The Pedaso Cozze Festival

The Cozze Festival at Pedaso, August 2009

During August, every town in this part of Italy holds a sagra or festa.

Strictly speaking, a sagra is a fair and a festa a party, though in practice there seems to be little or no difference between a sagra and a festa. Every town’s sagra focuses on a particular type of food; one we are intrigued by but have never been to is Altidona whose food focus is polenta and snails, but the sagra we go to every year is at Pedaso, where the subject is mussels.

At Pedaso, the festival of mussels

2009 was the 43rd sagra of cozze (mussels) in Pedaso, which means that the first was held in 1956. Every year since then, during the few days leading up to and including ferragosto (15th August), Pedaso holds its sagra delle cozze; some of the streets are closed and the tennis courts and football pitch are dedicated to the sagra. You buy a ticket at a shed that serves as the ticket office; precisely what’s on offer varies a bit each year but this year you paid €6 for a bowl of mussels, and/or €7 for a bowl of spaghetti with a marinara (chopped seafood and tomato), sauce and a bread roll. Every year it’s a bowl of mussels, a bowl of spaghetti marinara, and a bread roll, it’s just the price bundle that periodically changes.

You buy you ticket, then queue for your tray of dinner

When you’ve got your ticket you take it to the food dispensing tent, where you exchange it for a cardboard tray on which is placed a plastic container perhaps 8 inches by 6, piled high with mussels; a similar plastic container full of spaghetti and sauce; a bread roll in a transparent sealed plastic bag – this is a good idea as the roll can roll off the tray – and a paper wallet containing a plastic knife and fork; a paper serviette; and a lemon-scented hand wipe in a sealed envelope.

The mussels cookers stir big vats in the serving tents

The mussels have been cooked by being tipped from sacks into large heated vats, stirred by a man with a paddle. The vats will contain a little water and some oil and herbs, and when the mussels have opened and are lifted out you get a fair amount of the juice in the bottom of your little container. The spaghetti is cooked al dente, somehow they manage this on the large quantities, and is mixed with the sauce in orange plastic washing-up bowls before being ladled out into portions. The bread roll is a typical Italian bread roll, of heavily-processed white unsalted flour, and with a good crackly crust; for some reason only Britain seems to insist on bread with rubbery crusts, which is a pity as the bread itself is often of good quality, just badly let down by the pathetic apology for a crust (why is there no popular uprising against this?).

And da bere (to drink)

To drink, this year it was plastic glasses of white wine for free, or rather bundled in with the cost of the food, and litre bottles of sparkling or still water for a euro each.

Next, find a spot at a table

You take your food to one of the trestle tables that are laid with white paper tablecloths that cover about four place settings and are surrounded by white plastic moulded chairs, and you sit down and eat your dinner, and talk with your friends.

For dessert, cocomero (watermelon)

After you’ve eaten the mussels and spaghetti, you can buy a large lump of watermelon (cocomero the Italian word) on a plastic plate, together with a plastic knife, for a euro a portion, and for a further euro if you want it an espresso coffee in a paper cup.

Efficient clearing of tables

When you’ve finished, a man comes round and shoves all your leftovers, trays and all, into a black plastic sack, and when you’ve got up and left he does the same with your paper tablecloth and replaces it with a fresh one, ready for the next customer.

Efficient functioning of the whole event, amazingly

And it all works, surprisingly efficiently; surprisingly because efficiency is not something that Italy is famous for, but even more surprisingly given the number of people eating at any one time. It’s hard to estimate exactly, it will be at least a thousand, probably two or three thousand, may even be as much as five. This is at any one time. Serving starts at 7.30pm and goes on until about 9 or 10, and for most of that time there are few spaces available for someone to sit down; people are found wandering about with their tray looking for a free seat. It’s not too bad if you are a couple, you can usually find somewhere, a foursome generally not too much problem, but six or upwards can be a real struggle and they often have to split up.

The old fashioned screwing of the system

Since the Italians tend to arrive in largish groups, this difficulty of finding adequate places together presents a problem, so what many of them do is to send someone to find a place, who then reserves the seats alongside by telling anyone who comes along that they are already taken. No one seems to start a fight by disputing or arguing with this, even though they themselves might be hard-pressed to find anywhere to sit.

