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 his is a good time to be in Umbria. The spring rains have come and gone, less torrential than usual this year--some years they gouge out craters and channels in the steeper slopes of the dirt road that leads to our house and we have to drop everything and get out with the wheelbarrow and shovel to effect repairs. Another good thing about this time of year is that the hunting season is still comfortably distant--it begins on the first Sunday in September and goes on for five months. We didn't know it when we bought the house, but it seems that we are on an ancestral hunting ground. Generations of men with dogs and guns have come down through our olive grove into the small wood that lies below, shooting at almost anything that moves--I haven't seen anyone shoot at a butterfly yet, but it wouldn't surprise me too much. The only way to keep them out is to fence the land. But there is a local regulation that prevents us from fencing at a distance of more than 50 metres from the house, and this doesn't include the olives or the vines or the wood. So you have to fence, but you can't. It's a contradiction we still find baffling.Another snag at the beginning was the shortage of water. When we first came to live here my wife used the washing-machine four or five times in one day and suddenly there was no water, none at all, the well was exhausted. It was midsummer. A niece of my wife's was with us, 18 years old, very keen on personal hygiene. We had to leave. Now we have an artesian well that delivers thirty-five litres to the minute. The local water-diviner found the water for us. We saw the forked twig jump in his hands. "Just here," he said, "Fifty-seven metres down." Drilling to that depth is financially hazardous--you have to pay whether they find water or not. But they found it--at fifty-nine metres. Miraculous. The water-diviner said that his was a faculty not possessed by many. He also told us that water-divining makes you impotent, but he is in his mid-seventies so there may be other factors at work. Anyway, we now have plenty of water and we are exploring ways of evading the restrictions on fencing. The sun is shining and the vines are in first leaf. On a clear day like this you can see across the foothills of the Apennines and make out some of the hill-towns so characteristic of the region, towns that were already ancient when the Romans came and have not been much touched since then. Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Bevagna, and dozens more--wonderful views, always something beautiful to see, even in the smallest and sleepiest of them. Yes, on the whole, Umbria is not a bad place to be.
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Copyright © 1997 Barry Unsworth. Photo of Barry Unsworth © Jerry Bauer. |
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