I’ve never done a film review – or actually this is going to be more like a film advert – before, but this is a very special film. It’s Italian and it’s called ‘Pranzo di Ferragosto’. The English version is released as ‘A mid-August lunch’ which is a bit like translating Christmas Day as ‘A turkey meal in December’.

Ferragosto, 15^th August, is a very special day in Italy. It is the one day when no-one, but no-one, is at work if they can possibly help it. It is not a good day to fall out of a ladder. August is holiday month in Italy and Ferragosto, being nestled safely in the centre of it, is like holidayissimo, ultra holiday. Countryside villages, towns and cities alike all burst into life with feasts, Nutella festivals, outdoor plays and concerts, dances in the piazza and all manner of merriment and consumption. It is the most wonderful joyous day of the year once you know about it, and the worst possible day to arrive unknowing for your holiday, wondering why everything is closed and there’s nowhere to buy milk for your morning tea.

Anyway, the film. It tells a very simple story of a middle-aged man who lives at home caring for his wonderfully observant, highly demanding elderly mother. Already a very Italian tale. He is called upon at the last minute by a variety of friends and colleagues to add to his coterie of charges; they are leaving town to party / eat / have affairs and want to leave their elderly aunts / mothers in his care. Just for a night you understand. What begins with the potentially terrifying prospect of managing an unplanned pop up old people’s home turns into a life-affirming adventure exploring love, food and the art of celebration. That rare combination of feelgood and profound, the film works because of the brilliantly spontaneous performances of the elderly lady leads – all of whom were new to acting – and the quiet charmed bewilderment of Gianni Di Gregorio who keeps the whole unlikely gaggle, and the whole unlikely film, on track.

Watch it! Better still, watch it on August 15^th while eating a lovingly prepared baked pasta lunch.

Buon Ferragosto!

The idea is very simple: the book is essentially a visual survey of the eating habits of the world. I don’t think it pretends to be particularly scientific, rather it gives you the gist with beautiful simple pictures. Each one is just a photograph of a family, standing in their kitchen (or other eating place) –and laid out in front of them is all the food they eat in a week. The words are kept to a minimum – just where they live, how much that week’s food costs and what their favourite dish is.

It works on so many levels – an insight into what constitutes ‘a family’ around the world, the merest glimpse of that family’s power structure, a glance of interior decor, and of course the fascination of seeing laid bare what other people consume. Half an eviscerated sheep in Mongolia, a whole load of pizza in the US, a whole lot of not very much in Chad.

At the micro level, these photographs are endlessly fascinating too. The wonders of those mysterious packets daubed in delicate graphics, the different colour schemes of different countries – the delicate aqua hues of the Japanese in contrast with the vibrant primaries of China. The vast variation in the sense of ceremony of eating – from the functionality of the German table to the passion of Bhutan.

And then there are those brands, those logos, which leak across continents and social borders, creep into every corner. It reminds me of that famous Andy Warhol quote – that what is great about America is that it’s the place where everyone ‘from the President to the bum on the street’ drinks the same Coca Cola. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.

Discuss.

A short while  and rather fewer soap suds later, we decided to call in the professionals. Searching online, we found a plethora of Italian soap producers and e-mailed all of them (about 25) in faltering Italian. After a week I had received just two replies – one from a mad hippy asking me about my star sign, the other from a lady from Umbria called Simona. It was the start of a wonderfully joyous soapy collaboration. (And no I don’t mean with the hippy).

Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce the wonderful Simona Fabrizio (whose English is annoyingly good)….

From Simona:

“I thought to share with you  this recipe to introduce myself.  Homemade pasta, especially ravioli is one of my passions. I thought to use  Baccalà for the  filling. Baccalà is  salted cod, which in Italy is  used in many recipes because it has a wonderful flavor and is not  expensive.  I also decided to use  cherry tomatoes  which  dressed  with a good Extra Virgin Olive oil,  are a perfect combination for this dish. So here’s the recipe.”

HOME MADE PASTA

How it  works:

Place the flour on a board . Make a well in the centre and crack the eggs into it. Add olive oil and a pinch of salt. With a fork, first mix the ingredients in the hollow together and start to mix in the flour from the edge.

Gradually incorporate more of the flour until a viscous paste begins to form. Put the fork to one side and, using both hands, heap the remaining flour from the outside over the pasta in the middle. Work the flour in to the paste. If the paste does not absorb all the flour, and if the ingredients cannot be easily worked, add a little water.

Push out the dough with the heels of the hands, then form in into a ball again. Repeat this kneading action until the dough has a firm but slightly elastic consistency and no longer changes shape when you remove your hands.

By machine:

Put the strip of dough through the machine’s smooth rollers several times, narrowing the setting each time, until the desired thickness is achieved.

Start at 6 and finish at 2 for: Ravioli

INGREDIENTS FOR THE RAVIOLI FILLING AND FINAL DISH.

Ingredients (serves 6)
200 grams of cod
500 grams cherry tomatoes
Extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Chopped parsley

-
How it works:
After soaking the Baccalà over night, boil the Baccalà. When cooked, with a fork, mash it with a handful of chopped parsley. Place the Baccala in tea spoon portions onto a sheet of the pasta you all ready prepared. Cover the Baccala with another sheet of pasta and cut into the ravioli shapes. In the oven for 15 minutes grill the tomatoes, half of them cut in half and the rest left whole. Season with plenty of EVO  oil, 1 clove of garlic ,salt and pepper. Cook the ravioli, drain the pasta and serve with the grilled tomatoes. Sprinkle with fresh parsley.

I didn’t get up when the alarm went off, it was a preposterous idea. Instead I dozed and had weird dreams (quite nice). Then I got up, not very early in the end, though just early enough, it turned out, to make mandarin cake for breakfast.

Finding the recipe was not easy. Ironic given that it was a recipe we had actually made up. I knew it was in our book but it turned out we don’t have a single copy of our book in the whole house. Not even the one that sometimes props up the wonky table was there. So I looked on the internet (reluctantly – computers before dawn?) assuming that Jason must have recipe blogged it. But no! I had ingredients, a hot oven, the tools at hand and above all an early morning hunger to produce. I could not let it go. I looked again online and eventually found it, on pages further down on the google search than I’ve ever delved, on an old Nudo shop brochure that someone must have scanned or copied or some other miracle, just for me. (Thank you person or robot that you are).

It was very pleasing to be making cake before getting dressed. Especially as people started to emerge to the unusual smell. First Jason, ‘Cake?!’ he said, surprised and pleased. Next Rosie, ‘Mummy?….have you made cake?’ pleased but slightly indignant. And finally Sorrel, who was more direct. ‘Cake’ she stated, ‘Sorrel’s cake.’

And so it was that we all ate mandarin cake for breakfast.

