A Small Place in Italy

ERIC NEWBY

A Small Place in Italy

Copyright

HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This HarperPress edition published 2011

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1994

First published in by Picador in 1995

Copyright © Eric Newby 1994

Wine label by Jonathan Newby

Eric Newby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007367900

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007508150

Version: 2017-01-04

Praise

From the reviews of A Small Place in Italy:

‘Eric Newby must rank as one of the foremost travel writers of our age. Among his skills lies the ability to carry the reader with him on the most varied of journeys … Newby’s good humour, and his loving eye for a way of life now disappearing, makes it a sterling contribution to that very particular shelf of English literature, describing life as lived among the Italians’

HUGH CARLESS, Guardian

‘Newby is of course a travel writer of near genius – wonderfully dry in the narration of the tribulations which so often afflict him and Wanda, and splendidly precise on the nuts and bolts of things … Highly readable and dangerously liable to induce a craving for one’s own patch of Italian paradise’

MARTIN GAYFORD, Sunday Telegraph

‘Beautifully written. Full of wisdom, humour and humanity, Newby is touching on the poignancy of life, its fleeting pleasures and ultimate, inevitable loss … He is a perceptive interpreter of our dreams’

Sunday Express

‘A jovial account of living in Tuscany’

Literary Review

‘Newby goes into satisfying detail about the people, the food and the landscape, and the house itself takes a central role in the book … By observing the details of his surroundings with clarity and understanding, he gives the reader a gentle picture of a pleasant Arcadia’ Wanderlust

Dedication

To all our friends at I Castagni

whom we will never forget

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Epigraph

My dear little house

you were not there before

but in a short time you have grown

like a flower.

I beg you to remain

beautiful

and not to lose your colour.

I am about to go

because I have

a call from far away

but I will carry you

in my heart

for eternity.

Goodbye my little house.

Goodbye happiness.

Giuseppe Tarsiero, 1981

ONE

In August 1942, whilst serving with the SBS, I was captured during a raid on a German airfield in Sicily, a year before the Allied landing took place.

In September 1943 the Italian armistice was announced and the following day, on 9 September, together with all the other inmates of the camp in the Po Valley near Parma, I absconded in order to avoid being sent to Germany, as did thousands of other prisoners-of-war in camps all over Italy.

The one thing that most of these escaping prisoners had in common in the course of the succeeding months was the unstinting help they were given by all sorts and conditions of Italians who risked their lives in doing so without any thought of subsequent reward. One of these, a girl called Wanda, subsequently became my wife.

Once out beyond the barbed wire, which up to that time had effectively insulated me and my fellow prisoners from the country and its inhabitants, and after I had been transported high into the Apennines, I found myself in a little world inhabited by mountain people whose way of life was of another century. A world in which there were few roads, scarcely any machinery of a labour-saving kind, one in which everything connected with working the land was accomplished with the aid of mules, cows and bullocks. Even wheeled vehicles were only of limited use. In these mountains the most common method of transportation was wooden sledges. It was a world in which when the snow came the inhabitants were cut off for long periods of time. Living with these people I gradually began to understand their way of life and their closely knit society.

But not for long. In January 1944 I was re-captured by one of the armed bands of Fascist Milizia, supporters of Mussolini’s puppet republic of Salò, which continued to function until he himself was captured and shot during the last days of the war in Italy in 1945. From Italy I was sent to Moosburg, a vast prison camp in the marshlands near Munich, then to a place in what had been Czechoslovakia but was now Silesia, which the Germans called Märisch Trübau, what the Czechs had known in happier days as Moravská Trebová. From here, after a series of terrible events which resulted in the deaths of two officers, we were moved en masse to a camp near Braunschweig in western Germany where finally, on 14 April 1945, 2400 of us were liberated by the Americans.

At the end of 1945 I managed to get to Italy where Wanda was already working for an organization known as M19 whose job, now that peace had come, was to seek out and help civilians who had helped escaping prisoners-of-war. Once again I found myself, and this time with Wanda, entering into the world of the contadini in the Apennines above Parma which by now I had grown to know so well.

In 1946 we were married in Florence, and ever since that time we have continued to visit the people who helped me all those years ago.

While I was a prisoner in Germany I thought constantly of a day when the two of us might be able to return to the mountains and buy a house of the sort I had been hidden in and lived in while I was on the run. In February 1945, one of the last few awful months of the war in Germany, I wrote in my diary, imagining such a house:

It is an evening in late November. Outside the wind has risen, tearing through the trees about the house, bringing rain drumming against the window panes. The lamp is out and the fire casts enormous shadows on the ceiling and on the bookshelves, lined with much-read books.

