9 December 2005
Rome
ItÕs wet. ItÕs so wet. ItÕs coming down so hard and so relentlessly that it feels like a rainy season, but without the heat. I endeavoured to get a bit of Christmas shopping done this morning, but soon abandoned my quest, sploshed home, and decided that indoors was the only place to be.
In a break between downpours last weekend, we took one of our all-too-rare walks, down through MarioÕs field towards the stream which we could hear gushing noisily. Where it skirts the short end of the field, the path was no more. It had washed away, collapsing way down into the gulley. I told Mario later but he shrugged in that ŅthatÕs what happensÓ way. And of course it is. When, many decades ago, the path which descended along the southern end of our big field down into another whole cultivated field in the valley slid away, Mario must have shrugged then too. According to our walking talking Casa Galeotta history book Gigi, it was a good field, and very productive with its thick soil deposited by the two streams that meet there and its sheltered, sunny position. But a landslide is a landslide, and for the contadini around here, itÕs a full stop. No point hankering after inaccessible land. That big field down on the banks of the stream is a jungle now, impassible with its matted brambles and shoulder-high ferns. I dream of growing bananas and mangos down there one dayÉ so maybe itÕs just as well that itÕs virtually inaccessible: that way my dreams donÕt collide with harsh reality.
That path led down to the stream valley, to meet paths running along the water course, and others climbing up the other side of the valley towards the Perugia road. The newly-collapsed path, on the other hand, wound down from our house and up to the other case coloniche of what used to be the same vast estate on the Camparca hill to the north.
And it continued past our house to the south up to more farm houses and, finally, the Perugia road; this southern stretch is barely passable now Š another landslide, plus a dense thicket of Arundo donax which at least has the advantage of holding together with its immense roots the little that is left. The vaschetta Š our little bricked-about pond Š stands right on this path which was, by all accounts, a major artery. According to Gigi, it was the result of a decree by Mussolini that farmhouses such as ours had to have a walled water-container rather than a muddy hole in the ground from where drinking and washing water was drawnÉ after animals had waded in it. So women brought their washing from all around for a comunal scrub and chat here; and Carlo, the late father of our builder Stefano, recalled coming down from his home at Iroga, the house immediately to the south, to splash in the pond with his siblings and GigiÕs numerous brothers and sisters.
This watery social centre is another victim of our endless rain. Last spring I had Giuseppe clean it up a bit with his bulldozer. He removed accumulated debris and scraped down to the hard earth at the bottom, and cleaned back towards the stone wall just visible against the hillside behind. On the bottom we found what were undoubtedly the remains of some kind of lean-to roof: tiles and half-bricks. After the clean-out you could make out a three-sided structure at the back, the long side against the hill and two short sides projecting into the pond to shore it up. This archeological dig confirmed what Carlo had told me months earlier: he remembered the vaschetta being much bigger than it then appeared. Of course, he remembered it through the magnifying eyes of childhood: for these dirt-poor farm kids from a land-locked region, our vaschetta must have seemed a swimming pool of immense proportions. But the brick surrounding walls did indeed extend much further into the hillside that I had thought. I made Giuseppe leave a fair bit of earth shoring up what remained of the back wall which was only stones held together by crumbling mortar and vegetation. But it clearly wasnÕt enough, because on Sunday I noticed that the stones, and quite a bit of hillside, are now in the pond. At some point, I will have it rebuilt. I also noticed that despite the constant downpours, the pond is only one-third full. I can see moisture seeping, fast, out of the hillside and into the vaschetta. Other winters, it has filled up with much less rain. So where is the water going? ItÕs a mystery.
So, shrugging in an Ņit happensÓ way at this new landslide is very traditional, in its way. But itÕs also rather sad. The path system which was the mainstay of the estate community, the practical and social link between the share-cropping peasant farmers who worked the masterÕs land and lived in such dire poverty, is shearing off before our very eyes. ItÕs a piece of local history thatÕs going. I wonder if the master would have permitted it to remain like that, or whether he had too much at stake: this, after all, was how he moved his labour and produce around. The individual farmsteads interacted, sharing equipment as well as washing facilities. When the share-cropping system was dismantled, this cooperation came to an end. Farmers probably helped each other at all key times of year: sowing and harvesting, whinnowing and fruit collecting. Indeed, they still do help each other at times, though quite a lot of this help seems to be of the leaning on the fence imparting unasked-for advice type.
It would be totally fanciful of me to say that anyone Š except starry-eyed nostalgics straight from the city Š cared much about the old paths any more. If Mario has been down that recently-collapsed path in the last 20 years, it would have been to shoot a duck for Sunday lunch. If farmers want to see each other these days, they hop in their cars and stick to tarmacked Š or at least the more acceptably passable white Š roads like sensible people. But IÕm not ashamed of my unrealistic clinging to these vestiges of how our countryside once was. And IÕm not ashamed, either, of clinging to the hope that the lines attached to the telephone pole which slid down with all that mud were still functioning; and that when the phone-less houses at the far end lodge their complaint, Telecom Italia will send its machinery in to do what the farmers would never bother to do.