Too late for Tuscany?

Pause For Thought

Although we had no telephone chat this week, Alberto was true to his word and sent thro' a group of new photo's of this weeks limited progress.  But its a bit difficult to bleat about this and that when there is so much grief in L'Aquila, with the death toll still rising and the rescue services toiling around the clock to find any remaining survivors.

It's ironic that a lot of the work we have done in Chicken House is to repair damage caused by the 1997 earthquake which struck Toscana/Umbria and devastated Assisi.  The damage done to our place was minor, but we were so far from the epicentre of that quake, it defies the imagination what it must have been like to be in the middle of it.

Phoney war furniture

As of tomorrow Italy will have been back to work a whole week in 2009, but from where we sit, we can't see it.  I've done as much as possible over the holidays to keep myself busy, updated drawings, tidied my files etc etc, but now the silence of this Tuscan 'phoney war' is killing me.  Okay, I know I can call/email Alberto, but for what? to be told 'the stone didn't turn up yet' or 'ENEL are still playing games' so against my better nature, I am biting my lip so hard it hurts, and in order to ensuresome good news I am resolved to only restart the weekly telephone chats with Alberto NEXT Monday, and so I am stacking up a list of tough questions to start this year as we mean to go on.

With nothing else doing on the house, my mind has wandered to furniture.  Whilst everything that will go into property to be bolted down, ie lights, taps and that bath, we haven't spent a minute on thinking about furniture, so perhaps our first night in chicken-house we will sleep in the bath, its certainly big enough, unless we start to source some furniture, and not resort to IKEA (which thankfully is at least 2 hours away in Bologna). 

If/when we have some time to spare in Toscana, (especially the 1st Sunday of the month), we will have to check out the now infamous Arezzo antique market.  From what anecdotal evidence I've heard whilst its a great place to look, its way too expensive to actually buy anything.  I've also seen posters advertising antiques markets in Anghiari, so perhaps it may be cheaper there, but it remains to be seen if traders in Anghiari would sell large items of furniture.  Other than that, we will have to rely on word of mouth from our new found friends on their tips to find period pieces at reasonable prices.  If anybody has got any ideas, feel free to leave a comment here. Until then its just dreaming of furniture polish. Grazie

Snow and Igloos; in Tuscany?

At last we have photo-evidence, it does snow in our part of Tuscany, and quite a bit too looking at the picture, certainly enough for our builders to down tools for a few days, even though all the outside work was done to avoid just this situation.  Anyway, as I see from Italian TV (we get 6 channels via satellite), the threat of snow is gone, and its 9 degrees and wet today, but Monday is a holiday in Italy,Immacolata Concezione (Immaculate Conception), it looks like it will be a slow start to next week also.

If its snowing, then must be time to build an igloo! at last we have pictures of the elusive, anti-damp element, which actually looks like (and could well be), the bottom half of a 50 litre plastic container, upended on the excavated floor, a bit of reinforcing mesh laid on top then copious quantities of concrete to finish off the installation.  Seems all rather straightforward, but Silvio said his boys were in pain digging out by hand under the stairs!Actually, the floor level is still 15cm lower than it should be, firstly to hide any services that have to be installed, and on top of that the finishing cotti flooring.

All this talk of snow, means that in our house we are decorating the Christmas tree today, and getting in the mood with endless Xmas tunes.  Next time, tales of floors and doors. 

Saluti

Our neighbour Michelangelo

During our house hunting trips, we toured all over the Tiber valley, criss-crossing from one side to the other, quickly adding unfamiliar places to our regular vocabulary, in addition to the picturesque Anghiari, and the photogenic Arezzo, one place that sticks is the birthplace of Michelangelo, which when we tumbled out of Riccardo's jeep just those few months ago, like typical open-jawed stranieri(foreigners), and now we are near neighbours of (Caprese) Michelangelo, being less than 10km from us at Chicken House. 

When we took some time off from houses we went back to see C. Michelangelo and were enchanted by the place, it was late afternoon in April, and we were the ONLY people around, I did not dare to think how busy it must get in high summer, and all those quaint little houses cheek-by-jowl with the narrow lanes must get no peace 24/7 in August.    

