The Dolce Vita Diaries

The course carried on in similar vein for the rest of the day. The only difference was that the audience had an ever-growing confidence and would challenge Alfei, Barbara more and more at every stage. We couldn’t understand most of the words, but we could understand that there was a clash of cultures of sorts—between ancient farming tradition and modern scientific method. To me it seemed that the fact all these old guys were here at all listening (well, mostly listening) to a whippersnapper of a woman teaching them about ancient country ways was a victory for her in itself. And she clearly earned their respect—not least measured by the fact that they all stayed. She gently took the piss out of them—admonishing the critics of her methodology by insulting their trees as being ‘all wood’. This was something we’d read about—that a lot of people who kept olive trees mainly for their own use weren’t nearly radical enough in their pruning. They couldn’t cut one branch off in preference to another any more than they could choose to feed only one of their children. The result was that trees which should have at the most four main branches ended up with nine or ten—and the resulting tree was ‘all wood’. The effort it took the tree to keep all this wood alive meant that there wasn’t much left for the productive parts—and the trees would not only look ugly but be woeful olive producers. It’s a sort of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ warning shot for olive keepers.

That night, we sat on the cold tile floor of the B&B, our notes all laid in front of us, taking turns to use the Italian—English dictionary. Jason cross-referenced a lot of what Alfei, Barbara had said with a very technical manual published by the University of California, the only technical olive book he’d found that was written in English. It was a close contest whether the unintelligible academic text or the unintelligible Italian was harder to fathom.

By midnight we’d started to make some headway. The good thing about technical jargon is that it’s usually derived from Latin and the words are often very nearly the same in English and Italian. So we found out that the vaso policonico that Alfei, Barbara kept referring to was no more mysterious than a ‘polyconic vase’. Hang on, that’s pretty mysterious. But another pruning book showed us that this meant a tree pruned in such a way that it was like an open bowl in the middle, i.e. empty of growth inside, and that each of the (usually four) main branches was pruned into a sort of cone shape with one main growing tip then giving out to more productive shoots lower down. This was a shape we recognized from trees we’d seen and we liked the sound of it. Trees like that couldn’t be accused of being all wood and how clever we’d be to talk about pruning our trees like a polyconic vase. Even in English people would be perplexedly impressed.

The next day was more of the same, except for some reason freezing cold. I think the church heating bill can’t have been paid—though they’d really no excuse given the pile the Pope is sitting on. Now whenever Alfei, Barbara mentioned the vaso policonico we glanced at each other knowingly. Jason even did a ‘casual’ sketch of one in a place in his notepad which he knew was visible to the rows behind.

The afternoon brought excitement in the form of some young olive trees offered up to the Alfei altar. There was a gasp from the crowd—well, from my mouth—when she whipped out a pair of secateurs clearly with intent. As she demonstrated how to prune a very small olive tree, that messy bit where theory tries to become practice clouded our vision. And everyone else’s. Within seconds, half the audience were up on their feet poking and jabbing at this little tree, pulling a branch here and a twig there—saying cut that bit, leave that bit, everyone sure they knew the answer.

‘Domani,’ said Alfei, Barbara, ‘tocca a voi’ (‘you will have your turn’). The next day was a Saturday and some of the teensy farmers had brought along their burly wives. It had snowed the night before and everyone was thickly bundled. Rosie was almost rigid in layers, wedged into her papoose like a too fat hotdog in a too small roll. We congregated outside the church, ready to head up the hill to the olive grove which some unwitting volunteer had lent the course for our pruning experiments. Probably saw it as a cheap way of getting the trees pruned. But would you get a bunch of apprentice electricians round to have free run of your home’s wiring?

Alfei, Barbara bobbed up and down the ladder like a squirrel, showing why a snip here and a cut there were called for—and how, in some cases, there were branches big enough to justify the saw being brandished. She showed us what to do on perhaps four trees before offering up her secateurs to the first smart Alec who fancied his chances. A sprat of a man bounded up the ladder and was ready to start his ‘tac tac tac’ when Alfei, Barbara asked the assembled throng to suggest which branches should stay and which should go. A chorus of ‘Secondo me…’ (‘Well, I think…’) rang out through the valley.

