The Dolce Vita Diaries by Cathy Rogers

Author:Cathy Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Having the first press under our belts felt like a major achievement but it was really a drop in the ocean. To do it, we had probably only harvested about forty trees, out of a total of 800. Even if we were going to ignore the ones with too many mosca-infected olives, we had a hell of a way to go.

But some things got easier.

Rosie was finally allowed to start at nursery—tentatively at first, an hour on the first day, two on the second—as they got her acclimatized. Actually I think the acclimatizing was as much for them, as she seemed happy from the off. To be around lots of other small friends, singing songs and having different exciting toys to play with and painting to do—I mean what’s not to like? In fact, I secretly fancied that most adults would enjoy a spell in nursery school doing painting and gluing and pouring different coloured sand into pots. By the end of a week, she was allowed to stay for the whole day, which meant mounting the twin towers of having lunch and having an afternoon nap. All the tiny lined-up nursery beds looked like something from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and sure enough the first song she came home singing was an Italian ‘hi ho’. The words had been adapted though, to make them more about food.

Nursery made things much easier. And we also got quicker at the netting and collecting and pegging, so each new tree didn’t seem quite such a faff. And we found a lovely helper—‘little Carlo’ we called him, to differentiate him from the other Carlo we already knew who was probably only a centimetre taller. We’d been given his number by Antonio—what finer start—as he had done a bit of work with him in the past. He was currently still a student, training to be a maths teacher, but in all his spare time he loved being outside and doing healthy physical things. We had plenty of those to offer.

Every day we made an early morning telephone call/weather report so Carlo knew whether to set off or not. Working as a threesome was so much more satisfying—and, of course, also meant that we spoke Italian all day. And Carlo was an excellent teacher in that he relished teaching us quirky little words—explaining what a song lyric on the radio was saying, or telling us the slang word for the piece of bread you use to swab up the juices on your plate—even though in polite company you shouldn’t, of course, do this. And since we ate lunch together every day, we also learned a lot about the rules of Italian cooking; we were particularly keen to crack those about which pasta shape goes with which sauce—for example, why do you always see ‘penne arrabbiata’ but never ‘spaghetti arrabbiata’. When we asked Carlo this particular question, he looked at us as if we’d asked ‘Why don’t you sometimes wear your socks on your ears instead of your feet?’ and we realized we had a way to go.

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