quite a lot of bed linen to launder!) there was little time for putting pen to paper. So after a few days’ pause for reflection, here are some snapshots of a very special and memorable couple of months expressed in haiku.

A kaleidoscope
A summer of sensations
Bright-hued beads of joy

Sights, sounds, smells and tastes
Shared with friends both old and new
Making memories

Cathartic rants and
Belly-laughs and heart-to-hearts
That nourish the soul

Aperitivi:
Chilled drinks and dainty morsels
Served as dusk draws near

Churches, palaces
Lakes and sea and mountain views
Castles, galleries

Smoky aromas
From chargrilled swordfish steaks that
Sizzle over coals

Caves and operas
Picnics, pizzas on the square
Thunderstorms and hikes

Old jokes and nicknames
And ‘do-you-remember-whens’
Strengthening the bonds

And as summer fades
The warmth of those friendships will
Keep the cold at bay…

As with twists and turns
Of my new kaleidoscope
Summer is re-played

“A downside of life in rural Italy in summer: mosquitos the size of B52 bombers with the thirst of Dracula. I shall spare the world the sight of my bite-spattered limbs and offer instead an image of the arsenal of defensive, offensive and curative weapons I have gathered in my personal war against the little bastards.” So went a social media post of mine from around July 2017, along with a photograph of an array of anti-mosquito sprays, coils, candles and plug-ins, as well as various bite creams, bite zappers and fly swats.

This was a few weeks after we had completed the purchase of our house and in the middle of that first summer, during which we kept shuttling back and forth between Lincolnshire and Montelupone with van-loads of our worldly goods, only staying in the house for a week or so at a time at best. So with the place remaining empty for fairly lengthy periods, the local bug population – which includes many more species than just mosquitos, by the way – had ample opportunity to make itself at home completely unchecked. It was very much the same story with the large area of rough grass surrounding the house that we seldom found the time to try and tame as we were so focused on getting the house ready for me to move into come September while Mr Blue-Shirt returned to the UK to conclude the sale of the forge. Just swishing through the knee-high grass as far as the compost bin caused clouds of bugs to swirl up into the sun-baked air in preparation for an attack, but of course for as long as we didn’t mow their homes down on a regular basis, they just continued to proliferate. And back then, we had no terraces either, so all that rough grass came right up to the house, which meant that we had swarms of bugs for company every time we set foot outside, but above all, every citronella-scented evening over dinner since the only area of the garden flat enough to put our outdoor dining table and chairs was immediately in front of the patio doors from the sitting room.

Happily, those days are long gone. Our near-permanent presence has driven almost all bugs and creepy-crawlies from the house, the grass is well under control, and the terrace that now wraps all the way round the house helps keep whatever bitey-bastards remain at a relatively safe distance. Over time there has been a corresponding process of disarmament, with my arsenal now reduced to the odd, seldom-used coil, one anti-mozzy spray and a single tube of bite cream. And so these days, languid afternoons and leisurely evenings on the terrace are much more peaceful affairs, no longer punctuated by frantic bouts of flapping, slapping, swatting, cursing and scratching.

One bug that never seemed to bear us any ill-will, though and whose presence we continue to enjoy is the humble cricket. I fell in love with this harmless insect’s nocturnal chirruping when Mr Blue-Shirt and I spent our first holiday together in the south of France. Ever since, their sibilant song has for me been the quintessential sound of the Mediterranean: of sun-soaked days and balmy evenings, of bougainvillea and umbrella pines, of glossy black olives and aniseed liqueurs. It is a song whose vaguely hypnotic tune I feel I have somehow always known and which I like to think confirms that in this northern body has always dwelt a southern soul.

