The Italian festa on the 15th for the August summer holidays has come & gone. You & I ate for three days solid… pranzi, cocktails & cene… except for our hiatus to shop the Soffitta In Strada street flea-market in Sarzana. We bought these bunny wabbits. Then, an Italian House reader informed me that they are, in fact, hares!!! Gosh. Well, the black lacquered hare is mine. The hare vaaaase is You’s. The world still turns and we are happy about it.

Codiponte is populated with folk I have never seen before. This typically happens in August. What does not normally occur is a group of Australians are gallavanting about the town. They’re from Perth. Only Aussies can pronounce the city’s name like they like. The noise is as if you have pursed your lips to let it out, but actually, it’s squeezed out from the palate. How the Perthians??? Sandgropers??? Mates??? can purse their palates is probably just another mystery to add to their far off land. How did these Aussies choose Codiponte? Well, Mr. Perth’s dad died. The fellow was born in Codiponte. He had brought the gentleman’s ashes to be placed in the local cemetery here. I ran into Mr. Perth while walking The Dogs. He was biking. He had a Billy-bongo outback hat on. Goes with the accent. After I had heard his explanation of why he & his family were tramping around the village, I replied that, in the future, it sure will be a long way to come to pay one’s respects and how come the ol’ dad had stipulated Codiponte for his final resting place? Mr. Perth replied he hadn’t. Part of him is buried in a cemetery in Perth and the other half is now here. Gosh. He wished me G’daeyee and off he peddled. Did he bring his bike from Perth too? Very fancy. Would’ve been better to have rented a car instead. They are car-less.

Meanwhile, many villagers are working on the preparations for La Sagra dei Pomi, the oldest sagra around, and is scheduled for the first weekend in September… from Friday, the 4th to Sunday, the 6th. Three days of eating just like every other weekend it seems here. Che sara’ sara’. Yesterday, while out walking The Dogs… again and this is not the ONLY THING I DO!!!…  a group of men-folk were standing around a Navy-blue Ford Taurus stationwagon parked under the blighted trees below the Medieval bridge and right next door to the eventual fry-house for the sagra. Yum-yum… sgabei. Apparently, the men needed the car to be somewhere else to put a just delivered portable building down on the ground the car was occupying. The Dogs I went about our business only to find the same group standing around the car under the trees upon our return. Suddenly, before I could open my mouth, and bounding down the concrete ramp came a super-deluxe SUV cum truck tottin’ a orange jack on its flat-bed. And that is what they did… they jacked the car up and dragged it to another spot. Evviva!!! Minutes later, down was plopped the portable building. The men dispersed to purse their prep-programs. As you can tell, Life is really, really exciting here in Codiponte.

Codiponte has a priest. He came after the one before went mad. Yep, he went mad. The new one went and bought a dog. It’s a Pincher. Nice colour too. Kind of matches the priest’s outfit… dark, dull, brown-grey. The Dogs & I sometimes come across the pair on the dirt track to the Acqua Paradiso, the village’s local natural spring. The dog darts and bounces and leaps around. Scares the shit out Nina. If off her leash, she bolts for home. Moses ignores it, him with the collar, me with the leashes to sniff the environs. The priest’s dog has a defect… it howls with every toll of the priest’s church’s campanile. AYYYROOOOO!!! on the hour, the half-hour and the three times the bells rings like mad… sorry, not the best word to use here… rings and rings and rings in the 7AM Time-to-get-up, the Noon Time-to-go-home-to-eat and, finally, the 9PM Time-to-get-yourself-in-the-bed chimes. Whew. Amazing vocal cords has this priest’s dog!!! Kind of sad though. Doesn’t the priest KNOW his dog is lonesome? No surprise. The priest is clueless. One time at a Confirmation ceremony, he forgot the names of the nine Confirmation candidates. Noticing my shock, a local standing next to me bent towards me and said the priest has had zilch practice in human affairs. All he did before he was posted to Codiponte was to bless dead folk in a morgue of a hospital in some other Italian hinterland. Gosh. And he drives a new Peugeot too! Gads.