I moved to Italy back in May 2014, and boy, what an adventure it has been! It had been a good ten months or so between coming over to sign the final paperwork on the house. Finally, I’d packed up all of my worldly belongings – animals too, of course – and set out on the three-day drive through Europe, towing my ancient battered caravan behind an equally old, silver Astra.
We arrived, at last, at around 2:00 am in the pitch black… well, sort of! I had managed to, rather cleverly, get myself separated from the rest of the family. They were accompanying me in my little old Fiesta, to help with the moving in part. Safe to say that I’m not known for my fantastic sense of direction!
Long story short, I found myself halfway up a road that was really only suitable for goats, on an incline far too steep for my 1.6 Astra to manage to pull the weight of the caravan up. Because that wasn’t enough, the caravan was also too heavy for the handbrake to hold it in place while I went off to find help, there was an impressive drop-off just behind me, and all of my animals were sitting, blissfully unaware, in said caravan. I’m sure you can easily picture how stressed out I was at this point!
Miracle of miracles, after around twenty minutes of hair-pulling, frantic phone calls to my mom and brother, and with tears welling in my tired eyes, a face suddenly popped up at the passenger side window.
‘Buona sera,’ said the man, who looked to be a little older than my dad. ‘Tutto bene?’
My Italian is still somewhat substandard even now, but that much I understood. Without further ado, I proceeded to burst into tears, much to his shock and my own mortification – it had, after all, been a very long three days!
‘No, no…tranqilla,’ he said, coming around to the driver’s side and patting my shoulder reassuringly.
He then went on to explain (mainly in a series of hand gestures) that his farm was just a couple of kilometres down the road, and that his son would be here soon with his tractor to come and save me. My relief was profound, to say the least! I was in the middle of nowhere, in a country that I still didn’t know very well, and yet somehow I’d managed to snag myself a passing angel.
Another twenty minutes passed, and my panicked family finally managed to find me. The first order of business was to make sure that the animals were removed from the equation and safely stowed away in the other car. Shortly after my family had done so, the man’s son turned up in his tractor, and the two got to work hitching the car up to it. Two hours, a cup of coffee, and two rather lovely glasses of homemade white wine later, we had met the angel’s entire family.
Italians are some of the best hosts you will ever have the pleasure to meet. It didn’t matter that it was 3:00 am by the time we arrived at their house, our insistence that we didn’t want to cause any more of a fuss fell on determinedly deaf ears. Within minutes of arriving, we had been escorted up to their living room with its cosy crackling fire, and all but ordered to sit down and relax as they laid out coffee, cake, olives, salted beans and a carafe of homemade wine.
It didn’t faze them that our Italian was rudimentary at best, and we gestured and sketched our way through two hours of enjoyable conversation. Being British we, of course, tried to politely excuse ourselves a few times in an effort to let them get back off to their beds, but they were having none of it!
When we finally did get up to leave, we were led, first, on an impromptu tour of the farm and animals, before being taken down to their cool cantina. We thought they were just proudly showing us the fruits of all their labour, but before we could even take it all in, we found ourselves loaded up to the elbows with homegrown fresh fruit and vegetables. They told us that it was to help get us settled in at the new property, and the farmer’s mother then proceeded to present us with a bottle of their lovely wine as a housewarming gift.
It was like a strange but wonderful dream! We went from living in the UK, where you were lucky if your neighbours even noticed if water was pouring out of the front door of your house – but that’s a whole different story – to some sort of utopian society where people whom you had never even met before, behaved better and showed more caring and genuine concern about your wellbeing than many of those whom you’d known for years!
With the sun coming up over the horizon and bemused smiles on our faces, we drove off towards the house (the right way this time!). Needless to say, my angel (and neighbour as it turned out), Vincenzo, and his beautiful family were presented with the loveliest flowers we could possibly lay our hands on, the moment we could get to the closest florists.
When we arrived at the property, the neat garden and yard which we had purchased had since turned into a veritable jungle of foliage and wildlife, perfect for an animal nut like me, but not so good when it came to moving everything I’d brought with me into the property. Added to that, the water to the property bad been turned off by the well-intentioned former owner, and the kitchen – including everything but the bare pipes – had been ripped out and scrapped. We ended up having to utilise the well in the top field in order to ensure that the animals were looked after, and to give us some very rudimentary washing facilities!
In the years that have passed since that night, my love and respect for the people of this wild, untamed place have only grown in measure. Yes, the internet sometimes goes out for weeks or even months at a time, which is still definitely frustrating, but would I swap this life for the one I had in the UK surrounded by state-of-the-art technology and consumer-driven industry?
Not in a million years!
[Originally published on: www.grumpychickenblog.wordpress.com]