A run of rainy days

We eased into the week on Monday morning with a visit to Mara and Franco for a morning coffee. After inspecting their part-way constructed (work in progress) wood store and having a brief chat with the neighbours, Silvia and Fabbio, we headed indoors to drink coffee and catch up with our friends. We had a very pleasant hour catching up with them before heading home bearing various new useful pieces of information (including Franco's recommendation for the most accurate local weather forecasts), a beautiful mimosa sapling that Franco had acquired from someone he knows at work and a flowering/Japanese quince, which Mara had picked up for us at a local nursery last week - all of which were bestowed upon us as gifts, although Franco told us he was giving us the mimosa because he wanted it to brighten up the view of our hillside from their house! (For anyone not familiar with the mimosa tree, it has beautiful tiny bright yellow flowers in delicate clusters of tiny little balls and at this time of year the hillside is dotted with vivid patches of yellow where the mimosas are flowering. It is also the symbol of International Women's Day (Festa della Donna) and often given as a gift.)

Monday morning was the brightest it got all week!

Almond blossom,

Reggie and crocuses on the drive.

After a bit of work and a spot of lunch, we decided to head outdoors to carry on the tidying work we'd done over the weekend - we knew there was wet weather on the way so wanted to get as much work in as possible. We headed to the lowermost of the terraces beneath the house, where we had rolled and thrown all manner of tree branches, ivy trails and bramble clippings, and started a bonfire. No sooner had we started the bonfire than the clouds came over and we found ourselves in light drizzle. We decided to continue on though - it wasn't enough to dampen the fire, so we kept going, Stuart raking the detritus down from the terraces above, and me feeding the fire. We managed to get through a large pile of cuttings and while there is more still a fair amount more tidying to do, we were pleased with our efforts especially considering the less than helpful weather!

By Tuesday the rain - and wind - had really settled in, and while I worked in the office Stuart spent the day in the apartment de-grouting the tiles in the bathroom in preparation for re-grouting and general sprucing up of things down there.

It was wet and stormy overnight on Tuesday, with strong winds battering the front of the house, which made for a noisy night and we were quite surprised (and relieved) to get up in the morning and find that, with the exception of a couple of buckets that had blown a few metres away from where we'd left them, everything was still in one piece and completely unscathed.

We had our weekly group Italian lesson here at our house on Wednesday morning, after which Stuart spent a slightly drier afternoon using the pressure washer to clean out one of the drainage channels across the drive that had become clogged with sandy dirt and soil, and then attempted to trace the exit route of the drain that comes from the kitchen sink in the apartment. It has long been a mystery to us as to where the apartment kitchen waste goes - it disappears into a pipe that disappears underground and it definitely doesn't go to the septic tank or the de-greasing tank. After a bit of investigation, we finally found out, by spraying jets of water down the pipe using the pressure washer, that the waste from the kitchen sink... simply drains into the soil in the bank just beneath the guest patio.

Thursday was wet again, so it was another round of re-grouting and siliconing in the apartment for Stuart, office work for me, and our weekly Italian lesson with Samantha.

On Friday morning I took possession of the car and took myself into Pescia to go and meet up with Sue for a coffee and a long overdue catch-up. We had a lovely morning catching up and putting the world to rights before I headed back up the valley to hand the car over to Stuart, who then used it to go and do the supermarket shopping while I did some computer work. We finally joined forces for the day in the afternoon when we both headed up to Vellano to go and spend a couple of hours helping David and Sarah tackle the somewhat unruly wall of bamboo they have inherited at the edge of the the land at their new home.

It made a nice change to be doing something different (who knew that bamboo came in so many pretty colour and pattern combinations and all from the same crop!) and in a different location, and together we helped David and Sarah double the size of their pile of bamboo canes - as well as the pile of rubbish (broken canes, stripped bamboo leaves, tangled bramble...) they will have to burn!

For our efforts we were treated to an absolutely delicious dinner of Ottolenghi's stir fried black pepper tofu with chillies, black pepper (clearly), ginger and garlic cooked by Sarah - a dish so delicious we were both still obsessing about it and commenting on it the following day - before heading home at a reasonable hour to give Florence and Reggie their slightly less delicious dinners and to spend some time with them before heading to bed.

After a nice dry afternoon on Friday, Saturday was disappointingly wet once again. The day started with Stuart heading up to Macchino, the village above Vellano, to drop in at Antonio's, the guy from whom we have bought our various pieces of Stihl equipment. He wanted to give us the guarantee for my new chainsaw, and we needed to pay him for it as well as take Stuart's chainsaw to be looked at. So, while Stuart went to see Antonio, I got on with walking Reggie around the woods while it was not too wet. Once Stuart got home, we headed out for a run of errands. Our first stop was for a coffee (cappuccino), of course - we seem to have swapped our weekend evening pub ritual of old in England for a weekend morning coffee ritual here, where we visit one of our local coffee bars and drink a cappuccino while attempting to read the local newspaper. Far more respectable and at €1 to €1.50 for a coffee, a whole lot cheaper too! We are still a long way off being able to read a newspaper cover to cover, or even to get to the end of an article of any length, but we are noticing how much more we are able to understand these days, which is encouraging.

So, coffees dispatched, we went to the pet shop, then Obi, where we picked up a few more packets of seeds, then home via Amanda's shop where we collected bread, a bag of vegetable peelings for our chickens and a couple of dishes for our lunch (squid, tomato and red onion salad for me; roast chicken for Stuart, as well as roast potatoes for us both). 

