Living in San Giorgio di Pesaro

One of the pleasures of Italy is having breakfast out - which means having a cappucino and a brioche/cornetto filled with apricot jam. Having seen a recipe for them in a book I got bought for Christmas I decided it would be something I could make at home. To make them you need “Strong flour” or bread flour. I have never worked out what this is in italian getting completely confused with “00″ flour, “0″ flour”, flour for pizza, flour for cakes, soft wheat, hard wheat, durum wheat etc

So the other day we were having a coffee in the “Dolce Vita”, a cafe not too far away which has delicious brioche and I asked the owner which flour he uses. He told me it was “farina manitoba”. This is flour made from soft wheat grown in more nothern climes and which contains higher levels of protein and makes better bread. Although the wheat used may come from Canada, Russia etc in Italy it has been given the name of the Canadian Province.

So yesterday in the supermarket I saw a packet of “Manitoba Flour” and the first batch of bread (not the brioche) is  in the oven as I write.

The Christmas lights are on in San Giorgio. Unfortunately no one had donated a Christmas tree this year but the commune have been creative and have used strings of lights to create a Christmas tree shape. Although simple it does look quite good. The other Christmas decoration is the crib. It is made from metal figures which were sculpted by a local artist some time ago and donated to the commune. They are unfortunately rather dark and do not stand out. To make them more noticeable they have been dressed in plastic bags of various colours. This obviously teaches us about the value of recycling but it doesn’t add much to the crib looking good.

We have never seen the television series Downton Abbey but had heard how good it was. So we were pleased to know that it was to be shown on Italian television - Sunday evenings at 9.30. Dubbed into Italian we were sure we would be able to understand the Italian from the rich inhabitants, particularly Maggie Smith’s character. So we settled down to watch and were pleasantly surprised to discover that with digital TV we could watch with the original soundtrack. Unfortunately the ability to select the original language is only available on a couple of the digital channels but having it for Downton Abbey made Sunday viewing more pleasurable.

Outside the Osteria Casa Mina they had been using a tailor’s dummy to advertise the restaurant. Normally he was dressed as a waiter. Coming up to Christmas they decided to use Father Christmas instead. Unfortunately, a recent windy day caused a problem and Father Christmas literally bit the dust. Attempts were made, like Humpty Dumpty, to get him back together again and now Father Christmas had disappeared from the streets of the town.

A few weeks after making the road beside our house one way with traffic having to come down the road, there was been a complete change of plan. Now the no entry sign has been turned round and traffic can go up the road. Not sure why this has happened or whether it could change again.

In the last week the Marche area has started to go Digital. We woke up last Wednesday to discover that the analogue signal had been switched off and we were left with a television screen full of static. Fortunately we had already bought our digital box and plugging it in we had 12 channels available to us. Unfortunately Rai 1,2, 3 (equivilent of bbc 1, 2, 3) were terrible as the picture was continually breaking up. The other channels were better but there were no mediaset channels available. Talking to people in the village we discovered that we were not the only ones having limited channels and quality. Two days and a lot of moaning later we resynchronised the tv and this time we got about 30 channels downloaded including mediaset but still poor reception on some of the channels including Rai. Another two days later we resynchronised again and we now have about 40 channels and the picture quality is good.

At the side of our house is the road going around the castle. Just above the house the road narrows and at this point there is the entrance to the Osteria Casa Mina on one side and Maria Grazie’s house on the other. Under the last administration this road had been closed off both ways by the comune placing a large concrete block and a no entry sign. This was because as cars would drive through they would sometimes graze the wall of Marie Grazie’s house. When the new mayor was elected the block and sign were removed and the road opened to traffic again. However, now that the Osteria seems to be continuing to survive and that the entrance leads directly onto the road the council have decided to close the road again but this time only to traffic coming up rather than down. Clearly the policy option was for a compromise.
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Another change in the village is that the Post Office is now only opened on Tuesday, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Monday and Wednesday it is closed and the young lad who runs it has to work in another village. The Post Office as an organisation is under pressure to adopt a “business model”. The first impact was the cancellation of a saturday delivery and now we have the second impact.

Having travelled around Florida some Italian friends from Pesaro had met two other Italians who, it turned out, were also from Pesaro. So wondering if on our travels we will also be so lucky. Yesterday morning in the lift of the hotel I heard a couple speaking Italian. Asked were they were from but it turned out they were from Rome. They were heading out on the bus for a tour to the Grand Canyon. We instead went out for a coffee in the nearest coffee shop. Unfortunately it was a Starbucks and coffee was as bad as I remembered.

Back to meeting Italians. Need to keep looking for the folks from Pesaro.

Monique’s grandmother Domenica with her two sons - Monique’s dad on the left and her uncle on the right

When Monique was in San Giorgio during the summer she asked for some help getting birth and marriage certificates of various family members. She had the relevant dates and when we when to the commune at Mondavio and Serrungari we found the staff to be very helpful and within 30 minutes we had the relevant certificates.

At Mondavio we were looking for the birth certificate of her grandmother Domenica Quarta  who was born in Mondavio in 1894. When the man in the commune gave us a copy of the original certificate we asked if he could read out the details as the writing was difficult to decipher. Starting to read he suddenly went “Oh”. It turned out that the birth had been registered, not by the father, but by the midwife and a note on the certificate said that the child had not been recognised by the parents and was subsequently sent to an orphanage in Fano. However, the note went on to say that when Domenica was 10 she was “legitimised” by her parents and removed from the orphanage.

We assumed that leaving the baby for adoption was a result of poverty and their inability to manage. However, when Monique went back to America and talked to family members she was given some extra details:

Domenica’s father had gone to America, married a German woman and they had a child. He wanted to divorce her but being unable to, he returned to Italy where he met Petonilla, Domenica’s mother. (She was a widow - she had not only lost her husband at sea but her 3 children had also died).
They lived together out of wedlock and as children were born they brought them to the orphanage. Luckily, Domenica was taken in by, according to the family, a beautiful woman and Domenica came to consider her her mother. When she was ten, the German wife died, and her parents, able to marry, went to collect their children.
Domenica’s adopted mother started to come to visit her until one dayher real mother, Petronilla, told the woman that it upset her too much to see her and asked her to stop coming to see Domenica. It seems that her mother just used Domenica for labour and so when she met her future husband and he asked her to go to Americawith him she readily agreed.

Coming into most Italian small villages there are always some modern houses that have been built in concrete and never painted. Concrete grey is not the most appealing colour in the world but it is not surprising that they remain unpainted as it is an expensive job e.g. to paint our house we were quoted 8000 euros.

In or near historical centres the houses are meant to be painted in pastel colours but further afield anything goes and in recent years Italians have been opting for bright, bright colours. And so one family in San Giorgio has gone for orange. The picture does not do it justice. It is an orange that would warm an Ulster protestant’s or a fanatical Dutch football fan’s heart. It’s great.