Life In An Umbrian Village

I have two sisters in Italy (and a third in Scotland, just to keep things geographically interesting) and they all of them live on farms. My mother was Italian and her husband grew up in England. The big family secret as i grew up was that he was only pretending to be my father, a situation that made my life with my family untenable so when i coukd i emigrated. The Italian sisters are a decade older than me making them 66 years old today.

 

I have heard other people look back over their lives and remark that they find it difficult to identify the memories of their youth with their later life, as though their past was lived by someone else. Frankly I feel the same way sometimes. When I go back to Italy to visit my sisters in their farming life in the mountains of central Italy, a place the tour guides describe as idyllic, it is instead in my memory a place that was anything but idyllic.

 

My sister Elizabeth and I on a hike last summer walking through the woods above her farm. She is one of twins who are ten years older than me.

I did not grew up in an ideal family and we were never particularly close so after I emigrated I never went back for twenty five years. I used to joke in California that I was the white sheep of the family, but really I was a cuckoo in the family nest, offspring of a different, secret, father and never completely accepted, never mind wanted. I always felt like an outsider even though I never knew why.

 

My sister Elizabeth with her husband of half a century:

I have always felt the rather peculiar Gothic setting of the Italian side of my family gave my misery a peculiar individual flavor as though my unhappy family were different. Yet, over the decades I have discovered other family stories that were and are considerably more odd than mine. The setting of my childhood was extremely odd, unique perhaps for an English speaker living half a world away. Nowadays the area has been discovered and there is a lively expatriate American community in the handful of villages nestled in this particular fold of the mountains overlooking the Tiber River. The Acqualoreto Blog is one such internet page, or this a story of a vacation in my old farm manager's house. Kate Ballbach at Morruzze. They tell a story of the place where I was a child thnat I barely recognize, yet I lived there until I was 23. My family has recorded history in the village since the 18th century...

 

My other sister Patricia checking her sister's construction plans for a retirement home on the farm as Elizabeth's sons take over the business:

My own story I wrote up at some great length here The Emigre . But then, last year when I was most recently back in Italy something odd happened. I discovered the rural, isolated pocket I had grown up in had become a page on Facebook. The outside world had a direct connection to the biggest of five villages in the valley, Morre is online. Not only that my nephew's wife showed me a collection of pictures on Facebook from the past, some few people I remembered from thirty or more years ago. They constituted a snapshot of a place and time so distant it seems like two centuries ago, not fifty years. I may have some names wrong, and some faces are no longer in my memory bank, but these few pictures depict a way of life that vanished in even the rural United States during the after the Depression.

 

This first one is Angelina, a wizened old lady who used to run the village store, keeping her accounts with a stub of a pencil on sheets of brown wrapping paper on her counter. She's seen here filling a bucket with water. In the summer during the hot months water rationing was in effect and the public utility only ran water during a couple of hours in the middle of the day. Running cold water in the house was rare, perhaps unique in my family home (the one percenters). Everyone else had to make do by filling containers and lugging the water home from the public water tap in the village square:

 

These are the alleys of the picturesque mountain villages travel writers get so enthusiastic about. In this case with a Vespa included for authenticity! Television was available but only one channel and for a few hours in the evening. Life was intimate in these collections of medieval stone houses and gossip was the entertainment. Privacy was an alien concept.

The notes call this guy "Trettica" which in the local dialect means "Shakes," though the cause of his tremens isn't known to me. He's seen here roasting a bird on a spit, slowly twirling the rod, basting the bird with olive oil and salt, a job for a retiree under the supervision of his impatient wife. Winters in the moutains were cold and central heating was unknown. Hot water was provided for rare sponge baths from a pot hanging on the blackened hook on the left of the fireplace.

 

The mountains were littered with artesian springs which flowed year round, were maintained by the farmers and were a source of sweet fresh water for a young kid like me given to roaming freely through the hills all summer long (not to mention a source of water for cattle and sheep). Nowadays I have no doubt such freely accessible water in a world dominated by fear and corporate profits would be frowned upon as unhealthy but I seemed to thrive on it. These fountains were built to a common design and each feature served a purpose. I'll explain:

 

There were several basins. The first, nearest the source was full of clean water and it was used to let horses and cows drink from it. The edges were built flat, which also allowed the basin to serve as a seat wherein you could dangle your feet in the cooling water and your dog could sit next to you and drink. The second basin has the sides angled slightly. this basin was the rinse basin for laundry where the women (NOT the men!) would rinse the clothes and slap them on the stones. The furthest basin with the sides also angled was the soap cycle and you can see the water is murky from the laundry soap. From the furthest end the waste water simply poured onto the muddy ground...

