Torri, Imperia

Only in our third week here and we are learning that there is a lot to know about the tiny village that has become our winter home.

The real heart of the village is the piazza, 'Piazza Caduti per la Liberta' to give it its full title, which is a daytime gathering place for some of the more weathered inhabitants as well as being the focus for a random set of local events. The other evening as we returned from one of our lengthy walks a steel caldron set up on the piazza was being lit on which, from 7pm, castagne (chestnuts) were roasted and served to the villagers together with a highly spiced mulled wine. It was warm enough for us to sit around acknowledging the locals, even if conversation was difficult, and admiring the way the young and old were mixing and enjoying themselves. Such events are so much a part of life that there is no advance publicity and to newcomers like us, the way things just seem to happen, without advance notice, is baffling.

To one side of the piazza lies the ancient but well preserved church, appearing quite small from without but somehow larger than life within - carved saints with expressive faces lining the walls and a classic crucifix figure dominating the nave. Aside from it being a place of worship the church has a way of forcing its way into almost every waking moment, and some less wakeful ones too, for atop the church roof there is a tower which contains two bells. And in Italy, bells are meant to be rung.

Looked at in simple terms, the bells are an audible clock. On each hour of the day and night there is a mechanical striking of Bell 1, one blow for each hour. This same peel is then repeated some two and a half minutes later. It is clear from this that both peels cannot be striking the correct time... and as it happens, neither does. Then on the half hour, or thereabouts, Bell 1 strikes once, followed a few seconds later by another complete peel from Bell 2, one blow for every hour. For those interested, Bell 1 is pitched at approximately B♭ and Bell 2 is a major third lower than this. Thus at midnight and midday we are treated to 24 strikes and half an hour later, 13 individual strikes. (Incidentally when the clocks went back the bells struck 12 midnight twice in succession, a total of 61 strikes in two hours.) As if this is not enough, at 7 am each day there is a longer less regular peel of bells and on Sunday mornings both bells are rung together as a call to worship in the church.

Trying to look on the positive side of being woken at three am by the ringing of bells one could argue that it is a handy way of knowing that it is too early to rise from bed, the bells saving us the chore of raising the head from the pillow to look at a bedside clock. How have we managed all these years without these aural signposts to guide us through the night? It might also seem strange that Torri's inhabitants, many of whom live much closer to the church than we do, need such signposts when their wristwatches provide far greater accuracy than the church.

Such speculation is idle in Italy, however, for church bells are not a timepiece, they are a tradition. For Torri's bells to be silent whilst those in the village of San Pancrazio just down the valley, or indeed any other village all over Italy, were swinging would be inconceivable, unthinkable.

But let us return to Torri, this time using the Via Basso route which follows the lower slopes of Bevera valley northwards from the village until it meets the bridge below an amazing hanging village called Collobassa. This ancient footpath, in its heyday, an essential supply route to the upper valley, remains an impressive construction clinging as it does to the steep slopes using both natural and man-made ledges. Today it is in poor shape but in the past these ledges carried not just people but also water along channels, small aqueducts, still visible beside us as we walked. The drop down to the river is considerable but would have been an everyday part of life before the new car-bearing roads were built. The route dips in and out of the strong sunshine and once again there are strong smells that assault us as we walk. Where there are no olives planted there are pine trees and resin is coaxed from them by the sun, blasting us with scent as we bounce our way along the narrow pine needle-covered highway.

Mountain home

This is day three of six months of living in our Italian home in Torri. Easy words to write but not quite so easy to grasp. Almost without exception, visitors to this apartment would be holiday-makers, here for two or three weeks at a time at most, maybe a month if they were lucky. Working people can call this a holiday but for us retired folk we struggle to give a name to what we are now doing here. The atmosphere, our foreign surroundings, the weather, it is all here just as it would be had we come here for a holiday but then we say to ourselves, "We will still be here in six months time." Maybe the reality is that all we have done is to move to another home, one that doesn't float.

