The View from Il Loggino

2008 and gardening in January?

January 16th, 2008

On New Year’s Eve I watched the fireworks in Sydney on Aljazeera and then there were about sixteen people here in my house for our New Year’s party. Carmela did more than half the cooking, Eugenio played sommeliere. Muriel, Martin and Manuel slept downstairs after Gini was seen off to London . Barbara is up here in the small guestroom. Silvana, Alberto, Giancarlo, Anna, two of their friends from Naples- Maria Teresa and Franco. JeanPierre and Linda from Belgium. Marco, on his best behavior. Macia and Sofia. Only Angelo and Merry, Mario and Cesare, were missing – down in Puglia. There were little explosions of fireworks off in the distance in the valley. Maggie and Molly popped down for a look at everyone now and then. My bedroom with the electric heater going full blast and the windows open was the smoking room in deference to Manuel who is the best baby ever.

Up at 5:30 this morning, out on the highway in my orange vest in the fog directing traffic around the truck with the crane unloading materials into my garden. We’ve just decided to pave the whole damn thing. Scherzo. It’s going to be beautiful. Some gorgeous stone from the Dolimites. They said the tufo cracks and breaks too badly this high up. Guess they haven’t noticed global warming. But I love the stone.

On Sunday evening, a bunch of us drove down into the valley to look at some possible houses to be restored. This was after a great lunch of gnocchi di zucca at my house. Since then, Castiglion has been a bit of a ghost town – lots of rain. But there’ll be Friday night cinema in San Quirico’s library again starting Friday night. That’ll go until nice weather puts our cinema under the stars in one of the piazzette up here again.

Entry Filed under: here at home in the village