 

Village life. I well remember hot summer afternoons because winters were spent at boarding school in England, and in the heat of the day people slept or hung out in the shade and talked. Everyone talked all the time, about anything, all day and all night. Italians love to talk. These villagers taught me the value of style being truly laid back. When there was work they worked and hard too, but when they retired, or when there was no work, the practiced what Caribbean islanders call limin' - just hanging out.

 

This character I remember well. He was obviously the village cobbler, and he spent his days in his cave of a shop with his leather apron, his shoe nails and his glue, sheets of leather and sharp knives. Lorenzo had a radiant smile and he also owned the only payphone available for miles around. When my mother wanted to call her husband in London my sisters and I would troop into his shop and while my mother struggled with the operator to place an international call we would get to play with his tools and his lumps of dried glue and hear his stories about the latest village goings on. The call which lasted perhaps three minutes might take three hours to place and it would always be dark when we left.

This guy Carletto was the carpenter in the village, his shop smelled strongly of wood shavings and his tiny dangling home rolled cigarette that went behind the ear which didn't hold his pencil. I was friends with his son when I got older and we raised hell in his car, behavior that in retrospect may not have endeared me to the father...

 

Nicola the blacksmith was a prominent figure in our lives. He was always on call to repair broken farm machinery, ready to weld whatever critical piece of equipment was brought into his roadside shop. His other skills included shoeing my sisters' horses a job he undertook with no great confidence in the gentle nature of the horses and he tended to shoe them while attempting to dominate them with the fierceness of his personality while my sisters tried to calm the other end of the animals. He also rebuilt my bicycles when I wrecked them and later my motorcycles sometimes saw the blue flame of his torch when I ride them too hard off road or crashed as one does as a youth, unprotected by gear or Kevlar or other such esoterica. This picture perfectly captures the intensity of his job, and the permanent coal miner's tan he lived with. Seeing him in Church for mass on holidays it was always a shock to see his soft white and pink features cleaned from the grime.

Another "street" in the central village of Morre showing the particular skills masons exhibited building stone arches sing rocks taken from fields. Also note the oven almost invisible in the darkness where bread and pizza were baked. I was always to be found in my village outside the oven when Lisa, one of my buddy's mother was baking. She made exceptional pizza dough and my mouth still waters to remember her rosemary, salt and olive oil pizza; what would probably be called flatbread today. She taught me to make flat bread in the winter using the embers of the fireplace in my own home, a winter diversion when I was older and got to live here year round. Winters were cold long and dark. How I didn't become an alcoholic or a drug addict I'll never know, the boredom was that bad.

 

Local TV. Notice the iron bars on the street level window. Crime was unknown in those days and you could leave your motorcycle by the side of the road even with the keys in it and no one would touch it. Everybody knew everybody and the price you paid for not getting your bike stolen was everybody knowing your business.

Women knitted all the time. This was not a huge cash economy in the 1960s. World War Two veterans were getting pensions and they supplemented their income by growing vegetables and raising a few animals. Everyone's saving grace in these villages was that there were no mortgages, no debts and no banks. It was paradoxically a cash economy and people worked the farm for my family, or held government jobs, like road mender, letter carrier or some other sinecure. Notice the roof racks on the cars, by the time vehicles were making an appearance the family sedan, usually a Fiat or Lancia had to do triple duty including hauling family crap. This was when commuting started and younger villagers drove to serious jobs at the Krupps steel works in Terni 45 minutes away.

 

 

 

The older women always carried stuff on their heads, in this case a woman walking down the gravel road with a basket on her head and a plastic bag in her hand. Plastic bags were everywhere when I was a kid and it always makes me smile when Americans tell me shopping bags are a European tradition. Not where I grew up! There was also no municipal trash disposal in those days and garbage was thrown out as though on a medieval midden in a mutually acceptable spot just outside the village. Weird to think of today, trash just piled up on the edge of a field in a ravine.