The next difficulty arises on account of the queues. A couple of thousand people needing first to buy a ticket, and then to collect their dinner from the dispensing tent, will inevitably create a queue. For much of the evening this is an immense queue, which moves, slowly, slowly, but snakes for a hundred yards or more. So the trick of certain unscrupulous groups is to send one person to find and bag some seats, another to queue for the tickets, while the rest stand in the food queue, so that with any luck the person buying the tickets will be able to get to them before they reach the food serving counter and so hand them the tickets. This sometimes works, but often it takes longer to buy a ticket than to queue for food, so you find a gaggle of people waiting by the counter, saying to others behind them, who have followed the procedures in a more public-spirited fashion: please, you go ahead.

The queue-jumping and general overall uncertainty puts some people off going, but we find it all part of the general theatre. Also we try to get there reasonably early.

You walk on a bed of linolem

All this movement of people might be expected to churn up the football pitch and make a pretty muddy experience underfoot, so to overcome this they lay down a floor. This year it was a kind of springy grey linoleum-like vinyl, a bit like we have in one of our bathrooms at home though a lot more bouncy. It’s therefore simple to clean and presumably gets chucked away at the end of the four days, since there will undoubtedly be the odd cigarette burn-mark, though actually the number of people who smoke at the tables is surprisingly low – I’d estimate about one in twenty.

Ancillary entertainment

After having finished your dinner and bounced your way on the vinyl past the still-queuing ever-hopeful diners, there are roadside stalls to see; sometimes – though not this year on the day we went – there are street entertainers, and there is a live band with dancing. You can take a stroll by the sea, and you can go to a café for a coffee or an ice-cream.

The stalls are a bit predictable: an African selling carvings; a grubby-looking girl with lank dark hair, smoking a cigarette and selling silver jewellery; candy floss and sweetie stalls; and this year, somewhat ominously, the Scientologists, selling books. We take a look at these; we watch for a few moments the people dancing to the band, though only for a few moments as the band, which this year consisted of a female singer, a male trumpet player, and a man playing an electronic accordion and simultaneously controlling the synthesised percussion machine, were a bit hard to bear for long.

A stroll by the sea

We walked by the sea and then went to the café for an ice cream, leaving eventually to drive home at a quarter to eleven. We went on the 13th August; had we gone, as sometimes in previous years, on the 15th, we could have waited to see the firework display over the sea, which begins at an Italian midnight, ie about twenty past twelve.

This is the fifth year we’ve been to the mussels festival at Pedaso and we have formed some observations about it:

1. All the standing in line, queue-jumping, reserving of seats at the tables, it has a feel of Britain in the 1950s. It probably has a feel of Italy in the 1950s too, but Italy hasn’t moved on. The Brits still queue at the checkout in IKEA, they still queue to get on the Ryanair plane, but they don’t like it, and I think they’d take one look at the queues in Pedaso and say: let’s go somewhere else.

2. No one stands on the sidelines. Everyone participates. I’m sure in Britain now you’d get groups of people standing about and looking while they make up their mind. This is another change since the 1950s.

3. There are no immigrants, nearly everyone is a working-class Italian. It’s not entirely true that there are no immigrants, as there’s us, but we’re most unusual. The first time we went to the mussels festival in Pedaso we looked around at these thousands of heads around tables there on the football pitch and said to ourselves: there must be some Brits here. But there weren’t, and there aren’t. The local Brits don’t go. Nor do the Poles, or Albanians, and there are certainly no black faces to be seen. The whole thing works because everyone is following a common cultural set of rules. Why don’t any of the many local Brits go to the sagra? Who knows?

4. Free wine works for Italians of a certain age. No one drinks too much. Many don’t drink any wine at all. Unlimited booze obviously wouldn’t work in Britain, and it probably won’t work for the younger Italians, especially in the cities, where there’s an increasing drink problem.

5. Italian children in this area of Italy eat mussels like sweeties. Next to us at the trestle table were two women and two children, a boy and a girl, the boy perhaps six-years-old, both children tucking in to the mussels as if they were a bowl of coco-pops. Which just goes to show . . . probably something about the power of mothers. We’ve seen children enthusiatically chomping mussels in Sardinia too.

6. One in twenty Italians smoking is a surprisingly small number. And even if it isn’t one in twenty, it’s not many; you’d almost look around and believe that no one is smoking at all. This must certainly be a recent change.

7. Five thousand people on each of four nights, each spending €10. It comes to €200,000 and will be an underestimate. The organisers will have to pay for the sacks of mussels and the pasta, for the staff of whom there are a fair number especially those clearing tables, for the vinyl flooring, for the personalised cutlery wallets, for the fireworks on the last night, for the band, for the (not very extensive) marketing. Do the sums stack up? Hard to know.

