Gli alimentari di Ponte Am.

Many years ago, when we first bought the house here, Fabio jestingly referred to the village as Montefalcone Upwellnino. He had a point: whether they’re situated below sea-level in the Cambridgeshire fens, or two and a half thousand feet up the Sibillini foothills, rural communities have quite a bit in common.

   And not only real locations. At the moment life is once again imitating art: Ambridge is exploring the possibility of the community running the village shop - the driving force being Pat Archer. With startling synchronicity, my real-life Pat was invited to a meeting to discuss the future of the organic grocer’s in Servigliano, Ritorno alla Terra, the local equivalent of Ambridge Organics in Borchester,

   Although I didn’t have high expectations of last night’s meeting - and alas they weren’t disappointed - I went with her. And here any parallel with Ambridge ends. To kick off with, the meeting began at 9.30 in the evening. Because of the three hour Italian lunch-break days are structured differently here (see October 7th’s entry). You begin work earlier than in England and you finish much later: so, once you’ve allowed time for people to have supper, evening events begin at what seems to an Englishman an ungodly hour. The second difference, though, was less to do with national culture than the gulf between fiction and reality. In The Archers the meeting about the village shop was efficiently chaired by Pat and focused. In the real world community activists, particularly when they subscribe to ‘alternative’ life-styles are usually far less effective. We patronised an organic shop in Wisbech. The proprietor was a pleasant woman, if a little inclined to melancholy, and she stocked some otherwise unobtainable items. But it wasn’t awfully clean, and, unsurprisingly, she didn’t really have a business brain: to succeed commercially your main aim has to be making a profit not saving the planet. She ceased trading some years ago, despite holding a meeting of like-minded customers to try to save the shop. Ritorno alla Terra is cleaner, but the stock-control is worse. Pat’s often returned with items she found to be well past their sell-by date when she unpacked them. 

   The smell of joss-sticks as we walked into the meeting confirmed our worst fears. The shop’s  staff kicked off the meeting by introducing themselves and giving a brief history of the co-operative and its founding vision: a bucolic utopia in which people return to the countryside and recreate the close familial and community ties which modern society has lost. Although I’ve some sympathy with the pastoral vision, it’s not going to happen - I think Hardy probably had the last word on the subject in The Woodlanders. Montefalcone is surrounded by woods, but the trees stand on terraces and are relative newcomers. Until the late fifties these precipitous narrow strips of land were farmed.  Farming so back-breakingly arduous as to make the trials endured by Depardieu in Jean de Florette seem nothing. And outside Lombardy that’s what farming involves in Italy: scrabbling up a hillside, not placidly following a team of plough horses across an East Anglian plain.  Fat chance of most Italians wanting to return to that I’d say.

   But a popular dream with a certain sort of English person, the ‘let’s move abroad and renovate a ruin in the middle of nowhere’ reality-programme audience. And they were represented at the meeting, eager to participate in the next stage of the meeting. This seemed to be modelled on an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or a born-again God-botherers’ service. Everybody in turn made a statement - perhaps ‘gave testimony’ or ‘bore witness’ would be more appropriate terms - about why they were attracted to the organic movement. Pat and I declined, saying tactfully, ‘Siamo qui solo per ascoltare ed imparare’.

   And - after two and a half hours - that was it. Apart from a scheme to send youngsters to spend time on small holdings and introducing the co-op’s wares into hospitals there were no concrete proposals or sub-committees to implement them. But, a consoling thought,  the latter’s absence means you don’t have to worry about finding yourself on one with Susan Carter!