Wanted: your most vivid vacation memories

Have you ever spent any time in the hills of Le Marche, underneath the commanding Monti Sibillini range, enjoying a fine glass of Verdicchio or Pecorino... at a place called Casa Chiocciola? If you've ever been a guest at our lovely hilltop get-away, we'd be grateful if you could share a few words about your experience here with others on TripAdvisor.

Grazie

Why it's a good thing to stop and watch the fireflies

A few weeks back some guests who spent the week at Casa Chiocciola, our place in Amandola, left us this sweet note. I thought I'd share it with you here:

My wife described our stay as magical; the house was great, the views terrific and the wildlife stupendous. We have never seen so many butterflies in one place at one time and together with the humming bird moths we spend many an hour trying to photograph them. Unfortunately they moved so fast that many of the photos we took are completely out of focus. We did manage to get a few though. However the outstanding event was one night when there were myriads of fireflies. We have never seen them before and it was magical.

Summer time, and the living is easy

We're in the middle of one of those Italian summer heat waves where life in the city is pretty unbearable, sleep-deprived unbearable that is. Thank goodness we're far away from that. We're in Sant'Ippolito at Casa Chiocciola for the next two weeks where there's a lovely breeze and the trees hang low with fruit and where the girls can run around in their mutande, trudging over the grass and splashing in an inflatable pool we've set up underneath two shady oaks.  It's a real paradise for them here and I cannot help but smile as I see them shriek in delight as they chase butterflies and throw stones off the bank into the roadway, and find mischief that only two-year-olds can find in the countryside when they're allowed to run free. To see two people love this place as much as their dad fills me with tremendous pride. It will be theirs some day (hopefully, senza mutuo), I guess.

2012 is something of a landmark year for me and for this place – it's our 10-year anniversary. Amazingly, I've been coming here for one-quarter of my life. In those early years I had no idea what would become of this place. I was living in another country, living on a journalist salary, with big debts to pay. My grasp of the language was tenuous. My confusion over Italian tax law and red tape was even more daunting. I had no roots here. I had no real claim to this land, this place, these people, their history. But a lot has happened in just a few years. Xtina and I have made Amandola a true second home, a second home that squeezes in even in-laws from time to time.


The girls seem to complete this harmonious picture. They enjoy this place as much as I enjoyed another hilltop house from my youth, my grandmother's house "in the country," up in rural Sussex County, NJ. It would be a stretch to draw parallels between Lake Neepaulin and Sant'Ippolito (though there is that lake thing going for both communities) and yet I still get these vivid flashbacks of that place when, for example, I'm here listening to the breeze rustle the trees or watching the tractors bail the hay, or the shepherds corralling flocks of sheep, or watching the girls race each other up and over the crest of the hill. I now understand that I can see and hear these things because I've managed to slip into Sant'Ippolito's tranquil rhythm. The Lake Neepaulin of my youth had it too. It's a rhythm I hope my girls too will come to appreciate when they hit 40 too.

Amandola: a love affair turns 10

This month marks something of a milestone for me. It was exactly 10 years ago – October, 2001 – when I first visited a town in the heart of the Sibillini Mountains in the Central Italian region of Le Marche. I was so enamored with the place, I immediately thought: I gotta ring my bank manager.  The place, as you know from this blog, is Amandola. I had a little money left in my bank account, just enough to make a down-payment on a stone house sitting on the top of a hill, one that overlooked a valley and the front ridge of the Sibillini Mountains. The sun was shining bright. I stood on a stony lane under an old oak. I was desperate curious to see the inside of the house, but Michael, who had the keys, insisted we first go take a walk, to look around the 'hood, to come to this spot and take in a view I'll never tire of: the midieval spa town, Sarnano, in the valley below, the mountains soaring above, the hilltop towns of Gualdo, San Ginesio sparkling in the sun just beyond.

It took a few months for the sale to close. I had the keys the following March. I was cutting the grass in April, and again in May and June. I was swimming in the sea in July and in the mountain lakes in August. I was discovering a new culture, improving my pigeon Italian and re-acquainting myself with the art of home repairs. I lived in London at the time and got out as often as I could, which, thanks to Ryanair, was fairly often. We threw big pizza bashes and barbeques and, later, we had some amazing Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's feasts. As the name suggests (in Italian, Amandola can be broken into "amando la," or loving her) I fell in love with the place. And I still am we still are. Amandola is now a wondrous playground for the Garba twins. Our summer get-away is now the highlight of the year.

