Taking control

We have been back in London just 12 hours and Trullo Mare e Stelle already feels like a world away! 
We spent a back breaking three and a half weeks, gardening, hoeing, cleaning, digging up and digging in, spending money - and holding our breath. The sense of achievement is a joy, as is the realisation that perhaps, just perhaps, the worst is over. (My mum and dad also deserve a medal for their generosity, patience and support - and never saying 'It told you so'.) 

There is still an ocean of stuff to be done: perimeter walls need to be restored, the new cistern connected so our water supply will be less expensive (and erratic), a pergola built for shade, interior walls rendered around taps - the list goes on and on and at times, seems overwhelming. 

But then you have moments like this sunset on one of our last evenings when the life force imbued in this beautiful place envelops you and working really hard to make the pile of stones livable again is worth every 3am anxiety and all the heart ache.

Before leaving to (urgently) do some work and replenish the bank balance, I'd been desperate to catch up with the wonderful lady we met last year and who I wrote about in a previous post. 

Caterina and her husband Peppino were on the property when we arrived after our first road trip with the van in 2018 and we found out later that she had spent many of her childhood summers in the trullo playing with cousins and staying with the owner, a beloved aunt. All year I've been haunted by the thought that she might have driven past and seen an abandoned mess, perhaps thinking that the  project she was so thrilled to have discovered coming to life after half a century had been left to rot over the winter - or worse. (Sadly, the southern Italian country side is blighted with half finished projects, skeletons of just begun holiday villas, half-restored masserie, foundations started and never finished as money, planning and familial complications stop building works mid stream.)

As we sat down for an aperitivo at sunset mid week, Caterina told me that she had indeed wondered what had befallen the project. When I explained that our restoration and architectural plans had been approved in full - but the surveyor had failed to lodge to correct paperwork for construction - she let fly with a delightfully robust and wonderfully loyal fury about the man I will continue to refer to only as A R (sehole). Be nice if his ears were burning last night - and not in a good way.

Caterina next to me and on the other side, neighbour GIovanna and her husband Giuseppe, Peppino and their delightful grand daughter, Francesca who at just 22 is preparing to undertake a PhD in adolescent psychology in London. 

As is her way, Caterina came bearing the most delicious gifts: taralli hand-made at home, mouthwatering traditional sweet pastries, slightly salty and stuffed with amarena cherries - not to mention three, yes three trays of freshly made pasta, all local shapes including orecchiette. 

Our closest neighbours, Giuseppe and Giovanna (and their pack of adorable dogs) had also joined us for a drink and as night fell, they told us that the abandoned trullo next door had always been a ruin and even Caterina's 90 year old sister had no memory of anyone living there. 
"As a child, I always ran past it very fast at night because the front door was always open, it was dark inside and it felt scary" she said.

The front door is still open and looks dark today. Here is Robert  checking it out on one of our first visits before buying our own wreck).

Caterina's family owned the land we sit on, our trullo and one in fields further along - for at least 170 years that she knows of. Neighbour Giuseppe, 70, was born in the trullo across the road from us and they had played together as children. He has lived in the street ever since. 

In a quiet moment later Caterina said she had "a few things I'd like you to see and have": "Peppino, li vai a prendere in macchina?" (Peppino will you go and get them from the car?)

When her husband came back in, his arms laden, my heart jumped.
I still can't believe how lucky I am.
The most beautiful, beautiful bowls: both huge, classic Puglian ceramic pasta bowls but oh so wonderfully old. One, my absolutely favourite, contains a 'sewn' metal patch where it had cracked and two little holes were drilled to allow the repair. 

"We used to eat pasta from the same big bowl, all together," she told me. 

"There was a man who did this kind of work and came to fix plates with wire, he would come around and patch them so they could continue to be used. Nothing was ever thrown away." 

I can't wait to share a pasta with friends and family - in the meantime, it is holding Robert's library up

I love that patch so much: it says everything about the rural culture, the people, the children who shared pastas over half a century of summers, the frugal, environmentally sound, oh-so-modern-but-ever-so-ancient desire to use and re-use.

(I've always loved the English war time 'mend and make do'  credo while the Japanese art of kintsugi, making beauty out of blemishes and cracks - has also fired my imagination. 

Japanese kintsugi

(I'd already bought an old rake and fork at a market outside London because I fell in love with the patch on the fork, inexplicable to anyone else tbh).

When I told my mother the story today by text, it triggered memories of her own grandmother's country house in Puglia and big serving plates in the kitchen also 'darned and patched' with wire. 

Mum has also told me about the beautiful hand woven baskets she remembers were used to collect figs and wide, flat ones to dry them and to my joy last night, Caterina handed me two beautiful specimens of these too. 

Hooked on the wall ready for fig season. (the wire I found on the land next door)

Then,  came two little ceramic pots, traditional in design and a tiny, bright blue spirit stove which was used to warm baby's bottles or water and milk. 

I wish I could express more vividly how much joy these gifts have given me  ... 

Caterina said these are things that don't suit her house and are of another time and another place in her life. But she'd never parted with them and couldn't part with them - until now.

In my mind, these gorgeous bits have returned home. 

And our home, I hope, will in some way always be hers too.  

PS Rather wonderfully, she also told us that the trullo had played a significant role in her own parents' love story: her father was betrothed very young to a local girl and was taken, one summer's day, by his parents to the trullo to visit her family. However when he clapped eyes on her cousin, he decided there and then that she was the one for him. His ardour was reciprocated and the young couple defied the familial plans, married and lived a happy life. Caterina's mother was the 'other' cousin her dad had fallen for at first sight!