The first case is the easiest to deal with and I would recommend the following technique: commandeer another child, let’s call that child, child Beta; the ideal candidate will be young enough not to understand the copying game but old enough to understand the fun of physcial violence. When the imitating child, let’s call her Child Alpha, starts imitating you, play along for a bit, then throw in a sentence like ‘Oi, Beta, please will you kick me very hard on the bum?’ Child Alpha will repeat this in a loud crowing voice, Child Beta will kick Child Alpha very hard on the bum, Child Alpha will yelp and retaliate, all hell will ensue and you will have to wade in to stop warfare – but you will  have broken the spell of the now long-forgotten game.

The second case is trickier and to be honest, we would like some advice. We have been alerted (thank you, Nudo supporters out there, we owe you) to several cases of the most astonishingly blatant Nudo rip-offs. The olive tree adoption idea has of course, been multiply copied – but that’s to be expected – and we obviously didn’t invent the concept of adoption itself. But whole swathes of our text copied word for word from our website to another site selling olive oil, or our Nudo olive tree (lovingly created over many hours of painstaking labour by my sister) copied pixel for pixel to someone else’s olive oil bottle label! I mean that’s not on is it?

So this is a plea. Firstly, to your copycats out there, if you’re reading this and scouring for future ideas, please don’t do it! If you want our help, ask us, we will almost certainly give it. But not this way. The second is to you Nudo-ites out there: what is the solution for business copiers equivalent to the one for dealing with children above? Elegant, not pious, simple, not too precious, a bit messy and utterly successful?

Over to y’all.

The first people they have offended is you, loyal Nudo customers.  Why?  Because our special World Cup offer promised free shipping for as long as Italy stayed in the World Cup. We thought we were being generous! We thought that would mean weeks and weeks!  We barely had time to announce it before the team were out, slaughtered on the pitch by a game crew of highly deserving Eastern European first-timers.

The Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers had the one word headline ‘VERGOGNA!’ (‘SHAME!’) today and there are no punches being pulled in describing the team’s sickeningly poor performance. One of the more succinct descriptions came yesterday from the team’s midfielder Gattuso (who played with the winning team in 2006); ‘Four years ago we were heroes. Today, we are bollocks.’

As La Repubblica put it, ‘It is the end of a generation, the end of an illusion…now the world is laughing at us.’

Tip to anyone holidaying in Italy this year: don’t joke about this.

[PS - we've changed the offer to Free Shipping on gift sets in USA & UK for the duration of the 2010 World Cup - Ed.]

The 2006 world cup was my first insider insight into how Italy play football. As with many other things – lingerie, gelato, embroidered jackets, opera, the Catholic church – it made a different sort of sense when seen through Italian eyes. England’s first game – I can’t even remember who it was against  – made me feel itchy. It was disorderly, chaotic, stoppy-starty, inconsistent, just annoying viewing. Then I watched Italy’s first game and it was like watching a different sport. It really did resemble ballet! There was fluidity in the movement, the team worked together, the ball invisibly joined between adjacent feet, it was smooth, calm feeling, almost like slow motion. It didn’t make me feel itchy at all. It actually made me think I could learn to love football. And it certainly made me love Italy even more.

Then their second game was a bloodbath – that awful match against USA which ended with mutiple sendings off and bleeding heads and I felt that everything that was magical a few days earlier had been betrayed. This was brutality – cheating, faking, diving and barbaric desperate clawing for control. I hated football again.

But I couldn’t quite forget that first game. And in Italy the possibility of being allowed to miss a match was – well it wasn’t possible. And then Italy got through and through. And even though there was never again the splendour, at least there was no more blood.

And then it was the final. Italy against France. A rivalry which conjures in Italians feelings every bit as strong (and in some ways deeper rooted) as England vs Germany. We went early with friends to get a seat in front of the massive outdoor screen erected in the piazza in Mogliano. The screen and chairs (plus motley other furniture brought out from bars and homes) filled every paved inch of this tiny medieval quadrant. The atmosphere was unbelievable, fury at the French palpable in every touch of the ball – and all this fury frothing up into an explosion at the infamous moment when Zidane headbutted Materazzi and was sent off. The bloodlust for his departure would have been more appropriate for a hanging.

Full time. It was 1-1. Extra time. Still 1-1. Penalties. The word that inspires terror in the hearts of the hard. The injustice! The inelegance! The make or break of a reputation. For proper football fans, torture. For me, the best bit. The drama of the penalty shoot out is unrivalled. It is immense. And breathing it with a couple of thousand wired Italians squeezed into a too small outdoor living room was one of the most thrilling moments of pure pleasure I’ve ever shared.

The moment of victory was, for a micro-second, a disappointment. The life-affirming tension was over. But then the celebrations began. From nowhere, cars and little 3-wheeled apes and scooters and people were everywhere, saturated in red white and green, tearing around, making as much noise and mess and movement as was possible. The partying went on all night.

My sister is a reasonably obsessive supporter of niche passions – be it the Brighton procession of outlandish facial hair or the annual air guitar championship. She has a love of things that other people go to a lot of trouble to love. Asparagus love was a new one on her.

We were all in a bit of a spin and decided to prepare for the big day by, well, by eating lots of asparagus. Is there any food which passes so extraordinarily quickly through the nephrons of the kidney? One has barely swallowed…

The big day dawned and we headed down to the village, expecting to see people dressed as giant asparaguses and legion floats boasting different asparagus-based delectables. And of course bunches and bunches of that heavenly stem-thin asparagus that those in the know gather from secret spots in the wild.

There was none of this. What there was, was a strange exhibition of photos of plants as well as the plants themselves – none of them asparagus – which my sister described as an ‘earnest exhibition of weeds’. There was also a tractor, with trailer attached, carrying happy children in unambitious circles around the car park.

This remains one of the more mysterious days of our time in Italy. Other festivals – celebrating everything from artichokes to Nutella – have over-delivered. The strange lack of appearance of a single stem of asparagus at the annual asparagus festival is a puzzle up there, for us, and on a level with the continued popularity of Berlusconi. Perhaps the real asparagus devotees, having cunningly diverted all the local asparagus dilettantes, were out gathering those tasty stems from a local hill.

Next morning, same scenario, nothing doing.

Third morning, a glimpse of sun! An excited call! ‘Arriviamo’ says Antonio. ‘We’re coming.’

An hour later, four cars carrying an array of overalled men skid and bump their way down our terrible driveway. Ardelio arrives with his tractor. Then Enzo with the compressor and a tangle of wires attached to supersonic (well ok air-powered) seccateurs. The eleven men, whose even average age must be post-pensionable, head down into the grove with Jason, barbers on a mission to cut.

Louisa arrives a while later with half a coop’s worth of dismembered chickens. To satiate the appetites of all these workers , we have recruited her help and boy we are glad we have. Born and raised in Le Marche, she instinctively knows what and how much food will be required and she is unphased by the thought of producing it all to a strict timetable. Watching her fling pans and chicken thighs and linguini and spinach around is as thrilling as (and somewhat reminiscent of) the first time I saw the circus group Archaos juggling turned-on chainsaws.

