Living in San Giorgio di Pesaro and Kingston

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.

Recently the newspapers here have been full of revelations about Mr Berlusconi’s private life and his alleged use of Mr Tarantini (equally vertically challenged) to procure young esorts for his private parties. The revelations are becoming rather boring but yesterday one of the recorded conversations showed the humourous side of Mr Berlusconi and it made me laugh.

The newspaper was indicating that the girls procured were like a “United Nations” in that there were girls from Brazil, Argentina, Poland, Sweden etc. According to the tapped phone conversation Mr Berlusconi told Tarantini not to “hire any Russian girls as “they are too tall and we are only little’uns.”

Finally the rain arrived. On Sunday night it started and then continued into Monday. Then again Monday night and into Tuesday morning more rain. Not only rain but good rain in the sense that it wasn’t torrential but steady and so allowed the earth to absorb it. We were fortunate because some parts of northern Italy got real thunderstorms causing flooding and damage. In one area of north Italy they had more lightening in one day than they normally have in a year.

Today, Wednesday, we are promised some more rain in the morning and then the weather should improve again i.e. the sun comes back. However, the heat of the last few months has gone. Yesterday morning started out rather nippy and at 10 the temperature was 13 degrees – very cool when you have been used to maximum temperatures of more than 30 degrees and even during the night it never went below 25. Today when the sun comes back even the maximum temperature will be low 20s and the cooler nights will mean being able to sleep without the fan whirling in the background.

The very hot and oftern humid weather has continued here at San Giorgio. It has been a dry summer and the usual thunderstorms which come in August did not arrive and so it is now more than 6 weeks since we saw rain and as you can see from the photo the garden is suffering. At the beginning of the month a water ban was introduced. This allowed us to water the garden on Monday, Wednesday and Friday but only between 9.00pm and midnight. Now a a complete ban has been introduced and so to keep some of the pot plants going we are opting to safe the water from the showers and hope the plants don’t mind the soapy water too much.

Of course the continuing sunny weather means it is till possible to go to the beach. The season is definitely, in terms of  holiday makers, over but the beach is still busy at the weekend with locals. During the week it is very quiet and only the pensioners arrive in the afternoon for a chat and a bit of sun. The bars on the  beach are closed and there are only a couple of young vendors are walking the beaches trying to sell things.

San Giorgio is now operating its “differentiated rubbish collection”. After a few months delay the new system started in August. The first day there were only a few bins left out on the street as it was still possible to throw rubbish into old bins used in the previous system. Within a few days the old bins were removed and now the night before collection the street became lined with plastic bins. So far the system seems to be working well although it would be difficult if one lived in a small flat as to operate the system there are 4 bins plus 2 sacks.

The new italian words to help understand the system are:

umido i.e. humid and in this case used for waste food.
carte i.e.paper
vetro i.e. glass
metallo i.e. tin cans etc. – put in a red sack.
plastica i.e. plastic bottles etc. – put in a yellow sack.
secco i.e. dry – used for things that do not go under the other headings.

Sam the cat has had a cat flap for 5 years and in all that time no Italian cat has worked out how to use it, or at least has not bothered to work out how to use it. However, last week we discovered the cat in the picture helping itself to Sam’s food. So we decided to invest in the latest catflap which has a chip reading device. Pressing a couple of buttons on the flap allows it to read the chip in Sam’s shoulder. When Sam approaches the cat flap it reads her chip and allows the door to open.

The old cat flap was dull brown and blended into the door. The new one stands out as it is pure white and also has a small extension which holds the chip reading device. It is appealingly called the “porch” in the installation instructions.

The installation of the new catflap coincided with Sam’s annual visit to the vet. Sam had a thorough checkup and was given a clean bill of health. This means she should be with us for a while longer making the investment in the new system worthwhile.