Finally some rain

It only lasted for about 20 minutes just a little before 8 pm, but it finally rained here tonight. The plants, the land, and the air needed some refreshing. Wind was blowing soot and dirt around, and the plants were so dry as evidenced by the recent fires. Hopefully it rains more overnight, though that’s not in the forecast. Any rain is welcome. Since my last post, the town has exploded with people. The big summer holiday, Ferragosto, is coming up this Sunday, so many people have vacation from their jobs for a week or two. The beach is buzzing with activity, and filled to the max. A sign at the beach club said they are operating at 100 percent capacity, and it seems that almost every umbrella is raised. I’ve been relaxing a bit this week now that most of the work for the condo is done. Today, I took care of reporting our water meter reading to the township. This usually takes a few days and filling out paperwork, but cousin Valeria showed me I could just send the info via WhatsApp. So much easier and it’s already been confirmed as submitted. Used to take all morning, waiting in an office with no air conditioning, just to submit the paperwork and number. The other day I had a great weigh-in so I celebrated with my first, and so far only, gelato of the summer. I’ll definitely have more, but I’m down 13 pounds since I left NJ, so not much more.

Sadly, more fires

I had the whole day planned out today. I would go for a morning walk, a little more than a 5K. Then, I would go to the beach with my cousin Valeria before heading back with her to have pranzo (lunch) with Zia (my Zia is her Nonna). Valeria cooked a delicious pasta meal with eggs and zucchini, and turkey cutlets with roasted peppers. She also made a delicious tiramisu. As of 2:30, everything was going according to plan. I went back to the beach around 3:30, had an espresso and an Illy Crema (a frozen coffee treat), and planned to watch some “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV+. The plan going forward was to return home at 7, shower, write some of my new script idea, and then have some friends of the family over at 9. Easy peasy. Around 4:15 I went for a swim in the Adriatic Sea. It was so calm and clear today, like a swimming pool. After a couple of minutes, I sensed some shade come over me even though it was a virtually cloudless sky. I look and see smoke plumes rising high into the air coming from two main spots close to each other. I got out of the water after a few minutes and sat down to begin watching TV. But as I sat there facing the smoke, I began to think what direction it was coming from and realized it had to be close to our house. I quickly contacted my cousin, and noticed she had already contacted me. This is where my plan ended. I packed up my towels and electronics, and trekked back home, stopping for a couple of photos. As I drew closer and closer to the condo, I could audibly hear the fires crackling. Closer and closer I kept walking, all of the people out in the streets and balconies watching, then I was finally there. At the end of my driveway was one of the fires. I dropped off my beach bag and went to see the fire commotion. After a couple of minutes a woman was asking for bottles of water for the people who were fighting the fire. I grabbed her a bottle of water, and grabbed an old bucket from my house, and joined a group of citizens helping to fight the fire with hoses and buckets of water. Many times the Vigili dei Fuochi (Fire Fighters) were running out of water. They have no hydrants here in town, and the trucks are a third the size of our average sized fire trucks. Together we helped save the carwash across from Zia’s window, and put out plenty of hotspots. The professionals would wave us off at times, telling us it was too dangerous. Then they’d run out of water and let us attack the fire. It was a great group effort and we fought it as a group for more than 4 hours. At this moment, the fire near here is still smoldering, however, near the center of town I can see smoke plumes still rising. The entire hillside behind my house is burned up. They called in air support, but it didn’t drop any water near us. There was a fire surrounding a gas station on the main road, and they were dropping water there for obvious reasons. No rain for at least a month (my neighbors have been here all of July and August so far and not a drop), strong winds, and high temperatures (near 97 today) seems to be a recipe for disaster. Plus, on Sundays we have a lot of day trippers without houses to go to, as well as families with patios, who use charcoal grills and let the ash smolder. With the winds as high as they were today the fire spread like, well, wildfire. An eventful day that I’ll remember for a long time to come.

Foodtopia Moments

There have been a lot of recent moments, but I’ll settle on what I ate yesterday. For pranzo (lunch) I made a chicken cutlet and topped it with pomodorini tagliatte (chopped tomatoes) and fresh buffalo mozzarella. With the leftover uovo (egg), I decided at the last minute to mix in a bunch of zucchini slices and fry them up too. Then I had a side of pasta that I had made the day before. The sauce was pomodorini (little tomatoes), cipolla bianca (white onion), basilico (basil) and olio di oliva (olive oil). Of course some sale marino (sea salt) too. For cena (dinner), my cousin Mario and his wife invited me to dinner with their friends. There is a new Roman style pizza place near me, at the old skating rink that closed at least 15 years ago. The pizza is shaped like a flatbread but it is much thicker than the flatbreads I’m used to back home.. The place has a lot of interesting toppings, like fig, mela (apple), pistachio crumbles, and melograno (pomegranate). The pizza I ordered is called the Caramello, which had bacon (the menu actually says bacon), salsiccia di suino (pork sausage), mozzarella, cipolla caramellata (caramelized onions) and olio di oliva. We also shared the pizza fritta, which had ricotta, provolone, sauce, and salame stuffed inside two thin layers of dough and then fried to a golden brown. I am looking forward to returning and trying that one again.

