I’m sure my book isn’t the first to be written about the experience of living in Italy, but it may have the most bizarre tales to tell.
Four years ago when as usual I was enjoying my summer touring Italian spa towns, we were spending a week at a favourite old spa town in the Euganean Hills. Over the years I’ve visited all the well-known glamorous Italian spas – Montecatini, Salsomaggiore, Chianciano Terme – and even the less visited ones like San Pellegrino and Acqui Terme. It’s the architecture and the sense of a genteel way of life which has all but disappeared which I love so much. By the time we discovered the very faded town in the hills of the Veneto (which in my book I call Montebello) we were visiting places where no tourists would venture. Only Italians remain loyal to “Montebello”. It has the best mud in Italy, they say.
We’d just returned from a hot busy day in Venice, and got off the train in the little station, pleased to be back in the calm quiet oasis in the shade of the magnolia trees which line the street.
I said, half thinking aloud, as I sighed contentedly, “If ever I were to blow my savings and buy property abroad, it would be here.”
As if by magic, I then looked up and saw a hand-written cardboard sign on a balcony, announcing a flat for sale. My partner didn’t react very well.
“It’ll be too complicated.” (It was.)
“It’ll be freezing in winter.” (It is.)
“You won’t want to come back to the same place all the time.” (I do.)
“You don’t speak Italian.” (I do now.)
But I went ahead and bought it anyway, and I’ve never regretted it.
It didn’t take long to get to know the locals: my kindly old neighbour who makes weird sculptures from wire coat hangers and puts them on poles all round the garden was my first friend, closely followed by Alberto the ancient handyman, the mad woman in an orange boiler suit who makes fur coats, and the glamorous blue-rinsed 90 year-old whose best friend is Jack Daniels.
I’ve always kept a journal, and when I began to jot down my adventures and tell people back at home about them, I began to realise I might do something with my stories.
First, I published two pieces in the Daily Telegraph’s Travel Section. Encouraged, I expanded them and they eventually became two chapters in my book. I wrote more – even having a piece on the local canal in Canal Boat Magazine. At some point I decided I could probably put all my material together in a book which would be about my love affair with this old spa town. (And that is in fact the book’s subtitle.)
Then came the difficulty. Despite the successes of my various articles, I couldn’t find a publisher. Mostly the response (if they bothered to reply) was that I needed to go through an agent. When I approached agents, again if they replied, they would say something along the lines of “…in these difficult economic times we’re not taking any new authors onto our books.”
Your music is a genre that seemingly has little to do with the Italian musical tradition. Is this just a stereotype?By this time I had enough material for a book and desperately wanted it to be “out there”. I accepted a special offer from a publishing house and did it myself. It wasn’t easy. I had to do all the proof reading, and they were very bad at corrections. Often when I’d corrected something, a new error, usually to do with spacing, would turn up somewhere else. The cover wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind: it was far too glamorous and didn’t at all reflect the indignities of the “cure”, having six buckets of mud tipped over me. Nevertheless, I could see that the cover might attract interest, particularly with male readers!
Fried Flowers and Fango came out earlier this year. It felt wonderful to see it, and feel that I’d written a tribute to “Montebello”, the pleasure the place has given me and the way it has changed my life.
I’m no good at marketing, but in any case writing the book has been a labour of love and I didn’t do it for financial reward. I’ve given readings where it seems to go down well. I take along my Italian flag bunting and we have jolly Italian evenings where I sell a few books and it pleases me when my audience is amused.
And what next now the book is finished? Can I settle down into the day-to-day existence of my new life in Italy with my English conversation group in the library and the special deal of free use of the albergo’s thermal pool at siesta time?
The thing is, I can’t stop writing about it. I’ve already written three more chapters (the tale of the Tripe Festival and its odd juxtaposition with the Miss Montebello competition, for instance) and added almost as much again to many existing chapters. I’d love it to be republished, of course, but it’s a never-ending story. All I hope is that anyone who comes across my book will read it with pleasure, and perhaps be inspired to dig deeper to discover the Italy I know and love, warts and all.
Fried Flowers and Fango is published by and available from Author House at £5.80
ISBN 978-1-4520-9773-2 or on Amazon
www.authorhouse.co.uk or to order call 0800 1974150
