Spring has come to Capezzano

I’ve just come back from a very stormy England, tired and travel-lagged.  Pisa airport at midnight was very cold and damp and not unlike the UK airport I’d just left.  But waking up in our little house in the olive grove the following morning things looked very different.   Spring has really sprung in Capezzano.

               
The mimosa is flowering and the grass is starred with purple/pink anemones and tiny narcissi.  The creamy green hellebore we call ‘Easter Roses’ are everywhere.  The sun has warmth in it - enough to sit out and drink a glass of wine wearing only a jumper.  It certainly lifts the spirits.

It has obviously affected the cats as well.  Our adopted wild cat, Batcat, (who turned out to be female) has been sitting in the olive grove wowling at the spring sun (and everything else) in a very ominous way and it seems as though every tom cat in the village is strutting across our terrace trying to look suitably feral.  After dark there’s a great deal of tumbling and chasing and more singing - a kind of feline X-factor!  I fear this means kittens for Easter, but Batcat sadly isn’t tame enough to catch, put in a box and take to the vets.   Yet.

I was given a couple of preview copies of Young Adult novels to read when in the UK - ‘Wonder’ by P.J. Palacio and ‘Now is the Time for Running’ by Michael Williams -  neither of them out until the beginning of March. It’s interesting to read another genre, also interesting to see what publishers are buying from abroad - one was a best seller in America, the other in southern Africa before being brought over here.  UK publishers aren’t taking many risks these days.

War Tragedies in Capezzano

We realised soon after we moved in here that we were living in what had been a turbulent area during World War II.  The massacre that occurred in Santa Anna is only a few miles over the hills and we are quite near what was called the 'Linea Gothica' - an important front between the Allied and Axis forces.  This area was an active Partisan zone and the hillsides are scattered with crosses and memorials to long-forgotten battles.

A couple of days ago we began exploring our olive grove and went right down to the bottom, where we found a path that led through the woods.  Just past our neighbour's olives,  about a hundred yards from the bottom of our olive grove, we found this memorial to the massacre of six 'unarmed and defenceless' men who had been killed there.

Their names are also on a plaque in the village, which we'd read, but had  had no idea where they had died.  There are no ages listed on the memorial.  As most of the men of military age were in the mountains fighting, it was probably only young boys and old men who were left.  According to our landlord, Roberto, whose family have lived in this village for generations, the German forces came along the path below our olive grove, taking the village by surprise.  These six were taken down into the woods and shot on the 12th August 1944.  The memorial is very well tended, with fresh flowers and the Italian flag planted in the ground under the trees beside it.   

Coming from England, it is very difficult to imagine having to live, as Europe does, with this kind of history - it's many centuries since we were occupied by a foreign power.   But many of the people here are relatives of those who died and are old enough to remember them.

The Big Dilemma

I wrote a while ago about the problems that Neil and I had working at opposite ends of Europe.  Where to live?  How to live?  Neil is chipping marble blocks in Pietrasanta - not something you can do easily in the wilds of northern England, and I am writing, teaching and publishing in England - not something I can easily do in Italy.  But we have finally decided that we have to make a decision because we are both tired of spending our lives apart.
I have decided that I'm going to give up creative writing tutoring for a year and base myself in Italy.  I will have to be on planes and trains quite often to keep my commitments - literature festivals, workshops etc - and I'm going to be quite broke -  but it's worth it to be here. 
And  the great news is that we have found a little house on a hill, in an olive grove, with spectacular views of the sea - one bedroom and a tiny room I can use as a study, with a small sitting room big enough for a sofa and a TV.  But the terrace is great - a concrete ledge with a tree growing through.

It 's just (only just!) affordable and will be quite  close to the marble yard that Neil uses.  So - with a large intake of breath - are we mad? -  we have signed the lease and been given the key.  It will be weeks before I can live there - after the end of the university term - but at least I know that it's there waiting for me.

We found this table in a shady corner of the olive grove in what seems to be a rather overgrown garden.

 This is one side of the terrace.

And this is the view of the sea with Pietrasanta just below.   Now we're off to celebrate our insanity!