Then suddenly, the wind dies and the rain ceases. The silence by contrast is enormous. Look now into the heart of the fire where slipping logs have formed strange caverns. Will I then remember the life in the prison camps: the damp blue fog that hung about those now far-off barrack rooms in which we seemed entombed, far into the day; the sudden, senseless arguments in which we all participated; the air-raid sirens wailing day after day, night after night; the bombs from the Fortresses, the Lancasters, the Wellingtons and the Mosquitoes streaming earthwards in their thousands to where we crouched, hemmed in by the all-embracing wire which allowed no escape; the long evenings when, from seven o’clock onwards, we sat around a flickering margarine lamp. Shall I remember these things?

I can remember them, all these things. That is if I want to. But I prefer to think of the friends I made, both British and Italian, their courage in adversity, and I thank God that we were not prisoners of the Japanese.

For the memory is selective and it is easier to remember what one wants to remember, so if I have to choose between the splendours and miseries, I will choose the moments of happiness in spite of the fact that there are few situations in which men and women are completely happy and completely free.

We both of us dreamt of buying a small house in Italy, one in which we might be able to re-create the happiness we both remembered; but it was not until more than twenty years after the war ended that we found ourselves in a position to realize this ambition.

What follows is the story of how we finally succeeded in doing so, and of the whole new world of friends and acquaintances we found on the way.

TWO

In the autumn of 1967 I went to Africa to visit the game reserves, then the latest craze, and write about lions who took siestas in trees, and other wonders, as Travel Editor of the Observer.

While I was there Wanda sent me an express letter from Italy which somehow contrived to arrive in a couple of weeks when a month was around par for a letter from there whether it was sent express or not.

In it my Slovenian, who likes to keep things stirred and on the boil, wrote that what she had feared was now beginning to come to pass. The prices for houses anywhere near the sea in northern Italy were beginning to go up and it would only be a short time before houses in the depth of the countryside would follow suit. ‘Unless we do something quickly we shan’t be able to buy anything at all,’ she concluded on an appropriately pessimistic Slavonic note.

Spurred into action by this cri I flew from Africa to Italy instead of back to London and eventually came to a halt in a place called Tellaro, where Wanda was staying in a tower, originally built as a lookout against roving Saracenic pirates who used to come ashore on these Mediterranean coasts in search of livestock for the north African harems.

This tower was the property of Wanda’s friend, Valeria, with whom she had worked in 1943. Tellaro is near Lerici on the shores of the Ligurian Sea, at the mouth of the Gulf of Spezia, where Byron went for a six-mile swim. At that time (in 1967) it was still a fishing village, an almost unbelievably picturesque one, that looked as if it had been designed by Rex Whistler, and it was still inhabited by fishermen sufficiently genuine to roll out of bed every morning at 4 a.m., except Sundays, or even earlier, and put to sea, making a hideous din.

In summer a cool breeze blew up from the sea through Tellaro’s dark and cavernous streets, filling the gleaming white bed sheets that were drying on the lines stretched high overhead between the opposing houses as if they were spinnakers that were drawing nicely. But not always. When the scirocco, a nasty wind from Africa, blew, bringing torrential rain, thunder and lightning along with it, what had been magical, mysterious caverns became deep, dank ditches full of water, then Tellaro was not so allegro.

For Tellaro and a number of similar places on the shores of the Mediterranean, that autumn was the beginning of what was soon to be a period of extraordinarily rapid change and transition.

One moment Tellaro was a fishing village with a few artists hidden away in it; the next it had been ‘discovered’ by senior people in Fiat and Olivetti and suchlike organizations, who saw it as an ideal place in which to immure their wives and families during the long Italian summer, less boring than Forte dei Marmi. A place to which they could drive down from Turin or Ivrea, or wherever it was, on Friday evenings in a couple of hours or so, driving back on Sunday nights to the embraces of those of their mistresses who could stand August in such places as Turin or Ivrea, or wherever it was they were returning to.

Within a year or two smart little fish restaurants would be springing up around Tellaro’s minute piazza, opened by locals who soon became ‘characters’, the sort who treat their clientele with carefully cultivated insolence, a sort of treatment the rich and powerful, rather surprisingly, seem to enjoy, turning them into suppliants.

And in a couple of years or so most of them would have either grown rich by selling their houses or plots of land, or else, more modestly contented, would be doing well working in the bars and restaurants, and in the souvenir and picture postcard shops.

A member of one of these local families, by this time very elderly, whom we happened to meet, was a still sprightly lady who had known D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen. They had come to live in Italy in September 1913, returning in July 1914 to England, where they were married. In Italy they rented a house in a small seaside hamlet between Tellaro and Lerici called Fiascherino. Every day this signora, then a young signorina, used to walk along the coast path through the olive groves to Fiascherino, where she used to do the Lawrences’ housework and sometimes the cooking.