At 12 on the dot, eleven hungry mouths, loosely attached to eleven tired bodies, appear. By 1 on the dot, they are all fed, watered, wined, varnellied, coffeed and ready for the afternoon session.

I think that a day such as this is what people dream  of when they dream of life in the Italian countryside and the honest rewarding labour of tending an olive grove. And they are right to dream. It is a perfect day.

There was one person, though, whose eyes positively lit up at the challenge: Ardelio (who has since become much more involved with Nudo, and whose groves now form a part of the Nudo collective). He drove his tractor up and down and in and out of the trees and up and down the hills with the gay abandon of a three year old let loose on his trike. We could only stand and gawp, delighted that we had found our man.

And then we found our woman. Lina, Ardelio’s wife, not only drives the family tractors with a force and zeal that make Ardelio seem restrained, but she produces the most incredible mouth-watering lunches of salami (home made, with meat from the family pigs), cheese (ditto, but from the sheep’s milk) and bread (flour milled from their wheatfields). She smiles calmly, modestly, never breaks into a sweat and even in overalls and covered in dirt, is all woman. The simple fact that Lina exists gives one cause for optimism about the future of humanity.

Lina and Ardelio we salute you!

This week, the sun coyly coughed and let us know it was standing behind the door in its dressing gown. Just checking things out, the lie of the land. I was instantly fooled. Crocuses out, tights off! Let’s go! And now let’s get back inside and put that thermal vest on.

Best approach this time of year is to get planning your summer holidays. We’re feeling the allure of a barge or possibly a tent. Somewhere that your brain tells you is wet and grey 97% of the year but which your heart still believes will produce unremitting sunshine for the two weeks you’re there. The beauty of the imagination. If you don’t share a desire to be in a queue at a lock in the rain in Wales, then why not give Le Marche a try. We have lots of great recommendations for places to stay and the chances of warmth are, well, we can’t make promises, but if it’s not warmer than Llangollen I’ll eat my galoshes.

We love Dean & Lesley of Caserma Carina and Bob & Ian of Casal dei Fichi – both offering a luxurious, comfortable stay close to the Nudo olive grove in Le Marche.

Earl’s Court exhibition centre is one of those places I must have walked past or driven past or gone past in the bus a hundred times. Not once did it cross my mind that I would ever go in, let alone wearing a badge saying ‘Exhibitor’.

Like most new things, there was a whole new language to master. Even the simplest thing (such as, embarrassingly, the difference between a trade show and a consumer show), was an eye-opener. But the real revelation was seeing the huge industry which exists around these shows.

Here’s the basics of how it works: you pay a (usually exorbitant) fixed sum of money to rent a tiny square of to-be-carpeted space on the floor of a giant hall. For first timers, this usually means the minimum rentable area, which is 2 metres by 2 metres – the definition of a space just too small to swing a cat. First timers assume that said exorbitant sum covers everything you will need in this tiny handkerchief of space, but how wrong they (we) are. The sum does not include, say, a table to put your things on, a light to show people your things, a fridge to keep your things cool or a sink to wash them up. It does not even include a chair, a shelf or a leaning post for when you’re too tired to stand. By the time you’ve got all that little lot, you need to sell your personal lifetime best in order even to break even at the show.

Luckily it’s all worth it because you get to meet your customers face to face and remember what all this is about.

So please do come and visit our stand F32 at the La Dolce Vita Event at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London. It’s on all this weekend 11-14 March 2010.

The following is an extract from our book ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries’

‘But when Jason tried the first sticker it didn’t quite fit. Not quite fitting is a bad thing as it means the edge either creeps up over the rim of the tin or, worse, that it doesn’t quite cover all the metal the other end. All the stickers seemed to be just a tiny bit too big. If you were lucky and happened to find the middle way, you could get an acceptable fit, but it was mere chance really. At 10.30pm on the eve of our van departure, though, I was prepared to go with it. “We’ll send the ugly ones to people with double-barrelled surnames,” I said, only half joking.

“I can’t bear it” said Jason. And he went into the office to get what I knew was going to be the guillotine. “If I cut down each one and you stick, we’ll be able to get them just right and I think we can still do them in time.”

“Oh my god, are you serious?”  I said. Cutting them would mean a painstaking shaving off of maybe three millimetres on each side of the sticker at slightly tapering angles.

I knew that protest was useless.

And so we spent the whole night, well until 4am, deliriously slicing and sticking the last 500 stickers on to the tins and leaving them in neat piles to be packed up the next day. When we closed our eyes, we had repeating green olives etched on the inside of our eyelids.”

Enjoy your spring packages!

“The Dolce Vita Diaries: Stories and recipes from an Italian olive grove” is now available from Amazon.co.uk.  The paperback version can be pre-ordered for April 2010.

The bigger the bow the greater the proof that it really is the thought that counts.

A very lovely friend used to do this every year. She would take (or have someone take) a great photograph which she would turn into a great card which she’d mail out to friends all over the world. They were always beautifully done which meant that the recipients invariably kept them on display for ages – so sometimes you’d go to someone else’s house and see one just like the one that you had received. Far from minding that the card was replicated, this would instantly induce a moment of exquisite and profound bonding.

So get to it. It’ll be even better now. At a time when we all type instead of write and have digital prints by the shedload, how much more magical to receive a real physical card in the post on a day when only the dead-hearted can completely deny a glimmer of hope of a mysterious love surprise.

I have never been a gym goer (except for a few years in LA, it’s actually a civil offence there not to and I didn’t fancy another run-in with the LAPD) and much prefer exercise that is part of rather than an addition to normal life. Cycling to work, harvesting olives, mowing the lawn – these are all good examples of exercise. Spin classes, jogging on the spot these are not.

And I have a theory about winter exercise. With winter exercise, a little goes a lot further. Just think how much extra effort your body is making just to keep a normal temperature when the world outside is freezing its ass off; you’re practically exercising by just getting out of bed. Shivering – that’s high velocity muscle pumping. Chattering teeth? A full workout for craniofacial ligaments. Those old people noises that arrive unbidden when you stand up? Meditation with vocal enhancement.

So go for a nice brisk bracing walk, knowing that you’re practically running a half marathon of effort, enjoy a nice cup of tea with a fully earned piece of cake at the end of it, and leave your resolutions where they should have stayed in the first place, in the bin with the party popper carcasses.

My sister’s taste sensations were much more sophisticated and befitting of the fully modern lady she is. They involved no cheese nor pineapple, but fresh anchovies, pickled baby chillis and green olives, all clinging to their 70s heritage through the DNA of the cocktail stick. Delicious (not the stick).

