Names

Domenico at the top of the table and his mother Olga bottom left providing quality control, with Franca and Corinna in between

Franca gets to the community hall at 7.30 every morning to sort chestnuts. When I arrive around 9.00 there are already four family members around the table. Now that I’ve discovered the therapeutic value of talking, I decide to find out more about them. There’s Olga who is 85 or 86. I think of her as Domenico’s mother, rather than the other way round, because she lives in her son’s house, opposite mine, with him and his wife Ebe. Olga walks with a stick, which seems totally unnecessary to me. I met her once coming along the woodland path from Castelluccio, the farmstead where she raised her family, which is a brisk 45-minute walk from our village. Her stamina at the chestnut table is unbeatable, and her speed and accuracy of sorting puts the rest of us to shame. I reckon she could do all 24 sacks of them as quickly by herself and she just tolerates us to make us feel needed. I ask her whether anyone is living at Castelluccio now. No, no longer, but they used to cultivate all the land there. She doesn’t sound sad or nostalgic. Times change, and it wouldn’t be practical to live there now.

Nostalgia there must be on the part of Domenico who goes to Castelluccio every afternoon to keep the house and land in shape.

Then I ask about a couple of houses farther out, one of which has recently been restored. Do I mean Lupinaia? Well, I don’t know. I didn’t know every house had a name.

Lupinaia means the place where lupins grow. Lupins used to be cultivated for their seeds which, after soaking to remove their bitterness, were eaten as a snack like peanuts.

Someone asks whether I discovered Surignano. The house with the beautiful Roman arches? Some English people bought it a few years ago, but never restored it. They think they bought it on the internet and when they arrived and saw the state it’s in, abandoned in the midst of the chestnut wood, they lost heart.

Surignano once housed two families and was surrounded by cultivated land and pastures.

The others now start throwing names into the ring and try to describe to me where they are — houses, churches, water mills, streams. The conversation becomes animated. Names are repeated, rolled around in the mouth to recapture the flavour of them. Each place is like a family member with its own personality. The landscape is a patchwork of names. Nowhere is omitted, nowhere is nameless wilderness.

The names and one sign-painter's images of what they meant