Hill Fort and War Graves

Gradara, July 2009

On the drive south down the Adriatica autostrada, we stopped at Gradara. We see Gradara as we drive along the motorway, it’s a spectacular-looking hill fort, very close to the motorway, yet there’s no indication on the motorway quite what or where this impressive-looking walled-town is. We worked it out from the map. The next job, was to find it, for though it is marked on the map, you need signposts to tell you which road to take when you are actually on the ground, and there aren’t any, or rather there was one, but to get to the road where it is located took us a fair bit of following the position of the sun.

When we got to Gradara we found it to be yet another of these Italian places where, were they anywhere else but Italy, they would be promoted with a vengeance. In fact Gradara was clearly quite popular as a visitor destination, judging by the number of car parking spaces with more being made room for, and I’d guess it is a known outing for families on a Sunday afternoon; on this particular Wednesday in July there weren’t many people about, though a couple of Dutch-registered cars and another British one as well as ours presumably means it does appear in certain guidebooks.

As is often the case with such places, anything that you have to pay to go into, such as the interior of the fort itself and a walk round the walls, was closed between one and four, while every human being is supposed to be having their lunch. The trinket-shops lining the streets were open, their owners all having something of a desperate air about them, and the restaurants and cafés were open, many with no customers at all, which must be pretty depressing for their proprietors. Being British, and as we were not at all gripped by the look or price of any of the menus on display, or by sitting alone in a practically empty restaurant, we ate our own sandwiches.

Driving back towards the motorway from Gradara, I saw on the hillside what looked like it could be a war cemetery, and so it turned out to be. This cemetery is right alongside the motorway – presumably it got there first, so in reality the motorway was built right alongside it. We’ve driven this motorway what the Italians call ‘ennessimo’ times (ie n-times) and never seen this cemetery, possibly because there are no indications from the motorway that it might be there (and equally possibly because one needs to concentrate rather more on an Italian motorway, than on a British, German or even French one).

We pulled in to look at the cemetery. During the Second World War, the British and allied forces were pushing up through Italy, having landed in 1943 in Sicily, and, probably unknown to all but a handful of troops on the ground, the plan was to put minimum resources into Italy as the their main job was to keep as many German troops as possible tied up in Italy so as to dilute the number of German soldiers on the western front. Thus there were quite a lot of allied troops killed. A battle front was formed in 1944 called the Gothic Line, and the eastern seaboard end of this was at Gradara. The cemetery is for soldiers who were killed over a wide area relating to the Gothic Line offensive. Soldiers of all ages and from a wide range of regions. Someone keeps the lawn tended, which is nice. As the traffic rushes noisily by.

Dinner with the Neighbours

January 2009

We were privileged to be invited to dinner with our neighbours. Privileged because they are a working-class Italian family, father, mother and three children aged about 21, 18 and 12, the youngest a boy and the older two girls. Mother was to make gnocchi, and Hilary said she’d like to see how it was done – to their bemusement, as everyone knows how to make gnocchi!

First, mother made a big ball of dough from mashed potatoes and flour, getting it to a consistency where it was kind of stretchy. She then took gobbits off this and rolled them into tubes on a flour-covered board. For gnocchi, you really do need a ‘tavolino’, a large wooden board that you can coat with flour to roll the dough out on. When she’d rolled out four or five snakes of dough, each about ¾ inch diameter, she put them side-by-side and cut off sections with a knife, each section ½ to ¾ inches in length. These she dropped into a pan of boiling water, and when the gnocchi rose to the surface, they were ready to eat.

While the cooking as going on, the father of the family took me into the dining room, ie the sitting room with a large table laid, for he wanted to show me a travel magazine. Brazil, Thailand, Cuba – these places should get a good exchange rate, no? He is ‘curioso’ to see the world, which given that he will only eat pasta, is kind of a slightly painful wishful thinking, but given his financial situation, as a manual worker in a shoe factory that is suffering increasingly frequent lay-offs, and with three dependent children, is also practical wishful thinking. We looked at the brochures. He would love to go places, in principle at least.

At dinner there was Hilary and me, father and mother, their three children, and daughter number two’s boyfriend, who carries about him the to us splendid name, though to him clearly the slightly embarrassing one, of Eros. Eros’ job? He drives a cement lorry. Like all cement-lorry drivers, Eros is overweight and his stomach hangs over his belt. He is in his early twenties.