At this time of year, taste sensations – small surprises for the mouth that almost make you say ‘oh’ – are great for keeping all that winter warming cooking alive and bristling. I don’t mean you have to ram fresh anchovies into your shepherds pie – the very thought – but little moments of extreme pleasure can really help puncture the winter gloom. This is the time to look to jars of baby gherkins, olives, capers, anchovies, strong parmesan, smoked bacon, pickled onions, sun dried tomatoes, dried apricots and dried fruit of all kinds. Intense flavours, concentrated hits. It’s all going to be ok.

In fact this is the perfect time of year to while away a few hours helping making some astronomical facts. There’s this wonderful site called Galaxyzoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ where you can sit and categorise galaxies. The data is all pooled into a giant information resource about the stars all around us. So the project is no less than a crowd sourced classification of the universe, wee humans tapping away, sorting millions of galaxies squillions of lightyears away into different boxes. How fabulous is that? It’s the perfect winter project.

Not only that, but the worst is over. You see? You’d forgotten already.

The feast was stupendous, involving no less than 8 different spins on the langoustine (not great for Jason the vegetarian though the spectacle was at least a feast for the eyes). After the eating was done (well it was never really done, as courses just pushing their way through, but after the main assault) Rosie and Louis had both passed out in pushchairs and Frazer unilaterally decided it was time to kick the dance floor into life. As if by magic, Billie Jean beat into action and before anyone had the chance to object, Frazer was engaged in a full-on crotch-grabbing routine to the mystification of the assembled Italian mammas.

Shortly afterwards people headed off outside to get a breath of fresh air and calm themselves by handing homemade fireworks to the under 5s. And at about 5 in the morning everyone disbanded to drive home sozzled and happy.

Being introduced to Christmas Day Italian style has made me realise another plus of midnight mass attendance. It really helps you work up a hunger man enough for the task of surviving Italian Christmas feasting. The trick is to not stagger home and indulge in a midnight feast; do that and you’re doomed. You need to keep the hunger, and you need to keep it right through Christmas day morning without succumbing to temptation. ‘Feel the burn’ as Jane Fonda used to say, in exercise instruction tapes so old school now that they were actually only released in cassette form.

Those of you who are thinking you’ve experienced any challenge of quantity that Christmas fayre has to offer, I give you this single thought. In Italy, it is traditional to make a huge homemade baked pasta dish for the Christmas meal – a richly layered lasagne, a deeply stuffed cannelloni. This rich, filling pasta dish is, literally, your STARTER. With your belly filled with ladlefuls of rich gooey pasta and vats of sauce, you are ready to move on to Christmas dinner proper.

Food for thought eh? Sing heartily, sing loud.

Anyway, it’s up and it really is a thing of beauty. That warm Christmassy feeling in electrical form. The only niggle is that the F is not properly committed to the cause and usually remains un-illuminated. So its ‘Buone este’ round our place. Este means east in Italian. Could we be looking at an act of international sabotage by the apparently charming staff at the Chinese pound shop?

Buone este one and all.

Those message cards nowadays teleport me to Nudo’s very first Christmas. The company had only been going for a few months and we had just, rather ineffectively, done our first olive harvest. I think the total number of trees we’d adopted stood at around 14 and we knew the names, and birthdays, of all the foster parents. Friends and family are the saviours of early hopes in a new business. Anyway we were approaching Christmas and somehow hoped that ‘real’ customers might somehow, magically start emerging in force. But how would anyone find us? How would anyone in the ‘real world’ even know we existed? Is this something Father Christmas asks himself?

The answer, at least as we saw it, was Christmas gift guides- you know those lists in newspapers (so old school!) that give you great ideas for last minute presents? We were prepared to do anything, including as it turned out, selling our children, to get in one. I exaggerate of course. But I do remember in our desperation, sending a photograph of one year old Rosie with a sorry expression and the words ‘What kind of Christmas?’ with the press release that we sent to friends to scatter to anyone they knew who’d ever even had a paper round.

Emotional blackmail is a very effective tool (a fact soon to be confirmed, were confirmation needed, by spending Christmas in the company of Italian mammas). By the miracle of modern communication, that press release made it into the hands of someone who knew someone who knew someone who was compiling no less an opus than the Independent’s guide to ‘Great Christmas presents for men’ in the Independent. Those Christmas gift guides really do make a difference. People knew we existed. People adopted our olive trees. And Rosie had a lovely first Nudo Christmas.

In Italy, my favourite is Tutti Santi, All Saints day. It’s basically the hoover up day for all the second division saints who don’t get a proper day of their own. It’s the potluck saints dinner of holidays. There isn’t a particular celebration (I mean obviously if you are spire or mass inclined, you won’t be disappointed) but what’s nice for us is that this day always manages to take us completely by surprise, often even on the very morning of it, cropping up as it does at some random moment in godless November. It’s a roll of the dice day of holiday thrown in without warning. That can be a bad thing – and at first all that its arrival really heralded for us was not having any milk for the day – but now we have embraced it as a sort of ‘surprise surprise’ of holidays. Imagine it – you wake up in the morning thinking it’s just another day of work and wey-hey, everyone’s down in Approdo (our local cafe) having languid cappuccino breakfasts! No work with no warning. Like being off sick but you feel great. Marvellous.

Tip to anyone with ambitions for public office: chuck in a surprise day off. Only let people know on the day. Ensure yourself an agenda-less, live-in-the-moment-full day of celebration. Even name it after yourself. If you can’t get in on that card, you might as well give up now.

Cut to 2009. We have a land rover. We have expert olive harvesters. We have a machine with automated wiggly fingers. A team. No travel cots. No favours from sisters. And Corrado doesn’t laugh at us any more, sometimes he even, almost admits to being quite impressed with our output.

And it’s funny getting better at things. In one way, it is surely one of life’s great satisfactions to improve, to realise that one can learn and become more effective and more efficient. But on the other it is hard not to hold out a bit of nostalgia for those innocent, inefficient days that are the nursery slopes of any new activity. So when Jason phoned last week to say that the Landrover was stuck down in the grove, unable to get up the slippery mud-slide, and he and team were hoiking the crates up one by one, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit fond, a little bit proud even. It’s good to keep a hand in with your past.

I don’t think it’s that they’re greedy, or that I am really Jack Sprat-mean, I just think we see these things in a different way. It’s as if (and some physiologist somewhere has probably looked into this) they feel that to make an impression on the body, one needs to provide above a certain quite high base level; 20 beans and you might as well not bother. Five a day? More like five kilos a day. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten more than one orange in a sitting. I’ve seen Italians eat five! Because today is orange day. So let’s make it count.

Apply this same approach to gelato or chocolate and you’ll have found just one of the many reasons Italy is such a lovely place to go on holiday.