See? She has her skein of wool in a plastic bag!

 

The village church in Morre. It looks identical today.

 

 

 

The laundry was carried in big plastic tubs by women on their heads to the fountains for washing and rinsing and then hung up to dry. Lie was a lot of work back then. Less expensive but harder.

This dude and his wife are shopping at one of he itinerant vendors who drove through the villages on scheduled days. Most of them used smaller vehicles, typically a three wheeled truck built by the same people who make Vespa motor scooters. I can't tell what this truck was selling but it must have been bulky stuff like household goods. The three wheeler dude I remember best sold vegetables and fruit, coming round every week and letting us kids taste his watermelons so we'd pester our mothers to buy us one.

The man here has obviously just come in from the fields where he hand cut a bunch of clover probably to feed his rabbits kept in cages ( for meat not pets!). His wife in her sturdy rubber boots does her own chores outdoors. Life was not a lot of book reading in those days, up with the sun, and falling asleep at night in front of the black and white TV.

There was a school house and kids in Italy get a free education all the way through university. Combined with free medical care life, though stressful in different ways, had its own balance. It was a very Huckleberry Fin kind of childhood spending summers riding my bicycle, and later my Vespa moped all over the place. Paved roads didn't arrive in these villages until about 1975, and I learned to ride on gravel, and I learned to pick gravel out of my bloody flesh when I crashed. I remember distinctly the sting of the grazed skin and the sight of the bright red blood welling up out of my wound which was powdered white by the gravel like face make up pancake.

In this picture we see my brother-in-law's brother Mario driving the tractor. He had a job in the city but he'd come back to his native village to help his brother with harvest season. The dude with the flat cap was my brother-in-law's helper, an old dude strong as an ox with two stubby teeth left in his mouth and the ability to work hard for fourteen hours a day. Manilio was one of the happiest people I knew always smiling, enjoying a joke and wielding his machete like it was a butter knife in his huge paw. In his leather shoulder bag he carried his lunch, pasta, meat bread and a flask of wine along with a bottle of water. Home made wine was a breakfast drink and a lunch drink every day. Kids drank it and drunkenness was not unknown but not an epidemic. After lunch in the fields the works would take a nap for an hour in the grass, in the shade before working on till duck most days. It was tough.

 

This was a bit before my time, but I remember the Vespa around the village. In the 1960's cars were still rare and most people commuted on two wheels to local jobs. My generation got used to having a car and I was of course perverse in that I only ever rode a motorcycle. people thought I was lucky in summer and crazy in winter as I rode by...

 

 

This lot were the next generation of youngsters but we did the same thing, hanging around bored, wondering what to do with ourselves and accomplishing not too much...We craved escape from structure but lost our minds when we were left to our own devices. I got used to going off by myself to get away from the boredom of hanging out with a bunch of people unable to figure out what to do.

 

When I was ten years old my summers would begin when we arrived from England for three months of bliss. I would pull my bicycle out of storage and ride off to find my buddies. We made slingshots and we explored the forest trails and paths. We played war games ambushing unsuspecting villagers at their chores. later in the summer we would find ripe fruit like this arbor of grapes and we would sit and eat grapes, pears, apples or whatever we could find until we got indigested. My mother used to get mad if I came home for lunch with no appetite. She's take me upstairs for an afternoon nap and throw her arm over me on the bed. As soon as she started to snore I'd slide out and meet my buds for a game of cards or target practice with our slingshots while the adults slept off their lunches and the only sounds were bees and flies in the heat of the afternoon.

 

 

Winter was olive season when adults were paid to climb trees and hand pick the berries. We had a family olive press where workers stayed up all night crushing olives and keeping a roaring fire going in the stove all night. That was where the stuff you order in Italian restaurants as an appetizer, bruschetta was invented. For a snack the mill workers would put slices of bread on the stove to toast, the root of the word bruschetta, and they would take a bottle of the fresh pressed oil, add salt and maybe a little tomato and hey presto gourmet snack! Shown here with excessively green fresh oil:

 

Writing about it, it wasn't a bad childhood. My sister shad such a blast they never left and live outside Morre to this day. Me? I had to travel and see the world so I did.

