A Packet of Arborio Rice

I’m writing this while preparing to put ‘stuff’ in storage for when we go away and my apartment will be rented out. What is it about packing up possessions that makes you reflect on what you’ve done and are doing with your life? Looking at clothes – good grief, was I actually seen in public in that? And others – well that was a waste, still got the label on and I’ve gone up two sizes since buying it. Maybe I could sell it, not sure I could be bothered though. All my business suits should be given to charity. I have no use for them any more.

I abandon the clothes and move on to packing up the food cupboards. Good grief, that packet of arborio rice is dated 2014! I remember buying that when I went to see my brother John in in the wonderfully elegant city of Lecce, southern Italy where he lived and painted.

Lecce

I love Italian cities, but prior to Lecce, I had only toured northern cities in Tuscany and the three ‘V’s, Venice, Verona and my particular favourite, Vicenza, with its Palladian architecture and the first permanent indoor theatre in Europe - Teatro Olimpico, which is still in existence. Wait, I’m forgetting my trips to Rome, and there were quite a few over the years.

I loved Rome partly because I had a lovely friend, mentor and talented writer, Maureen, who moved there after a stint as a housekeeper near Newbury, where she had charge of two adolescent boys - one kept snakes and the other was an arsonist. Why are you never told these things at interview? ‘By the way, the snakes escape from time to time, they bite but they’re not poisonous, no need to worry.’ And ‘We don’t keep matches in the house, but little Johnny is adept at starting fires with anything he finds, so don’t let him near the cooker or the wood fired stove.’ The parents were long-haul aircrew and, Maureen confided, very happy to be away for eight days at a time.

I met Maureen when we were both learning Italian, her to escape the arsonist and the snake charmer and live in Rome, and me, ever the optimist, to ‘do something with it’. I didn’t but she did move to Italy, at first to the top of a hill above a pretty little town, Porto Ercole, near Orbetello in Tuscany

Porto Ercole and the Orbetello lagoon

and then on, after an eventful summer to Rome.  Orbetello had been the HQ for some of Mussolini’s air force - seaplanes were landed on its lagoon during WW2, and the parade square outside the train station where he held troop inspections surprised us, it was huge and empty.

Maureen had secured a summer job through an advert in ‘The Lady’. It was working for a titled lady who owned a beautiful villa across the lagoon and up the hill above Porto Ercole, but who wouldn’t visit since the death of her husband, an ambassador. Instead, she let it. Maureen thought it would be a great way to improve on the basic Italian she had before moving on to Rome where she had a cousin. The staff already in residence were an Italian husband and wife team, cook and gardener/handyman. What Maureen hadn’t counted on was that the local accent and dialect meant that she rarely understood them, not at all like the classroom Italian we had learnt in England.

The villa was let to a middle-aged rotund Italian and his taller and very glamorous girlfriend, who displayed herself around the pool in the tiniest of bikinis, causing the plump, grey-haired cook to go into fits of apoplexy, especially if her husband was cleaning the pool at the time.

It was some days before Maureen realised that the ‘friends’ who were staying at the villa with the couple were bodyguards and the car outside, a black sedan with darkened windows that could barely crawl up the steep, winding hill, was heavily armour-plated. The tenant was part of some newspaper empire and being investigated by the law and the tax authorities, and (inevitably as this is Italy,) chased by the mob. Of course, neither Maureen nor the unsuspecting owner knew the danger that lurked if any of his foes got to the tycoon while he was staying in the villa, but Maureen was jittery and never fully relaxed during her stay there.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that he had a yacht moored in the bay far below the villa. The yacht had a crew captained by a very handsome English guy who was a nephew of the owner and who had an eye for the sailors. He managed to get himself into spots of bother most nights. Sometimes he would just get a black eye for his trouble. Other times the bodyguards were called in the middle of the night to bail him out of jail. Either way he was a liability, but he couldn’t be sacked because of his relationship to the titled lady owner.

That was one of the years I towed a caravan over and stayed with the kids on a campsite at the foot of the hill. (another story for another day). We arranged to go up to the villa on a day when the entourage was on the yacht. We were shown round the reception rooms which were jaw-droppingly luxurious, and then ushered out to the pool, from where the kids could not be shifted for the rest of the day. On one side of the pool was a summer kitchen, a concept new to me at the time. (Well, it was the ‘80s.) I was entirely captivated, the lady could keep her posh house, just give me the pool and the summer kitchen. I wandered along it stroking the cooker, sink, fridge freezer, wine fridge, and bbq, all in shining stainless steel under an obliging rattan roof which kept the burning sun off whoever cooked the day’s catch.

