Spring followed by Winter (From Western Telegraph)

January 2011

9:30am Tuesday 1st February 2011

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The New Year started with a tremendous show of fireworks, they are very popular here with most towns having their own pyrotechnic specialists. From our elevated position we were able to follow the start bursts and booms from our neighbours below who started theirs off fifteen minutes before midnight to the West where Sarteano were putting on a fine display. We moved to the bedroom to watch Piazze’s then to the bathroom to view both Fabro’s examples of setting the sky alight to the very distant Orvieto who were lighting up the low lying clouds with colour changes. We moved on to the living room, glasses in hand, and watched Ponticelli’s organised show with Citta della Pieve’s citizens doing their own thing. The shows went on almost to 1 am and despite our double glazing and the nearest fireworks being 4km away we could here the explosions clearly. Fortunately our two cats had sensibly come in for the night and were content to be ensconced on our bed in the warm for the duration.

In the first week a friend phoned to say she’d just been into town and seen that there was a carol concert being held at the local theatre with 5 choirs each giving a few traditional songs for the evening, starting at 6pm. We hurriedly got the fires banked up and us changed and arrived at the theatre at 5.40 to discover most of the seats had already been taken as it was free of charge. Promptly at 6pm, unusually on time, the compare arrived on stage to explain one choir had had to drop out, another had a stand in conductor and he himself was unexpectedly on stage due to others contracting colds. The first choir was the least experienced from the Valenerina Terana, south of Orvieto. They sang well and included a new variation of Jingle bells and a Nigerian Christmas carol we’d never heard before accompanied by just a wooden flute or a tabor. The next choir also had travelled from the south of the province, sang in Latin as well as Italian and the third from a small town devastated by the earthquake that affected Assisi years ago and had a piano accompaniment. The last visiting choir’s last song was a compilation of songs with “Fa-La-La” starting with “Deck the halls” but they included the “William tell overture”, the 1812, a Viennese waltz and other snippets that were instantly recognisable. The last choir was from the town and then all the choirs, no matter where they were sitting, joined in with the last carol to end the evening, almost raising the roof off the place. It was a great fun and we enjoyed the community atmosphere and harmony we’d been part of for two hours.

Befanda day, the witch who brings the Christmas stockings stuffed with toys and sweets, is Epifany on the (6th January) its a huge event for the children and most towns have markets the weekend before and the day before the bank holiday. People, both men and women, dress as the old crone or good witch carrying a broom and sweets to hand out to the children in town. The following week the sales started in the major towns and cities, although they were nothing like as discounted as the UK sales were.

The second week on January warmed up to spring like conditions with temperatures above 10c and they reached 18 on several days, which we were grateful for as we had all ready used half of our winter wood store as the December had nights dropping to minus 9c frequently and not raising to much above freezing during the day. Most people took advantage of the change burning their bonfires, from olive tree trimmings, digging over the ground and starting other external jobs. We rushed out and built a fence at the end of our orchard to delineate the boundary to indicate to the hunters that the land is part of our garden and that there is a house close by. The rules are that guns should not be fired within 200 metres of habitation but we’d been peppered by shot from the woods on two occasions in the past so we thought it a good idea to do something. However the fence is an open one, two uprights with two crossed pieces of wood between, so animals have access to our grounds as it is illegal to make an impenetrable fence unless you have permission from the council, fees payable of course. To get permission you have to have a valid reason, such as breeding pheasants, as there are no trespass laws here and the countryside has to look open to the eye. Many boundaries are simply ditches, large trees, boulders and memory. Not having a clue as to where ours were we asked our geometra to organise someone to pinpoint them accurately using a GPS system and then plot the points onto a aerial photograph. We gained a coppice and an overgrown terrace, which we will deal with in the distant future. The hunting stopped on the last day of the month and the wildlife celebrated by raiding the garden, digging up and eating the bulbs and emptying the flowerpots.

We made a start on the olive pruning in glorious sunshine. Not being that fit we only managed 8 trees the first day and 11 the next then we had to give up for 5 days as the weather went from spring back to winter with plummeting temperatures and snow. In some ways we shouldn’t be surprised, it is winter after all but snow is more usual in the last week of February, early March. January is normally cold, wet and windy so it seems this year everything is around 3 weeks early, making us lag with some of the chores and ahead with others. As Mike points out the trees will still be there when the sun comes out again but we expect to have finished the pruning before the end of next month.

Bologna had a public pillow fight with hundreds of students filling the streets with feathers. It seems there is an international pillow fight day, many raising funds for charities, with teens and younger adults taking part and the feathers really fly. An interesting fact we were told is that the Italians didn’t like feather filled pillows and used wool instead years ago, something to do with mites. These days they are mostly foam filled.

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