Busy and the beach

It has been a fun few days since I last posted. One of the things that I wrote about before, the wildfires, happened again overnight from Wednesday into Thursday, but was out by morning. It’s pretty common here this year to smell fires burning or burned woods, which is different from past years. The gardener that was here this week showed me some photos that people have posted online of some of the destruction to the pine forest and wildlife in town. In one of the photos there was a snake at least six feet long, another showed a large turtle, others showed rabbits. It was pretty heartbreaking to see all of the damage. Again, there were fires up and down the coast, and Italy isn’t the only country dealing with them in Southern Italy right now. The gardener came and did his thing this week, cleaning up all of the overgrown weeds, vines, and trees. It’s definitely cleaner to look at, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I miss the color and privacy that the overgrown garden provided. As soon as Giovanni the Giardiniero (gardener) left, I broke out the mop and squeegee and cleaned the patio. The condo is finally cleaned up. I spent Friday morning heading up to the main part of town in the hills. Handled the banking in just about an hour, normally it takes two to three trips to handle it all, but I was hustling and alone so it moved much quicker. This week has also been fun hanging out with family and friends. Zia and I went out on Wednesday night to Ristorante Netti with my cousin Renato, his wife Dorette, their son Mario, his wife Cassandra, and their daughter Rosella. It was my first chance to spend time with Rosella, as she’s only 18 months old. Thursday night I went out for a drink with our friend Monia and my cousin Valeria Lido Miramare on the Lungomare (beach strand). And last night Mario and Cassandra invited me to tag along with them and their friends to a new pizza place near me. Oh yeah, I’ve also been spending several hours a day at Lido Ritz beach club. Their wifi had been zooming all week, then today, with the place packed, it was slow again. Italy just instituted a thing called green pass, which is a digital vaccine record, but so far no one has asked me to show it. We do need to wear masks inside the clubhouse now. That was optional until yesterday. All in all, things are going well here.

Disclaimer

For those of you that have been following my posts over the years, thank you. You may be noticing that the layouts are funky this year. My computer is 12 years old, and no longer supported by Google Chrome. In order to make posts to a Google owned site, I have to use Mozilla and there is not anything that I've been able to do about the layout and spacing issues.

Foodtopia Moments

I finally finished the roasted veggies today. I reheated them, and added pasta like the last time. This time, however, I added a can of tonno con piselli (tuna with peas in tomato sauce), and some ricotta di buffala (buffalo milk ricotta). The mix was a perfect way to add protein and creaminess.

Wind and wildfires

It’s been a few days since I blogged, but it hasn’t been boring. Sunday, Zia (which means Aunt, and in this case my Aunt Carmelita) and I had pranzo (lunch, but the main meal of the day) together. She cooked a great meal, but that was far from the story of the day. In the morning as I went for my daily walk, I noticed an extraordinary amount of wind. As the day progressed, the wind kept picking up, with gusts of 50 mph. It was howling all through lunch. Toward the end of pranzo, we heard a siren and remarked, because of the heat of 97 degrees, that someone was probably having heart problems. It was a benign conversation at the time. As I was leaving Zia’s house, with dust and sand blowing into my face, I noticed some smoke in the sky. We have farmlands pretty much as far as you can see to the west of us. It’s not unusual for the farmers to pile up their clippings and weeds and burn them, later turning the ash back into the soil. It is, however, odd to see the smoke so close to the residential area. Within a few minutes, there were more plumes. Then more and more. Three different areas in town had fires raging at the same time. Helicopters and planes were called in to drop sea water for hours. The newscaster stood under Zia’s apartment window to deliver a live report. Our side of town was blocked off from traffic only a block away. The pine forest that is right next to the beach was officially burning. It took about 7 hours of sirens, smoke, ash falling onto my patio, and the smell of burning wood, before the fire was out. This afternoon, two days later, the forest is still smoldering in spots. It burned in spots right up to the beach club I go to, Lido Ritz. I didn’t walk all the way down the beach road, but could see the charred area in the distance. Really creepy, and it wasn’t just our town. Termoli and Pescara, two of the bigger towns north of us, were also experiencing fires, as were a few other towns. The rumor mill around here is that some group of people started a bunch of fires for some reason. No one can give a reason. That night, Zia said to me something about the sirens and how we thought someone was having an emergency and how wrong we were. The whole area was having an emergency. Since yesterday, I’ve spent most of my non exercising, eating, or cleaning time at Lido Ritz. I do enjoy it there, and this year it seems very close to normal with people only wearing masks inside the snack bar.