in Picenum

So our time in Italy is ending. We’re packing up and moving back to London. The last year and a half has been by turns exciting, depressing, infuriating, and blissful.

I remember the day in October when we unloaded the moving van into a house with no back door, no water apart from the standpipe outside, no heating, and no kitchen - but plenty of scorpions and mice. I remember Henry learning to walk here and saying his first words and the ecstatic look on his face every time Carletti lets him up into the cab of his monstrous turbo diesel tractor for a lift up the hill.

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A quick note to say that our house is available for rent over the summer. See details here.

This weekend I’ve organised a pista for about 10 friends - two months later than the traditional time, but this was the first weekend we could get everybody together. I didn’t think timing was a problem. Until last night.

When I told my friend Leo (ex-butcher) what we were up to, he was horrified. He grabbed my shirt and shouted: you’re a criminal! You can’t have the pista this late in the year, the meat will never cure! It will all go bad. You’ve been in Italy too long - you’ve become a criminal!

I’ve just spoken to Gian Paolo at Taverna and it looks like Leo may be right. GP is going to have to come up with creative solutions for all things we’ll make on Monday - things that should already have been hanging up in a cold cellar for the past two months.

I can think of worse crimes than making sausage out of season. Though judging by Leo’s reaction, some other people can’t.

I’ve just eaten the best piece of meat in my life. I went up to Carletti’s this morning to have breakfast with him, his uncle and aunt, and his mother as they get ready to finish the pista - turning their slaughtered pig into all the wonderful things you can turn a pig into.

We were clustered in a cozy room in the old stone farm house, around a wooden table with a thick top lacerated with cleaver marks. On one side of the room was a disproportionately large fireplace where Carletti’s mother sat in a tiny chair at the hearth, raking out coals and turning a wire rack loaded with bracciole steaks. Bracciole are usually thin steaks cut from almost anywhere on the pig, but in this case they were thick and came from the beautifully tender meat at the base of the back. 

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Snow arrived yesterday (the two photos are the same view 24 hours apart). Carletti, with his farmer’s ESP for weather, had been making noise about the snow for at least a week before it arrived. He kept coming down to the house to inspect my tile laying on the terrace (he used to lay floor tiles as his profession) and as he left he’d say smugly, you better hurry up or the snow is going to put a stop to your tiling.

He was right about the snow. And looking out at the terrace now under its unbroken white blanket I’m asking myself what the hell I was busting my ass for in the first place. When our families arrive on Friday I could have just told them there was a beautiful terracotta tiled terrace under there, they’d never have known.

In addition to covering up my tiling, the snow has pointed a blinding spotlight on the empty place where all our winter preparations are meant to be.

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There’s an excellent four page article in yesterday’s New York Times on the frustration in Italy with the cumulative effect of decades of clientelism, mismanagement, and corruption. As Sette Bello points out, there’s not much new in the article, but it does sum things up well. And there’s a great video of Beppe Grillo, Italy’s most famous blogger and the force behind a growing popular movement against the status quo in government. And what a status quo: many of the same powerful figures have been there, creaking and wheezing, since WWII - despite their criminal convictions.

But the problem isn’t isolated within government. The old system permeates every level of society, down to individual cittadini. Most young people still aspire to a job in the hulking and ineffectual public sector where the hours are often comically short, few results are required, the benefits are large, and it’s very difficult to be fired.

Many people want to take part in the system because life is easier on the inside. Consider the long queues at the police station or government office - which side of the window would you rather be on? The side of the civil servant or the side of the queuing masses?

Here’s a paragraph from Paul Ginsborg’s Italy and Its Discontents that sums up the relationship between citizen and state:

… practice of the bureaucracy depended to a notable extent upon the exercise of the discretionary power on the part of the functionary. The key term ‘discretion’ did not in this case signify the necessary and desirable autonomy of action of the individual civil servant within a general framework of impartiality, but rather the performance of favours in response to particularistic pressure. The speed and efficiency, indeed the very realization, of a bureaucratic act became dependent upon this sort of discretionary act, and the task of the citizen (if she or he could be called such in these circumstances) was to find the right levers to trigger that action. Naturally enough, not all citizens were equal or could exert equal pressure. Inducements to action varied from the use of friends and relatives to the pulling of rank, to outright corruption. As a result there came into being a profoundly deformed relationship between citizen and state. (p. 216)

Operating in this way for so long has tainted people on both sides of the window: the civil servant with the discretionary power and the lines of ordinary people looking to any possible way to jump the queue.

So how will Italy bring about the transformation (at every level) that will be required if it’s to survive as part of Europe?

As I mentioned a few weeks back, it’s been a very lean year for olives. This week, Tessa and I managed to harvest all of our crop in a single day - a job that took four people four days last year. And the results are predictably depressing: barely 10% of last year’s take - maybe 2 month’s worth of olive oil. It’s like this all over Le Marche, probably because of the drought over the summer, and the price of oil is shooting up.

But lean year or not, it was worth a trip to the olive press in Massa Fermana today to take some videos of how they do it. Where last year the press was in operation 24-hours a day (Lino had to settle for a 3am slot and he’s a respected man down there) this year they told us we could come anytime this afternoon. Last year the boys at the press looked hag-ridden and irritable, a parade of vans steadily disgorged a stream of crates into the warehouse, and people hurried in all directions. This year was slightly different:

But at least the lull allowed me to get good shots of the process. And the boys at the machinery didn’t seem to mind the intrusion - they seemed almost grateful for a break in the tedium. Last year I reckon I’d have been run down by a wheelbarrow. I had the chance to ask them a few questions, some of which they answered. When I asked about what makes oil virgin or extra virgin they looked at me blankly. Just press your olives like the rest of the punters and take your oil home, they seemed to say.

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Why can’t a heterosexual guy tell a heterosexual guy that he thinks his booty is fly?

Following tip-offs from Kiwis Peter B and Gareth, please see clip below. And if you’d like some more, there are links to some other brilliant Conchords songs below the video.

Business time, If you’re into it, The humans are dead

Excellent article also published in the Guardian. Biofuels just get worse and worse.

A couple of nights ago Marco and I met up for a drink at Urbe. Paolo poured glasses of red and we picked over the plates of snacks set out on the bar. Outside the low clouds were drizzling steadily into the fields, which have abruptly changed to shocking green after months of drought.

I told Marco about recent chaos at work that might require me to spend more time in the UK. He was puzzled when I explained that I disliked the idea of being pulled away from Marche to spend more time in London - especially at pista time. I told him if I had to choose between career and the pista, I think I’d probably pick the pista.

And he told me about work on his building sites recently grinding to a halt.

Most of my workers are out sick, he said.

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