Dinner began with gnocchi in a sauce of mushrooms and sausage. Daughter number two and 12-year-old son did not eat any of this; daughter because she does not eat vegetables, and son because he is an increasingly demanding 12-year-old who gets his own way with just about everything, and he does not eat vegetables either.

Following on from gnocchi with mushrooms and sausage, came gnocchi with ragù, ie a meat sauce. Gnocchi with ragù was popular all round, both number two daughter and son were able to tuck into this. Eros, to his credit, tucked into everything.

After this second gnocchi dish came polpetti. Polpetti are Italian meatballs. And with the polpetti, some salad. Our stomachs were pretty full, as the gnocchi, especially that with ragù, came in an enormous dish, from which we were encouraged to take second, third and unlimited helpings, and which was still half full long after we were nearly completely so.

The taste, from beginning to end, was beyond criticism. Squisito.

To drink there was just one bottle of red wine. No one had more than the tiniest of glassfuls. Italian families will typically drink a small glass of red wine, then do as Eros did, and when offered some more place his hand over the glass and shake his head in the certified fashion, with an especially determined and serious look on his face. We have not perfected this yet, but have learned to be politely abstemious.

There was talk of dessert, though nothing it seemed had been planned especially, but we had brought as a small gift a packet of chocolate ginger biscuits, so we all agreed that with some coffee we should eat some of these.

‘All’ here excluded number two daughter and 12-year-old son, who would not even contemplate trying something like ginger, that they were unfamiliar with. The others did try them, and Eros in particular was most complimentary about their subtle taste, which was fair comment, we had brought them from the UK and they were of expensive quality.

I asked Eros what his hopes and expectations were for 2009, and he seemed a bit taken aback by the question, but replied that he expected that 2009 would be an exact replica of 2008. And I suppose that probably, for him, it will, as it probably will for many working people all over the world, it was inconsiderate of me, coming as I was from my privileged position of professional-class choice, to ask it.

While the dinner progressed, the typically Italian circumstances prevailed of:

a. unbroken and multitasked conversation, and

b. the large-screen television on in the corner of the room; in this room’s case quite close to the table – 12-year-old son spent the best part of the meal with his eyes glued to this.

In addition, and in case we should find the walls too bare, there was a fish tank with a number of brightly-coloured fishes swimming about looking rather agitated. Some red ones and a rather spectacular and shark-like blue-black one. The fish tank is a recent family acquisition.

It was extremely kind of the family to invite us, and somewhat difficult to know quite how we can repay such hospitality.

I’m Dreaming of . . . Something

Christmas 2008

On Christmas Eve at midnight mass we sung in the choir at the local Catholic church. This came about because Tiziana, who plays the organ in the church, decided it would be a nice thing if a couple of carols were sung in English, by the English-speaking community hereabouts. We did a practice run on the 22nd and that didn’t put them off, and so on the 24th, or really the very early hours of 25th, we formed a part of the choir, joining-in on some of the Italian songs and doing a couple of verses of Oh Crumble Ye Faithful (or at least it is when I sing it) and Silent Night. Hilary tells me that I did a kind of Max-Bygraves-in-a-pub act complete with the arm movements – well you want to make sure it doesn’t sound too turgid, it can often sound so turgid.

At the end of the service the priest asked that we all join him for a drink in the bar next door, but then someone discovered that, it being after one in the morning, the bar was closed. Some local people were all for getting the owner out of bed but we thought this unkind, and so in a somewhat haphazard and shambolic manner, we drifted away.

Tiziana had heard one of our group sing, a 26-year-old American girl, and had said that she had such a good voice it would be nice if she’d do a solo. OK, replied the American girl, what would you like me to sing? Can you do I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas? One or two of the Brits advised Tiziana against this, pointing out that Irving Berlin is not really considered, by them what know, to be a writer of Christian devotional songs, but Tiziana was not to be swayed, and so it was that the American girl did a solo on, yep, I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, in the Catholic Church, as part of midnight mass.

But scoff ye not, for we woke up on Boxing Day to six inches of snow!

A Cenone for New Year’s Eve

December 2005

Male Appetito

It was New Year’s Eve and on NYE in Italy you eat a cenone. A cenone is a big cena, which is the Italian word for dinner, rather like a calzone is a big sock, you thought it was an Italian pastie what you get in pizza restaurants didn’t you? Well it is, but it means a big sock, which is a pretty good description if you think about it. Anyway, a cenone is a very big dinner and on NYE it commences about 9pm.

