Cows, a chiesa and gelati

Well up until now it's been your usual Italian summer - a nice even temperature just above 30 degrees with warm nights that you can sleep through but this week we have seen a return to the hot, sweltering 35+ days and nights that we endured for 3 months last summer. We are well and truly back to three or four shower days!

My next door neighbour and mate, Domenico, and I, along with a couple of his mates, were so hot that we bundled ourselves into his tiny Fiat with no air-con and pushed it up the hill on the top of San Veto Romano last night. It was worth the effort as it was sprinkling rain when we got there and the temperature was much more bearable.

We had a drink and a chat at the bar in the village piazza and then we pushed the Fiat up the next high point with telecommunications towers all over it and the fallen remains of an ancient chiesa built to honour apostle James the Major (San Giacomo). [You will recall that I met up with James the Minor at the Basilica Apostile near Via del Corso a couple of months ago. There were two disciples named James and, because surnames were not yet invented, they distinguished the two Giacomos by age - the Major being the elder and the Minor the younger]. Not sure how easy it was to pick the age difference. My preference (had I been there) would have to have been to go by height because you can usually tell which one is taller if they are in the same room. I am not sure whether that would have made a difference to their designations.

What a place! Who in the world would live in such a place? Only persecuted people wanting to stay well out of harm’s way I suggest!

They had no Fiat to push but it is still one hell of a climb!!! You actually have to dodge the dairy herds all the way up the road. The bitumen is the only “flat”, navigable path and so the cows (and bulls) have to use it too. In fact the cows seem to have the clear notion that the road was built for them and that the cars are a bloody nuisance. They also have right of way (which they are very well aware of) so it makes for interesting navigation, especially after night-fall. Fortunately they are all white all-over so they are easy to spot. I guess the black ones haven’t survived the motorists and now it’s only the white ones that reproduce.

It is interesting that the ancient church (built before they started recording things so we don’t know exactly when) started to fall into a bit of disrepair in the Middle Ages and the congregation lobbied the Comune of the time for help to maintain it but their pleas went unheeded so the place literally fell down in 1950 but all the huge blocks are still there with their Latin inscriptions.

Cripes, it makes you wonder:

1. How the hell did they build this chiesa in the first place? Even if they had the ancient equivalent of heavy lifting equipment, where on earth did it come from? How did they get it up there (past the cows)?

What is quite obvious is that these ancient builders had better access to this equipment than all the generations who have succeeded them because we were all unable to keep standing what they had erected!

2. How the hell did they survive? They obviously had milk to drink and the occasional heifer to roast but what about pane, veggies and ice-cream?
The nearest Carrefour is at the bottom of the hill which would have taken a two month expedition by foot – a couple of hours down and the rest of the time getting back up!

So they buy two months’ supplies which sustains them for the journey but then they have nothing left when they get back – so they have to come back down and reload, and they have to keep repeating that. How did they find time to live, build chiesas and worship in them?

And how the hell did they accomplish this in winter when it is mandatory to fit snow chains on the wheels of the buggies and carts and in summer when you need to rest under a large shady tree every twenty metres?

3. How much booze would they have had to consume to keep warm in the snowy winters and cool in the hot summers?

Anyhow the current locals have gotten the hint now. Hardly any of them remain. We came across three pretty old ladies sitting in the piazza discussing global economics and there was a very old man holding up a lamp-post in a nearby walkway and they made claim to being the only surviving residents. There are apartments there to accommodate a couple of hundred people, all in excellent structural and aesthetic state of repair. The village walkways were all neat and tidy and the whole place seemed to be in picture postcard condition. Which just goes to show that it is a lot easier to maintain a village when there’s no people to bugger it up. It seems ironic that the Comune spends time maintaining a deserted village when its predecessors over the past 2,000 years couldn’t find the resources to do so when the place was full of folk!

Anyhow, Such is Life!

Domenico and I have elected a strategy in this heat of climbing mountains each night to cool down and to have a nice pleasant drink and maybe a gelato.

I came back from Spain with the flu.

I didn’t sleep a wink last night until 5am. It was bloody hot but I don’t think that is what kept me awake. I had a longish siesta but thought I was tired enough to hit the hay at midnight but I spent every 15 minutes racing up to the throne to have a leak. I have never relieved myself so much in all my life! I guess I had been drinking lots of fluids with my cold and because it is so hot but this was ridiculous. I would struggle upstairs, have my leak, come down again, lay on the bed and immediately feel the urge to make another ascent. And this went on ALL night!

I think I was a tad over medicated. My principal method of attacking coughing is to take a slug of the sciroppo EVERY time I cough. This meant that the bottle was drained by the time night time came. The strategy really works excellently. The body knows it gets a bomb every time I cough so, eventually, it gives up coughing and then I don’t need to take more syrup. And my cough has basically disappeared now, so I know the strategy works.

But last night I was obviously as high as a kite! I kept telling myself jokes – all night! I was having such a good time and laugh!!!! I was laughing louder last night than I have been coughing the two nights prior. The nearby residents must be having fun.

You see when I am unaccompanied I put on what I call a "one man show" which is to say I am both the entertainer and the audience!

The neighbours must have thought there was a comedy night going on with all the laughter. I was wandering around the apartment laughing like hell – and out onto the terrace where it was slightly cooler, then back on the bed. It was the greatest entertainment that I have had for quite some time.

It reminded me of the time I was in Concord Hospital with my broken ribs. They had me plugged into one of those machines that automatically doses you at prescribed intervals with a red over-ride button to administer an extra belt when you suffer a pain attack.

I was highly medicated and I couldn’t stop telling jokes! I’d laugh and it would hurt like hell so I’d need more medication. The more shots I got the more jokes I would think up, the more jokes made me laugh more which increased the pain which meant more medication! You get the picture. It took me about a week to come down from that high.

Anyhow last night was one I won’t forget in a hurry! I am not tired today. I am about to have some fettucine and then I’ll have a siesta, wake up at 5pm and buggerise around before cooking dinner at 8pm then relax on the terrace until the moon rises (about 11pm at the moment).

I am feeling much better today after the comedy show and I am sure that, by the end of the week, I’ll be as good as gold.