Years later, when I stayed in Lecce with John, he took us to a May day lunch to one of his friends, an English woman who lived out in the country. She was an interior designer and her house, huge and very old, featured vaulted ceilings in the large kitchen area, and in one of them was a tall fridge. Having been instructed to fetch the white wine, I opened the fridge to find not the wine, but trays of wine glasses chilling. Impressed, I called John to come and marvel at a whole fridge devoted to cooling the glassware. The owner, whose name I can’t remember, passed by and said airily, ‘Oh, but I think everyone has one of these now, don’t they?’ It’s still my dream!

My lovely friend Maureen survived her eventful summer with the newspaper baron, and even wrote a novel loosely based around her experiences. She moved to Rome and worked as a French translator for the Food and Agricultural Office of the UN (FAO). The FAO was housed in Mussolini’s old headquarters, an imposing building close to the Baths of Caracalla and opposite Circus Maximus, and it was very exciting to meet her for lunch there when I visited several times a year. As she came to know the city, Maureen would store up visits for me, places and restaurants that tourists don’t find but that say so much about the history and culture of Rome.

We often had lunch in a tiny family-run restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto. It was little more than the front and back room of a house, with barely room to move between tables and no menu in sight. You got whatever the two elderly ladies were cooking (very volubly) in a cubby hole in-between the two rooms, yelling at the ancient male server if he didn’t move quickly enough for them. In order to get in at all, we had to queue up and join a club, which was a way of getting past Rome’s licencing laws, a years old dodge to which the authorities seemed to turn a blind eye. I still have the membership card somewhere. The food was superb of course, served with a jug of red wine, plonked on the table with a bottle of water. No smiles, no politeness, just grumpiness. Perfect!

the Jewish Ghetto

If pressed I would say my favourite place in Rome isn’t actually in Rome. It’s a short train ride away, and it was one of Maureen’s happy places too. Ostia Antica was the old port of Rome and I loved walking on the old Roman roads, peering into the brothels and pizza parlours, still with wall murals clearly visible. The market square with its mosaics denoting where each stall stood and what it sold is almost untouched. The amphitheatre is huge, so the population in Roman times must have been substantial. We would go for the day and picnic among the ruins of someone’s house, trying to imagine what their days would have been like. We could almost hear the clanking of the chariots bowling along the huge cobbles and feel the hot breath of the sweating horses as they pulled their heavy loads around the town. More of the town has been unsilted since I last went, which suggests that more spirits of Ostia Antica have been released for us to find, so maybe I’ll go back one day.

Ostia Antica

Sadly, after 20-odd happy years in Rome where she had managed to write plays for Radio 4, have stories published in magazines, taught at Arvon some summers and thoroughly enjoyed the frequent hospitality at the Irish Embassy and the English College, Maureen became ill and eventually went home to Cork to be nursed by her family, until her death, not long afterwards, left us all the poorer. I haven’t been back to Rome since.

I’m continuing to pack stuff away, my tins of food, wondering what Maureen would say. She certainly would not approve of the tinned tomatoes. She always made her own sugo, peeling and deseeding the tomatoes just as she was taught by the cook in Orbetello. They didn’t need words; cookery was their common language.

I’ve had enough now, the packing can wait. I’ll just open a bottle of fizz to toast my friend’s optimism, bravery and enthusiasm for Italian life, which has rubbed off on me and most of my family. Cincin Maureen! §§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

Listen, Watched and Read

I’ve listened to The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng on Audible. If I’d been reading it I think I’d have given up, but listening to it as I drove made it easier to get through. It started slowly but gradually the story got more interesting so I persevered.

i’m listening to a rerun of ‘Between Ourselves With Marian Keyes’ on Radio4 extra and BBC Sounds. Marian reads some of her non-fiction pieces and talks to Tara Flynn. If you like her fiction you’ll love the non-fiction. It’s hilarious.

I watched Boat Story on BBC1 now on Iplayer. Bonkers but I loved it.

I don’t seem to have finished reading anything this month so I hope I‘ll have more to report next month