"The locals' vendetta" - a chapter from the Award winning book Living in Italy: the Real Deal!
If you turn right out of our gate, the road takes you to the tiny hamlet of Spagna. If you turn left, you will find our neighbour Francesco’s large and relatively new house. Opposite this house stands his former home, now occupied by his unmarried son, Roberto. In the summer, the house also accommodates seasonal workers from Romania and Albania. Beyond this house the little asphalt road becomes a wide gravel road that winds through across the vineyards down to the valley and joins a main road. Behind Francesco’s villa there is a little row of houses, of which the middle two are owned by some Milanese people who only visit once in a while in the summer. The last house in the row is occupied by Francesco’s daughter and her husband. The first house bordering Francesco’s house is the odd one out in this neighbourhood: it belongs to the antennista Piero. Francesco calls him Il Meridiano, the Southerner, because Piero originally comes from the South of Italy and for many Italians from the North that’s tantamount to a foreign country.
Piero and Francesco were in a vendetta, the ins and outs of which we were not privy to, although Piero had wasted no time warning us of our untrustworthy neighbour, as he thought of Francesco. The woman with the seven dogs from Ca’ Bosco was of the same opinion and warned me that Francesco was no buona persona. When Nico last came across Piero in the vineyards, whilst out on a walk with Saar, Piero told him that he was an antennista, an installer of TV aerials. Just the person we needed. He promised to come over soon to see what we needed doing and how he could help us. But once inside our house, at the kitchen table, he was brimming with revenge against Francesco and seemed to want to talk only about him, no matter how we tried to steer the conversation back to satellite dishes.
“I want to warn you, please don’t be offended if I seem rude, but I see that you are kind and trustworthy people and I don’t want you to suffer the same fate that I have. I see it as my moral duty to warn you. Be careful with that charlatan; don’t do business with him because he will rip you off. I have lost ten thousand euros. He was going to do everything for me but nothing came of it. He also stole a piece of my land: according to the land register, my garden is a lot bigger.” Piero was just rattling on, going around in circles and coming back to the same topic every time. “Nico, Stef: ascoltatemi, non fidatevi, ricordatevi quello che vi ha detto Piero. Vi faranno male. Ve lo dico dal cuore.” With that, he placed his hand dramatically on his chest. What were we supposed to make of all this, as newcomers and outsiders?
We had already heard a variety of bad stories about Francesco but apart from his clever trick, roping in our architect Cassani, there wasn’t much we could resent him for. Or was there? Francesco had once asked us urgently to fence our boundary off with a couple of sticks and some wire. “You need to do that because if someone drives across your land with their tractor a couple of times they might start to see it as their right to do so, and you lose control over your land,” said Francesco. We didn’t think twice about it, and anyway, we wanted to stay on his good side, so we erected a wobbly bit of chicken wire. We only found out much later that Francesco’s advice wasn’t given entirely selflessly: he had a different agenda, while keeping us in the dark.
Considering Francesco’s reputation, we didn’t really trust him. But Piero wasn’t a very personable character either. Filled with hatred and revenge, he wasn’t really able to show any interest in others: he didn’t listen. His small back garden (which even he didn’t dare to enter), was home to four bloodthirsty dogs which barked day and night, terrorising the neighbourhood. Not a good demonstration of thoughtfulness towards others. Had he got them to scare Francesco away? When Piero finally arrived to install the satellite dish, after several follow-up visits which he spent bad-mouthing Francesco, he behaved like a dictator towards his son who came along to help him.
During the first months since our arrival in Spagna, we witnessed many strange scenes which we watched in surprise. We could hear a public argument between the two neighbours from our balcony, Piero shouting: “Vergognati, vergognati! Be ashamed! Be ashamed!” What Francesco should be ashamed of, was not clear to us. We couldn’t hear Francesco. A couple of weeks later, we saw to our astonishment that a barrier had been erected behind the little row of houses. A real, official, red and white railway barrier. Was it there to stop Piero from accessing the street on which the houses stood? At the beginning, Piero lived together with a girlfriend, who suddenly disappeared from the scene, from one day to the next. Soon after this, we heard that Piero wasn’t working for the aerial company anymore, he was no longer an antennista. How did he earn his living now? Later on, he ran for mayor of Montecalvo, only to suffer a humiliating defeat by the incumbent.
Another couple of years later, during which time we tried to avoid Piero as much as possible (every time we met him in the street he would start up again about Francesco), we saw a removal van appear in the street. He couldn’t, could he? But it was true . To our relief, Piero departed, taking with him his noisy pack of beasts. He had sold his house to another of those Milanese families who would only visit occasionally at weekends. The railway barrier remained as a testament to the old days. “Remember when the meridiano was still around?”
A chapter from the award winning book Living in Italy: the Real Deal
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