 

But that day it was all ours, from the house (or even castello) at the top of the hill were the great man was born & lived (but only to 5 months old a BBC documentary told me recently), to the restored church where he (full name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) was baptised, back in 1475, and all the streets in between. 

On a more down to earth note, we did'nt get any further update on progress, and can only hope that the snow melted and our builders continued with removing floors/ceilings, so we went out and did our bit to help the credit-crunch and bought the lights for the kitchen, deciding some time ago to use the staple of the hi-tech/minimalist designer the 'hi-wire' system, (thats the little spotlights that are strung from low-voltage wires right across the room), perhaps they are a bit funky for our old house, but they should fit quite snugly between the main Trave in the kitchen, time will tell.

Anyhow would be good to know if we had any electricity to power them with, perhaps we will get some good news at our next schedule tele-chat with Alberto on Wednesday, I'm a born again optimist! 

A river runs thro' it

A friend asked me over dinner on Saturday, 'how high was the house?' inquiring about the chances of snow, and I confessed that I didn't know, altho' I know that snow is possible in our area (from anecdotal tales), it must be a rarity, compared with some other (northern) parts of Tuscany where its a part of life (and livelihood). So, next day I pulled out my local area map I had bought some months before in a little bookshop in Anghiari, a 1:25000 scale job, which after some investigation told me that the house was at 531m above sea level.  Now I don't know if this is bad or good, further looking at the map told me that Baddia Tedalda is at 700m, we looked at a house in BT in April, well we would have looked if we could have seen it thro' the fog, and there was snow on the road (whilst in Anghiari we had left behind bright sunshine), other areas I know are: Karins B&B (430m), and she says they get heavy snow from time to time, and Pieve (440m), I've seen a pic on the web showing snow in Pieve (but don't know when it was taken).  So I come to the conclusion that snow may hit us, but perhaps not every year, and not so bad, after all I've spent many a winter in Russia, and that is cold (eg my worst was -38 deg C, brrrrr).

There is a stream at the far side of the meadow in front of our house under the escarpment, also the road at the end of our lane is called 'Via Tiberina', and every time I turn left by that sign to go to Chicken House I wonder if our stream is the source of the mighty Tiber, as it starts its journey to Roma.  So, back to the map, to find the Tiber, but to no avail, until it dawned on me that the big blue riband thro the middle of the map called 'Tevere' was possibly the local name for what I was looking for. Tracing back to its source (at Mt Fumaiolo), about 25km from us, across the border in Emilia Romagna, (and at 1200m it must get snowy every year up there).  There is a good pic on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Source_of_Tiber_2.JPG

If you take the E45 through Tuscany to Rome, (and many do, as its toll free), then you will glimpse the water that runs between the legs of the highway bridges, that is the Tiber, and then on the right just as the highway sweeps up, is a vast expanse of lake (lago di Montadoglio), created ~30 years ago, by damming the end of one of the many valleys in this region, and allowing the Tiber to fill it up, to the misfortune of the inhabitants of the village nestling at the foot of the valley (there is a book about this, written by a Frenchman), with the resultant power from the dam being used to power the nearby pasta factory, as this is the home of Buitoni.  Downstream of the lake, the valley widens out considerably, with towns like Sansepolcro, San Giustino and Citta de Castello along the way, with the whole of the valley a maze of canals to rival Venice, to aid the agriculture (as well as olives, tobacco is a major crop) that flourishes across the valley floor. 

Going further back, these plains were the location for the 'battle of Anghiari' in 1440, commemorated in its own museum in the centre of Anghiari, and in (a now lost) painting by Leonardo, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anghiari

So, unfortunately, OUR stream isn't the Tiber but is called the Isola, one of the many tributaries that feed into the upper Tiber, that turns it from a trickle as it comes off the mount, to an already wide and full river, even by the time it hits Pieve, 30km south, see photo gallery.

Its amazing where you end up trying to answer a simple question, as I say, 'every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better'.