I’ve arrived in Campello’s Bar Le Logge for my morning cappuccino and write-up at 11.45am on Sunday and people are skipping into the church, late or nearly late, with that shroud of hurry we used to put on coming into Canterbury Cathedral late for assembly, trying to look more trite than we felt, or perhaps just annoyed at not being on time. On my walk back up to the house yesterday, the sun suddenly came roaring out but it’s still autumn-chilly today.
Yesterday Beverley was at our house when I got back and the four of us segued into lunch, Imo hacking the tomatoes into chunk-like slices, mozzarella, bread, oil; the standard fare had here over and over. Mum and Beverley did various gardening things after lunch.
6 o’clock we went to Vincanta, a wine bar just outside Campello, at the bottom of the hill, to meet Rodney, an Australian classics academic and friend of Beverley’s, who lives in Poreta, the neighbouring village to Campello. Rodney had in tow an American couple, arrived that morning from Cleveland, Ohio and drunk with jetlag, who are renting his home from him for a month, as he has just started working at a university in Sicily, in central rural Sicily, in fact, in a town, to which, of all places, Mum has been.
John and Harriet from Cleveland, Ohio are in Umbria for a month. He is a writer/ screenwriter/ playwright/ academic with a keen interest in fly-fishing and has come to research Umbrian fly-fishing, and possibly write about it. I never got to the bottom of what Harriet does.
Caroline was at the table too, an English woman who married an Umbrian and moved here pregnant with their first of two daughters. Now divorced. Molly her Corgi mutt stared at us all evening. And Paolo and Paola, an Italian couple.
Figaro (Beverley’s dog)’s vet frequents Vincanta for an aperitif. She appeared on the terrace – and Figaro yapped berserk. She sticks a needle in his bottom every time they meet at the clinic – poor Figaro wasn’t to know this wasn’t likely to happen at 7pm on a Saturday night in a wine bar.
Back at the house, we watched an episode of Poldark, thrown back to C18th Cornwall, mines and balls. I’m progressing with The Leopard.
Our house is lowest-right
My walk down from the house to Campello’s piazza and sole cafe, Bar Le Logge, in the mornings is quite a pleasure. Tough uphill on the return.
I need to introduce myself, at some point I think, as part of the English family up the hillside. Making something a routine here which involves the people of Campello is quite a novelty – usually we duck in for a week in April, a week in October, maybe a week in the summer, and really just rest in the house, or out and about beyond the village. Perhaps they don’t know or care. Though you can imagine in England everyone would have tabs on an Italian family dropping by their village.
The church service started with a clacket of bells at 12. The sun isn’t any closer. I’m wrapping up and going back up the hill.
Char in Oxford 