This summer, however, the softly-spoken crickets have faced unusually stiff competition from those most vocal of insects, the cicadas. Normally the two of them work in tandem: the crickets, who produce their song by scraping their textured fore-wings together, cover the night shift and fall silent as night fades, and then the diurnal cicadas take over the day shift with their incessant rhythmic sawing. The thing is, while they don’t typically start up their mini chainsaws until the temperature climbs above 30°C or so, they then tend to keep them running until the temperature drops back down below 30°C again. So, as we have had an unusually long and hot summer with temperatures reaching that critical threshold by breakfast time and then not falling back below it until late into the evening, those strident little chainsaws have been running non-stop for up to fifteen hours at a time almost every day since mid-June. And the racket they produce – by means of a pair of tiny vibrating membranes built in to their abdomen whose hollow structure amplifies the sound – really is unfeasibly loud at times: up to 120 decibels, apparently, which at close range is as loud as a passing aircraft or, indeed, a real chainsaw. All of which can become rather wearing, like the crackle of an untuned radio turned up to full volume, especially as we seem to have a sizeable flock of them living in the enormous oak tree about 20m from our back door. As a result, the poor unassuming crickets have barely been able to make themselves heard until finally the SODDING CICADAS SHUT THE $%&* UP!

As the earth’s tilt away from the sun increases by the day, however, even day-time temperatures now seldom exceed 30°C – and then, not by much and not for long – while the sultry night-time heat has at last been replaced with delicious, restorative cool. Which also means, of course, that the cicadas have – apart from a brief but vigorous sawing session around the middle of the day – largely fallen silent. So, as the heather and honey of dusk darken to inky blue, the soothing susurration of the crickets can once again be heard floating on the soft, evening breeze. And unlike that first summer, we can now even enjoy the music of the Mediterranean without getting bitten.

Image of cricket courtesy of http://www.italyhouse.wordpress.com

On 15^th August we and our latest visitors woke to grey skies and a mass of thickening cloud rolling in from the mountains. This left us with something of a dilemma, though, as it was Ferragosto, the national public holiday that marks the height of summer and that is typically celebrated with a protracted lunch all’aperto (in the open) with family and friends, preferably somewhere that offers some respite from the mid-summer heat. And we had been planning to observe this custom by heading up into the relative cool of the Sibillini Mountains for a picnic on the shores of the cobalt-blue Lago di Fiastra where Mr Blue-Shirt and I had marked the holiday with a refreshing dip as well as a picnic a year earlier.

We had risen later than usual that morning too, as we had been to see a dazzlingly bonkers performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Sferisterio in Macerata the night before and hadn’t gone to bed until well after 1am. So over a leisurely late breakfast– and as we scanned an increasingly gloomy sky – I told Nick and Elaine about the origins of this festival, which, like many traditions in Italy, are Roman. The name is a corruption of ‘feriae augusti’, which translates as ‘the holidays of Augustus’, the pre-Christian Emperor who designated August as a period of rest following the strenuous labour of bringing in the harvest over the preceding weeks. During this period, working animals were also relieved of their loads and horse races were held as part of the celebrations.  Indeed, this is the origin of the palio, the bare-back horse race that many towns still hold in their central squares, the most famous of which takes place in the Tuscan town of Siena on 16^th August in much the same form as in Roman times.

In between bites of toast and distant rumbles of thunder, I ran through what I could remember of the holiday’s origins, with Nick checking details for me on his phone as I went. Well before the emperor’s intervention, August was already punctuated with festivals such as the three-day Nemoralia dedicated to Diana the Huntress, the Consualia to honour Consus, the god of the harvest, and the Vinalia Rustica to celebrate the forthcoming grape harvest. So by unifying all these pre-existing jollities into one continuous holiday period, Augustus’s apparent largesse was tempered by obvious efficiency considerations. Not that the masses would have objected, especially since, providing they wished their masters ‘buon ferragosto’, they would also receive a small gift of money or food from them with which to enjoy the holidays. This tradition became so entrenched that during the Renaissance, the Papal States (of which Le Marche then formed part) made it obligatory.

