Home in Italy

It is the evening of our second day in Italy.  I am sitting outside of our new home for the next month on the stone patio overlooking rolling hills and watching the sun go down.  Chaim is sitting on the steps to the house in front of me trying to get a perfect shot of the sunset with our new camera.  It is magnificently beautiful here.  I’ve been thinking that if Israel had rain all year round it would look a lot like this.  We discovered two fig trees, an olive tree and rows of cherry tomatoes growing on the property.  The field in front of the house has just been plowed in preparation to plant wheat but they’ve been delayed we were told because the price of wheat seeds has gone up.  We thought it was going to rain tonight since there was an overcast all day and faint sounds of thunder but just as we were going to collect chopped wood for our fire place the clouds cleared and we were gifted with our first sunset at home. The clouds are all shades of white, blue and purples and the rays of the sun are changing from yellows, orange and golds, to pinks, reds and purples.  Everything here is just as I pictured it, many winding roads, stone homes, rolling hills covered in green and brown fields plowed for the last crops of the season.  The air is so clean, you can taste its sweetness and Michelangelo (the brother of our host) tells us the water here in Mantagano is the cleanest in Italy.  I almost never drink tap water but I dared to taste it today and it is among the best tasting water I have ever had, sweet like the air.

We arrived in Rome yesterday and took a train just 20 minutes from the airport to Termini station in the centre of Rome.  At Termini station we bought a sim card so we would have a phone while here.  We then called Angiola, the woman we are renting our house from. We had planned to stay in Rome the first night but Angiola suggested we head straight to the house that night because there would be a general strike the next day and the trains would not be running.  Originally Angiola was going to take the train with us to Campobasso (the closest city to our house) but because of the strike the next day she was unable to.  She was very friendly over the phone even though it was hard to understand her English or hear her over all the noise on the street.  She told us her sister Maria Pia, “who does not speak english but is very kind”, would meet us in Campobasso at the train station and drive us to our house in Montagano.  So we bought some water and our train tickets and got on the train to Campobasso.  During the three-hour ride Chaim worked on a paper while I watched the scenery pointing out things he should look up from his laptop to see, it was great teamwork.  Once it was dark I read the instruction manual of our camera for 5 minutes before falling asleep.

We arrived in Campobasso just after 10pm and waited next to a sleeping dog inside the train station for just 5 minutes until Angiola’s sister and brother arrived.  As promised their English was minimal but they had huge smiles and embraced us both with a kiss on each cheek Italian style.  They helped us pack up the car and drove us up winding hills, with a stop at Pizzeria De Luigi along the way, to our beautiful cozy stone house.  There was a lot of laughing and conversation in broken English and even more broken Italian from Chaim and myself.  Maria and Michelangelo handed us our keys after showing us around the house and where everything was and promised to come meet us in the morning to take us grocery shopping.  We were happy to be here instead of spending the night in Rome.  Since it was already very late we just dropped our bags and went straight to sleep on a very comfortable bed that we were both very grateful to have.

We woke up as we had hoped with the sun at 6am and decided to get dressed and go greet the sun as it rose over the hills around us.  Chaim draped a quilt around his shoulders in case either of us would get cold and we set out to explore our new surroundings.  The silence here is incredible, we were noticing the most delicate sounds that we rarely hear.  Birds were chirping and a gentle breeze was rustling the leaves of trees around us.  We were happy to notice now in the daylight that we are not completely secluded.  Along the paved road by our house are a few other houses here and there, most look like summer homes and one building looks like a small community centre but seems to be some kind of museum, it was closed so we were not sure.  I asked Michelangelo about it, he laughed, “ohh the garage, yes yes it is a museo but looksa like a garage.”  Later on we learned that Michelangelo is an artist himself and we both excitedly told him that our mothers are too.  The garage/museum has a mirpeset (balcony/patio) with a nice view of where the sun comes up, we stood there for a while watching it rise and noticed two nuns get dropped off by a house in the distance.  They were working in the fields behind the house but we were not sure exactly what they were working on.  It was comforting to see life around us, people, houses, cars driving down the road (but very few).  It’s nice to be somewhere so quiet and remote but it feels safer to know people are around us.  Everyone here is very warm and friendly just like we were told.  Even the homeless people we saw in Rome interacted with each other with hugs and double cheek kisses and affectionate tones and hand gestures. 

After our early morning walk we went back to the house and made some tea.  Chaim started working on one of his papers and I went back to sleep until 9am and then started unpacking a little bit.  At 10am Maria and Michelangelo arrived with fresh baked croissants and packets of tea and Italian coffee.  Maria went in the house and started to make coffee in a little silver coffee maker I’ve never seen before, I watched and learned.  She then set up a table outside with a little tablecloth and laid out the breakfast they had brought us while Chaim and Michelangelo investigated the fig tree that had a lot of buzzing in it.  We all sat down together for the best coffee I’ve ever had and started to learn a little Italian.  From what we could understand Michelangel told us that just in this region of Italy there are over 130 different dialects and that the people in Montagano have a dialect that sounds like they are singing all the time.  We asked him the meaning of some Italian hand gestures too.  In particular we saw one that looks just like the gesture that is identical to rega (wait a minute) in Israel.  He told us it is an ugly gesture that only uneducated people use and we must have seen it in Rome.  After cleaning up the breakfast table we headed to the supermarket that we think is something like the equivalent of a Wal-Mart in Canada.  This supermarket is in Campobasso.  In Montagano the village we are just outside of, there is a small market but apparently it is more expensive than the supermarket.  Since the supermarket is much further away we decided to take the opportunity of the car ride and stock up on a lot of food that we could store for the month that we are here.  When we run out of fresh food we can walk 20 minutes to the markets in Montagano. 

On our way back Maria Pia drove a different route to show us a small “romantic” wooded area near our house that we could walk in that comes right out onto our property.  Once we arrived we organized the kitchen and unpacked the food.  I’ve been extra tired because I did not sleep at all on the plane and have a bit of jet lag so I took a nap at 1pm which felt much more like 6pm in my head.  When I woke up Chaim had unpacked all our things and made our house homier by organizing everything so nicely.  He even put my clothes out into the dresser just how I would have, it was very impressive and felt really nice to wake up to.  There is a fireplace with a nice stone mantle where I’ve placed the beautiful little Shabbat candleholders that Mark and Shainie gave us and our Ma roller on the other side.

At this point the sun has gone down, there is a cricket symphony outside, Chaim is back to working on school papers and I’m boiling water to get started on dinner.  Tonight we make our first dinner in Italy together…Pasta.

I’ll try to write as much as I can and so will Chaim, and we will do our best to share photos.  Feel free to share our mail with extended family.

B’ahava & Ciao,

Chaim & Tamar