Now that ‘Neighbours’, that long-running soap from Oz has ended (not that I ever watched it…) I reflected upon our own neighbours and came to the conclusion that the best thing about where we’ve moved since just before Christmas last year is that we don’t have any neighbours (or at least any within fifteen minutes walking distance).

Why that reflection? Surely Italy is a nice friendly country where people actually talk to their neighbours unlike those inhabiting East Cheam? Actually that is the problem. It’s OK to meet neighbours occasionally but when they’re permanently lodged next to one’s habitation it’s can be a different matter. Frankly, there are times when I want to have my privacy all to myself and not be in what often seems to be in a continued public gaze no matter how much I might crave for fame or signing autograph books.

Actually when we lived in Longoio this wasn’t as bad as it could have been for our residence there was detached with three sides surrounded by woodland instead of other people’s houses. Moreover, the houses on the remaining side were holiday homes, largely unoccupied for much of the year and in one case left unvisited by their owners for almost three years.

It’s quite OK if one owns a holiday home in an Italian Apennine village and visits it for a few weeks a year. (Incidentally thanks to all those wonderful people who voted Brexit in even those visits are now curtailed to ninety days in a period of six months…). However, if one intends to make one’s home in this country a semi-permanent one (as in my case where I’ve been working in education here) then a completely isolated house with an ample ‘cordon sanitaire’ of woodland and meadows surrounding it is preferable.

At the same time I do not envisage a place utterly isolated in a secret valley or a hidden mountain chasm requiring ropes or crampons to reach it for people of a certain age (like us). Reasonable road access is essential. And especially…space to park the car near the front door – and leave it there – without having to lug one’s shopping up a steep track.

Our new house continues to satisfy our preference for a reasonably isolated location but with easy road access. (Indeed there is even a bus stop at the end of our driveway. Maybe it’s always been my secret ambition to own a house with its own personal bus stop and our little farmhouse is the sort of place one could easily turn into a family nudist colony and not raise objections from others (unless a double-decker bus comes along). It’s also the sort of place where we can absolutely decide who we want to see and certainly not the sort of place where others see us whether we want to see them or not.

It’s interesting how humanity’s privacy is constantly being eroded around lives with the rapid spread of electronic data communication and increasing computerisation and how as a result so many of us crave more and more for a spot of blessed earth free from prying eyes that we can truly call our own.

Talking about electronic data communication – or as the Italians like to call it ‘I social’ – I have been ruminating on all those methods of keeping in touch since the days when the only way to know what others were up to (apart from chatting over the garden fence) was by picking up a fixed-line phone or writing a letter (and remembering to post it!). Now, of course, it is a rather different picture with media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, WhatsApp, Tik-Tok, Email, Instagram widely used, especially by the latest generation. Which ones to choose from?

The only ‘social’ I regularly use (apart from my mobile – I gave up my fixed line phone ages ago) are WhatsApp, Email, my Blog and Facebook.

Does this mean that all my Facebook friends are really my friends? Or that my friends are all on Facebook? Of course not! Like a Venn diagram only some of my Facebook friends are those who I would call friends and those who I call friends are not all on Facebook.

It does, however, mean that in many cases I know more about what’s happening to my Facebook ‘friends’ than what life-events are afflicting my non-Facebook ones.

Clearly, all this boils down to an individual’s sense of social space by which I mean not only how far we tolerate other humanoid habitations from our own but also how far away from our face we are willing to tolerate them talking to us. (In Italy, for example, I find some people talk to you uncomfortably close to your face.)

I wonder how aspects of human social space in different cultures will develop in a world with an ever-frenetic population explosion. As previously stated we bought our new house principally because of the physical amount of social space it has given us i.e. we do not have to have curious neighbours observing us from next door. The building may not have all the features we were looking for. For example, the stairs need some redesign and the garden (as always in mountain areas) wants some shoring up.  But the first box we needed to tick was precisely the one referring to social space and, interestingly, our visitors tend to come up with that point when they call on us. ‘Lucky! You don’t have nosey neighbours to contend with.’ ‘You’ve got your own space to do whatever you like’ and so forth.

To sum up. Holiday homes may be bought within prying distance of neighbours but as far as we are concerned the only spies we wish to see are deer, stoats badgers and boars (and not too many of those either).

By the way I forgot to add. Neighbours can, of course, be good or not so good. Of the not-so-good ones the worse neighbours have not so much been locals born-and-bred here but those from abroad who have decided to live here. And of these the worse like to call themselves ‘expats’ rather than immigrants. No need to guess from which country they come from. But then I have no wish to mention names…

Having shown my cards regarding neighbours and social space I remain quite sociable and, because we are now in a more isolated location, enjoy our interaction with other bipeds rather more than before. Here, for example are a few places we visited last Sunday. They included a very convivial gathering celebrating the grand Ducal road which connects Bagni di Lucca over the mountains with the Duchy of Modena with a folk-song group and Virgilio Contrucci enlightening us on the way this road, which passes through some of the most stunning landscapes, came to be.

 

And in the evening there was a captivating re-telling of Ovid’s metamorphosis of the Persephone legend staged before the gorgeous Romanesque façade of San Cassiano church as part of our local festival there.

Let us in the meanwhile continue to enjoy this summer before Hades return to the scene to capture Persephone, abduct her to the nether regions and cause winter to re-descend upon us.

(PS There must be a linguistic connection here for alter but one letter in the Italian word for Hell or Hades – where Persephone was abducted to – and ‘inferno’ changes to ‘inverno’ = winter.)