I saw this postcard in a local tobaccaio and felt compelled to buy it.  It is one of the most honest and unpretentious postcards I have ever come across on my travels.  It's charm is delightful with the text in the bottom right corner proudly proclaiming 'Monopoli City Tourism'.  I admire the unbridled optimism of the card designers.  We view a streetscape composed of feral plants, lopsided signposts and what looks to be an expanse of rubble. It begs the question "WTF are we looking at?" And what do you write on this card when sending it to loved ones far away?... 'Having a great time, wish you were here'. 

The gentle man in black stood in the piazza, the rain falling softly around him. He stood alone. He stood still, umbrella angled sightly to the front and right of him, held in a gloved hand.  He wore a collared shirt with a red tie. An elegant long black coat covered the tailored trousers that gently caressed his black leather shoes.  He was by far, the most elegantly dressed man in the whole piazza. 

This photo was taken in the same piazza that forms the wallpaper for this blog. The piazza is located within a town called Castallana di Grotte and is a 20 minute drive west of Monopoli.  The town is famous for the largest cave system in Italy, attracting thousands of Italians every summer.  There was a tour of the caves scheduled for midday and I had promised my colleagues that we would be counted among the tour group, but first we had to find the caves.  We followed signs that took us through narrow streets, each sign promising us that we were coming ever closer to our destination and then, as has happened so often on this trip, the signs just stopped being there. As though the men whose job it is to erect signs come so far and then stop for an afternoon aperitivo on a hot summer's day and decide the signs are close enough to the destination. Well, this Australian having driven beyond the last sign only to reach a roundabout with five exits would like to meet with the sign men and share an aperitivo and perhaps express a different opinion on how far the signs should actually go, towards a destination.  And so it was, that after coming across the same piazza from four different directions after the signs to the grotto dried up, we had come to the conclusion that the entrance to the grotto must be within the piazza.  I parked the car and we three Australians ventured into the piazza.  

The day was wet and cold, the greyest and wettest day of our two week stay.  In the piazza, a crowd of men stood in a loose gathering.  There was no formal queue but optimistically I felt these men standing in the wet, and decidedly chilly air would surely be waiting to enter the grotto at midday. But as we searched the piazza for a ticket office or an entrance, our confidence became increasingly diluted in the rain.  And like the predawn light that slowly and gently creeps across the horizon to illuminate a brand new day I realised with increasing clarity that the men were standing in the rain with the sole purpose of  conversing with each other.  

I stopped walking and stood there too, in the piazza, in the rain, in the cold.  For a few seconds, I was perhaps part of the tradition but then the other men noticed me standing there and they stopped their conversations and looked at me looking at them.   They must have known that I was not a local.  I took out my compact camera and idly took some photographs of nothing in particular and the men returned to their conversations. It was while I was taking random photographs that I first noticed the man in black.  He was different from the others.  He had a presence.  He stood alone, in his own space, metres from any of the other uomini.   He was an elderly gentlemen, well groomed, immaculately presented.  Even his hat spoke of his classic styling, a styling that had been practiced over decades so that the final effect was achieved with effortless grace. He stood motionless. He did not even move his head to look at the others.  He was waiting.   I stood several metres in front of the man.  The rental Fiat, my colleagues and midday lay beyond him.  As I walked past him, several metres to one side, he looked at me.  Our eyes connected and something unsaid passed between us, it was loneliness.  And then our eyes averted and I carried on walking.  I felt a great heaviness come upon my heart in that moment.  Close to the car, I stopped and turned around and I took the photograph you now see, in remembrance of him.

I put my camera back into my pocket and I stood for a few moments looking at his silhouette.  I knew now that he was waiting for someone who would not be coming, not today and not tomorrow.   I knew he could feel me looking at him and at that moment he started to turn his head in my direction.  I turned quickly and walked hurriedly towards the Fiat.

Inside the warmth of the Fiat I turned the key in the ignition, reversed back onto the street, slipped into first gear and drove up the street past the man in black.  He remained motionless... waiting.

I know that in the future, when loneliness puts his hand on my shoulder, I shall think of the man in black.  

