A Tuscan View - from Umbria

20 more days

So much to look forward to here when Summer arrives, as it finally did a few weeks ago. We endured a long Winter this year and it was difficult to imagine the heat, as today it is difficult to imagine pulling on a second pair of trousers as a brace against the freezing cold. But a part of this Summer has been put on hold and tempered by the fact that our youngest child, the (not-so-small) small one, fell off her bicycle and broke both bones in her right arm.
She knew, we all knew, just by looking at it.

We took a tearful drive to the hospital and then had to make a longer journey to Perugia, as the nearest orthopaedic specialist was there on duty that afternoon.
The afternoon soon became the evening and we finally emerged, bleary eyed and blinking into the dark carpark, one of us wearing a heavy plastercast all the way up to the shoulder, set for 40 long days. Our little girl had no idea at the time what lay in store as the Summer began to take it's toll, but as we have now arrived at the 40th day, we are all at the end of our proverbial tethers.

I have been fortunate to have been otherwise preoccupied of late. Not surprisingly, things of a building nature are my immediate concern and it's a little like firefighting as I lurch from one emergency deadline to another. The stress of that is, though, tempered by allowing myself time every so often to go out in the car and 'discover' new and interesting places to draw and paint.
I call it research, and it is, but it also gives me a chance to stop for a time and focus on something other than power tools.

I just do quick sketches or small paintings to get a true sense of what it would be like for a group, then move on. So far I have a little 'library' of good places for morning painting, good places for afternoon painting, and loads of good places for lunch.

I've been busy.

For the patient back at home, unfortunately it's not quite as simple as just 'taking it off' today. You see, the bone hasn't quite set correctly and we will have to wait for the results of a final x-ray to confirm that she is now free to swim, ride her bicycle, draw, and do homework with her right hand. Our supportive, collective family-ban on all such activities seemed like a good idea at the time, but 40 days is a long time for anyone, certainly long enough for our wheatfields to turn from vivid green to golden brown.

So today has been a long time coming and, hopefully, the real Summer will start, for one little girl at least, very soon afterwards. We'll see.

The stupidest thing I did today;

I said, rather foolishly, as we went in to see the specialist, "I'm sure it'll be alright, then we can go swimming this afternoon!". Not according to the doctor.

He simply shook his head and said, "...ancora 20 giorni..." Aaaaaagh!

Zen and the art of the decespugliatore…

19th June 2008

 In London, when I used to hear a faint buzzing hum on a hot Summer’s day, it was more than likely a hovering helicopter, checking the congestion or searching for an escapee from the local prison.

When we thought of moving to Italy, one of the overriding sounds that I always imagined and hoped for was a similar faint, distant hum of Summer, but this time caused by crickets, bees, or simply the hazy heat rising.
Unfortunately I was wrong.

That sound here (especially at this time of year) is nothing to do with nature, it is the buzz of the ubiquitous ‘decespugliatore’. Americans know it as the ‘weed-whacker’ and, in England, it is simply called a ‘strimmer’.

To memorise and then to be able to pronounce this inexplicable word makes you an honorary Italian in my eyes and, despite the rising heat in Italy, my decespugliatore was hard at work today, along with so many thousands of others across the country.

Yes, grown men in orange boiler suits, you know the ones, spend hours each day strimming Italy’s countryside.

Some say Italians are a little obsessed with this method of weed control, I say no.
Once you’ve strapped on one of these beautiful machines with the correct mix of petrol and oil (‘miscela’ it’s called, available from country petrol stations on request) you can see why the hours seem to fly by.

You go into a kind of hypnotic trance, strimming away at anything that has the temerity to raise its head above about an inch off the ground. It’s mesmerising.

In England I used to feel quite sorry for anyone with that job, I just couldn’t see the attraction. Now I know that they are the lucky ones, not those fancy uniformed and sunglassed helicopter pilots.

The stupidest thing I did today;

Just got a bit carried away with my decespugliatore…now I have a little explaining to do.