Having placed another batch of toast and a second pot of coffee on the table on the terrace I explained that along with many other festivals of Roman origin, the Catholic Church soon muscled in on things and sought to Christianise these pagan festivities as early as the 5^th century AD when it established The Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary bang in the middle of the feriae augusti.  Since then, 15^th August has marked the day on which the Virgin is claimed to have ascended to Heaven at the end of her life on earth and so is officially the reason why it is a public holiday in Italy.

While we were still trying to decide whether or not to spend that public holiday as custom dictated, I added that during the first part of the twentieth century, Mussolini gave the festival a more secular and political flavour. Another quick google enabled Nick to fill in the sketchily-remembered details for me: Il Duce’s fascist regime began organising discounted trips for workers through its Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Recreational Club), which was conceived as a means of competing with the Socialists in terms of providing for workers’ welfare. The scheme, known as ‘the People’s Trains of Ferragosto’, ran from 1931 to 1939 and gave the working classes the opportunity to take short trips to the seaside, the mountains or cultural sites. This, I then recalled, is why present-day tourists are still able to visit museums, monuments and galleries on 15^th August even though many other amenities are closed. And as this initiative was aimed chiefly at city dwellers and workers, it turned Ferragosto from an almost exclusively rural affair into a festival for all the labouring classes and as such was effectively a fore-runner of modern mass tourism. Since the People’s Train trips did not include meals, however, travellers had to bring their own food with them, so the picnic quickly came to be one of the defining features of the fascist era Ferragosto, and the tradition has stuck.

It was already late morning by the time we had finished our extended breakfast and our fact-checking, and by this time the weather over the Sibillini Mountains was looking even more threatening. So with a lakeside picnic now definitely looking ill-advised, we broke with tradition and opted to go for an ice cream in the village instead and then, despite the thunder eventually delivering much less than it had promised, to spend the rest of the afternoon with our respective books, sketch pads and podcasts before making our own pizzas for dinner. It might not have been the traditional way to mark Ferragosto, but I don’t think Emperor Augustus would have minded too much.

It somehow felt rather like time travel. There we were, my nephew, his partner, Mr Blue-Shirt and I, sitting beneath a warm inky sky in a 3000-seater arena inspired by the Romans, built a couple of decades before the Risorgimento originally as a venue for a game created in the Renaissance, ready to watch an opera set during the Napoleonic Wars that was written at the very start of the 20^th century: Tosca.

One of the best-known and best-loved works of the mainstream operatic repertoire – and a personal favourite of all four of us – Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca is a tragic story of love and betrayal, power and politics. In a nutshell, the action unfolds in Rome in June 1800 with the city under French occupation. Floria Tosca, a singer, is the lover of Mario Cavaradossi,a painter. Baron Scarpia, the corrupt Chief of Police who has long lusted after Tosca and who is willing to go to any lengths to have her, suspects Cavaradossi of assisting an escaped political prisoner, Cesare Angelotti. Cavaradossi is soon arrested and tortured for helping Angelotti to flee, so Scarpia tells Tosca that she can end her lover’s suffering if she reveals Angelotti’s whereabouts. Unable to bear her lover’s screams of agony any longer, she eventually succumbs, to Cavaradossi’s later dismay. But Scarpia is still not satisfied as it is Tosca herself that he really wants. So he offers her a deal: if she gives herself to him, Cavaradossi can go free. She is revolted by the prospect but when she hears preparations being made for her lover’s execution, in despair she agrees to submit to him and Scarpia duly instructs his men to carry out a mock execution. As Scarpia forces himself on Tosca, however, she kills him. But her triumph soon turns to horror as Cavaradossi is later executed before her eyes and she realises that Scarpia had double-crossed her. She has no time to mourn her lover’s death, though, as Scarpia’s henchmen are on their way to arrest her for his murder and so she flees. They chase her up onto a parapet and with no means of escape now left to her, she flings herself to her death.