Facing a Cenone

Facing a cenone in one of the region’s best-thought-of restaurants, when your appetite has gone missing, as mine had done for a couple of days since, is rather like the man with no arms or legs who enters a swimming competition, jumps into the water and sinks straight to the bottom. When they fish him out he splutters, “What a time to go and get cramp in the ears!’. Whereas I had to face the following tweleve-course meal:

12 Courses

1. a plate of cold stripey-grilled vegetables; courgettes, aubergine, mushroom, onion and olives, preserved in oil or vinegar or both.

2. some olive ascolani and cremini, olive ascolani are large green olives special to the region of Ascoli Piceno, which have been de-stoned and the resulting hole filled with a mix of chopped beef, veal, turkey and pork, the olives are then coated with flour and deep-fried. Cremini are little cubes made from a mix of flour, egg and sugar which are then coated in flour and deep-fried, so the result tastes rather like deep-fried custard, if you can imagine such a thing.

3. something resembling a slice of mushroom quiche.

4. a mushroom omelette

You may have detected at this point that someone who doesn’t like eggs or mushrooms could be disadvantaged – yes indeed, the menu planning could be improved, notwithstanding the restaurant’s reputation. I like both eggs and mushrooms but unfortunately not that evening.

5. pig's trotters and lentils as a kind of thick soup.

I was looking forward to trying this and it was quite palatable, even for someone with no appetite.

6. mushroom ravioli in a creamy sauce

yes, yet more mushroom.

7. a slice of vegetable lasagne, vegetables including mushrooms.

8. a plate of sliced duck meat with an Italian pickled onion

(less harsh than the British form as done in red wine vinegar, not malt vinegar, so not too awful to eat).

9. a pork chop from a young pig, with potato cubes done in the oven in the pig fat.

10. a plate of salad.

11. a dessert of a kind of jam- and cream-filled sponge.

12. coffee and chocs.

With this came four bottles of wine, a fizzy white one to go with the starters, a light red one for the pasta, a darker red one for the meat, and a sweet fizzy one for the dessert.

Going Out For Air

Fortunately, now that smoking is banned in Italian restaurants, the Italians are forever getting up and going outside for a smoke during their dinner, so I was able to wander out for some air now and again, without seeming to be rude or out of place.<

A Jolly Do

But it was quite a jolly evening nonetheless, with much wandering around and shaking of hands at midnight.

Going Out For Air

And I’m pleased to report that by the time we came to drive back to the UK on 3rd January, my appetite had been found again.

A Christmas in Italy

December 2005

Midnight Mass

On Christmas Eve, after a jolly time with some Italian neighbours eating Christmas cake and drinking sweet Bridisi fizzy wine, we drove out to the abbey for the midnight mass. As it was a Catholic mass it had its share of graven images, including a plaster Jesus on the cross with what was presumably supposed to be a crown of thorns upon his head but which looked considerably like an old battered hat, plus a rather sinister-looking plaster Jesus child, which had seen a few masses in its time, the result of which was that most of its fingers and toes had broken off.

L’Albergo è Stata Pieno

The priest spoke clearly and slowly, which was nice as it meant that I could understand just about all of what he said (the mass was in Italian, not Latin). It’s odd when you hear a familiar story in a different language that you understand, so for example we heard that Jesus was born in a manger because the hotel was fully booked, and that the angel came down to talk to three ‘pastorale’, which does mean shepherds, but with more of a hint of country bumpkin about it.

Feeling Suitable Remorse

The church was freezing cold so everyone sat huddled in their coats, except for the priest, who perhaps had three layers of Long Johns under his cassock and who’d had a hard day and did quite a bit of yawning.

At one point the priest asked us all to stand and pray for a moment for those of our friends and family less fortunate than ourselves, and try as I might, I could not think of anyone, friend or family or even foe, who was less fortunate than me at that moment, standing there as I was in the freezing cold at half past midnight, worrying that the telephone and the heating were going to cause me ongoing grief (for both had failed a couple of days earlier), and that I’d have to spend a fair bit of the forthcoming days doing the washing up (the telephone line and dishwasher in our house were both broken and proving hard work to get fixed). These selfish thoughts made me quite guilty, which just added to my sense of feeling sorry for myself. I don’t get religion at all.

