Free A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby Page A

be a bedroom with access to it from the outside door at the back, the one in mid-air to which the only access at the moment was by a rickety ladder. The lower part was going to be a combined bathroom, lavatory, dressing room and storeroom.
    It was the need to have the lavatory on the ground floor below what was going to be the bedroom in the loft that meant that it was going to be impossible to leave the ladder and the trap door where they were at present, giving access to the loft from insidethe building. In future anyone residing in the loft wanting to use the bathroom would have to descend a ladder at the rear of the building and make a journey round two sides of it in the open air.
    Perhaps we should have thought of this before we bought the house, but we didn’t. What we now had to do was to render the floor/ceiling between the bathroom and the upper bedroom sound and smell proof. Eventually we were successful with the smells, with the sounds less so.
    Now, in readiness for our first night on the premises, we blew up our airbeds and unrolled our sleeping bags, as we had done in many an uncomfortable spot throughout the world – the worst being a rat-infested railwaymen’s institute on the banks of the Ganges. Remembering this Wanda elected to sleep on top of an old chest in case there were any mice in residence, the mice in these parts, according to Signora Angiolina, attaining the size of small cats.
    We also tested the crazy electric light system which Signora Angiolina had told us how to switch on at the main and which, to our surprise, worked, but only in the kitchen.
    After this we set off to drive a few bends up the hill to where the carpenter lived.

EIGHT
    The name of the carpenter was Alberto – he insisted on being called Alberto rather than its diminutive Berto, the Italian equivalent of Bert.
    Alberto was just the sort of man we needed. He was young and agile and promised to come and look at the house the following Monday morning – Easter Monday. We asked him if he knew of a plumber, and he said he did, an older man called Bergamaschi, but a good one and he could ask him to come too.
    Then we set off in search of the muratore , whose name was Renato. He lived in a nearby valley that terminated under the precipices on the east side of Fosdinovo.
    Renato was a small man in his thirties with very bright blue eyes, as brown as a nut from a lifetime spent mostly in the open air, and full of energy. Things looked like getting off to a bad start at our first meeting when Wanda asked him if he was a manovale . In Italy a manovale means an unskilled labourer, the sort of labourer I was destined to be from now on, whereas Renato was a muratore , and a highly skilled one. For a moment it looked as if the meeting might come to an end there and then, but fortunately he had a sense of humour.
    ‘I am a muratore , not a manovale ,’he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘but I have also been in my time a manovale .’
    Renato lived in a smallish house in the middle of a fine vineyard with his wife and three children, two small boys of about nine and eleven and a pretty daughter who was a couple of years younger. He was an ardent cacciatore. He owned several shotguns and rifles, there were piles of shooting magazines everywhere and the walls of his house were hung with trophies of the chase.
    Renato constantly bemoaned the fact that to all intents and purposes la caccia in Italy was finished. He was now planning, together with a number of like-minded others, to release a couple of pairs of male and female wild boars, in a dense forest near the Foce il Cuccù, the pass to which Attilio had gone to do a giornata , in the hope that they would breed in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile hunting them. There was no danger of the boar failing to procreate. They did so to such an extent that the area became infested with them.
    In addition, hedging his bet as it were, he was saving up to go on a shooting holiday in one of the