Surrounded by all the Neo-classical architectural splendour of Lo Sferisterio, we were all fully expecting the traditional bicorn hats and muskets, tight bodices and sweeping cloaks. But what the director of this production had in store for us was in fact another leg on our journey through time, for she (yes, she: Valentina Carrasco) had chosen a Hollywood film studio during the 1950s McCarthy era as the setting for her interpretation of the work. In Ms Carrasco’s telling of the story, Scarpia is now a McCarthyite film producer seeking to root out Hollywood ‘Commies’, which Scarpia suspects Angelotti of being, while Cavaradossi is depicted as a communist sympathiser and Tosca as an up-and-coming film actress. A film being made about the occupation of Rome by Napoleon’s forces provides the backdrop for the action between the three main protagonists, and this ‘film within an opera’ device is developed further by various characters using hand-held movie cameras to film key scenes and arias such as Cavaradossi’s torture and Tosca revealing Angelotti’s hiding place, with the images, mostly in close-up, projected in black and white onto the vast wall at the back of the stage.

Scarpia’s predatory advances to Tosca and her resistance to them are handled in the same way, and with the almost painfully tight close-ups of the powerful film producer preying on the vulnerable an desperate young actress, Ms Carrasco brings us another step forward in time by drawing clear parallels to the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and the origins of the ‘Me Too’ movement.  And the action takes another step closer to the present day at the deadly climax of the opera which even appears to take on echoes of the recent Alex Baldwin incident – although because this is so recent, it is possible that this may be ‘happy’ coincidence rather than yet more clever adaptation work.

I am pretty open to modern interpretations of classic dramatic works at the best of times as I am drawn to their ability to underscore the universality and timelessness of the themes their plots explore. But none I have seen has come anywhere close to the inventiveness and relevance of this particular re-telling. Locating the ‘film within an opera’ scenes at the sides of the mighty, 40-metre-wide stage while keeping the main action tightly in focus in the centre and then using the imposing back wall as an almost full-size cinema screen turned the practical difficulties of the physical setting into an artistic virtue; and then the McCarthy era setting along with all its more current film industry references transformed what some consider a slightly clichéd, late Victorian melodrama into a genuinely gripping, heart-wrenching and modern thriller, to which Ms Carrasco even managed to add a feminist edge. Who said that opera has to be all about mythical kingdoms, consumptive heroines, and swashbuckling heroes?

As the audience spilled back out onto the pavement at well past midnight, we caught snatches of their conversations on the mild night air, all of them along the same lines.
“Tosca’s voice was stunning…”
“Wasn’t the Scarpia-Weinstein reference clever…”
“The end of Act I gave me good-bumps…”
“Projecting Cavaradossi’s torture onto the back wall really added to the drama…”
“I was so impressed with that orchestra…”
“The whole McCarthy thing worked so well…”
“That baritone made Scarpia such a bastard…”
And there was not a single comment that any of us could disagree with. On the way back home and then over a late supper of cheese and biscuits we shared our favourite moments, googled McCarthy and Un-American Activities hearings, shared our opinions of the quality of the singing and wondered how on earth Valentina Carrasco had come up with such an inspired idea in the first place. And the four of us concluded that it had been by far the most adventurous and captivating production of this classic work that any of us had ever seen – and all in a two-hundred-year-old converted sports stadium in the provincial depths of Le Marche.

We initially came across the place way back in 2009 on our first fact-finding tour of Le Marche when we spent a couple of nights in the large hilltop town of Macerata. Our room in the tiny hotel looked straight out onto a section of enormously tall, blank brick wall which a quick look at the city street map told us was the rear of Lo Sferisterio. A similarly quick look in our well-thumbed Lonely Planet guide told us this large outdoor arena hosted a major opera festival every summer, but as it turned out we had missed the month-long event for that year, we just mentally logged it as an interesting thing to have in the vicinity should we happen to end up in that neck of the woods.

The place remained on our radar, though, especially as the regular holidays we started to take in the area often included a good mooch among the honey-toned palazzi in Macerata’s historical centre and maybe a meal in one of its bustling piazze. However, since these trips were typically timed to coincide with a blacksmithing event in Tuscany that is always held in September, we were still always too late for the opera festival. But over time – and certainly once we had decided this was the part of Le Marche we wanted to move to – we did at least find out a little more about this unique venue.