The ‘secondo mes’ carried on the whole day, with arguments about what and where to cut becoming more impassioned as cold and hunger set in. A nice lady lent me a blanket she’d brought along so that I didn’t have to lay Rosie actually on the snow to change her nappy. The lady and her wrinkly husband laughed at us affectionately and called us the ‘mad English’.

In terms of learning, the experience was one of feeling like you’ve got it, then lost it, then regained it, then lost it, then regained it again. There were so many different bits of the theory that, when faced with an actual living tree, one often contradicted another. So the rule that said you should cut off anything blocking light to the centre ran into conflict with the one which said you shouldn’t sever a ‘principal branch’, when the tree you were faced with had one main branch that curled across the middle of the tree and exploded growth out down below. Or how to choose between retaining the end branch that was too vertical and the one which went through an awkward dogleg right at its end? This was life and one had to make compromises. We were sorry when Alfei, Barbara told us it was the end of experiment time and the course.

All that remained was for us all to assemble in a restaurant across the road and eat an enormous feast. I suspect all Italian courses end a similar way. At the end of the meal, a group of dignitaries at the high table got up to speak. The farmer next to me told us that one of them was the local mayor, one the president of the Le Marche olive oil society and various others things I didn’t understand. They talked keenly for quite a while and singsongishly enough to send Rosie thankfully to sleep. Then there was a reshuffling of chairs as it became clear that presentations were to be made. Everyone who had completed the course was to be given a certificate! In turn, each grizzled farmer was called up to walk in silence to the high table, shake hands with the mayor and collect his little paper slice of prize.

The mayor said the words ‘Oceantelfordgibb and androsierogers’ so strangely that it was only when we were jabbed in the back that we realized it was our turn. We felt terrified. Jason said he was more nervous getting this three-day pruning course certificate than he’d been getting his degree after three years of study!

Suddenly, out of the quiet, everyone burst into spontaneous and loud applause, which turned to cheers and whistles and shouts as we walked up, Rosie slumped in her sling. As we shook the mayor’s hand and looked out at these lovely grubby rosy smiling faces, it was all I could do to stop myself bursting into tears of gratitude. Gratitude that we had been allowed to fit in.

This was to be our life.

5 Leading double lives (#ulink_2bad2183-f2ea-5420-b01d-cc8731e8ba81)

It was to be our life. But we weren’t there yet. I was leading a schizophrenic life, half as a TV executive, and half as a budding Italian peasant. Jason, too, was in a strange hybrid life, our Italian plans seeming a chimera juxtaposed against the all too practical everyday duties of nappy changing. Occasionally for him these two worlds collided, as when he made a trip to Italy with Rosie in tow. Being there with her on his own, in the middle of winter (this one just didn’t seem to end), staying in the not very nice but very cheap B&B, was no easy feat. Rosie could still barely sit up by herself and the challenge of doing so on freezing cold marble floors was too much—so she’d preferred to be suctioned to Jason most of the day.

Jason had to go for two reasons: first, to check up on the building work on the house and, secondly, to prove that we lived there. Even though we didn’t.

Let’s take the relative ease of the first. We were having some fairly big work done to the house. It was not on the scale—thank God—of the total restructurings that many embark on and that we had so nearly done. But the house hadn’t been lived in for probably a decade and when it had been last inhabited, it was evidently by people who liked cooking in a tiny dark poky corner, hated the view and never had a bath.

The house, like most Italian country houses, was divided into two halves—the half where the animals lived and the half where the humans lived. The animal half was basically a huge lofty room—by lofty I mean you could have fitted in another whole floor just about—with tiny windows. In more recent years, it had been done up as what can only be described as a 1970s pizzeria—with pale pine wood cladding the walls and a disproportionately huge (and that’s hard in such a large room) open-plan brick fireplace.

This ‘pizzeria’ was the site of most of our major work—because this was the room where we thought we’d spend most of our waking hours. So we were changing the tiny windows into big French doors, putting in a big open-plan kitchen, getting rid of the fireplace and clad walls and opening the whole room up with a big archway entrance.

In the rest of the house, we were also changing the garage into our office, stealing one of the bedrooms to make a bathroom and opening up the erstwhile living room with another big archway, instead of its current plywood door. We were retiling all the floors, rewiring all the electricity, putting in a gas hob (which meant a big buried gas container in the garden), installing a septic tank, waterproofing the cellar, redoing the roof and the stairs and repainting and plastering pretty much everywhere.