No curry powder in Italy?

I went to the supermarket yesterday to buy ingredients for some good old fashioned home cooking.  My beautiful wife had given me suggestions on the weekend for tasty meals that won't tax my culinary abilities.  One of these recipes is a personal favourite, spicy lentil soup,  hmmm... delicious.   The recipe calls for carrots, onions, red lentils, chicken (or vegetable stock) and a tablespoon of curry powder.  What could be simpler?  The list is short, the challenge, not too great.  And yet, 45 minutes of scouring supermarket shelves led me to the inescapable conclusion that there were no herbs or spices to be found, no curry powder, not even a whiff of a chilli in the fresh food section and do you think I could find chicken or vegetable stock?  No sign of it.  In a supermarket that had 10 aisles, each one 25m in length, I was stymied.

I spied a couple of shop assistants and decided that as a last resort I would do the unmanly act of asking for help.  I retrieved my trusty Lonely Planet Italian phrasebook and found a quiet place between the bottles of Nutella and Cinzano Bianco where I could practice my broken Italian.  My phrasebook has a section called 'self-catering' and I flipped directly to that section and quickly found  'Where do I find the...'  I then looked for the word 'curry' and to my dismay realised that no matter how often I read the words listed between 'B' and 'D', the word curry just wasn't there.  I weighed up the pros and cons of walking up to one of the shop assistants and saying "dove posso trovare il.." and then miming curry powder.  Suddenly, making spicy lentil soup had become more challenging than I had initially thought.  How do you mime curry powder?  I set that thought to one side.  Even if I could pull it off, I would still need to ask for chicken stock.  In my mind's eye I saw an image of myself doing the chicken dance in the aisle and then pointing to a bottle of fruit juice - Chicken juice, would that work?

Life was becoming too complicated.  I went home and bought a pizza.

The church that stands opposite the house in which I reside is called Portale Chiesa del Purgatorio which translates into English as the Home Church of Purgatory.  And the street I live on is called Purgatory Street. I can now claim in all honesty to be 'living in Purgatory'.

The external walls of the church are decorated with carvings of skulls and bones and there is a room within the church that houses a tall wooden cabinet with glass doors.  You can see the contents of the cabinet.  Priests of this particular brotherhood were kept in the cabinet dressed in their cassocks.  Forgive me when I say the obvious but I believe I have found the Catholic 'skeletons in the closet'.

My thanks to the priest on the left who turned to me and smiled when I took the photo.

Monopoli, Italy lies 50km south of a town called Bari which itself is located in the southern half of Italy, at the start of the heel of Italy, if you will.   Bari lies on the Adriatic coast and it is not too far by boat to Albania and Croatia.  Perhaps, like me you have never heard of Bari but to the Russians and in particular the Russian Orthodox church, Bari is a holy place.  It is the resting place of St Nicola, known in the Coca Cola marketing department and millions of people around the world as Santa Claus.  Every year, tens of thousands of Russian pilgrims make the trip to Bari to pray to the remains of St Nicola.  His bones were rescued hundreds of years ago by Italian fishermen that sailed across the Adriatic and made their way to the country now known as Turkey.  It was feared that Muslims would destroy the bones of the patron saint as they had done with so many religious icons and relics of Christendom.

Monopoli, the 'only city', where the English word, monopoly takes its meaning has its own fair share of history and it is here that I will call home for several weeks while working on a project for an Italian company.  I can tell you that I live with my two work colleagues in a limestone house that is 200 years old within the fortressed walls of the 'old city'.  Canons made of black iron sit atop the length of the 6m thick wall that encircles the city.  The canons point seaward and  I sleep peacefully at night knowing I am well protected should any sea faring marauders consider pillaging the town.

