I'm now at a villa on an olive farm (fattoria di oliva) outside the town of Vieste, on the Gargano Peninsula in the Puglia region of southern Italy. We're scheduled to housesit here for the next year. It will be interesting, to say the least, because most of the people speak no English and I speak about three words of Italian. Still, I expect to learn, since the alternative is to starve to death.
It was a grueling trip to get here: a thirteen-hour flight from Auckland to Hong Kong, followed by a fourteen-hour flight to Rome. We slept off some of the jet lag, then began a train and bus adventure that landed us in a parking lot in central Vieste at 11:30 at night. Italian rural cell phone service can be spotty, so our hosts received none of the messages we'd left, and were not there to meet us. We ended up walking through the empty streets until we came to a hotel where the night clerk gave us a room. He spoke no English, but we managed to communicate in rudimentary French.
In the morning, the English-speaking manager of the hotel helped us connect by internet with our hosts, and we were collected and brought to the farm. In gratitude to our rescuer, I'd like to recommend to anyone thinking of a visit to the Italian Adriatic coast -- which is stunningly beautiful -- to pitch up at the Hotel Falcone. We paid only 65 euros for a well-appointed room and as much Italian breakfast as we could eat.
The farm is called Vallecoppa (because it's in a cup-shaped valley). Parts of the villa are rented out to tourists during the season, if anyone is looking for a different kind of vacation. It produces the best olive oil I've ever tasted -- the lemon-flavored variety is apparently Prince Charles's favorite.
The main building was built in the thirties by an Italian-American millionaire, over the core of a centuries-old farm house. Benito Mussolini used to stay here when he came to the surrounding Forest of Umbra to shoot wild boar and deer. The two palm trees that flank the entrance to the yard are said to have been a gift from il Duce.
An amazing coincidence: the young British couple who own the fattoria, Joanne and Oliver Driscoll, picked us out of the various prospects on a housesitting site housecarers.com where we've gotten most of our sits. It was only after we were corresponding with Jo to arrange terms and logistics that Ollie discovered that he had had one of my books on his shelves for fifteen years. It was a copy of my short-lived thriller, Downshift, that he'd picked up while backpacking around Vancouver Island during those few brief months in 1997 when it was actually for sale. Considering that there are, at the most, 750 copies of the book in existence, and most of them in Canadian libraries, the coincidence is astounding.
