Easter in the South of Italy

Paestum

Well, it’s been a social whirlwind for the past week, which means no time to blog. But this is the first time I’ve experienced Easter here, and it’s interesting because it’s even bigger than Christmas. There must be some arcane religious reason why Catholics celebrate the resurrection more and C of E celebrates the nativity more, but who knows what it is? I ought to look it up, probably.

Gifts were exchanged with neighbours. Much in evidence was a cake made of ricotta and grains of wheat and egg and orange blossom water. It seemed to come in both sweet and savoury versions, and at the party for Pasquetta (little Easter) I went to last night, I was told that every village makes a  slightly different version of it. It’s nice, if a little heavy. This party was one of those ‘bring a  dish’ buffet dinners, and I’d brought breaded chicken drumsticks and potato wedges. I was reminded of the general Italian interest in food and local food in particular when people asked me if these were traditional British Easter delicacies. I was like, ‘Um, no.’. Now I wish I’d made hot cross buns instead. Not that you’d really want to eat those for dinner. I couldn’t think of any other British Easter dish except Simnel cake, and I wasn’t even really sure what that was, except that somehow it involved marzipan. Cadbury’s creme eggs?

Today we took guests over to Paestum to check out the temples, and found that typical Bank holiday behaviour also extends to Italy, with crowds of people descending on beauty spots. Bank holiday roads are bad enough in England but here we have the addition of insane, let me repeat, IN-FUGGIN-SANE driving on the SS18, known in local media as the ‘Autostrada of Death’. Which given that I was sitting in the middle of the back seat with no seat-belt and a great view of all the head-on traffic coming flat out towards us down the wrong side of the road before nipping in with metres to spare, was not conducive to bank holiday relaxation. I am not exaggerating at all. I have no doubt there’ll be deaths this weekend. And families will weep, and it will be entirely down to sucidally stupid driving, a wholly avoidable self-slaughter of ordinary, decent Italians. What makes them drive this way? I shall probably speculate in a later post.

The most interesting event of the Easter weekend, however, was probably the traditional reenactment of the events from the point at which Christ entered the Garden of Gethsemane leading up to the crucifixion. More about that later.

Potenza: City of Cool Stuff

The longest escalator in Europe.

Well, I think this is pretty cool, anyway. It’s the longest escalator system in Europe. Note – escalator system, not escalator. That was a tad disappointing. I was hoping for an Endless Ride, but it’s actually loads of fairly long escalators broken up by landings. It makes sense; you wouldn’t want to fall down the longest escalator in Europe.

But it is still very cool to go to work by escalator. This stretches from the suburb in the distance to the city centre. Big wow!

The Enigma of the Italian Breakfast

I do not understand the Italian Breakfast.

The Italian lunch, I get. It is a meal of well-defined parameters. You have your pasta, and everything else falls into place around it. Italian supper, too, is easily comprehensible. Lighter and later than an English dinner, it’s often eaten at 9 or 10 pm and may consist of leftovers or bits of pizza. But you know where you are with it. You know what to eat for supper in Italy.

I do not know what to eat for breakfast in Italy.

Some people start their breakfast by eating a cornetto stuffed with nutella or jam or crema (sort of custard) and drinking a cappucino. But you can’t have breakfast in the bar every single day. What do people have for breakfast at home, on an ordinary daily basis? There is no porridge, and the museli wouldn’t tempt a mouse.  (I have wondered if polenta could substitute for porridge, and would be glad of any advice on this topic) . Then my mind has been boggled by buying packets of biscuits, something I’d have with an afternoon cup of tea, to read on the back that ‘Six of these chocolate biscuits plus a fruit salad make an ideal breakfast’. NO THEY DON’T.  Chocolate biscuits do not make an ideal breakfast to anyone who is not a student.

There is bread. But it’s a solid and humourless kind of bread. I can’t imagine choosing to start my day with that. It’s good bread to go with soup, but it doesn’t toast. It would weigh on your spirits all morning.

There are cereals; Special K and the like. But they are sold in such small boxes and at such high prices that it is clear no-one expects them to be take seriously as breakfast. They’re breakfast for show, the kind of breakfast you buy when you expect to have to impress someone early in the morning; the kind of breakfast you find face-out on the display shelves in a high-end kitchens store.

There is fruit. And this would probably be the best option. But the idea of eating fruit for breakfast is somehow ruined forever as soon as you remember that in this country, people eat chocolate biscuits for breakfast and think it normal. How can anyone be satisfied with fruit for breakfast after that? You will forever be thinking of your Italian neighbours, dunking their sixth chocolate biscuit in their cappucino as you pop grapes and try to pretend you like it. This is not an encouraging start to the morning.

I don’t think I will ever truly feel at home here until I have solved this dilemma.

This post should be illustrated with photographs, but computer says no.