Still, this is where I grew up so I guess I can never escape my past even if I wanted to. I used to hate being from here and I remember when I saw the movie ET I wished I had grown up in a Spielberg suburb, a place apparently filled with friends and adventure. Weird that I didn't recognize those same qualities in this funny little village where I lived my own alien adventure.

 

 

The source of these pictures, Quelli delle Morre su Facebook came to my attention thanks to my nephew's wife. I was hanging out with Roberta last September and she said "Have you seen this?" I was amazed. It was completely outside the world of the few family photos my sisters have kept. The old pictures kept ping round in my head yet it took me six months to pull them together.

Posted with Blogsy

Florida Keys Community College

It was a hot afternoon and Cheyenne had had a warm walk already so she was ready to nap in air conditioned comfort. She prefers to sleep on the floor in summer and only uses her bed (or mine) or muscles her way onto the couch in cold weather. She looked up as I gathered my phone and my man purse and resumed her nap as I went downstairs to fire up the Vespa. Last seen looking like this:

My wife had told me she was waiting at the college library so I parked and made my circuitous way toward the library.

I got an Associate in Science degree herein marine engineering oddly enough and I enjoyed my time though I am not an ideal student not least because I hate taking exams. I find the examination process tends to occupy so much of my mind concentrating on that takes away from the pleasure of simply learning.

But I like wandering the campus, enjoying the bright tropical colors and the covered walkways that remind me of public buildings seen in Africa, designed for maximum comfort in the heat. Of course this place has plenty of Sid conditioning but the design of the campus hints at places more exotic. At least it does to me.

The college sits on a spur of land that juts out from the north side of Stock Island, so it is surrounded on three sides by tidal waters. Because the City of Key West annexed the northern half of this island (to facilitate a developer of homes at the golf course), the college is actually in the city of Key West. No surprise then that we find an artistic representation of the famous local Conch shell on a wall:

Conchs have been fished out in the Keys. Any you eat here have come from Carribean countries like Honduras, though they are trying to increase local populations in protected waters.

Ironically the library was closed when I arrived before actual closing time (!) so I had to call my wife on the phone to alert her that I was out here. What did we do before we became surgically attached to pocket phones?

There weren't many people around, least of. All students at dinner time on a weeknight. There are dormitories on campus to encourage out of town students to attend school in this very expensive town, but this is mostly a day school.

William Seeker was the long serving President who molded the school in his own likeness before time forced him to retire. His replacement was a brash yet supremely competent fund raiser of a President who unfortunately upset the sensibilities of critical components of the administrative staff. She was replaced by a smart milquetoast cypher whose name I can barely remember and whose influence in town is not really felt.

Office of the President - Florida Keys Community College, a nice enough dude they say with the money he has set his disposal. It's nice to have a leader not making waves for a change, I suppose. Even so I get the uneasy feeling educators should be in the business of ruffling a few feathers from time to time.

Yes indeed, a part of me does miss the good old days of bring a boat captain and a student all at once. I look back and I seemed so immature.

 

Posted with Blogsy

African Cemetery Passersby

The Florida Keys official Tourism Website has all the information one might need to understand the value of the beautifully decorated piece of beach dedicated to slaves brought by chance to this island in the 19th century. Yet for some peculiar visitors it is merely a playground!

Across the street there is a dog park on land donated by the county but paid for by private subscription to the tune of $16,000. Plans to move Atlantic Boulevard further back from the beach have imperiled much of the dog park, upsetting to those who use it. Indeed, further exploration of the African cemetery has also threatened the dog park but so far nothing here has changed.nthe size of the cemetery plot seems to be fixed at this point.

The African cemetery only came into existence slowly over the course of this century. Three slavers bound for Spanish Havana were intercepted by the U S Navy and brought to Key West in 1860. The refugees were pretty much abandoned on the beach and left in the care of the only US official in the city- the postmaster. That decent fellow lost a great deal of money and was never reimbursed by Uncle Sam for his efforts to keep the 1400 Africans alive.

In the end 295 died here and the eleven hundred remaining got passage back to West Africa though not to their original homes. The dead were forgotten until 2002 when researchers with ground penetrating radar started looking for the human remains. They found a few they say, in this area and those dozen likely graves were the framework got this dedicated piece of land, as much a symbol and a reminder as an actual graveyard.

