Connections with the past

 

This trullo is full of stories - as earlier posts will attest. It has attracted people it knew from its past - bringing new friends for us - and now delights the many visitors who have come to know it in its restored incarnation. 

Serendipity has returned objects that belonged in the trullo half a century ago and we have brought some things to it that seemed to fit in organically to become part of its story. My grandparents' kitchen table first and foremost, wood and marble top restored meticulously by Pasquale Aversano who knows that table as intimately as we all do. 

Caterina Argento - whose family owned the trullo and played here as a child and her husband Giuseppe Sasso have been integral parts of this story of lost objects. Every time I return, I look around and think of them. 

This is my absolute favourite, the old clay double handled bottles that held water and kept it cool for those working in the fields that surround the trulli of this region.

There are ceramic plates, roughly glazed, with the chips that signify decades of meals around family tables, some salvaged by the man who used to come around and 'sew' an iron stitch into a plate that threatened to break away. They are symbols of a different time, when recycling was a necessity, resources scarce. 

In this, our sixth year of having the trullo, something very dear to my family has returned to Puglia thanks to my cousin, Michela. Last week, she brought me a treasure, symbol of a chapter in her father, my Uncle Gian Luigi's life and in my mother's as well, although she was younger and remembers very little of that time. It's a period I have written about in my family memoir, The Sea Palace and the Golden Bee, when their parents - our grandparents - were arrested by Mussolini's men and spent the last years of the war, before the Allies arrived in Italy, in house arrest as the Fascists deemed them foreigners deemed dangers to the state. Despite the last two generations being born in Italy, the family had retained French citizens and were therefore classified as 'enemies' (thankfully in some ways as they were able to sit out the war in the relative safety of the Puglian countryside, near Terlizzi.

My uncle (above), whose emails with me in the last months of his life, form a significant chapter of the book, was a young school boy in this period and local farmers handmade and gave him a set of perfect miniatures of their own agricultural tools to play with. They're small and incredibly beautifully made, obviously by someone with blacksmithing skills. He gave them to my cousin, his eldest daughter when she had a trullo - and as she has now sold it, she passed them on to me. They are truly a joy and I am so very grateful to have them - and to bring them back to the land they were made.

Now to find the right spot for them....