New and improved in CVS

New vegetable van and New Awning

It is pretty hot here and I feel it is affecting me more than last year. It was around 95f today and the sun is intense. We did get out to the market and noticed some changes around town. The vegetable van guy has got a new truck with better speakers and more melodious songs. He is still shouting out his wares, but if one spoke Italian, it might be possible to know what he is saying. The second change makes one of Jim’s paintings history. Al’Kaffe now has a blue awning instead of the red one in Jim’s drawing. I took some pictures of this event at the busiest intersection in town, but I could not capture the excitement and danger in still photos. A car, with a child standing in the front seat holding on to the dash, turns left in front of the parked vegetable truck while another car comes from the right, a four wheeler wants to turn left out of the street across from the piazza and it all happens at the same moment. Elderly women in black totter down the 1/2 meter wide sidewalk as cars fly by on a two way street. There is frequent backing up and pulling forward when they all, when, as if by design reach the intersection. It is all exacerbated by the car with the new awnings on top, the vegetable van and six cars are parked illegally in the piazza. In between all this people try to cross the street. It doesn’t matter if you are six or 100. The cars are not going to stop and let you cross. Another car parked illegally, headed down a one way street, is smoking while pulling out toddler ware from racks in his car. He and the shop owner debate styles and prices. Tomorrow I think I may sit and draw there. It is an amazing ballet of near misses and disasters.

Wildflowers

Capochinno

Madonna on the Half Shell

Out to Dinner and First Pastel of 2012

This is the view from their terrace near the end of dinner.

Last night we went to dinner at Rolf and Kirsten. I will be teaching the workshop at her studio. Bjorne and Karin drove us over. Just when I am getting used to being the only non-Italian speaker I had to get used to being the only non-Danish speaker, but they spoke English quite a bit for our sake. Danish is hard for Jim. It was a fabulous meal including two deserts. When you sit at the table for five hours you can eat a lot.

Jim and I went out early and did our first pastels of the summer. It is very hot today so we wanted to be able to accomplish something before midday.

At 1:30 the fireworks went off again and I didn’t even bother to go look out the window. As you will see by the photo, what is the point?

We have been doing lots of laundry the last couple of days and I wanted to share that with you. On a hot day having laundry hanging at the front of the terrace, with the breeze coming through is nice.















No more watching black and white Italian TV for ten minutes a day. They have switched to digital here. The TV is now in the cave along with other relics of ancient life in Italy. We were able to take down our ugly antenna and the wires that ran down from the terrace to the second floor. Now we understand why every house we have been in has a new TV.

Last year I posted a picture of this man’s garden, because of all his water bottles. 

Now I wanted to taunt Vermont gardeners with this picture of his corn and tomatoes in mid-June.

This is a woman of Castelvecchio walking from the Supermarcato toward the Alfa Romeo dealership.

Fireworks and other things

A Horse runs by our house!!


I am missing the things that irritated me so much my first visit. Where is the traveling fruit and vegetable guys calling out indiscernible announcements? Why aren’t there dozens of motorcycles, even though it is Saturday? Why aren’t farmers filling their water wagons constantly? And why are there fireworks during the day over by Castel d’Irie? Besides us, out on our balcony, we only saw two other people who bothered to look out their windows. Fireworks in the day? What, you foreigners do them at night? So weird. It must be an important day in Abruzzi history. 

Now I have learned that all fireworks are done in the day. Of course. There was a rock concert in Castel d’ Irie last night so it must have been some sort of big saint’s day there. They also set off some fireworks this morning at 8am. It sounded like bombs. Jim and I were out doing our first pastels on the road behind Castelvecchio. There are many wildflowers and bees. The colors of the greens are like spring.

Caffe!!


It has been a trying two days, but everything is under control as far as we know. This would not be possible without good friends and at least a couple of people who speak some English and the Danes who speak perfect English. Our friend Marello at the hardware store called Paulo to come and fix our broken pipes. I could have called him, and said, “water broken help”. He was there within an hour and then came back in the evening to do the job. He even missed the Italian team playing football. Paulo had to use a hammer and chisel to fight his way through the outside wall of the bathroom. He has state of the art pipe benders and fasteners, but then he pulled out a large piece of horse tail and cut some off and wrapped it around the threads to make a better seal than tape. He said that horse hair expands when it gets wet.  He will be back later to plaster the wall, we can’t see it so we don’t care, as long as it is before September. He charged 70E which is ridiculous so we gave him 100E.

The Hole in the Wall.