The daily shop, and even more so, the market shop, is the answer. It works on a much more human scale in every way. You can carry everything without breaking your arms. You know what you feel like because you are dealing with the present tense not some speculative future. You can fit it in as a little break between other jobs. You can see what is fresh and there.  You know how much you need because you know how many you’re catering for and how hungry you are. And you can spy on other people’s purchases to get ideas.

In a tiny village like Loro Piceno the spying element is not to be underestimated. Everyone shops in the same place (there’s only one food shop in the centre), so everyone can see exactly what everyone else is buying. There is undoubtedly a sense of cooking competitiveness. If there’s a particularly choice cut at the meat counter, there will be a rabble elbowing each other out of the way to get it. There’ll be a run on artichokes if an influential local figure declares them to be fine. There will be disdain for anyone with too much prepackaged food in their basket. Market day on a Monday would make a fascinating study in group psychology, as people queue for ages to get zucchini from stall A, even though there is no queue at all for the seemingly identical offerings at stall B.

And now the Brits are slowly coming around to the ‘small and often’ philosophy of shopping. It’s not that they’re turning from the supermarkets – far from it – but they are using them with a bit more sense of the market (with its associations of fresh produce, recently plucked from a supplier and soon to be sent towards stomach) and a bit less sense of super (the idea that everything has to be scaled up). And hooray for that.

It might be time to shatter a few illusions. Perhaps you imagined, as I did until a few years ago, that an olive harvest went hand in hand with sunshine, artisanal wicker baskets and long languid lunches. Wrong on all counts. Our first harvest in Loro Piceno several years ago, we enjoyed consistently grey skies, freezing weather and one day it actually snowed. Not even that whispy pretty snow-on-a-sunny-day kind, the grey, drizzly stuttering kind that makes you feel vaguely melancholy. Of course we had to stop harvesting. When it comes to harvesting attire, I’d always pictured people in vests and shorts – insane! Not just because of the cold (that first year, we wore most clothes we owned, elegantly layered, as if we’d been caught in a suitcase-contents blizzard) but also for protection; if you are up in the innards of a Piantone di Mogliano tree, foraging away with your harvesting comb, any bare skin is going to going to come away mucho scathed.

Then the basket thing? Well that image comes from ‘olive oil as hobby’ land. If you have a handful of trees to harvest to make oil solely for home use, then the basket might well come in to play. You can tootle out after lunch, pick a couple of basketfuls and throw them into the communal press for your share of oil. And good luck to you. For us, things are scaled up and deromanticised quite a bit. Huge nets ten metres square and a set of massive tent pegs to keep the bottom end up and the olives from tumbling down the hill, large plastic crates which, when full, weigh around 20kg and a team of earnest workers. It’s a different kind of fun.

The long languid lunch. Hmm. Bear in mind that harvest season generally happens close to the shortest day of the year. Every hour of daylight is a precious thing and the notion that you might waste any more than the very bare minimum on something as decadent as eating is quite wide off the mark. Lunch is necessary (harvesting is proper physical work) but also necessarily speedy – if you’re lucky it’s a quick plate of pasta hurriedly put together by one of the team, if you’re less so it’s a ciabatta sandwich on the run.

So with sentiment cast aside, we can now turn to the real romance of the harvest. Because despite the fact that you don’t look a pretty sight and your belly might ache, the real romance lies in the olives themselves. The romance lies in the miracle that converts these oleaginous orbs into one of the most wonderful products humans have ever chanced upon. And when at the end of a long day’s harvest, you see yours, first a drip then a steady flow, coming out of the olive press, baskets and sunshine and any other fancies, really do pale into insignificance.

Buona raccolta!

Friends who come to stay with us in Italy often wonder, after a week of sensational and gluttonous eating, how all Italians aren’t hideously overweight. We did too until we realised there is a knack to eating like a local. By way of intro, here’s what we’ve learned about the famous Italian three hour lunch…

The first important thing is not to eat breakfast. Most Italians don’t anyway, unless you count a couple of strong espressos and a stale nutella-ed wafer. If you have been up since the crack of dawn and eaten nothing by the time it gets to 12.30, you are ravenous.

This explains the antipasti – usually a simple and – crucially – immediate, plate of local speciality meats and cheeses. It is something delicious but not over-calorific to quell the panic of a stomach which hasn’t been fed since what feels like Roman times – though more accurately is the night before. With crisis averted, it’s then time to move on to the ‘primo’ (ie what foreigners refer to as the ‘pasta course’). This is your carb course. It is the Yorkshire pudding of Italy, whose job it is to put some fullness in the belly. In content terms it could mean pasta, risotto, orzo or even a thick pulse soup. The key thing to bear in mind here is sharing. Only foreigners will go into a restaurant and order a primo each – and each one different (imagine the havoc in the kitchen, each separate pasta pot, each separate sauce pot – expect raised eyebrows from your waiter). Italians, by contrast, will generally agree on a single choice for the whole table and then order, for example, ‘cinque in otto’ – 5 portions to share between eight people.

With the primo finished, there is rarely ‘hunger’ in any true sense, but the body still has a desire for other types of food – protein and fibre in particular. Here’s where your ‘secondo’ comes in – a few simple lamb chops, grilled over open flames, or a piece of chicken in a simple olive and tomato sauce. The simple flavours are delivered by the meat rather than created by the additions of the chef. Obviously to follow and to complete the nutritional family, something vegetable-ish is called for. Again this is generally very simple, a plate of braised chicory or some simply roasted herby potatoes.

All of this is being washed down with water which (as in America but still irritatingly often not in England), is brought as a matter of course. And naturally a small jug of local cheap wine (the cost is usually about equal to the cost of the water; if it’s not, you’re probably getting tourist rates).

The stomach has been filled and rounded. But there is still just a corner for a touch of something sweet, a piece of fruit or a small dessert. And with that, you’re done, balanced and not bloated and pretty textbook in terms of a beautifully balanced diet.

All that remains is the tiniest espresso (never, ever a cappuccino – of all the sins we foreigners commit in the eyes of Italians, this is the most incomprehensible, insulting even). The espresso cuts through all this food and wine with just enough of a jolt to propel you back into what is left of the day.

Buon appetito.

Luisa wasn’t sure what to do about the bees so she called us. We weren’t sure what to do about the bees so we called Guida. Guida is always sure about what to do so she called her friend the bee keeper. Within a day, the bee man had been and bee-ed. Sadly we weren’t there to see it (who doesn’t love all that spaceman bee-keeping regalia). But happily we did see two beautiful things when we arrived at the house a few days later. The first was the amazing site of the now empty hive and stickier-than-superglue honeycomb trails which decorated our bathroom window. The second was our very own honey left on the porch for us in one the friendly bee keeper’s miele jars. Now that’s what I call homemade.

Some of you might have seen a couple of articles in British newspapers over the last couple of weeks called dramatic things like ‘Not such a dolce vita’ and ‘The end of our Italian dream’. (Journalists, aren’t they wonderful?) We thought we should write something here to set the record straight.