As we were on our way home we were just starting to think that, despite having been wet in the morning the weather might be decent enough for us to spend the afternoon working outdoors - but almost literally as soon as the words had left our mouths the heavens opened and it was Armageddon-stations once again. And it stayed like that all afternoon.

Casting around for something to do indoors, we ended up starting to plan a new kitchen (as you do). In fact, this isn't quite such a leap as it sounds - we have been planning to do something to sort out the kitchen ever since we moved here (the kitchen cupboards - which, by the way, I hate - hang way too low on the wall so that you have a face full of cupboard when you stand at the sink; the sink itself and the unit it is embedded in is horrible, poorly made and nasty to look at; the oven is now on the blink for the second time after having been mended). So we came up with a plan to put in a new (smaller) oven, a hob, a double sink and a nice tiled splash back all the way across. Thankfully I just managed to hold Stuart back from doing anything more than theoretical at this stage (he correctly read the look of horror on my face when he suggested taking cupboards off the wall there and then) - the idea of a new kitchen is lovely, but I was somewhat worried that we would end up living for months with a half-finished, half-old, half-new kitchen because we'd thrown ourselves into it without thinking the whole thing through and at a time when we already have a long enough (and suitably prioritised) to-do list! With guests (Amanda and her partner Alessio) coming for dinner this week as well, I wanted to be sure we wouldn't be entertaining people in a building site. It's definitely a project for the near future, though.

Sunday started out cloudy and damp, but not rainy. After a quick run around the woods with Reggie, we hopped in the car to drive up to Vellano to pick up David and Sarah. As we drove higher up the road, we climbed above the level of the cloud and even found blue sky above.

We picked up David and Sarah from the end of their drive and then continued up into the village where we parked up outside the circolo (the village club) and went in for a morning coffee and pastry. David and Sarah are frequent Sunday visitors to the circolo for coffee, but it was our first time there for morning coffee - and we liked it: good coffees and great pastries. After a second round of coffees for Stuart and me (we were both feeling slow to get started), we got back in the car and continued to climb up the road, heading for Marliana, a village just over the top and on the other side of the hill.

Last week, Stuart and David had picked up some flyers for an exhibition of photography about the war years (specifically 1943-44) in Marliana and we fancied going to have a look. As it turned out, the photographs were not originals (we went the whole way round the exhibition without realising this, until the photographer herself explained the project to us at the end), but a project whereby a group of people staged photographs using period clothing and other items. The photographs were all based on the memories of the photographer's grandmother, who was a young girl living in Marliana at the time of the German occupation. The photographs depicted the German soldiers arriving in the village, talking to villagers, signing paperwork with the owners of the homes in which they were billeted, eating their lunches, and general every-day life. One thing we had commented on as we went round (while still thinking that the photographs were originals) was that we imagined the photographs had been taken by a German, because they all seemed so friendly and smiley and without conveying any feeling of fear or discomfort. The photographer explained (in perfect English - after apologising that she only knew 'school level' English) that that was exactly what she had been trying to convey - the "other side of the story". Unlike many villages in our local area, which suffered terrible tragedies during the war, Marliana was relatively unaffected in that sense, and the photographer was trying to portray the fact that her grandmother had happy memories of the time, that the German soldiers were ordinary, young, family men, and it wasn't all fear and loathing. Fascinating stuff - and, we felt, a very brave project to embark on, given that there are still so many villagers around who remember that time (the photographer did say that she'd had some older people come to her with panic in their eyes to ask what was going on after they had opened their front doors to be confronted with German soldiers.. all over again).

After the exhibition, we took a short stroll around the pretty village of Marliana - somewhere we have driven through on a few occasions but never stopped to look around - before stopping for some light refreshments in a local bar and then heading back down towards our valley.

Around and about in Marliana.

The bright sunshine of Marliana disappeared as soon as we headed towards Vellano, and the rain started when we dropped David & Sarah home. It seemed like a repeat of Saturday and having just told our friends that we thought we might spend the afternoon planting some shrubs and digging some holes for the construction of a pergola... the heavens opened and all our plans seemed dashed once again.

Nevertheless, by the time we'd had a spot of lunch, the weather had dried up a little. I wouldn't say it was the sort of weather that makes you want to go outside, but the fact that the downpours had stopped meant it was good enough to go outside and do something constructive. Therefore, after changing into work clothes we went outside and 1. planted the mimosa and the flowering/Japanese quince, 2. cleaned out the chickens and topped up their food and water, 3. took up the old paving slabs then dug some holes in the ground for posts for a pergola for the guest patio and 4. concreted pieces of plastic pipe into the holes (the posts will sit in the pieces of pipe). Not a huge amount of work (indeed Stuart did most of the work), but it put a tick in a couple of boxes and was enough to satisfy us and make us feel we'd achieved something.

We then showered and changed and then headed out once again, this time to Castelvecchio to call in on our friends Paul & Kathy. They had very kindly picked up (and dropped off) some sweet potatoes for us when out and about last week and we needed to pay for them (sweet potatoes are a rare find here, so stumbling across them in a supermarket is both newsworthy and worthy of a quick round of messages to see if anyone would like some - which is what Kathy had done). Paul and Kathy - and Kathy's Mum, Gill, who is staying with them at the moment - were as welcoming and hospitable as ever, and we spent a lovely hour or so catching up with them over a drink before finally wending our way home to cook ourselves some dinner and think about the week ahead.