Free A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby Page B

Iron Curtain countries, such as Yugoslavia or Bulgaria which, at that time, were arranging hunting expeditions for those who wanted to engage in such capitalistic activities as shooting bears, wild boar, deer, game birds, wolves and hares in exchange for large sums in foreign currency. In some of these countries the shoot had to be paid for in gold.
    Besides being a good shot Renato also knew how to make really good wine in spite of this being, as we were beginning to find out after some sampling in depth, not a particularly good area for wine. The end product at that time had no denomination such as DOCG (Denominazione de Origine Controllata e Garantita) or DOC (Denominazione de Origine Controllata), or even DS (Denominazione Semplice), the humblest of all. When we beganbottling our own wine, our son designed a label with a pen and ink drawing of the house and the words Produzione Propria on it.
    Now Renato opened a bottle of his own red wine, something he was going to continue to do for all the years we were to know him, which made up for the somewhat meagre ration Wanda had imposed on us because it was still Lent. He, too, promised to come to the house on the morning of Easter Monday, but before we left he gave us what proved to be some useful advice.
    ‘You won’t have any difficulty in getting people like Alberto or Bergamaschi, to work for you, or even me, a muratore , a onetime unskilled labourer,’ he said mischievously. ‘But if you want us to continue to work for you we must be paid when we tell you we need the money. One of the curses of Italy is that if you are engaged in manual labour, whether skilled or unskilled, you can never get any money owing to you without a struggle. If you do eventually succeed it can take months, even years. So if you pay on time then you will have no trouble, word will soon get around and you will never lack for help.’
    We followed his advice, only having work done that we could pay for at the time, and as a result no one who worked for us ever failed to do what we asked them to do – well almost none of them. In fact many years were to pass before things really changed for the worse, by which time what had previously been accomplished at I Castagni in a matter of months was no longer possible.
    Our next stop was at the ironmonger’s shop at Ponte Isolone. There we put in a crash order for things to be delivered that evening before dark: for a gas stove and a gas cylinder, a couple of rubber buckets of a sort that Renato assured us were indispensable to a muratore , a ‘real’ galvanized bucket, an assortment of brushes and brooms and one of those things you sweep all the dust into and then knock over, some sacks of cement, sand anda hosepipe with a connection that I hoped would fit the tap in the kitchen.
    We were the first foreigners who had ever entered his establishment, the proprietor told us in a most uncharacteristic burst of confidence. Uncharacteristic because it was the last occasion, apart from greeting us formally at such ceremonies as weddings and funerals – ‘Come sta, Signora, Signore?’ – that he ever addressed a single word to either one of us for a period of twenty-five years, apart from telling us the price of something in his shop or, when he rang up the till, how much we owed him.
    After this we went back to the house to await the delivery – at least we were getting it free.
    The goods arrived in a largish but rather feeble-looking van that was certainly not equipped with four-wheel drive, which the driver brought down round the bend and across the torrent with consummate ease, making me feel pretty silly. He then set up the gas stove, which was only a two-ring affair without an oven, on top of the fornello a carbone which Wanda understandably funked using.
    The last act performed by the van driver before taking off up the hill and round the bend without touching the tree, was to pour a Sahara of sand on to the ground outside what was going to be