The first important thing is that we didn’t set off to Italy with ‘an Italian dream’! We set off with a business plan and lots of Italian grammar books. We wanted to make olive oil, we wanted to live in Italy and we wanted to see what a different kind of life, involving a lot more physical work, would be like. But we weren’t under any illusion that we were stepping into a life of chianti lunches and semi-retirement. This was often tricky for people to accept; the image of an olive grove in Italy and the bucolic life that goes with it is so potent that it was sometimes hard not to feel as if we were living everyone else’s illusory Italian life. We knew we would have to work hard, and learn a lot and be out of our comfort zone in every way imaginable. And all of that has turned out to be true, sometimes in wonderful ways, sometimes in more difficult ones.

One thing we came to realise after about two years living in Le Marche is that we were not cut out to live full time in the countryside. We really missed the city and the proximity of lots of people and noise and dirt and chaos. So we spent the next year and a half living mostly in Rome, with frequent trips back to the grove. Those were lovely times, two thirds of the time getting our city fix and the rest being able to really enjoy the countryside and nature in a way that we found harder full time.

But it was also a very expensive way to carry on, not least because we also had to make frequent trips back to the UK for business reasons – to do trade shows, visit stockists, do tastings and so on. After much hand-wringing, we decided that the most sensible plan was to move back to London, have that as our base, and make frequent trips back to Le Marche.

So that’s where we are currently at. We love living in London but also miss lots of things about Italy and Le Marche. But we are lucky enough to be able to still spend lots of time there, seeing friends, looking after the grove, having holidays, discovering new local delicacies and so on. Inasmuch as there was ever a ‘dolce vita’, there’s actually more of one now than ever. From the chaos of London the quiet of Le Marche takes on a gentle calming quality and the beauty and greenness of nature is all the more seductive after weeks spent amidst manmade grey.

Nudo continues to grow and thrive and our network of Italian food producers increases by the month and we feel very privileged to have literally the best of both worlds.

In terms of this blog, it has always existed to bring stories from that other world of green pastures and perfect cappuccino, Italian customs and friends – to bring a little bit of that charming world into worlds that are often very different. And that is still the plan. And we very much hope that you will keep reading, and keep sharing our little tastes of Italy.

Jason tells me the clear water isn’t necessarily a good sign. (He has a way of puncturing romantic notions about the sea.) Apparently the Mediterranean is actually one of the most nutrient-poor seas in the world – and the consequent lack of life further up the food chain is the main reason for the clarity of the water. Personally I don’t get it – there seemed some perfectly delicious looking seaweed around in reasonable abundance, so I don’t know why the grill or whatever those bitty fish things are called are so choosy.

Sardegnans, we were told by Guido and Claudia, have a history of being terrified of the sea. The Sardegnan people, in contrast to most islanders, are typically shepherds rather than fishermen – and the island famously has more sheep than people. Everywhere you go inland, you hear the pastoral tinkling of a passing goat or sheep and some of the finest food finds like their potato, mint and pecorino filled pasta called culurgiones have nothing to do with seafood. Most people still live in towns perched on hilltops inland and the courage to set up shop on the coast is a very recent phenomenon, inspired mainly by the need to service tourists.

We were lucky enough to be there with friends who have a sailing boat, so we had some gorgeous trips up and down the coast exploring hard to reach beaches and coves. Four children under the age of five in a space as confined as a prison cell meant the joy when we could anchor down and swim out was unbridled on all our parts.

Sardegna is one of the very most fragrant places I’ve ever been. Everywhere are amazing smells – of juniper, rosemary, mint and the local herb called ‘mirto’ (which I suppose is myrtle) growing in huge wild bushes. In great Italian (and maybe world) tradition, mirto is most used culinarily to make the delicious post prandial headache-inducer of the same name. It’s evilly good.

If you are thinking of going there, I’d recommend the less-trammelled parts on the South and east of the island rather than the Prada-store filled North (where Berlusconi and cronies hang out). But of course it depends what you’re looking for. Luckily, you can get mirto wherever you go. So that’s alright.

So anyway, there is this fact that Italians make the best coffee. On average, that is. If you were to take all the coffee-making Italians and all the coffee-makers of all the other countries in the world, add them all up and divide by their number – the Italians would surely win. I’m sure this experiment has been done. But to reach an average, or a ‘mean’ value if we are being pedantic which we clearly are – there will be several people who really excel, who reach beyond the average ‘quality’ number. And there will be others who fall somewhere behind. Sometimes very far behind.

On holiday in Sardegna (lovely, beautiful place, delicious food, crystal sea, charming company, thanks for asking) we met one of those very far behind coffee-makers. We have photographic evidence of their crimes. I am not going to name names but suffice, I hope, to say, that a cappuccino does not have a smiley face daubed on it in red and brown chocolate sauce. That, my friend, is not a cappuccino, it is an affront to all that is Italian. So publish and shame, that’s our simple aim.

This whole cappuccino business is sensitive because the time of day when one is most in need of correct coffee satiation is the morning, a sensitive time for most of us. When we lived in Rome, we spent days researching the best possible cappuccino amongst the dozen or so bars and cafes within a 100metre radius of our flat. There was a clear winner, a cafe on the corner we dubbed ‘The Brothers’ because all of the three or four baristas who worked there had the same nose. We became loyal supporters, going there every day for our perfect cappuccino, perfectly foamed with bubbles so tiny the smoothness competed with a bambino’s derriere, perfectly roasted coffee, perfectly strong, nothing added. That cappuccino made every day that bit better.

Then one day a dreadful thing happened. I went in alone, we’d been away so hadn’t been in for a while. By way of celebrating my return, brother number 2 made a ‘special’ cappuccino. It had a cobweb lattice crafted on top, of caramel and chocolate interlaced sauces. I could have cried. It was worse than the day my brother ripped up my Leif Garrett poster. In my shock and horror all could say was ‘Wow…. grazie mille’ or something of that ilk. The cappuccino was ruined, all its delicacy decimated by this vulgar sickly snail trail. Brother 2 looked at me, all eager and pleased and I wanted to be Italian and upfront and honest and tell-it-like-it-is. What I said was ‘Mmm delizioso’ and as it came out of my mouth it sounded horribly convincing.

I tried again the next day hoping it was an aberration. But brother 3 gave brother 2 a knowing nod that said as clearly as if he’d graffiti-ed it on the Colosseum ‘Remember what our nice lady friend enjoyed so much yesterday.’ The same perfect cappuccino was presented, again devastated by vile gelatinous confection. I smiled, drank it, said ‘Ciao’ to the brothers with a sad heart and knew that I could never go there again.