Lo Sferisterio resembles an ancient Roman arena – albeit an elongated one that has been sliced in half lengthways by an 18m-high wall – but it was actually built in the 1820s. Its name is derived from the Latin word sphaeristerium which in Roman times was the term for a large open space dedicated to ball games and often formed part of a complex including baths. And as such, rather than hosting gladiatorial contests, chariot races or executions, its primary purpose was as a venue for the then very popular sport of pallone col bracciale (‘ball with bracelet’). This game, which could be described as some kind of a cross between tennis, squash and handball is thought to have originated in about the 16^th century. Although there are several variations, it normally involves teams of three players hitting a solid, leather ball back and forth, not with rackets or bats, but with a spiked wooden cuff (or bracelet) that extends from the fist to the middle of the forearm. It was effectively Italy’s national sport until the early 20^th century when football started to take over, eventually leaving just a handful of places where it is still played – including, incidentally, the pretty town of Treia, which is under 20km from Macerata. Despite the sport’s continued popularity locally, however, Macerata’s Sferisterio gradually fell into decline as a pallone col bracciale venue, but at the start of the 1920s, its surprisingly good acoustics were discovered, quite by chance, apparently. As a result, the arena was quickly converted into an outdoor music venue and its first production, Verdi’s Aida, was staged there in 1921, although the internationally renowned Sferisterio Opera Festival of today wasn’t formally established until 1967.

This unique venue still never got any further than our radar, though, even after we ended up living within sight of Macerata’s domes and towers that stand silhouetted against the skyline barely 12km to the west of us. The 2018 season, during our first full summer here, coincided with a final overland trip to the UK to tie up the remaining loose ends of our transfer to Italy, while the demolition of the pigsty and the building of the first section of the wrap-around terrace meant that the 2019 season passed us by too. The 2020 season was cancelled all together because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and although the 2021 season ran with limited capacity, we still didn’t feel comfortable going to large public events at that stage. But when my nephew, a professional conductor, and his partner, a proficient organist as well as a doctor, said they wanted to come and stay with us at the end of July – ie slap-bang in the middle of this year’s festival – we had the best reason possible to get our act together and finally book tickets. Better still, of this year’s trio of operas, it was Puccini’s Tosca, a personal favourite of all of us, that was the one that coincided with their visit.

And the experience was every bit as magical as we had hoped as we found ourselves sitting beneath the star-sprinkled sky in this 3,000-seater arena with its spectacularly lit Doric-style columns running around the long, curved side that houses two tiers of boxes and below them, the huge, fan-shaped main auditorium. What really makes it a venue completely unlike any other though, is the mighty forty-metre-wide stage that spreads out in front of the vast and imposing wall that forms the arena’s straight side and thus provides an arresting backdrop to every performance. All of which, effectively of necessity, results in productions unlike any other too. And this particular telling of Tosca, with its timeless themes of love, betrayal, politics and power, was certainly nothing like any that the four of us had ever seen before – but also much more current, gripping and heart-wrenching than any that the four of us had ever seen before…

Like all good stories, to be continued…

They may have been our fourth set of visitors so far this year, but their stay felt no less momentous as a result. For this visit was the first time my nephew, the youngest of my late sister’s three grown-up children, and his partner had come to stay with us, either in the UK or here in Italy. Consequently, with so much catching up to do, so many sights to see, so many places to go and so many things to say, there was little time for putting pen to paper. So after a couple of days’ pause for reflection, here are some snapshots of a very special few days expressed in haiku.