All this introspection does me no good at all and does little to ease the throbbing thighs or the calf muscles shouting at me somewhere below. For yes, Kate and I have been out walking. And walking in Torri simply means going up, then sometime later going down. Even if we fancy a little walking on the level the choice just doesn't come into it because the moment we set foot outside our door we are going up or down. Our apartment is at the top of four floors worth of rough stone steps; the roof terrace is higher still up more giant steps. Popping over to my brother Graham's place, just across the village and up another four stone floors, I arrive panting at his door as if finishing a 3-mile jog.

From our walk yesterday I have chosen two pictures to illustrate what we are dealing with. The first is taken from above Torri, looking towards the terraced slopes which loom over our village to the west. The terraces are man-made, earth held back by dry stone walling, constructed to retain the roots of olive trees. Today it is mainly the trees in the lower, more productive terraces, that are maintained, these being managed by pollarding which produces ancient, thickened trunks and slender branches spreading from about head height. Close to the top of the slope in the photo, the faint line is a rough track, just passable with a lot of nerve and a four-wheel drive vehicle. Once you leave the valley bottom, this is what passes for a road, carved out of pure rock and clinging precariously to the hillside.

This next photo was taken from that same track, the camera pointing downwards at an unbelievable angle towards the church in the centre of Torri. Our apartment is just in beneath the shadow to the right - the mountain shades us in the mid afternoon at this time of year, before most of the rest of the village.

In the course of a little over six hours on a magically sunny day, Kate and I ascended the 800 or so metres up to something called Monte Cogorda following vague footpaths created to give access to the higher olive terraces. From here we could look north across the French border towards snow-topped Maritime Alps and in the other direction the Mediterranean Sea glinted at us with Ventimiglia tucked down at its shore.

As we walk, large brown crickets take to the air from under our feet, revealing their ruby-red wings for a few seconds before landing and disappearing into their camouflage again. Bright yellow butterflies dodge before our eyes milking the tiny yellow and blue flowers which hang on in defiance of the approaching winter. In general the vegetation is tough and spiky but the smells of wild thyme, rosemary and lavender assault our noses, the plants themselves sticky with scented liqueur.

As ever, my eyes are often pointed downwards (I like to watch where I put my feet) and once again a wild animal chooses to cross my path. This slow-worm eyeing me up for a meal, decided I wasn't worth bothering with if it meant giving up the last rays of the day's sunshine.

A direct descent down to the valley is an impossibility so our return is long and arduous, traversing the mountainside on a bluff high above our apartment's roof before leading us down into Calvo, a village further down our home valley. We have met no one all day and even here as we peer into gardens cultivated with plants and shrubs we fail to recognise, we have the place to ourselves. It takes a peel of bells from the brightly painted church to wake us to reality as we finally arrive at the main road so we can march our creaking legs back up the valley to our home.

Changing landscapes

In the space of little more than a week our latitude has reduced from 56.4° to 43.8° N and as expected, the most immediately noticeable change we experience is the climate - temperature up and humidity down. The sun has real power despite it being October and even sunburn is a reality for us northern types. Our senses are overwhelmed by much around us that feels different and strange, some things being obvious - car steering wheels appearing on the wrong side - and other things that are difficult to recognise and just seem to creep past the retina. Our brains are trying to interpret a world of unfamiliar lines and shapes.

En route we passed through the cityscape that is London and I was struck there by the preponderance of vertical and horizontal lines. There were tall buildings with flat roofs, offices with windows and doors all rectilinear in shape, lamp posts and even tall buses seem to be designed to this same model, sharp right-angles and hard edges everywhere.

Contrast this with the seascapes of western Scotland we have left behind us. The sea always produces a horizontal plane - the widest horizontal in the world - the horizon (hence the word) stretching as far as the eye can see.

In amongst the islands this might be broken by vertical lines, sea cliffs, with the rounded curves of mountains aged by the centuries - shapes too complex to define but with softer boundaries.