So what the heck is this vino cotto that makes it worth such a party? I mean even Martin Luther King only gets one day. What can be three times as good as he? The answer is a strange kind of medieval homebrew which tastes somewhere between fine sherry, fine port and paint stripper depending on who you are talking to. It is made by taking freshly crushed grapes and boiling the juice down over a period of several days, very very carefully, then ageing it for years (or longer if you forget, which apparently quite often happens, the task often falling to the more ancient members of the family) and eventually daring to drink it.

Jason and I have come round on it. And like anything of course it depends on the quality; there is undoubtedly the paintstripper end of the spectrum. But at the good end there is some pretty fine rustic stuff. It is sweet and heady and tastes pleasingly, er, can I say continental? It is just not a drink that would be made in Britain. And it is the local speciality of Loro Piceno, dating back you know the usual centuries. Which is enough reason to celebrate.

The Loro Piceno Vino Cotto festival happens in August every year, around the time of Ferragosto, one of Italy’s most important national holidays, on 15th August. There are local vendors selling artisanal goods from socks to honey and unlikely bands playing on the unfeasibly large stage set up in the village centre. One year we saw cheerleaders from Idaho, another a procession of brass brands from I think it was Ukraine. It is a wonder well worth beholding. And of course secreted down small alleys, and in the newly enshrined ‘vino cotto’ museum, are old timers and young bucks comparing stories and secrets about how to turn out the best cooked wine Loro Piceno has ever known.

The wedding was a truly delicious event and, as ever with Italian social occasions, held some lessons for us Brits.

The guests all gathered in the evening around the beautiful church standing tall in the piazza of San Elpidio al Mare. The group was fantastically diverse in dress choice alone – from Miami Vice white suits to the latest designer confections, from edgily modern to charmingly old-fashioned, from spent a week getting ready to just popped out. Walter was amongst the waiting guests, excitedly chattering to all and sundry. Everything was literally and metaphorically out in the open. There was no hiding away the precious couple ready for a big Hollywood reveal: when Desiree arrived (late! She always is!) and stepped out of the car, everyone cheered and chatted at a greater pace. She and the rest of the guests all walked in to the church together. Lovely. Whenever I have spoken to girlfriends who have been through the wedding ‘thing’ (Jason and I, despite a five year long engagement and two children haven’t quite got round to it) about that moment where they have to appear in the church, wrapped up like fragile parcels and gawped at like beautiful mute swans, as somewhere on a line between nerve-racking and horrific. There was none of that here – the occasion was still special and all about the couple, but the more so for their being allowed to be a part of things not apart from things.

And so it continued. The priest had doubled as a maths teacher in younger life so knew both Desiree and Walter from their childhoods; this leant an intimacy to the proceedings which also felt new. It was quite a long service – much less the ‘wedding ceremony’ complete with music full of pomp and circumstance of Britain and much more a sort of ‘wedding flavoured service’. People wandered in and out, sat down, stood up, were relaxed in a way that is impossible for most of the heathens forced awkwardly into churches for their once a year wedding shot. And the bit that always jumps out in the UK version – when friends and family are called upon for an underpowered ‘we do’ to support the couple through thick and thin – was writ large large large here. We really were all in it together. For them.

The reception was in the grounds – the driveway, the pool, every bit of surround  – of Walter’s parents’ lovely nearby home. Thank God we know enough about Italian eating now to know that the twenty five tables laid out with every imaginable delicious morsel, not to mention the twenty waiters circulating with trays – were only the antipasti! The sit down meal that followed lasted for the next  3 or 4 hours, throughout which time Walter and Desiree bustled around, together and separately chatting and joking around with guests. How refreshing. It’s another British wedding bugbear that you often only get to say a quick hello to the bride and groom as somehow they are too busy! Doing what?! Only once everyone is drunk and they hit the dancefloor are normal human relations allowed to be restored. Here there was the high table – the highest ever in fact, perched up above the swimming pool, setting the guests off against the sky like a crazed Di Chirico painting. But no-one was stuck up there, they came down from haven and amongst their fellow men.

The speech situation presented another interesting difference. Every time Walter appeared, someone would start shouting ‘Speech! Speech!’ but as soon as he’d start saying anything they’d shout ‘Basta! Basta!’ ‘Enough!’ There was no pomp allowed. It was just a great party. We left around 3am and we were among the early ones. Thank you Desiree and Walter and we wish you the happiest life together.

I can’t wait. I’ve never been to Sardinia before but everyone says it’s beautiful. The picture I have in mind is a hybrid of images of Sicily – a staggeringly gorgeous island imbued with vertiginous ancientness – and pictures from a magazine article about Berlusconi’s Sardinian getaway. His few mega-hectares there are his very own Neverland with ten swimming pools and a runway and concert hall and heaven knows what else besides. I think it’s where he takes his trainee cabinet ministers for executive summits if you know what I mean. Maybe we’ll anchor off one of his beaches and send him a black spot in a bottle or something.

We haven’t managed to adopt the correct Italian summer holiday posture. While we are going on holiday for a very conservative two weeks, Guido and Claudia, by the time we join them, will already have been in Sardegna for a month! How very white and creamy we are going to look. And how greenly envious. Yet sadly I don’t think the 2-3 month summer holiday is something we are ever going to be able fully to embrace. We pretend it’s because we have our own business which is impossible to leave for that long, but truly I think we are genetically incapable. If I have even a two week holiday, the first week is winding down and the second week an existential crisis. I don’t know if I have the courage to peer over the abyss of the deeper beyond.

Anyway, for now two weeks seem like heaven. Hopefully next time we report, it will be about some newly scouted Sardinian food delicacies. Sardines even, maybe.  Happy holidays!

When we got to the front of the queue, we realized we were in more-or-less the same illiterate boat as the rest of them. First of all we got in a muddle trying to explain that we didn’t have a phone number – one of those situations where I always say too much. Where ‘non telefono’ would probably have got the message across, instead I decided to try to explain that we were redoing our house and still waiting for a phone line to be put in; what came out was something like ‘The house, yours, is being reseeded and we are late for the string.’

Then we got in a pickle about where to put our first names and where our surnames, and also whether we needed to put Rosie down (London habits making us think that this list might also serve as a checklist should the place be bombed). In the end I put Cathy where I should have put Rogers and Jason where I should have put Gibb – with everything leftover going in the column for first names. The result was that for that evening and for the duration of the course, Jason would be known as ‘oceantelfordgibb’ and I as ‘androsierogers’.

One night, we decided that it would be fun to take some photos and we were feeling creative. I dug out a book of Da Vinci paintings and we decided to have a go at recreating his famous Last Supper. We were a few disciples short of a following but such details weren’t going to stop us. There followed a stint of rummaging around for props and arguing about who got to be who. Jason scored the Jesus lead by playing the untrumpable birthday boy card.

After a few self-timer comedy moments (last supper with sprinter in foreground) we’d managed a quite good (by which I mean terrible but recognisable) offering.