That same sweet fizz of
Excitement, rising as if
Bubbles in champagne

An embrace so tight
I feel our hearts beat in time
Pumping our shared blood

Languid splashing in
Limpid lake and sapphire sea
Bathed in golden sun

Shared love of music
A night at the opera
Goose-bumps and tingles

Sprawled beneath bright stars
Wine-loosened conversation
Late into the night

Sharing memories
That connect aunt and nephew
Now and for all time

Weaving more tightly
The tapestry of kinship
That time cannot fray

I realised when I saw the first posters for the event that we had actually only been once, back in 2018 – our first summer here. In 2019 we were still too fearful to leave the house empty following our second break-in only a couple of months earlier. In 2020 we were between lockdowns, but all public gatherings, even outdoor ones, were still prohibited. And in 2021, although outdoor events were allowed by mid-summer, Covid restrictions had been lifted too late to leave enough time to organise everything. So last weekend was the first time since that first summer that we had been to one of Montelupone’s biggest events, the four-day long annual Festa della Pizza.

Four years on, however, our experience of it felt very different, right from when sat down for an aperitivo on the terrace of the café in the main square. Back in 2018, we knew hardly anyone in the village and were still very new to village life. These days, though we are greeted by the café staff as regulars not tourists, and as we waited for our drinks to be served, we pinged messages back and forth with the two sets of friends we had arranged to meet, agreeing that Francesco and Donatella should go and get in the queue while we stayed at the café to wait for Lori and Antonio. Although they only live in the next village but one, they had never been to this event before, so this time they were the ‘newbies’ while we were the ‘old hands’, ready to show them the ropes.

So busy was the village, they eventually arrived a good half hour late having struggled to find a parking space, so we all set straight off to the little park where the festa was being held. This well-hidden space nestles between the square where the war memorial is located and the ancient walls that encircle the village centre. And as we walked through the gateway, we were delighted to find that the event we had such fond memories of seemed pretty much exactly as we had remembered. Just as before, the space was thronged with people, euro-pop was blaring from speakers, strings of lights were dancing in the breeze, and the warm evening air was rich with the aroma of freshly baked pizza. We ushered Antonio and Lori past the dance floor and the stage for the band that was due on later, both of which were in the same place as before beneath the magnificent cedar tree that dominates the park, and directed them towards the pair of cash desks on our right.
“We need to order and pay for our pizzas and drinks here and they’ll give us separate receipts for our pizzas and our drinks which we take over there.” I pointed towards the long narrow marquee where the pizzas were being made and that, together with the bar, ran the entire length of the far side of the park. Having placed our order, Mr Blue-Shirt took our drinks receipt and joined the queue for the bar and Antonio went off in search of Francesco and Donatella while Lori and I headed for the pizza marquee.
“Do we have to queue up again, then?” asked Lori.
“Not as such,” I said, indicating the gaggle of people crowding around a long bench across the entrance to the pizza marquee at which stood a tiny woman wearing a fluorescent yellow ‘crew’ T-shirt and holding a microphone. “But we do have to wait for them to call out our order number – look.” I showed her the number printed on the corner of our receipt.
“zeta cento quattro!” called the woman over the crackly PA system, plucking a ticket from where it was tucked into the stack of pizza boxes that had just been deposited on the bench.
“Si, io!” yelled someone in the crowd and waved their receipt at the caller who then checked the number before handing over the order.
“What number are we?” asked Mr Blue-Shirt, suddenly appearing at my elbow with a tray of drinks.
“Z123,” I said with a grimace.
“If they’re only up to Z104, we might as well go and find the others. Francesco has just messaged me to say they’ve got their pizzas and have bagged a table in there.” He gestured towards the open-sided marquee from which spilled rows of trestle tables and benches already crammed with diners munching pizza.
“You go,” said Lori, taking our drinks from the tray. “We’ll wait here. Our order shouldn’t take too long, should it?”
“A quaranta nove!” blasted over the tannoy as Mr Blue-Shirt disappeared into the marquee.
“A49 is from the other cash desk,” I explained in response to Lori’s puzzled expression as she passed me my drink. “So there are effectively two queues. We could be here quite a while.”
“Oh, well, it’s probably cooler out here anyway,” said Lori with a shrug.

