Seasons: Rocca Malatina

Seasons

Six months in

Rocca Malatina ITALIA Pictures and thoughts about life in the country Laurie and Blair Pessemier 2015

SPRING On the first of January 2015, friend and fellow artist, Kathryn, said, “this will be a year of big change�.

Little did I think we would leave Paris, our home of more than 20 years, and move to the Apennine mountains in Northern Italy. It was a great move, so completely different than our past life, it gives us an entirely new chapter of pictures, stories and eventually, memories.

It wasn’t completely without prior thought that we moved. Pasquale, a new resident in our apartment building, would see us int he morning and beam forth “Good morning Blair and Laurie!” I told Blair, “I want to move to where he comes from”. He is from Rome, Italy .

So when our friend Gary contacted us in March, and said, “I have found the perfect house for you,� our ears perked up.

We drug our feet ever so slightly, but when we saw the house, the property, the possibilities, we jumped in. The house was built around 1910 and had much of its original furniture. It was completely furnished, so all we had to move were our paintings and clothes.

We fell into a field of buttercups.

And the property (about two acres) came with a caretaker. Not a fancy fellow, but Lodovico cuts the buttercups and keeps chickens and bees.

Rocca Malatina is just short of an hour from Bologna, food capital of Italy.

In June, we left to pick up the rest of our belongings in Paris.

SUMMER In fact, much of our summer was spent in Paris, packing up. You never know how much you have until you need to move it – so many things we just put on the street to the extreme delight of passers-by, who found their hearts desire right on rue de Rennes, free.

We came back to Rocca Malatina in August, the height of the season.

There were guests, and new friends to be made. Piero and Gianni took us to the mountains and the woods. We went to dinner at different houses, learning all the time more Italian and the customs of the region.

Little by little, people moved back to Bologna to start working again, the town empties, leaving us with the landscape.

FALL As fall sets in, grapes are harvested, wood is delivered, and the kids are back in school. We buy rugs for our tile floors, and turn on the heat. The chimney is cleaned. Mushrooms and truffles abound, and I make long-cooking dishes with guinea hen and cabbage. Apple sauce, apple pie, apple crumble.