Some days later, with everyone gone and the silence returned, we received the print we’d had made and I decided to go and get it framed at our local shop. I’d been in there a few times and had got to know the gruff-but-heart-of-gold framer a bit. We had even come to joke about how we had polarly contrasting framing tastes. I knew that if I went for a frame type that prompted an ‘urgh’ reaction, I’d probably chosen well.

I was a bit nervous about him seeing the picture. Maybe there was a law against masquerading as a biblical figure. Maybe he’d think we were mocking the lord. As I unfurled it, his eyebrows lifted. “L’ultima cena?” (“The last supper?”) he half asked, half stated. “Er…Si” I replied, smiling out of one side of my mouth, looking at him hopefully. He burst into a big fat laugh. Ha ha ha. I looked him in the eye. Ha ha ha, he continued, “Jesus is good” he said.

It is the classic Italian cooking rule of simplicity. They have good ingredients that really taste. They prepare everything by hand, fresh, right here right now. They don’t spread themselves thin by offering a squillion choices – they have the confidence to say ‘Here is what is good today’ based on the fresh ingredients they have, and maybe who is in the kitchen and maybe what they feel like. The customer doesn’t always have to be right. Sometimes a bit of unapologetic, proud and informed leadership is so much better for everyone.  And the La Perla tagliatelle could end wars.

It’s very thin, much thinner than what might be called tagliatelle in a British supermarket. I’d say the strands are roughly 2millimetres wide. It is delicate. It melts in your mouth. And it really tastes of something – subtly of course but the wheat, the egg, the fields – somehow it is all there. And here’s another amazing thing – the tagliatelle isn’t just a conduit, an excuse, a blank canvas for sauce in the way it so often is outside Italy. In London I have been given pasta dishes which are pretty much 50% pasta and 50% sauce. No no no no no. Here the dish is 90% pasta and 10% sauce, the sauce just nudging a mouthful of the pasta a bit more in one direction or another. And an almost sauceless mouthful bringing  not a feeling of having been short-changed, but one of extreme pleasure. It is as different from foreign tagliatelle as instant coffee is from a freshly brewed Italian espresso.

And the real beauty is the bill. A total La Perla three course lunch with wine costs about what two humdrum starters would set you back in Blighty.

Note to self: must make more time to go out for lunch. If everyone else thinks we are ‘living the dream’ we might as well try and prove them right.

But that’s probably not much help for anyone trying to plan a holiday!

So on to a couple of specific gems we found. Fermo, balanced on a hill near the Adriatic Sea, has breathtaking 360° views of the surrounding countryside and the coast. Its main piazza is one of the oldest and best preserved in Italy and I’d defy anyone not to get bliss’ed out with an hour’s people watching in one of the piazza’s cafes. The Fermo theatre is also a classic of its kind, highly ornate with a column of vertiginous boxes, and seeing an opera there is really a must. The opera season favours quality over quantity so there are maybe only a handful of shows a year, but they are excellent. And you can get very cheap tickets if you are prepared to stand at the back of one of the boxes (from where you get a perfectly good view).

Ascoli Piceno has a piazza made entirely from travertine, a very particular kind of Italian marble. If anyone has visited the Getty centre in Los Angeles, they might be interested to know that the whole place is made of the stuff, shipped over especially from Italian quarries, and chosen for its gorgeous texture and the way it plays with light. I don’t technically know how to describe it, but I’ve always loved those book covers which are somewhere between matt and gloss in finish – and travertine is the stony equivalent. It looks even more beautiful if it has just rained – so rush there if there is a shower and enjoy the sheen as you sip an unfeasibly thick hot chocolate (its basically chocolate, heated) from the lovely art deco bar on the corner.

This time of year is also when Castellucio, a tiny village perched in the middle of the mountains, boasts a display of flowers that would make the Dutch blush. The whole valley – a flattened bowl which is all that remains of an ancient lake – is filled with flowers of every colour as far as the eye can see. The whole fantastic display only lasts two or three weeks but the memory lasts forever. And even if you thought it was impossible to be excited by a lentil, Castellucio is famous for them and one sip of a lentilly broth in one of the humble but excellent village eateries is sure to have you beating at the door of their ever-growing fan club.

When Jason went over to introduce himself, he was surprised to find that Jesus already knew who he was. ‘Ciao,’ he said warmly, ‘e benvenuto.’ Was he really Jesus and knew everyone in the world?  He noticed Jason was looking at him rather puzzled. ‘La tua casa’ (‘Your house’), he said, ‘ho messo tutte le piastrelle’ (‘I tiled your house’).

Another one?! We thought Elmedine’s dad had tiled our house!  No.  Apparently he only does the outdoor tiling. Jesus had done all the indoor stuff – a big job, big enough to pay for his new car, he ‘joked’.

Jason said that he’d like to come along to football training, just to do some exercise and keep his skills up. ‘Ma certo. Iniziamo proprio  ora?’ (‘Of course. Do you want to start now?’)

A bit embarrassed having seen what he was up against in the kit department, Jason headed back to the car to pick up his motley assortment of mismatched QPR socks, Liverpool shorts and raggedy football boots. Everyone else was in pristine Loro Piceno kits, clearly ironed by their mothers, and carried everything around in state-of-the-art kit bags with equally pristine boots tucked away in the bottom. They had two sets of shoes each – trainers for training and football boots for footballing. This was all a bit of a shock to J, whose previous idea of an evening of football was a few fast physical games of five-a-side with plenty of bruises and swearing, then straight down the pub.

Training proper began. It transpired that Jesus wasn’t the main coach – he was just God’s number two, God being a guy called Ciocci who used to play for no less a team than Inter Milan, so in the eyes of the ragazzi was genuinely pretty close to the big guy.  This was a man who had played alongside true footballing gods such as (Jason tells me) Jürgen Klinsmann. How on earth he ended up in Loro Piceno, the other God only knows.”

Another time Antonio met one asleep under an olive tree in the early morning. This he claims was a venomous one (the big black ones aren’t) so for safety he stabbed it in the head with his handsaw. I was off in another row clearing suckers out of a different tree so knew nothing.

Yet another time, one poked its cheeky head out of one of the drainage pipes that pokes through the tumbledown garden wall, glimpsed Jason and was never seen again. I was the other side of the wall pulling weeds.

Well this week all my near misses were forgotten as I enjoyed my first bona fide snake sighting. I was sitting in the office, working at the computer when I looked up through the glass door into the garden. Plain as daylight, there it was, sort of slithering around like a slightly directionless bellydancer. Rather beautiful and rhythmic but also quite big and long and stuff of horror films like. I stood up to get a closer look and even the tiny sound of my moving chair was enough to prick its ears (do they have ears?) and it was off. I was going to say ‘it legged it’. It moved so fast, it defied human logic – how could anything with no legs run so quickly? It almost flew in its strange spirally wiggle, covering at least double the distance those clever crows fly.

So there it is, another achievement to strike off my rural ‘to do’ list.