So in between sipping our drinks and chatting, we watched the pizza-making operation going on in the marquee. This was teeming with volunteers in their acid yellow ‘crew’ T-shirts and white aprons, and was furnished with a row of tables that formed the pizza production line. At one stood a team forming dough into plump balls, at the next stood the dough-rolling team, and at a third volunteers were ladling rich tomato sauce onto the wafer-thin bases. Then came the topping-adding team, and finally the mozzarella-scattering crew. Here, the finished pizzas were lined up ready for the pizza chefs to slide them onto long-handled paddles and feed them into the roaring maw of the one of the four huge wood-burning pizza ovens that dominated the marquee. After just three or four minutes, the bubbling, sizzling discs were slid back out of the fiery caverns and passed to the pizza-boxing crew who brought each completed order to the front of the marquee. And eventually it was our order that arrived on the bench.
“Zeta cento venti tre!”
“Si, io!” I cried, waving our receipt in the approved manner.

We jostled our way out through the crowd with our pizza boxes and went to find the others. As we threaded our way among the tables I exchanged greetings with Luca, one of our local Carabinieri who was there with his family, then with Silvia who runs the village laundry and dry cleaners, and all but bumped into Alessandro, the builder who helped out with the demolition of the pigsty and who may well end up re-building out our cantina, before arriving at the table at the back of the marquee where the others were waiting for us. Francesco and Donatella had already finished their pizzas, so we just had time to say hello, have a chat with Lillia, Francesco’s mum (whose hens provide us with most of our eggs these days), and to be introduced to his sister and coo over his brand-new baby niece before they all went back to the square for an ice-cream and we took over their seats.

Since the live band had started their set by now, conversation was difficult, so while we ate, I looked around the marquee. Unlike four years earlier, I saw lots of faces I recognised from around the village as well as a couple of our neighbours with whom we are on regular nodding and waving terms, along with the chap who used to live in Cambridge and who always collars Mr Blue-Shirt whenever he seems him to ask what he thinks of Boris Johnson’s latest antics. And from over by the entrance, I even got a cheery wave from Massimiliano, the Carabinieri station commander who was so kind to us after the burglaries and who had clearly drawn the short straw that evening as he was there in uniform.

Antonio dabbed the last traces of tomato sauce from his lips. “That was excellent,” he bellowed over the music, tossing his napkin into the empty pizza box. “In fact, I’m already thinking about hiring a couple of those ovens for a pizza event at the motor cycle club. What do you reckon?”  Lori and I rolled our eyes at each other as held forth on this latest big idea for the club into which he has drawn us both over the last year or so. And while we finished eating, I reflected just how far we had come since the last time we had eaten pizza in that marquee. Back then we felt like outsiders and mere observers of village life; now we felt like real participants and utterly at home.

It was right back close to the start of the pandemic that the town council in Montelupone set up a comune WhatsApp group. Originally it was used solely for passing on Covid-19 information, help and advice to residents of the village while everyone was in lockdown. Gradually, though, the group came to be used for an ever-wider variety of purposes including thunderstorm warnings, pension distribution dates and changes to the school bus timetable. It has also been used to disseminate information on the annual ‘flu jab programme, school closures due to snow, power outages thanks to maintenance work to mains cables, road closures resulting from re-surfacing works, as well as local Covid testing and vaccination programmes, and even for Christmas messages from the mayor. 