Sopranome

27th May 2008
 
 Football is a funny old game and, at my level it is full of funny old players. So it is with my team mates at San Fatucchio. They are a typical mix of men from various walks of life and the game is  all the better for that; some with a love of the game because of their skills, some with a love of the game despite their skills, some who feign injury week after week, some who don’t mind being so much better than everyone else. Some who shoot rather than pass, some who spend most of the game rearranging their hair and jewellery.
There is always argument and plenty of shouting, always a pizza afterwards and plenty of laughing.


But no-one had prepared me for the arrival of Jesus.

His real name is Simone. He has long hair and a beard which I assumed was the reason for his ‘sopranome’, but the other players also wanted to impress on me that he also plays as well as Jesus.

(Italians seem to enjoy the assumption that, had he lived in Italy, Jesus would have played football like Totti.)

Simone  holds the ball, never loses it, always has time to look, never speaks, is calm, assured and a pleasure to play with, unless of course he’s not on your team.

That was when I made my big mistake. I have one talent in football, and only one. It’s not much to speak of but it tends to upset the opposition and so I use it whenever possible. The ‘nutmeg’ or, as Italians call it, the ‘tunnel’. You simply pass the ball between the opposition players legs and he is left rooted to the ground, humiliated and  unable to turn and chase you.

At school you use to have to shout out ‘NUTS!’ or ‘MEGS!’ just before you did it, to add to the humiliation.

So, to cut a long story short, I managed to nutmeg Jesus, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

But then, you see, there is an unwritten law in football that you won’t find in the Rule book. If you can nutmeg the person who nutmegged you, then you, by definition ‘un-nutmeg’ yourself and can stand proud once more. That was all Jesus wanted to do. He had the skill, and the motivation to spend the next hour and a half humiliating me, nutmegging me, not once but 5 times.

He didn’t need to score, although he did, the game was all about revenge.

The stupidest thing I did today;

See below


Can’t really believe I was suckered into this one. Their names are ‘Maybe-Melven’ and ‘Mitzy-Mittens’.
Yes, two kittens who have leapt off their chocolate box and into the arms of our speechless children.
But, perhaps, not as speechless as the vet will be when I try to explain those names...

Ochres and Umbers

22nd May 2008

 The problem with finishing the website, offering painting holidays, giving out dates, and gradually getting towards the end of the building project is that I suddenly realised that I’ve not done much painting for quite a while. I’ve done plenty of other things; sandblasting, digging and worrying mostly, but there’s not been much time to paint.

So, the other day I determined to go out and do just that, in case I’d forgotten how.

 

When I took trips to Italy some years ago, we would often stop in the art stores to get materials and I was always intrigued by the difference between the palette of colours available here to those I routinely found in England. They reflect the landscape and the towns of Italy with warmer cadmiums for yellows and reds, and loads of ochres and umbers to make up the box set. I suppose it’s obvious really.
    
 

Anyway they give you a good head start and allow you to concentrate on what you’re looking at. These three paintings were about the different lights that fall on the walls and windows around here. They are small watercolours and perhaps a little fussy but, as with all representational paintings, they make you look that much harder and appreciate that much more of your everyday surroundings.

Problem now is that I really should get back to the digging…

The stupidest thing I did today;

Made two big mistakes at football tonight - firstly suggesting that we play 'old men' versus 'young men'. Whilst I was happy to concede that I would be one of the 'anziani', my Italian teammates were less forthcoming and rather reluctant to admit their ages. A bit embarassing. And we lost.
The second mistake would take too long to explain but, suffice to say, I nutmegged Jesus. I promise to expand in my next post...

The rule of threes

20th April 2008

I know things don’t happen in threes, no more than they happen in twos or fours, but people keep mentioning my two recent building site incidents and mentioning this ‘three’ thing, and I am starting to wonder. So this morning I was extra careful, hoping the third thing might happen to someone else.

