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It has been a gloriously sunny day and I have just come back from walking Tufo, Simonetta and Marco’s beautiful and lively white German shepherd. He leaps into the back of the Twingo and we drive further up the mountain road towards Renaio which is normally very quiet, but I had forgotten the significance of today. It is Epiphany, a bank holiday and hundreds of cars were heading up the hill to see La Befana.
Although children all look forward to Babbo Natale, Father Christmas, arriving with their presents, a much older Italian tradition is the Epiphany celebration on the twelfth day of Christmas, when the Wise Men presented Jesus with their gifts. Entwined with this is the story of La Befana, an old and house proud lady who was visited by one of the Magi on their way to Bethlehem and asked if she would accompany him. But she was busy sweeping and refused, only to reflect later on what she had missed, wandering restlessly forever from door to door looking for the Christ child. But she is said to visit every child on January 6, the day of Epiphany, travelling on her broomstick and bringing gifts, or for the naughty only a piece of coal.
Although the mountain side where I live is what some would consider remote and there is simply a scattering of houses tucked in the trees here and there it is famous for one thing, the official home of La Befana. How this came to be I don’t know, but just a short walk up through the forest above my house there is a little wooden hut at the edge of the trees with a few pens and a meadow round it and this is it. Most of the year it remains empty but for Epiphany animals appear in the pens, La Befana herself is in the house waiting to see children, and a little cafe opens up selling home made biscuits and sweets. (more images here)
The line of cars was never ending and it took two harassed traffic controllers to keep the flow moving each way as the roadside became a long, continuous car park. Children and their families became one steady stream along the little path from the road and I would think there was a very long wait to get into the house and have your moment with La Befana. But in spite of the queues and snail’s pace driving it was all good natured and a family outing in the sunshine, the last festivity of the season.
Days full of blue skies and sunshine have followed one another and although cold after sunset it has been much milder than the norm. From my windows I look across the Serchio valley to the Apuan Alps, usually snow capped by now, and most mornings it is so crystal clear and fresh it feels as though I could reach across and touch the mountain tops. And as the sun goes down behind them the sky glows with colour, from orange to brilliant pink, each afternoon a glorious show unlike the one before, and I must stop and watch, it is so beautiful.
There are buds on the apple trees, tiny violets are in flower near my back door and roses are still trying to bloom. In November we had 75% less rain than normal and in December no snow, a crisis for the ski resort of Abetone not far away in the mountains which has only been open for a handful of days instead of the usual busy winter season. By this time last year I had already been snowed in twice for several days and in spite of the dreadful flash floods during the autumn it is thought that 2011 will prove to have been the driest for fifty years. I have read that we have unusually mild weather here because somewhere else it is abnormally cold and the earth is doing all she can to find balance.
I remember writing after my first Christmas here that commercially everything seemed more low key than in the UK, a pleasant surprise, but after my fourth I think that Italy is catching up. It is still slower to begin but inexorably that harassed feeling has taken hold of shoppers by December, reaching a frenzy as we enter the last week. Nonetheless I enjoyed my shopping in Barga and it felt like a milestone, exchanging greetings here and there with what are now familiar faces in the bread shop, the chemist’s, the pasticceria and the newsagent’s. “Auguri, buone feste, Signora”, smiles all round, and the greengrocer, who was most notable for his lack of enthusiasm when I first arrived, doubtless thinking I was only here for the week, gave me a rather lovely linen shopper for next year’s purchases.
In the supermarket I had one of those unexpected little triumphs when an Italian man, shopping from a list, held out a bunch of long, slender, bottle green leaves and asked me if they were cavalo nero, a cabbage much favoured here. Surprised and delighted I beamed at him and said “yes, and I’m English”, which was clearly more of a pleasure for me than it was for him. Most Italians, both male and female, take food seriously and frequently compare notes and argue the toss about the best way to cook something.
They are also notably conservative in their tastes and largely stick to the traditional and trusted. I took a table at a Mercatino di Natale, a little Christmas market held in a lovely old villa belonging to some friends and had made treacle and butter toffees which were met with enthusiasm by ex pats. But Italians viewed them with suspicion and wanted to know exactly what was in them. I hadn’t got further than saying they were English to one lady when she wrinkled her nose and said “Inglese? Oh no, not for me, I have a cousin in Scotland and her biscuits are awful.”
And I have a new job. In Barga there is a little English library started by Keane, an artist and journalist who has been here twenty years now and has a finger on every pulse and a knack for connecting people and events. In fact he always has so many balls in the air at once I suggested on a whim a couple of months ago that he might like some help with the library, and in a trice it became virtually mine. There are over 2,000 books and anyone can become a member for thirty euros a year, have their own key and visit at any time. (more images and article here)
Books are donated continually and the shelves are now creaking, so my tasks are to weed out the old and shabby, keep the online library updated and complete a database of members from the handwritten forms everyone fills in when they join. I began this last enthusiastically, but being technically challenged lost the lot once I had entered about forty people, heaven knows how, so am having a break before I begin again. But I am enjoying having a little responsibility and being involved in something else.
This makes me laugh now I think about it, how expectations change. Five years ago when I was still in the planning stages of leaving the UK and coming here I was a workaholic, albeit I didn’t recognise it, and constantly looking for more involvement in any interesting and exciting thing that arose. If anyone had said to me then “and one of the things you will enjoy in Italy is being a librarian” I am pretty sure I would have thought, well, if it gets that bad I can always come home again.
And that’s another thing, home. I have gradually and imperceptibly become more immersed in life here as the months and years have passed but still found myself automatically calling the UK home. Then a few weeks ago someone asked me where I would be for Christmas and without thinking about it I said I’ll be at home this year. And that’s here. At last.
Happy New Year. – more on A New Life in Tuscany
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