Final days in Italy

At the end of this week we will be filling our two enormous suitcases and taking them away from here. Like many others, we negotiate the mysteries of the Internet to make bookings for our return to Britain, taking advantage of the considerable discounts available to those who can make travel plans some way ahead.

Doing financial transactions on the Internet can be a nerve-wracking experience; we follow the trail of data from one screen to another, trusting that the thin thread connecting our computer to the world-wide web via an Italian service provider holds on for long enough for us to complete the process. Somehow it no longer seems incredible to us that we can do these things so easily from wherever we are. If we need to find out when a bus in Scotland will depart or the cost of a window seat on a train leaving London, this information is available to us, our car-free life having forced us to learn the skills and given us the confidence to apply them when we need them.

Our last week in Italy is a time for reflection. Soon the sights that our eyes have become so used to will once again appear foreign. Take the arches, for instance. Everywhere we look these shapes taunt us with their simplicity, defying gravity and even time itself. The arch is used inside, as in our apartment where the curved ceilings are supported by walls up to a metre thick, and outdoors where tightly packed mediaeval buildings are connected by these apparently fragile arches of stone, many hovering in space despite the absence of mortar. These simple, man-made structures could be centuries old, proving just how robust the form is, how clever its use has been. Whole towns have been built using little else, hanging together solely because of the arch, a shape that occurs over and over again.

It is so prevalent in the landscape that one quickly takes it for granted and ignores it.

Its strength lies entirely in the pressure of each stone on its neighbour, each one passing the load to the next, outwards into the supporting buttress. Take just one stone from the arch and it will fall, so interdependent are its pieces. Even such a thin arch as this one, just one stone thick at the top, will easily support a man walking across it. If there is one single shape that just shouts 'Italy' then I nominate this one, the arch.

And if there is one single plant that surely does the same then, hardly surprisingly, it must be the olive. As we leave Italy the new growth shoots are appearing, pushing upwards towards the light despite the frosts and snows of the winter only a few weeks past.

We are told that it is regarded here more as a plant than a tree; the trunk continues to lengthen each year, stretching ever upwards. And it seems almost impossible to kill an olive - no matter how much it is cut, the root will always throw out new shoots, from anywhere along its length. The effect of this after many years of pruning is a vast, contorted and twisted root-ball spread far beyond the girth of the original plant. Somehow over many years, and with the help of man (it must be said), this organism may well have learned the secret of immortality.

Which only leaves me to reflect on the Italians themselves and the society in which they thrive. So many aspects of British society are governed by rules and laws which are intended to protect us from harm. It seems strangely comforting, therefore, to find a place where an individual is expected to use his own common sense to judge whether or not something is safe.

Take the level crossing in Ventimiglia where impatient pedestrians will duck under the closed barrier to cross the line and we have seen armed polizia nonchalantly watching nearby. The trains only pass slowly at this point so the danger, they would argue, is no greater than crossing a road. And who needs stop lights at a pedestrian crossing when surely drivers can see when someone needs to cross the road. Natural courtesy applies and this is acknowledged with a smile and a wave of the hand. Standing forward of the driver in a crowded bus might be unsafe and might even make driving more difficult but who in Italy would think to challenge those standing there or interrupt their conversation with the driver. The trip into town is, after all, a social occasion. Then there are the domestic gas and electricity meters and valves which, rather than being locked away inside, are located at street level outside the buildings. Dangerous? But why would anyone with common sense want to interfere with such things.

These examples reflect attitudes that are very much at odds with how things work in the UK. They present us with many questions about our own society, making us think about how protected we are and what we lose as a result of this. There is, it seems, another way and we are grateful for having the opportunity to discover this.

Travel plans

With less than three weeks to go till we depart Italy and begin our return to the Western Isles of Scotland, we closely watch for news that might disrupt our travel plans. Back in February we were returning from a short trip back to London when our return flight was cancelled at the last moment. This brought home to us, for the first time, how vulnerable we are in these situations, how the airport suddenly becomes an alien landscape and how frightening it can be when this sort of thing happens. Suddenly we had become part of the crowd scene normally only seen on the TV news - people milling around looking for information from the airline when there was none available.