Me, being extra careful.

The second thing was a nasty cut to the head, requiring stitches.
My friend interrupted his holiday with us to take me to the hospital in Citta della Pieve, careful not to get my blood on his car seat. Once there I may have made a mistake. I assumed that because someone works at a hospital and wears a uniform, he or she must be a doctor.
Two men in bright orange uniforms quickly gave me a combination of; head-shave, local anaesthetic and stitches.

It was only later, when I was leaving the hospital after the obligatory cranial x-ray, that I noticed two similarly dressed men putting up a wobbly wooden fence around the town walls. Then I saw them again, on the motorway, painting white lines, quite badly.
Now I look at my stitches in a different light. They are the sort you draw onto a face when you’re 6 years old, or the sort you would do if you had absolutely no medical training and were having a bit of a laugh while the doctor was at lunch.
I will spare you the photos.

Spring, in our garden, seems to have sprung - by the way

The stupidest thing I did today;
Watched ‘Cloverfield’ – where do I go to claim those 84 minutes of my life back?

Dyed hair and false smiles

8th April 2008

It would be hard to miss the election about to happen in Italy, not because our tv is filled with grey-suited, bespectacled men with dyed hair and false smiles, and not because the adverts are punctuated by explanations of how the complicated voting system works. It is simply that every public place; car parks, piazzas and municipal parks, has suddenly been filled with large, metal, grey election poster boards, presumably designed to keep the unsuspecting buildings poster-free.

I won’t pretend to understand anything about Italian politics or the machinations of the voting system, but suffice to say that after the election there are a lot of ‘conversations’ in smoke-filled rooms as the parties form tenuous coalitions with each other to achieve a working majority. This then results in a government which is quite soon held to ransom by all the smaller parties until the tenuous coalitions fall apart and the working majority is lost and we have another election and the large, metal, grey election poster boards come out again.

Someone once told me that if you go to a dinner party in England, the subjects to avoid are religion, sex, and politics. But in Italy, whether at breakfast, lunch or dinner they are the only topics of conversation.

Political manoeuvrings are an Italian tradition, they have been going on for centuries, and almost every fresco, sculpture and painting in Florence owes its existence to the blind ambition or overt gratitude of a benefactor with one eye on the heavens and the other firmly over his shoulder.

This goes some way to explaining the appearance on fresco cycles of the faces of so many wealthy Florentines. As many as five hundred years ago, a little advertising and a little publicity did you no harm at all, you could even carve on the façade of a church the fact that you paid for it and, more importantly, how much it cost!

The stupidest thing I did today;
Momentary lapse in concentration whilst holding a chisel and swinging a hammer

Tufa

18th March 2008

I made a rather foolish decision a few days ago. The job was to smash down a small building attached to the house to make way for a large terrace. At my disposal was a very nice, orange digger (see picture) which is designed to knock down small buildings in a matter of minutes, or, alternatively I could choose to spend the rest of my life taking it down by hand to save the bricks for later.

Me and my digger

That was the first bad decision. Then, yesterday, when deciding where the drains and septic tanks need to go, it was decided that the perfect spot would be where I had just spent 3 days piling up those 562 big, water-heavy bricks (trust me, I did count them)
So now I have to move them to the other side of the garden, by hand, which gives me another chance to count them, I suppose.

Tufa - beautiful, but heavy when wet.

Who would have thought that the main topic of conversation at my 6 year olds parents’ evening would be the fact that of all the children in her class, only Lorenzo eats his vegetables and absolutely no-one eats the minestrone. Those parents who weren’t busy chatting on their mobile phones looked most upset except, of course, for Lorenzo’s mother who almost felt the need to stand up in her moment of pride. This was, fortunately, the only moment when individuals were singled out. Most of the parents were cowering in fear of the public humiliation at the hands of a teacher who was literally foaming at the mouth as she explained her exasperation at coping with such an ‘unruly’ lot.
However I managed to escape unscathed from both sets of teachers, now I just have to work out how our two children manage to transform themselves into little angels between 8.30am and 4.30pm.