Indeed some people think the Africans could have been buried all round Higgs Beach. In those days neighboring Rest Beach was where cattle were slaughtered for the population of around 12,000, who all lived in the northwest corner of the island. As a result this modern tourist thoroughfare at the time was a piece of wasteland overseen by the brick Martello tower, whose remains are to the right:

Until a hurricane blew the bodies out of the sand there was also a city cemetery at Higgs Beach but after that episode they moved it to its current location in the middle of the island, at what was then the outskirts of the inhabited town.

And nowadays they come and amble by, in all their glorious diversity and most ignore this piece of history at their feet.

 

Posted with Blogsy

The Bonneville From The Archives

I have been sifting through the archives and it occurred to me I have been around the block a few times since I bought the bike in October 2007. Above I rode an Iron Butt to New York State in 36 hours, then I went to visit Jack Riepe in 2010 recorded in one of my better essays: Key West Diary: Riding With Riepe. I also rode across Florida to a conference and got to spend a long enjoyable day in the saddle exploring the back roads of central Florida.

I used to use Triumph soft saddlebags made of cloth that was neither waterproof nor impervious to being twisted by the wind. After they tore from constant use I replaced them with heavier but solid and waterproof 1430 Pelican cases which I bolted to the soft bag frames. They still work just fine, seen here on a rain-filled ride to Georgia for a family gathering:

The Bonneville continues to run perfectly with almost 80,000 miles on the clock.

Back and forth on Highway One.

In the years between dogs, after Emma died but before I found Cheyenne, I did a lot of lonely Keys exploration by motorcycle. Fishcutters on Summerland became The Wharf:

Garrison Bight:

My preferred parking when going to a movie at the Tropic Cinema.

On my many miles of commuting I have seen fog a couple times:

But this is, in my estimation the perfect motorcycling climate, usually between 65 and 95 degrees year round.

One year I rode my bicycle to the Summerland Key polling station three miles from my home, and the poll workers said I was the first cyclist they had ever seen. As time has passed I have cone to find less and less comfort in voting as money seems to count a lot more than what we the voters have to say, but so far I have not yet found the courage to ignore the process entirely.

Another mainland trip saw me coming home from the Everglades on a Highway 27, my preferred non-freeway route across central Florida. Here at the junction southbound with Krome Avenue:

I also got held up by a massive wreck on Krome Avenue that trip which closed the road and I sat in the grass waiting...just as though it had been the Overseas Highway.

And as I usually prefer Card Sound road to the no-passing restrictions of the 18 mile stretch I found myself getting ready to pay the dollar toll to cross the Card Sound Bridge:

Frank Deford the NPR sports commentator also came to Key West in 2008, typical of the caliber of visitors to the Southernmost City in winter:

Key West Diary: Frank Deford

A day on Cudjoe Key, pre-Cheyenne, saw me riding out to the horses stabled on Asturias, and then visiting the flooded gravel pits on the other side of Blimp Road. Kids liked to drive around there and that of course had to be stopped so now they've blocked off the entrance, on the puritanical principle that fun must not be had. I'm sure it has you do with liability or some other such thing.

I would ride to El Mocho on Stock Island for my favorite Cuban food, truly the place where locals eat:

The Overseas Highway through Stock Island hasn't changed much:

They've taken out a few passing zones when they recently repaved stretches of it (bastards!) but the sun still shines on a Highway One:

The Bonneville is an easy bike to ride, not light at 500 pounds but I find it scooter-like in the ease of the controls, so I enjoy exploring back roads on it, here at Bay Point, Mile Marker 15:

Also at Bay Point Knuckleheads didn't work but it made way for what appears to be a successful eatery called Kaya Island Eats. I ate there last week and it seemed pretty good, much better than my first visit when it opened, but I suppose that was to be expected. Kaya Island Eats

In 2007 I went to my home in Italy for the first time in 25 years and I rented a BMW 650 to ride around Umbria. It was a good bike but rather breathless compared to my easy going Bonneville.

The Summerland runway is still there flanked by homes equipped with airplane garages. The signage is a bit more imposing these days.

But the point remains the same, cars and airplanes shouldn't mix.

Part of the pleasure of the Key West climate is that it rains mostly in summer when it's hot and summer rain is no big deal. Hypothermia is highly unlikely on a commute around here:

And the sunrise can be quite comforting as one rides home from a long night at work.

Posted with Blogsy