With the exception of one tongue-in-cheek sideswipe at the average British Tourist (Viaggio par Britannicus) I have, until now, kept my counsel on matters Italian. But enough! I cannot stay silent for much longer. Having decided to call it a day on a sorrowful, culturally flagging, Blighty we threw ourselves into the task of integrating into an Italy that we had come to know and love over some considerable years via a holiday home and many glorious memories of La Dolce Vita.
And yet, no matter how many times you holiday in a country that you think you know nothing can prepare you for the absolute shock of being in a different culture on a permanent basis. As an example, how many times on holiday do you want to go shopping between 1.00 pm and 4.00 pm for a piece of timber, some screws, take in your dry cleaning or simply top up your car with petrol. You probably won’t need to do any basic food shopping and if you did, particularly in any rural location, tough luck because the shops close for a considerable lunch hour or three. Can you imagine any retailer in the UK closing for three hours at lunch?
On holiday at this time of the day you are probably in a city or town queuing for entrance to a gallery or some ancient tourist attraction. More likely you could be sipping your first pre-lunch snifter as you pore over the menu; and if you are good luck to you. You’ve worked damn hard all year and you’re certainly going to take it easy for two weeks and just let the world go by.
That’s the problem when you move over here on a permanent basis. You’ve worked hard all your life and you think that you can just switch off, like you do in your summer vacation. However, unlike the two weeks of absolute bliss doing nothing more than reading, eating, drinking and whatever else takes your fancy, you have to get on with the routine of every day life, in a society that has turned incompetence into an art form.
A few months after moving in to our refurbished house our telephone line went on the blink, making a terrible crackling noise and getting and maintaining a connection was in the lap of the Gods. Having reported the problem to Telecom Italia they did a quick check and said that there was nothing wrong with the line and it must be the telephones we were using. Therefore we should buy new ones immediately (Telecom Italia naturally sell phones). Resisting the urge to splash out we did the obvious thing and took the three phones round to a friend’s house to try them out. Needless to say they were fine, so back to Telecom Italia we went for further debate. We struggled on for three weeks until one day I heard the phone go ping and lifting the receiver I discovered that the line was now perfect. Having deduced that the engineers had finally found a duff connection somewhere we were happy to get on with the rest of our lives without any further hindrance from matters telephonic.
How naive could we be? A couple of weeks later a friend rang the cell phone to say that she had called our land-line number on three occasions and each time had spoken to an Italian man on the other end. What she actually said was ‘did we know that there was an Italian living in our house?’ On phoning our home number from the living room using said cell phone I was not surprised to hear “pronto” at the other end. When I asked the receiver to confirm the number that I was calling he promptly recited ours. I told him that this was our number and that he could confirm it by checking the telephone directory. He replied that it must be his because Telecom Italia had given it to him the day before shortly after he had moved in to his new house.
So another call to Telecom Italia to get the matter sorted, except that it was now Saturday and the engineers would not be back until Tuesday, (Monday being one of the 12 Bank Holidays in Italy). The connection was finally restored on Thursday. We only knew this by constantly dialling the number on the cell phone as Telecom Italia would never call to say that the matter had been rectified and, by the way, apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Perhaps the most annoying incident to date was the affair of the nutty neighbour. This involved the small study we were having built adjoining our property boundary and his. During the digging of the footings he came round to say that the building line was on his land and it had to be moved over to our side at once. Worked stopped until the geometra was called for who confirmed that the footings were very much on the boundary line and not on his land and work continued apace (Italian pace that is). Two months after the work was finished we received a letter from our neighbour calling for a response to the concerns listed within two weeks or the matter would be put in the hands of his lawyer.
The burning issues were that I had planted a row of shrubs within the forbidden range of half a metre from the boundary (despite the fact that they were planted six months previously and we had actually had the odd conversation whist I was planting them) and that the roof of the study was not to the original slope. However, the best of the lot was that whilst he accepted that the adjoining wall of the study was on the building line the rendering was on his property, all one-sixteenth of an inch of it! By this time I was quite prepared to move the shrubs, go round and knock the rendering off the wall myself and tell him to get stuffed over the slope of the roof because planning permission had been granted in accordance with the geometra’s specifications.
The geometra explained that the Italians like to get their retaliation in first to put you on the back foot and it would only be a matter of time before we found out what he wanted. And so it was the case. When he met with our neighbour it transpired that he wanted us to let him build something adjacent to our study wall and, in return, he would drop all claims stated in his letter. On that basis we have signed a joint agreement to this effect, although I would have let him do what he wanted anyway. One consolation in all this is that I now know the word for ‘wanker’ in Italian.
However, there are some positive aspects of moving to Italy. One is that it is like stepping back in time to the 1950’s when children played in the streets safe in the knowledge that they would not be abducted by some raving paedophile. Village life in Umbria is akin to austere post War Britain where family unity was paramount and the mother was the dominant figure in the home. Well, she had to be really because my recollections of the early 1950’s do not incorporate any male member of the household washing up, cleaning, bathing children (on bath days that is) and tucking them up with a bedtime story.
No, men were the workers and after a hard days graft they needed sustenance and rest. After all, women weren’t really working were they? They were at home all day and could stop for a ‘brew’ whenever they wanted to unlike the men who could only stop work when the bosses said they could (there was many a strike over tea breaks in the 1950’s believe me). Speaking of tea breaks, as a quick aside, we were in the bank shortly after moving here to transfer our account from another branch and the person we were dealing with got up after five minutes and went next door for a coffee because it was her time for a break. We sat in her office for a full ten minutes with open access to files on the desk and cupboards left open. When she eventually returned she picked up the conversation as though nothing had happened.
Anyway, the point I make is that in many ways it really is the 1950’s out here all over again, but more of this anon.