So what then is the shape of landscape of our new home in Torri, this tiny mountain village nestling in the foothills of the maritime alps of northern Italy? It takes time to recognise just what makes this place look so different to our unaccustomed eyes. Then realisation dawns. For here the predominant shape is the diagonal. A long sweeping olive-tree clad slope dives into a deep valley bottom where a tiny river snakes its way seawards. The slope is mirrored across the valley by another identically angled slope, equally steep and equally high but there are precious few horizontal or vertical lines, just a collection of buildings tucked into the rock of the sloping hillside. The contrast with the landscape we have left behind is both dramatic and stunning. Although a cloak of old wizened trees softens the land, with branches going in all directions, unlike Scotland the ground cover is sparse, no spread of heather or bracken covering the soil, for here rain comes rarely and the summer sun burns fiercely.

Our first day here is hardly the time to comment on the people who live here but it seems pretty certain that we can always expect the language to be a barrier to deep conversation. Most of the residents speak a local dialect that renders our Italian phrase books totally redundant although fortunately French seems to be understood pretty well; the border is not far away. I used to wonder what prompted my brother to move here many years ago, until back in Wadhurst near my mother's home I came across this sign beside a newsagent's shop. Is nothing sacred any more?

We have spent our first day here adjusting, unpacking those mighty suitcases filled in Scotland and lugged across Europe, shopping and doing a spot of gardening. My brother has a friend whose allotment just up the valley is available for us to pick whatever is growing there. So we have come back loaded with grapes, tomatoes of various types (including some sweet yellow ones), beans, a small melon and a single chilli pepper with enough power to heat a month's meals to burning point.

Boatyard life

Tonight will be our last night in the marina boatyard on board Cirrus before we depart for our winter home. Sleep might not, however, come easily as we are currently in the grip of the fiercest storm in our experience here. Gusts are whipping across the island and even tucked in behind the raised bank in a corner of the yard our boat is shaking and vibrating beneath us. Our mast pokes up above the bank into the full strength of the wind making the rigging howl and whine, the pitch varying with the wind strength and in the squalls there is a low humming noise as well, as if the mast is being played like a violin string. Leaves torn from the young trees above us flash past our windows, smaller broken pieces of debris settling on our wet deck briefly then flying off again.

As I write the sun shines brightly from a patch of blue sky, as if defying the storm. But every few minutes a rain squall drops from the racing clouds, water accelerates in the fast-moving air and thrashes against us, penetrating every weakness, invading everything it can. All day yesterday the barometer needle swung anticlockwise as the pressure dropped steadily. By evening the wind had reached gale force, the noise rising with it, disturbing our sleep. This morning the air pressure had reached its lowest point and started to climb back up, the barometer needle now moving rapidly. The wind continued to increase in strength; 75 mph gusts are now flashing past us, diving down the slope to the sea behind us then hurtling across Oban Bay, whipping up spray which is driven away into the town. Little is moving. No ferries are leaving port. The population is hunkered down for the duration.

We count our blessings that Cirrus was lifted out some days ago. The marina, still full of yachts, is sheltered by the island but masts are swaying about wildly just the same. We think we are through the worst now; if the forecast is right, the wind will diminish overnight so our journey across to the mainland tomorrow is not likely to be affected.

A boatyard is a strange place to be living, hardly to be recommended. We have mains electrical power here but for the toilet and showers we have to cross the open yard, negotiating puddles and other debris. There are few lights and at night you forget the torch at your peril. Even with this there are hazards, like the sheepdog from the nearby farm who wandered into the yard and tried to round up Kate on her way back to the boat the other night, getting quite cross and nipping at her heels when she would not stay in one place.

On our last brief walk around the island several days ago we found this deserted beach where we added our footprints in the sand to those of the otters who live here. A truly magical place this, the pebbles carried here from a thousand different headlands all with stories to tell of their journeys.

So today we are packing - one large suitcase and one large shopping trolley - ready for our travels. Somehow, possibly with the assistance of a few ropes, we'll manoeuvre our luggage from deck to ground then across the yard and along the pontoon to the ferry. For the next week we have a complicated schedule, a minor surgical operation, and many miles of our own journeying to undertake.