Now, this is not a 10-year anniversary thing, but I do have a new site that explains a bit more about the house, and the region and the things about the place that we've discovered over the years. It's called Sibillini Slow. And, I've set up a Facebook page for it as well. Please check it out and follow us.

Rush hour in Amandola

Last summer, I ran into a common traffic snarl in the country on a bend in the road by the house: a pack of four-legged commuters. I took these snaps with my mobile and finally got around to posting them here.

Dateline: Michael's garden, Sant'Ippolito, Amandola (AP)

Today is an historic day in lil' old Sant'Ippolito. This little hilltop hamlet has seen its fair share of pilgrims, Napolean's troops, and later, Anglo Saxon house-hunting invaders, but never this: Wifi access! Yes, Michael and I, after 2 months of tinkering, cussing the skies, squinting at invisible data relay points across the valley, have finally established a high-speed data link with the outside world. As Xtina quips, now Vitale will be chatting with "le donne di Firenze" ('the girls of Florence', the headline of a notorious spam making the rounds in Italia not long ago. You didn't get it?) from atop his tractor and Graziella will meet an Australian surfer and run away to make movies. I'm not so sure.

The wifi has its teething pains, not nearly reliable enough to go wrecking marriages or plunge distracted farmers into bankruptcy. The problem is a strange one: whenever I'm surfing, Michael loses his connection. Whenever he re-establishes a connection, I get punted off. So now we have a system. I get to the desired Web page and holler, "Ok, you surf while I read/write". And he does the same for me. It's like sharing a brain, I reckon. Everybody is happy.

I've written up the experience for my weekly Times column. When it's up, I'll update this blog. Update: the story is up. Love the headline. Bravo, Holden!

But in the meantime, I'll leave you with a photo of Gualdo, the (supposed) source of our connection. There are two antennae atop the tallest campanile in town that are, in theory, supposed to pump out the data signal to us. The only problem is the antennae are not hooked up properly, so Michael and I are picking up a signal from the more distant village of San Ginesio, 10 km away! We're told they will properly hook up Gualdo "any day now", which should give us a doubly fast connection speed. Speriamo!

If you squint real hard at the photo, perhaps you can see the antennae. If you can, you're lying!

Here's Michael's version of events. Warning there are a lot of kitten photos. Yes, Marina had 4 mischievous bambini a few weeks back - 3 boys and a girl. In March, Lucy had a litter of 8 puppies. Yep, spring has arrived in the countryside.

Geeky map stuff

I'm crazy about maps. I've been known to pick up a map, with no travel plans in mind, and chart out a route from say Paris to Bordeaux (passing through Tours), or Berlin to Prague (definitely via Dresden). Don't ask me why. I don't want to get in a car and actually drive these routes. I'd prefer to make the journey in my head, I guess. Still, I can't resist picking up a map. It's such a satisfying read. Particularly ancient maps with oddball names for today's cities, or regions or states.

Old Italian maps, I find, are the best because the landlord has changed so much over the years. Italy has only been Italy as we know it today since the 1860s. Before that it was a jumble of states, administered by powerful merchants (as in the case of Tuscany, Genoa, etc) or it was under papal rule.

Where am I going with this?

Well, Xtina and I just received an incredible gift -- a 17th Century map of what is today Le Marche. At the time, it was under the greasy thumb of the pope. Le Marche (or most of it) was known as "Marca d'Ancona olim Picenum," a convenient way of amassing the four provinces of Le Marche into one territory for the pope. The map is an incredibly rich hand-drawn piece of art. It's not exactly accurate, but it's close enough. At the time, Amandola was called just "Mandola" and for some reason Sarnano was shifted about 15 km to the northeast. Close enough. The sea is not the Adriatic, but instead the Golfo di Venetia. Urbino, Rafaello's hometown, is a province unto itself.

See for yourself. The first pic is of the entire region; the second a close-up of the Amandola (here noted as "Mandola) region. Yes, I'm a total map geek.

Sibillini at dusk

Here's a great photo courtesy of my mischievous neighbour Michael.