No voglia

"I have no voglia" is a phrase that comes up a lot in the anglo-italian conversations between myself and my two best friends, who are American and Canadian. If you have 'voglia' it means you want to do something - literally 'the desire to'. Lately I've had no voglia to go back to the office after lunch (especially if there was wine); no voglia to sit through never-ending meetings about budgets, savings and targets; no voglia to wake up early on a Saturday and get things done around the house, and absolutely no voglia to write about my lack of voglia on my blog!! Despite my complete apathy, I have been achieving much of the above and am proud to say that the new apartment is coming on nicely. We spent the weekend furnishing the terrace, which included the purchase of 2 sun loungers, one of which has officially become my new best friend. We are, infact, inseperable. My new best enemies, on the other hand, are the many many flying / hopping / crawling /wriggling creatures which seem to thrive out in the depths of the Val Padana. I have never seen so much wildlife before - it's insane! I have a bit of a phobia about anything that moves, particularly spiders, so I'm having to be really brave but so far I've come across spiders' nests on the balcony, weird huge wasp things that aren't hornets or calabroni and nobody seems to know what they are, a family of 6 frogs that camp out right outside our garage door every night (just us, not the neighbours!), and a line of ants from the front terrace to the rubbish bin that had to be irradicated subito. It's a wilderness adventure safari I tell you!! Not to mention the chicken, hens, cockerels etc that live on the small-holding at the end of the garden. And all just 25 minutes from Milan!!

Wild animals aside, the apartment is great and we love the location. My parents are coming to visit in 2 weeks, by which time we hope to have just about everything in its place. Time to put the lack of voglia aside and start shopping for a sofabed...

A Quiet Life

There are gypsies on the piazza behind our apartment. It’s not the first time we’ve had to put up with unwelcome visitors – local kids who litter the square and vandalise the streetlamps, the occasional camper which stops to offload its rubbish, even other gypsies have turned up in the past – but these take the cliché to another level. As soon as they arrived, the camper doors flew open, and out scampered 5 or 6 grubby-looking kids, the oldest of which at just 11 or 12 years of age, provided us with a perfect demonstration of why he will almost certainly grow up to be a professional lawbreaker, pretty much like his fathers before him.
Stones were launched at the windows of the derelict farmhouse on the other side of the piazza, the waste bins emptied and their contents scattered across a wide area, glass bottles hurled onto the neighbouring football field, its goalposts torn down. Swinging like a monkey from the net and taking obvious delight in his own ability to destroy everything in his path, the little monster displayed more pent-up aggression than you would imagine possible in an orang-utan, let alone a child. The ‘parents’, unsurprisingly took no notice whatsoever as they hurled bags of rubbish from the caravan windows and fought among themselves in an unknown – probably Eastern European - language.
Not one to stand by and witness such events without taking some sort of action, I picked up the phone and promptly called the Carabinieri – Italy’s answer to the Bad Cop. Sounding like I’d maybe interrupted his pasta lunch, the police officer half-heartedly assured me that he would send a car round to ‘have a word with them’. An hour passed, and we continued with the task of painting the second bedroom – keeping half an eye on the piazza, expecting a little blue car to turn up at any minute. Two hours. We ate our Penne al Ragù with one eye on our forks, the other on the window like we were on a stake-out. Three hours. “OK, that’s it”, say I, picking up the phone and planning a speech in my head along the lines of “Listen, officer. I pay 600 euros per month in taxes” (seriously, I do), “and when I call the police and ask them to come out because I have a problem, I expect them to do just that! Capisci??!!!”
I would never have gone through with it, but fortunately in any case a car arrived at that moment. Having done a little tour of the square, it promptly drove off again - no stopping, no confrontation, not even time to ‘have a word’. Is that it? Is that all that decent, tax-paying citizens can expect from the forces of law? Do we have any choice but to put up with lawless behaviour, literally in our own backyards? It would appear so. As I write this, the gypsies are still in residence, the dog who lives across the road is whining loudly as he does whenever his owners leave the house, the local teenagers are racing each other with their scooters up to the end of the road and back again, whilst the church bells which have been plaguing us ever since we arrived provide an appropriate soundtrack (chimes on the hour, chimes 5 minutes past the hour, chimes on the half hour plus an extra little ding, fanfare at 07:00, fanfare at 12:00, fanfare at 19:00. 24 hours a day).
Quiet life in the country, anyone??