At the end of my stone paved street, just round the corner, there is an inconspicuous brown wooden door that is recessed into one of the Cathedral walls (did I mention there are six churches and one cathedral within a 400m radius of our house).  The door is totally nondescript and indeed I have walked past it everyday on my way to work, on my way to Caffe Roma for my morning cappuccino and fresh croissant still warm from the bakers oven, on my way to the morning fruit and vegetable market in the local piazza and I have never given the door a second thought.  I'm not sure why, but on one such occasion as I walked past the door I noticed a small sign, no bigger than a sheet of A4 paper  And embedded in the Italian was the number and word '4000 anno' and the word 'crypta'.  Could it be that beyond this door there existed a burial place so old that Christ himself would have regarded it as ancient history.  I will tell you what I found in a later post.

 For now, I wanted to share with you an image of daily life in this small community.  Every morning (but not so early) the locals set up their stalls in the town square.  There are crates of mandarins, apples, eggplants of the most intense colour, green leafy vegetables and there is seafood, the 'frutti di mare', fruits of the sea plucked fresh that morning from the rich waters of the Adriatic.  There are stalls selling olives by the bucket and other stores that sell grains and cereal.  The men shout their specials and entice you with the offer of a plastic bag into which you can put their produce.  Old men stand in clusters, sometimes in the rain and cold.  They are talking about the threads that bind their lives together.  Epicurus, the Greek philosopher would have said they are engaging in one of the three elements that are fundamental to happiness - spending time with friends.

One man had a stall that was no more than 1m long and he sold only bunches of radishes.  He was no doubt the Radish Man.  His radishes were of good size, a deep red and firm to the touch.  He was proud of those radishes and he engaged with me for some minutes, trying his best to tempt me with his wares.  He held out the plastic bag to me, he implored me with his Italian and his body language but I resisted.  I had been thinking of what I could make with 5 radishes and the strawberry yoghurt that sat alone on my shelf in the house fridge.  And I confess, my imagination let me down and I successfully resisted the urge to buy these wonderful radishes.  I later regretted my decision, a decision based purely on practicality.  I should have bought the radishes, I know that it would have made Radish Man happy.  But it's not too late,  I will seek him out tomorrow... and maybe even buy two bunches of radishes.



Sometimes in life, you have to dig deep, you need to put in the extra effort to find that one mandarin that you know is right for you.

Never give up.

  

I do not know how long the olive tree had been there.  It looked as though it had erupted out of the earth many hundreds of years before I was born.

We had waited 2 days to get the bikes, they needed to be checked to make sure they were fit for use.  We are here in the off-season and the bikes hadn't been used since the last rays of the Italian summer had faded away.  It's 5 degrees now in late January, some rain and slate grey skies.  6 km into the ride, I lost my colleague.  I figured he had stopped to take a photograph so I crossed the road to take a closer look at a ruin while I waited for him.  The ruin sat heavy and alone by the sea.  I saw my colleague on the other side of the road and called him over.  He walked up to me and handed me his bicycle pedal.  Welcome to southern Italy.  

I decided to inspect my own bike and discovered the front light had no on/off button but there was a button hole where one could poke a long fingernail and thereby hit something electrical that did turn the light on.  Fortunately, I carry a slightly longer fingernail on my left pinkie for such occasions.  

And the rear light just didn't work.  

And so we stood at the ruin, in the middle of nowhere, one bike with no pedal and the other with dodgy lights, while darkness looked at us from across the sea.   There was however, a man close by, he was loading all manner of fishing gear into his Fiat and it was evident that he had been harvesting the fruits of the sea.   I approached him while wheeling the bike towards him with one hand and brandishing the pedal in the other.  "Mee skuzee" I cried, "Buonjorno".  He replied, "jorno" which I have learned is the casual reply in these parts. His face was crusty, old and weather beaten.  His facial mortar had been eroded by time itself leaving deep wrinkles, in sympathy with the ruin that looked down at us in silence.  I gestured what I imagined to be a spanner turning action against the pedal and his kindly eyes registered understanding.  He said "no" but held his finger up in a gesture for me to wait a moment and he walked over to one of his buckets.  He pulled an old towel from the bucket, walked over to the bike and knelt down.  With his gnarly stubby fingers he did his best to screw the pedal into the shank using the towel to improve his grip.  It was of no use but I was touched by his efforts to help these two Australians.  I said a cheerful "grazie" and smiled thanks to the fisherman as he walked back to his Fiat and fishing gear.