We are back in Longoio at last. We were meant to be here in March but something called covid19 came along and we had to miss the bus…or rather the plane. Finally, after various cancellations we managed to get O’Leary to transport us to Pisa. The journey, despite our fears, was quite safe with a whole seat row to ourselves.

Landing in Italy we were immediately set face-to-face, or rather mask-to-mask, with a clearer and more distinctive approach to the health crisis. So many more people, officials and public, were donning masks, hand sanitisers were placed everywhere and public information notices were prominently displayed. I, somehow, felt safer although I think anyone would feel the same after leaving the worst affected borough in London, Brent, with over two thousand deaths so far.

The Italian summer does help. The temperature difference from our place in the UK and our place in Italy approached 20 degrees! Mediterranean cafe society, with its open air arrangement of socially distanced tables and chairs, is a palliative too.

We took the train from Pisa di Bagni di Lucca where our Panda 4 x 4 was parked. Trusty as ever it started, after lying idle for over four months, at the first turn of the ignition. Of course, I had disconnected the battery before leaving Italy in February.

We found our house in very reasonable shape. No major storm had damaged the roof and no surrounding trees were down. Most of our geraniums were again flourishing although the lawn left something to be desired; rain had been lacking.

Most important of all we found our quintet of cats, Carlotta, Cheekie, Corneglia, Nerina and our latest arrival Archie in excellent form and still able to remember us! This happy fact was clearly due to the efforts of two friends, one from Guzzano and the other from Longoio, who visited, cuddled and, most importantly, fed our feline family.
It’s been hot, though not intolerably so, since our arrival three weeks ago.

However, there has recently been one day when the heavens wreaked their wrath upon over us with the strength of a breached sky-dam: a typical ‘bomba d’acqua’ or water bomb, as they are called here, worryingly reflecting the alterations in weather patterns today. This is what I said about it:

“As I write a terrible storm is pouring its vengeance upon the normally blue skies of an Italian summer. The wind is angry upon the hill our little village is poised. The rain is pelting down at a rattling machine gun rate. It turns in an instance into hail. Hail just when the season is heading towards its warmest holiday patch,’ferragosto August the fifteenth. The whole earth is rumbling continuously. It’s almost like an earthquake (we’ve had a few of those here too…).

There’s no respite. The soil breaks asunder. The birds and cicadas are no longer heard in this pandemonium of the elements. Like searchlights in a concentration camp flashes of lightning follow the incessant noise reverberating round and round our usually peaceful and verdant valley. If any wonder at the violence of the storm sequence in Vivaldi’s Summer from his ‘Four Seasons’ then here is the proof. The heavens are terrifying. The wind is blowing the branches and transforming them into the hands of supplicating victims begging for mercy. When will it end? When will the catastrophic interlude end?

When will we have our festive sunny season back? Why now! In an instant the irritated giants whose gnashing scared both the living and the dead have retreated. The clouds are parting to reveal a timid pallid blue and are shedding their menacing dark grey pallour. We can at last see and relive the harmony and the heat of this country’s summer without temerity, without dodging the lighting flashes, without hiding, like our cats, into the comforting folds of a bed. Yes this is Italy: a country that breeds extremes, that justifies them. For for every beam of golden light clearing its way through the azure skies there is the warning of the elements, For every invitation to love and caresses there is the terror of darkness, and violence breeds in the very heart in this land of fables and desires.”