‘I called him Signor Lawrence,’ she said, the ‘ce’ as a soft ‘che’. ‘He was very thin and he had a beard. He looked as I imagined Gesù would look. And he enjoyed the wine.’

‘Signor Lawrence,’ the Signora said, ‘had a wife. She was a German, a nobildonna. She was simpatica. Then, suddenly,’ she said, ‘they went away. We didn’t know where.

‘One of the things they left behind them was a big trunk full of papers and a key to it. They never came back for it. There was no money in it, only papers.

‘Then, one day, I can’t remember when exactly, a signore, a foreigner, I think he was an American, came to our house, I was married then, and said that he was a friend of Lawrence and that he had been given permission to take some papers from the trunk, so I let him do so.

‘Then, one day, many years later, another signore appeared, also a foreigner. He said that Lawrence was dead and he, too, took papers from the trunk, all that remained.

‘You may think I was stupid to let them have these papers,’ she said, ‘but they were all written in English or German and there was no one at that time in Tellaro who could understand them. The words were difficult words.’

The Signora lived in La Canonica, The Presbytery, a fine old house in Tellaro, in an apartment on an upper floor. She wanted us to buy it because, she said, she liked us; but for us it was too high up and too dark. Also it had no garden, not even a balcony or a terrace to sit out on. So we didn’t buy it. But when we told her that we couldn’t buy it she cried a little and then gave us as a parting gift two silver spoons with the arms of the von Richthofen family engraved on them.

Inspired by all this we began to look for our house as soon as I arrived from Africa. It soon became obvious that it was not going to be easy. What had up to then looked like desirable properties immediately ceased to do so when we began to look at them more closely.

It took ages to locate most of them. Sometimes we felt like travellers in a desert in which the mirage was operating. What looked like a desirable place at a distance ended up by being perfectly awful when we actually got to it, or else, as with a genuine mirage, unfindable, a figment of the imagination. Some were nice but too near the road, some had no outlook, some had outlooks, but very gruesome ones, some were too ruined, too lonely, too frequented, too noisy or too expensive.

We soon decided to abandon completely the search for anything near the sea. Neither of us had wanted to be near it, anyway. The only reason for being near it was that it would have been nice to have found a place near Tellaro, where Valeria and her husband lived.

We got an introduction to a surveyor, a Signor Anselmo. He was tall and slim and nice to talk to and he lived in an apartment block in Lerici. Surveyors seemed to us to have enviable lives. All they did was to tell their customers that the places of their dreams were riddled with dry rot, or were built on the lines of geological faults and were likely to disappear into the bowels of the earth without warning. ‘You may think you need a surveyor,’ an American resident in Lerici told us, ‘but you need one like you need an attack of the hives.’

No, Signor Anselmo didn’t know of any property that would suit us down here on the coast. He advised us to go inland, even a few kilometres inland. Inland it was different, he said, but it was outside the area in which he operated. He did, however, know someone who might be able to help us, a Signor Vescovo who owned a bar/ristorante. Signor Anselmo kindly offered to telephone him.

Later that morning we presented ourselves at Signor Vescovo’s bar/ristorante. Signor Vescovo was smallish, slightly rotund, aged between forty and fifty and wore thick, tortoiseshell glasses. Was it his name, Vescovo, which means bishop, that invested him with a faintly priestly air?

He, himself, as he told us, was in the process of selling his business and was at present engaged in negotiating the purchase of a large farmhouse somewhere near a place called Fosdinovo, across the river Magra in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, which he was proposing to convert into a ristorante specializing in wedding receptions and anniversaries, in which the food on offer would be what is known in Italy as produzione propria (home produced). According to Signor Anselmo, Signor Vescovo knew more about the buying and selling of properties in this particular area than anyone else.

‘There is one house that I think you would like very much,’ he said as we drank a coffee with him. ‘It is on the side of the hill just above the place where I am trying to buy the farm. It is rather ruined and it only has about two thousand square metres of land but it is a pretty place and very quiet. It belongs to a Signor Botti, a contadino who lives at a place called Caniparola, a small village at the foot of the hill. I think he might be persuaded to sell it as it doesn’t render anything except a bit of wine and a small amount of olive oil; but like all contadini he needs time to make up his mind.

‘If you would like to see it,’ he went on, ‘I can arrange it for this afternoon. I will send a message to the Signora who has the key to it by the local bus, telling her that you will come at whatever time you say. I will also write down the instructions about how to get to the house which is called I Castagni [the ‘I’ pronounced as in ‘E’] – The Chestnuts.

‘And if you are wondering why I am not going to charge you anything, even if you buy the place, it is because I owe a favour to Signor Anselmo.’

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