We also learnt just how big a place an airport is. Our flight was cancelled after we had checked in and had passed through the security barrier - we were 'flight-side' - so we had to be led back on a roundabout route, guided through various code-controlled barriers, till we once again stood in a queue for re-booking a flight. Several hundred confused people had to be rounded up and walked a distance of about a quarter of a mile through the airport complex, a not inconsiderable logistical problem for any airline. Some will no doubt provide a better service when something like this happens, I am sure some will be far worse. For the passenger it is the feeling of helplessness that is so distressing, the lack of control over what is happening and what made it worse for us was that we were travelling with my mother and her companion, both of whom are elderly and have mobility issues.

The reason for this disruption - the French air traffic controllers were striking - was an event far beyond our control. Now we hear that on the date booked for our return at the end of March another strike is being planned. It is difficult to see how this might affect us (our airline is not involved) but nevertheless we must consider planning for the eventuality so we are better prepared.

No matter how difficult these events make it for us to get there (we will walk if we have to) soon we will be participating in the re-birth of our catamaran home in far-away Scotland. And in case anyone is wondering how this is done, take a look at the picture below, a bizarre set of drawings we spotted in a Ventimiglia hotel, of all places.

'Comment naissent les bateaux'.(How boats are born) shows an 'elfe marin' and a 'sirêne' (mermaid) blending together to make this fine vessel, a very modern-looking multihull. We just can't wait to get started on Cirrus Cat.

Visitors

Our friends Rich and Gerry are the latest visitors to stay with us here in Torri and from the very first day they threw themselves into a punishing mountain walking regime, despite the threatening weather. Just like others who have visited us here, their legs sprung boldly into action up our steep mountain slopes before their over-stretched muscles shouted 'stop!' and we gave them time for recovery. Having the Ligurian mountain scenery so accessible for the last five months seems to have given us something of an edge in the lower limb fitness stakes when compared with most of our visitors, that and the 61 steps up to our apartment door, of course.

Our evenings with Rich & Gerry were occupied with playing a card game we were taught by our son Ben some weeks ago, a new one (to us) and one that now seems to have slipped permanently into the repertoire of our lives. Sadly the one-word English name by which this game is commonly known is so vulgar that I will avoid writing it here by loosely translating it into the French phrase - 'Tête de Merde' - in the hope that this will offend less. (Anyone interested in knowing the rules should follow this link.)

A few weeks later and I have reached a significant milestone, my 60th birthday. This time our visitors are my mother and George, her companion, and we were treated to meal out in the Italian style. To those used to the British way of eating a meal it may seem strange to be served a succession of tiny portions of different foodstuffs, one after the other, over a period of several hours, all nibbled along with pieces of bread and (of course) floated down with wine.

There is far less mixing of tastes on the same plate as we might be used to in the UK, each mouthful being just a single tasting experience rather than a blend. 'Meat and two veg' it is not. At our meal each morsel arrived on a new plate (in lesser restaurants the same plate is re-used), was dressed with olive oil from a different region and was flavoured with marjoram or rosemary if the chef felt this was needed. Eating this way the diner is encouraged to focus on one single flavour and one texture before cleaning the palette (with wine of course) then being served the next. In Italy a meal is expected to be a social occasion which takes as long as it takes - no rush - and it ends when it seems right that it should.

The final dish was the fruit course and mine arrived with a blazing roman candle stuck in a strawberry, a nice touch and a very memorable end to the delicious birthday meal.

Encouraged to show our distinguished visitors more of the area we live in we popped into France to take in the noisy delights of the Menton Lemon Festival, complete with its fire-breathing, orange and lemon dragon and a parade of near-naked dancers. Then on another day we explored the back streets of Savona just along the Italian coast, a town which boasts a Sistine Chapel with a ceiling painted almost as artistically and dramatically as the more famous Roman one. Savona was the home of Pope Sixtus IV, one of the line that give their name to such chapels.

Kate and I are not great at being tourists and do not generally give sightseeing the priority many think it deserves. We generally prefer to shun the crowds and sneak away somewhere quiet where we can appreciate something nobody else would be remotely interested in - like a set of attractively curved roadside benches which would put at risk the toes of any occupants from passing traffic or else we just gaze at the colours of the mountain landscape we are in, generally dark green but for the next month or so splashed with bright yellow of mimosa flowers.

As spring starts to creep out from under its winter shell we begin to think of leaving this land behind us to return to the boat we left far away on the west coast of Scotland, to meeting up with the many friends we left behind there and to continuing our travels around Britain.