Regardless of whether the announcements are of relevance to us personally – and in all honesty, many are not – we enjoy the succession of snapshots they provide of the vibrant community we are part of. Just in the last couple of months we have received details of the list of road closures to allow the Giro d’Italia to pass through Montelupone, the days on which anti-mozzie spraying would be carried out, and information on the council-funded programme of children’s activities being run over the school holidays. And more recently, we’ve received the new local ordinance on water usage in light of the extremely hot and dry period we’ve endured since mid-June that has pushed temperatures well above what would normally be expected in August, but without any of the accompanying thunderstorms that normally provide a welcome temperature reset. So it seemed somewhat ironic that, just the day after being informed of rules that until the end of September ban the topping up of swimming pools and washing cars at home, and ban watering the garden except on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays (and then only between 10pm and 7am), we received a warning for heavy storms and strong winds for the following 24 hours. In our experience, the Protezione Civile do seem to err very much on the side of caution, but they did get it bang on this time round. The next evening we were indeed battered by one of the most vicious thunderstorms we have seen since we’ve been here.  Luckily, we had hedged our bets a little on this occasion and had at least closed the parasols and brought all the seat cushions in before the storm was due, but we still ended up with plant pots toppled like skittles and garden furniture tossed across the lawn like children’s toys. But we did get the temperature reset we had been longing for, with a drop of about twelve degrees in little more than two hours.

While the only unusual thing about this latest storm warning was its accuracy, the message we received first thing last Monday morning was rather less quotidian. For it warned us, not of storms or road closures or bus cancellations, but of the presence of wolves in immediate locality! The lengthy warning included advice on deterring wolves, such as disposing of organic waste carefully, not leaving food out for animals at night, and – a tad superfluously, I thought – not trying to feed any that happen to come onto your property.  And should we actually see any wolves, the official advice is, for the record, to move away quietly but remain vigilant if they are between 50 and 100 metres away, but if they are under 50 metres away, to scare them off by yelling, waving your arms and throwing sticks or stones towards them (not at them) and to retreat slowly while keeping the animals in front of you. Rather incongruously, the message also included a breathless-sounding request to send photographs or videos of any sightings to the council offices as soon as possible, but then recovered its more serious tone with a reminder in red capitals that the wolf is a protected species and that killing one is a criminal offence.

The Italian (or Apennine) Wolf is native to the Italian Peninsula and numbers remained high until well into the 19^th century thanks to a cultural respect for the species dating back to Roman times that made killing wolves unacceptable. After all, according to Roman mythology, a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the twins who are said to have founded Rome, and wolves were also strongly associated with Mars, the Roman god of war, guardian of agriculture and of the Roman people. Consequently, wolves were never killed for food or used as sacrifices in religious rituals, while the use of wolf parts – such as teeth, fur or fat – was commonplace in Italian folk medicine.

From about the 1850s onwards, however, their numbers declined steeply, principally as a result of hunting, either for sport or to protect commercial livestock. Poisoning campaigns after World War II accelerated their decline further, and by the start of the 1970s, when the World Wildlife Fund for Italy carried out a census, numbers were found to have reached an all-time low of barely 100 animals. And these were confined to a remote mountainous strip of territory extending south from the Sibillini Mountains to the far end of the Apennine chain in Calabria.

At this point, the country regained some of its historical regard for wolves and hunting them was outlawed in 1971. Since then, other forms of protection, at national and at EU level, have been added, including a compensation scheme for farmers who lose livestock to wolves. As a result of such measures, the population has increased continuously ever since and now stands at well over 2000 animals. Thanks to the natural dispersal process whereby the young leave the pack in search of new companions and territories, that population is now also distributed over the entire length of the country – albeit still largely confined to mountainous areas – and has even reached parts of south-east France and Switzerland.

And Montelupone, it would appear. To be honest, we find this quite surprising. Although we are very much in a rural area, it is criss-crossed by a number of busy roads that are distinctly wolf-unfriendly, and prey would seem limited as most farming is arable and, apart from sheep, any livestock is kept indoors. Added to which, we are a good 60 to 70km from the wolf’s mountain habitat. That said, I imagine the extreme weather may have driven them down from the mountains in search of food and water, or perhaps it’s simply the result of population growth. Or maybe it’s just the comune erring on the side of caution again. But then again, I did see some alarmingly big paw prints on the road when I was out running the other day. And it is also perhaps worth bearing in mind that ‘Montelupone’ actually translates as ‘Big Wolf Mountain’, so…