I apologise!

I have just realised that the comments don’t automatically approve themselves! SO SORRY those of you who were nice enough to comment. Also, sorry for not blogging for ages. This is bad of me. A couple of reasons: 1) illness in family here sort of threw me for a bit 2) I started to wonder if I was just coming over as really negative and ex-patty in the worst way about Italy. The trouble is, the interesting stuff, the stuff you want to blog about, is usually the stuff that is a problem of one kind or another. Tension = Interest, you see; it’s a writer thing.
So I’m going to make a conscious decision to blog one nice thing a week. Because it is lovely here, of course it is.

The latest installment in the Epic Saga of the Bit of Land

An Italian wall. Not the one in question. (All walls have been changed to protect their identities).

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was a bit of a lost cause as far as work goes, not so much for me as for my husband, who had to spend the whole day dealing with it. We were woken by my father-in-law ringing the doorbell, and the noise of a jack-hammer under our balcony. Turns out our neighbour had decided to have our garden wall knocked down because it was in her way.

This is only the latest installment in an epic saga that goes back to before my husband bought the flat in Palazzo Sbaglio. I’m not completely up on the whole thing myself – to be honest, I’ve tried to keep out of it as much as possible – but I will try and explain. To cut a (very, very) long story short, the title deed to our flat includes a small section of ground underneath the balcony (where the knocked-down wall that is now a heap of bricks stood). We own this small piece of land, without question – it’s on the title deed and the courts have confirmed it.  However, our neighbour, who is a shrieking, muscular dynamo of an old woman, has been using it since before we moved in, as a kind of lumber yard. The previous owner, who happens to be her son-in-law, had already gone to court about the matter and received authorisation to put up a wall to stop he. It didn’t stop her, and when he sold up and moved to Genova, we got the neighbour problem along with the property. She just keeps on using it – she is building a house directly in front of it, and has hired two unsuspecting young men as builders who are using it as their yard. We are already in the middle of an on-going legal process to try and get her to stop. A couple of years ago my father-in-law called the carabinieri (the police) to witness the trespass; this ended with her shouting abuse at the carabinieri and attempting to attack my F-in-L with a frying pan. Frankly, if anyone is going to attack my F-in-L with a frying pan, I think it should be me. (JOKE, etc.)

So yesterday included: calling out the carabinieri and all the time that takes, getting a report filed with them, taking endless photos of the mess, going to the commune (town hall) to report it, going down to the carbinieri with further documentation, finding the carabinieri were on their lunch break, getting the photos printed, going back to the carabinieri with printed photos and finally contacting the builder to get a plan to re-build the wall and the boundary fence (also erected by previous owner and torn down a long time ago by neighbour). And by the end of it nothing had been done, but at least we could then go out for a pizza and some wild dancing with our musician friends. (We didn’t anticipate the wild dancing, but it was their friend’s pizzeria, and he got out the grappa and…)

By coincidence, on Friday my husband is a witness in a criminal case against the same neighbour, which arose indirectly from the Epic Saga of the Bit of Land. There was some kind of legal order served against her by the state which forbade her from being on the bit of land. This she has ignored, and therefore the state is bringing a case against her for ignoring it.

I don’t know how this will end. As far as I can see she has been using the land – which is what she wants – for the past 15 years, and ignoring everything from the police to court orders. So will she stop using it? I really don’t know. We will now have to pay for the wall to be re-erected and the boundary fence replaced, although she pulled it down and it belonged to us. She might well just pull the new one down too, who knows? There really is no dispute about the ownership of the bit of land, but this isn’t a nice situation to be in at all. Obviously we’d prefer to get on with our neighbours.

And now I must go, because Millenium is calling. More of that later.

A quick pic

Getting a head in the Cilento (boom boom)

a detail

I’ve seen the people upstairs from us in Palazzo Sbaglio take their shopping up on a rope before (there is a hook at the bottom, a neighbour fastens the bag on and they haul it up). It goes right past our kitchen window, and is very amusing when you first see the bag bobbing around outside. But today they have outdone themselves; they are taking up loads of firewood and I can hear the hum of an electric winch.

Ding dong merrily

One of the first things that Tobias Jones comments on in his book: The Dark Heart of Italy (a good introduction to contemporary Italian politics and society) is how loud Italy is. I’m experiencing this right now. The priest is delivering the service through a loudspeaker, which distorts his voice into a kind of echoing quack. The church bells clang out a rhythm. I can hear this all through two metre thick walls and a shut door. I have to say that in Muslim countries, it’s just as bad. Heard without a loudspeaker, the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds ever. But most of the time it is converted into an indistinct crackling roar. Why do religions never invest in decent PA systems?

It isn’t just the church that is noisy. I do not know who the woman is who walks up the street every morning at about 9 a.m. calling ‘Nello… Nello…”. But I do know that if I were Nello my thoughts in her direction would be distinctly uncharitable.