The Pope on Telly

To add to our spiritual enlightenment, on the following day, Christmas Day, we watched the pope do his Christmas speech to the teeming millions from the window of the Vatican – we watched it on the telly, of course. The Pope shares with our previous-evening’s priest, and with Silvio Berlusconi, the ability to speak Italian slowly and clearly, which means that I can understand most of what he says, and I approve of that. I’m also amused by the way he pronounces words like quando and questo, with is with a German accent, kvando and kvesto. Fair enough I suppose, seeing as how he’s German, but it kind of sounds funny hearing the Pope speak with a comic accent.

The Pope and the PM

The Pope also shares with Berlusconi the attribute of heading a rather shaky edifice that is overdue for change, though I think that Italy’s need is probably more pressing the the Vatican’s and it’s just about ahead in the game too, though of course in Italy the Catholic Church exerts quite an influence on Italian society so the two issues are rather linked. Possibly things will change a bit after Berlusconi gets voted out in April and the government can spend time doing more than just try and keep its leader out of gaol.

Wind, Rain, Sleet and Snow

December 2005

Schnee auf dem Autobahn

As we left Ulm in the morning it began to snow, and what with the strong winds blowing the snow across the autobahn travel became at quite a sedate pace, quite stressful too, requiring all one’s concentration. Snow and whiteness and two tracks to follow on the autobahn.

Der Brenner ist immer Öffen

Last year we had been held up by snow and had stayed the night in a B&B, where an ancient Bavarian lady fed us schnapps and assured us on our departure that, ‘Der Brenner ist immer öffen’, and so it turned out to be. And this year the same, to our surprise and relief the wind had dropped by the time we came to cross the alps and the snowploughs had cleared two lanes of the motorway across the Brenner Pass. We stopped the night in Brixen (Sud Tirol) (see Javoll in Brixen).

The Pall of the Po

Coming down from the mountains in the morning from Brixen in bright blue skies and sunshine, we could see the pall of pollution hanging over the Po valley, and into this we had no alternative but to descend. Italy has a big problem along the Po, and the Adriatic coast, and around Milan, where the weather tends to be fairly still, with no wind, for days on end. This coupled with the Italian’s predilection to use their motor car even to go round the corner to see their mother, means that they have a serious problem with what is called ‘lo smog’ (nouns in Italian beginning with s and a consonant, take the definite article, lo, see). So serious is this issue, that increasing numbers of towns are introducing alternating number plate days, where you can only drive in town today if your licence plate ends in an even number, and tomorrow if it ends in an odd one, and you get fined for getting the sequence wrong. This doesn’t appear to be having any noticeable effect on lo smog, but perhaps it isn’t being policed adequately, or maybe it’s because many Italian families have more than one car (oh, yeah, hadn’t fawt o dat, capitano).

Rain

Anyway, for us, while the Po valley was quite densely foggy, by the time we got to the Adriatic the heavens opened and it was bucketing down, causing yet more stately driving as the outside lane of the motorway became too exciting.

More Snow

Then as we climbed away from the coast towards our village, the rain turned to snow, and the roads became increasingly slippy. Since the road to our village includes a number of hairpin bends and we were the first over the snow, our journey became somewhat uncertain, but the car got up and round the curves without our needing to get the snow chains out, and with a bit of a slide of the back wheels into the road that skirts the village, we became more happy that at least we’d be sleeping in our bed, even if it meant a trudge up to the top of the town on foot.

A Car Out of Control

We thought we’d give the hill leading up to the top of town a try, so I turned into it, and there coming sliding down, completely out of control on its steering, was a car. I pulled right over alongside the door of the mini-market and the shop man opened his door to watch what seemed to be the inevitable outcome, but by some miracle, the sliding car stopped, literally but centimeters from our car, broadside on. Probably the ridge of snow that the car must have been ploughing had acted as a buffer, which was extremely kind of it. The driver dare not try moving, and it looked like I had space to pull forward, so I did, and the man at the door of the mini-market shook his head in a kind of confirmatory disbelief. Then we had the hill to negotiate, so I waited for a bit deciding what was best, when to our good fortune a Land Rover came by so I followed up the hill in his tyre tracks, three-pointed round the hairpin at the top, slippy-slidy up the final slope and we got to our house in time for a shower followed by dinner at the taverna, which was fully-staffed but empty but for a couple who’d driven up from the valley where it wasn’t snowing yet, since the Italians don’t go out if the weather’s poor. A journey of weather.