The stupidest thing I did today;
See above...

Vladimir and the villagers

13th February 2008

This ‘optimistic’ blog struggles to retain its optimism sometimes; red tape, ever escalating prices, never escalating temperatures and a dog whose diet of stolen foods makes for a vet’s bill much higher than it ought to be.

To give you an idea, last week he claimed; one pound of butter, a babybel cheese (including wax and wrapper), two pairs of sunglasses, various items from the cat litter tray, and as much of our rubbish as he could shove into his mouth before we caught him.

Having said all that. I was then privileged to witness the most extreme example of Italian’s love of their mobile phones. I have discovered that there is nowhere and no occasion in which you cannot or should not answer your phone. But there had to be a limit, and now I think I have found that limit. At the vets, taking the temperature of my dog, you might have thought that she could miss a call, but no. With one hand up my dog’s backside and the other ferreting around her white coat for the mobile, even the dog had to laugh.

Had a fantastic afternoon, without the dog, photographing the railway station in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. I put a few of the best ones in the sidebar…

The stupidest thing I did today;

Dipping out of my ‘theme’ for a change, I found out something very useful today which might stop me doing something stupid in the future. According to local legend, our builder, Vladimir, once ‘took on’ a whole village after a dispute in a bar. I must remember that.

Sounds simple enough...

2nd February 2008

When we bought the house, one of the main attractions for us was the fact that much of it had remained untouched for many years. The rust, the peeling paint and the beauty of its decay are bound up with its unique character. We are now making decisions which will affect the way the house will look for at least the next few decades and we don’t want to spoil those things that made us love it in the first place.
Sounds simple enough, but it’s not.

One good example is the doors and windows. They were made of metal. Old rusty metal and, according to most, must now be changed into ‘traditional’ hardwood with double glazing and a protective polyurethane seal to prevent wear and tear. We are suggesting to our builder that we quite like wear and tear and would ideally like rusty metal windows and doors, just like they used to be.

The floors. Many years and countless euros have been wasted trying to make ceramic tiles look like traditional handmade cotto ones. The argument is; pay more, lay them easily, and you never have to touch them again, they will stay like that forever. Aaaagh! We are suggesting to our builder that we would like to see them change over time with successive, deepening layers of wax, just like they used to.

Now it looks as though we are going to be ‘on our own’ for the floor, and that means choosing, buying, laying and treating it all myself.
Sounds simple enough, but that won't be either.

The stupidest thing I did today;

I'm not sure, but I think I may have killed my new best friend

Makita - my new best friend (possibly deceased)

New Year

12th January 2008

New Year and a time to reorganise, revitalise and prioritise. First of all (and most importantly), new boots - steel toe-caps, acid-proof, burn-proof, water-proof and rubbery. Next I have to start thinking about the year ahead. This is the big one and, if our project is going to work, we'll probably know by this time next year, so we have to get ourselves sorted. My job has now been split into two halves; morning and afternoons building (with new boots), and evenings trying to figure out how to use Dreamweaver and Flash to get our websites going (probably still in new boots). Not sure which is the hardest but, on balance, the frustrations of technology seem to outweigh those of a sledgehammer. My brain is being stretched and it doesn't like it.
Of course the antidote to all this is only about an hour away from us and is one of the reasons we are here. Florence.

Piazza della Signoria, Florence, at night.

We had to go over the Christmas period just to see what was going on and we weren't disappointed. The lights and the lighting proved to be as captivating and magical as we could have imagined, and even the children stayed the course with barely a murmur of discontent.
I haven't yet become used to, or complacent about, the fact that we are lucky enough to get onto the motorway a few miles from our house, and our choice of destinations, according to the big green signs, is as below. How could anyone grumble about that?

The stupidest thing I did today;
A new year and, so far, completely stupid-free.