Happy witch day

Today is the festival of the Befana, when by tradition the Befana, who is a good witch, is supposed to come to all children and leave them sweets if they are good and coal (really a hard candy coloured black) if they are not. There are various legends about the origins of the Befana, generally attached to the story of the birth of Christ: she is supposed to have missed giving him gifts along with the Wise Men and now searches all over for him, leaving gifts as she goes, like a sort of a cross between the Wandering Jew and Father Christmas (who is Babbo Natale in Italian!). In another legend she was a mother who was driven mad by the death of her child and went to see the newborn Jesus in the belief that he was her child, she gave him presents and Jesus promised that as a reward she should be the mother of every child in the world (the cynical might call this a mixed blessing).

From a writing point of view, I love characters like this: eternal, immortal wanderers. I love that the Befana doesn’t stand out, unlike Father Christmas in his red suit and flashy sleigh. She isn’t a heroine or a super-woman, she’s simply one of the masses, she’s an ordinary old woman who supplements her pension with cleaning jobs – just by chance immortal, and a wanderer as all immortals would have to be. She’s someone you could walk past in a crowd, someone you might employ for a year or so, someone you might know through someone else – and you would never know, talking to her, that you’d just had a brush with the eternal.

I thought I’d start making a list of great immortal wanderers – and they do have to be immortal, so Odysseus doesn’t count! They have to be people that, in the logic of the story or the legend, you could brush past in a crowd today. I would love to know what other characters can be added to this.

1) Mary Poppins. Mary is the Befana, somehow. Not a cleaner, perhaps, but a nanny, and one who appears when needed, brings gifts of magical experiences and then disappears.

2) The Wandering Jew. Legend says this unfortunate person was rude to Christ when he was heading to execution, and in return was cursed with having to wander the earth till the Last Judgement.

3) Ashwatthama. Never heard of this guy before I googled him. Apparently he is a character in the Mahabharata (an absolutely fascinating epic, which I wish I had read – it’s going on my to-read list for 2011) who was cursed with carrying the burden of the world’s sins on his shoulders and roaming alone like a ghost forever. To add insult to injury, he had to do this with a great big oozing sore that never healed in the centre of his forehead. Harsh.

4) Jack O’Lantern. Not just a pretty face carved out of a pumpkin, an Irish legend tells of a farmer named Jack who persuaded the devil not to take his soul when he died. But he hadn’t been a good man, so God didn’t want it either. Poor Jack was thus doomed to wander on earth forever. In a touching twist, Jack said he had no light and wouldn’t be able to see his way. The devil tossed him a coal from Hell, and he carved out a pumpkin and put it inside to light his way.

(I’m not sure what one is supposed to learn from this story: that going to Hell is better than wandering the earth forever? Hmm.)

5) ‘She’ from Outside the World by Lucy Clifford. In this extraordinary and brilliant short story by the 19th century writer Lucy Clifford, ‘She’ is never named. She comes from a cottage outside the world, has no heart, and walks around trying to find the meaning of life. She is not successful. Just like the meaning of life, he meaning of this short story remains ambiguous and obscure. It might be a metaphor for the quest of the artist or writer to truly enter into the experience of others. It might be a metaphor for depression or autism. Then again, it might not.

Who else would you add to the list?

A round, luminous robin

Dear Friends,

I gather that England has been under more or less continuous snow for a month. Here in the Cilento, however, we’ve had some really gorgeous afternoons, when it feels as warm as summer. Some very chilly nights, too, it has to be said. But in general, plenty of blue sky and sun. As a result, the garden at Palazzo Sbaglio is flourishing:

The grapes are doing particularly well:

Not to mention the bougainvillea.

Even the insects are thriving.

We think it must be the greenfly they’ve been eating.

Our chickens are doing splendidly now we have put them on the recommended diet of radioactive waste.

We made a special effort with the tree this year:

I wish that it was all good news this Christmas, but unfortunately we had a small alien invasion.

It was just like ‘Independence Day’.

 

 

 

 

Thankfully the casualties were low but in one tragic incident a light aircraft was caught in the cross-fire. (Warning: contains disturbing images).

The final explosion was so powerful that it created a parallel universe in the garden.

 

 

 

 

 

Who knows what 2011 will bring?

Sincerely, Yours.

—

All photos were taken in Salerno last night. The Christmas lights have been themed as the ‘Giardino Incantato’ and they cover the entire town centre and lungomare with light. Okay, it’s a waste of money and energy and so on, but it does look seriously impressive. Makes you wonder what Milan is doing. Setting off an H-bomb at the very least, I should think.

http://www.salernoturismo.it/vis_dettaglio.php?id_livello=1924

for more information, in English, and

for a You-tube film of the lights in action.