After the water was fixed, Jim went to turn on the gas. Now the next discovery! The gas was turned off and had been locked by someone. Luckily we have our grill so we still had dinner. Our friend Victorio road by on his bicycle and we ran down to greet him and of course ask him questions about the gas and the trash. The next morning we went to the Commune (city hall) and he had already found out the gas was off because we had not paid the bills. He had talked to the gas company and if we went to the post office and paid the bill he would fax it to the gas company and they would turn on the gas. All of this happened as promised. He also gave us our tax bill which we paid. Just a couple of examples of how you can think you know what you are doing, but you don’t. The money we left with Victorio was just for the trash: not the taxes. Sorry to everyone we told the taxes were so cheap. They are actually about $300 per year. Jim and Gregor had been to the gas company to get the bill paid through the bank, but that obviously didn’t happen. Jim had been using this as an example of how one can communicate and get things done without speaking a language. So forget that idea.

The Commune Castelvecchio Subequo


Now the water and gas are working and we have our cool compost bin provided by the Commune. They pick up organic material and trash two times a week, but there should hardly be any trash as there are recycling bins down the street for glass, cardboard and plastic. I know we could do this in Vermont. It has to be made easy with the bins and degradable plastic bags provided. All the towns in this valley are working together. I think our neighbors that have the garden seem to have big bags of compost that they are using.

Castelvecchio Subequo

My Garden
We planted Million Bells, basil and rosemary. The soil is as hard as rock, but by slowly adding water I was able to turn it back to dirt.

Yummy!



And now we are here and I am pretty sure we never left, the winter, the ups and downs the worries seem far away. Coming back to a place one has to wonder if it will live up to memory. It felt like coming home. With coming home there are the joys of home ownership. If our neighbors had not taken care of things, we might have come home to a foot of water from the upstairs neighbor’s pipes breaking. Enrica and Salvatore moped up the water. Now I see how frescos are ruined. The water brought out the salt in the plaster and white clouds had “bloomed on the wall”. The mediocre paint job I had done was washed away. Luckily it was not a Micodeangelo or a Di Vinci, but the effect was the same. If I hadn’t been reading about frescos the white clouds apparently growing out of the wall would have been quite alarming.

                                                                              The Market

 Our water pipes are broken in the bathroom and the resourceful, Paulo is coming to do a small fix and then a proper job on Monday. We can not get the gas in our stove to work, but we were able to use the grill to heat up pizza. The gelato was excellent, the caffe divine. We have seen many of the people that we knew last summer and my Italian is a little better this year. I can’t say much more, but I can understand more. Things are perfect, as Mica and Barry left them, but I do wish we had asked them to drain the pipes. It is good that this is a stone house or it probably would have fallen down with all the water coming in from the ceiling. Beyond that true calamity, the trash system has changed and the Commune and the internet place were both closed. But. Tomorrow is market day! We slept very well last night, we ate well today, people seemed happy to see us, and we are in Italy.

To Pratola

The bus was much more comfortable than the plane. It spent two hours in Rome picking up people. We slept through all of that. Heading out of Rome, the highway was lined with multi colored flowering shrubs. There were palm trees and other flora to attest to Rome’s tropical climate. As we climbed the hills around Rome, more and more tiny, ancient villages spilled over the tops of mountain sides or hugged steep cliffs looking down on the modern villages of the suburbs. Modern houses gave way to higglety pigglety fields of hay bales, crops the colors of Italy and tilled fields the yellow orche, raw and brunt siene of my palette, olive groves planted with such symmetry that there were diagonal rows as well as straight. A modern shepherd watching over his flock from a Jeep Ranger while the two pieranneze sheep dogs lolled in the shade. The sheep, at first glance clearly a rock strewn field, were freshly shorn with angled knobling bones almost bursting through their skin. Poppies were spread through the fields of grain, holly hocks of all colors reared up along the road side surrounded by blue, pink and yellow wildflowers. The mountains closed in, compressing the valley, at first lying like indolent lizards and then turning craggy and menacing. The clouds moved like light over a model revealing the form through the folds of land. And then the piazza in Pratola, Bijore picking us up, fnding out during our first steps in Castelvecchio that my best Italian friend’s mother had died three days ago. I had been thinking about her mother so much and about how I hoped to meet her this summer. When someone is so sad it is almost impossible to say the right thing, so maybe it is better I cannot speak and she doesn’t have to.

In Italia

In Rome we had to wait about four hours for our bus to Pratola, Abruzzo. Buses are confusing. There is no single sign board that tells the times or bus bay. There are many companies running buses. I asked five or six different people before three bus drivers, who enjoyed my Italian immensely, made it clear to me where to go. Even then we were worried. We walked the length of the terminal many times. Finally we saw another bus by the same company and then we felt mostly secure we were in the right place. It was enjoyable to watch herds of people following some unhappy looking person holding up a sign headed toward their tour bus. English, American, Middle Eastern, Swedish; we had a guess for each group.