Il Melo Blog

I awake early and open the shutters in the bedroom – from the bed, the view is all green apart from the cherry blossom. The rain will have been good for the new grass (so long as the bloody sheep don’t come back!) There’s something about this place that gives a feeling of peace – I suppose that’s what drew us back here from all the other houses we looked at. It’s nearly three years now since the first say we saw it and we have to be pleased with what we’ve done. Which is good because a lot of it was bloody hard to be honest. Anyway, no more time for reflection when there are bookcases to assemble!

Just put my glasses on and realised there’s a dusting of snow on the roofs up at Penna SG (the extra 300m of altitude makes a big difference compared to the weather here in the valley: I remember one Christmas there was no snow at il Melo, the snowline began at the top of our lane, by Giovanni and Rita’s, and in MS Martino it was so thick I had give up and turn round as the car just couldn’t get any grip). Well the weather forecast the other day did say the key word for the next few days was variabilità.

We spent the day putting up bookcases in the library and reorganising the whole room so it now feels more like a room than a glorified corridor. It should have had more books in it but we had a lot waiting to be brought from England when a burst pipe in the coldest part of the winter drenched the lot of them beyond repair – there were lots of paperbacks but also some beautiful books like Franco da Mosto BBC tour of Italy. We’ll replace them when the insurance is finally sorted (to be honest, drying and replacing damaged walls and ceilings took a higher priority.)

Rita came round and invited us to lunch tomorrow – she was a bit put out that we had bought eggs from the supermarket (“just come and ask, we have plenty of eggs”). To use up her eggs we had a late supper of fried eggs (Dom) and eggy bread (me); something I haven’t had since I was a kid (American French toast not being the same thing at all) and it was delicious. I’ll definitely do it again soon.

We watched some Italian game shows in the evening (while doing yet another bookcase) and I was absolutely chuffed to beat all four contestants on one of the quiz questions - even if I didn’t get any of the other answers right. Anyone who says he BBC is dumb hasn’t watched much TV in Spain or Italy – although, to be fair, I haven’t yet seen anything as dreadful as the BBC one where z-list ‘celebrities’ try to get through holes in polystyrene walls and fall into a pool if they fail.