Getting it up, Italian style.

For the last couple of weeks the village has echoed to the sound of hammers and power tools as it’s been getting ready for the annual sagra: Sapori d’Autunno. When we were still day-boys we enjoyed the sagra enormously: over two days around 10,000 visitors crowd into the centro storico- normal population around 100! The streets are more crowded than Oxford Street the week before Christmas. Since we’ve lived here permanently the shine has worn off: taking the dogs for a walk is a nightmare, the racket of the crowds goes on into the small hours, and the streets are filthy for weeks after the festa’s over.  However, it does bring money into the village, so I suppose it’s ‘a good thing’. On Sunday, after mass, Riccardo asked if I’d be willing to help get things ready on Thursday, to which I agreed. Yesterday lunch-time, whilst walking the dogs, I bumped into him and he asked if I’d help erect a gazebo that evening around 8 o’clock. At 8 I wandered the deserted streets - no sign of any-one, so I went home. Riccardo speaks thick dialect and I find him quite difficult to follow. Perhaps he’d been saying the 8th of the month rather than eight of the clock. Half an hour later, hearing a bit of a noise in San Pietro, I wandered downstairs to find Riccardo and another man wandering down the street. The latter was introduced to me as an Englishman, John, and we were told to wait in the still unopened mini-market (13) for Francesco. So John and I sat there for a good half an hour chatting until he arrived and we all went down to the Largo del Concordato (7) where together with a dozen other people, including the parish priest, Don Marco, we put up a gazebo. We then moved on to the Largo Felici (6) where we put up four enormous gazebos which cover the main eating area. We eventually finished just after 11. Oh how different from our own dear Britain as Queen Victoria might have said: starting work at a time some hours after it would have finished in the UK, and being organised in an utterly haphazard way. As I’ve said before: Italy is a foreign country, they do things differently here.