Extra Special, not just Virgin on it! (Extra Virgin - Annie Hawes)

Member Name: xalala

Product:	Extra Virgin - Annie Hawes
Date:	27/04/04 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic read

Disadvantages: Rustico probably not available for £2000 these days...

You wouldn't think that going for a gentle stroll in the Italian hills would lead to a moment of madness and corresponding change of lifestyle. But for author Annie Hawes and her sister Lucy that's exactly what happened. Their story is told in Annie's book "Extra Virgin: Among the Olive Groves of Liguria".

The book is an ideal read for hot, lazy summer days, relaxing with a glass of wine by your side. It's similar in style to Joanne Harris' Chocolat or Blackberry Wine, or in travel books to Peter Mayle or Bill Bryson. It's relaxed, lyrical, sensuous. It's a romantic novel, but the romance is with a country, a lifestyle, a place rather than a man (although there are a few intriguing hints to the contrary within it...). The characters who inhabit the tale are just that - characters - portrayed with an affectionate, even loving, touch.

Maria and Luigi, two of the first characters we meet, are Annie and Lucy's hosts when they arrive in San Pietro, Liguria, having bluffed their way into a summer job grafting roses for a local businessman, Petrucco, board and lodging included. Board and lodging and much, much more are provided by Maria and Luigi, owners of the local bar and eaterie.

Annie and Lucy are, after some early misgivings, taken under Maria's wing as she presses her exquisitely prepared meals on them and quietly despairs of the foreigners inability to finish a meal or adhere to the many unwritten rules of Italian rural life and delicate constitution (no cappuccino after noon, no more than two cups before noon, definite rules about when drinking wine or something stronger is permitted, and so on).

Other locals are mystified by the Foreign Females, worried about their seeming lack of either husbands o
r fathers in the area, or out to take advantage of their ignorance. Fortunately this last is largely limited to Frank "the Knife", and he's out to make a buck or two from them in an open and cheerfully frank manner. It is Frank who spots Annie and Lucy rambling around the Ligurian hills above San Pietro and, more importantly, sees them stop to explore a tumbledown "rustico" high on the hillside.

The rustico, it turns out, belongs to Pompeo, an old Ligurian who is willing to sell it to them for just £2000. The offer is tempting and they fall over themselves to accept, although Pompeo is wary of the deal - there is, after all, no man involved... Once the rustico is theirs (and their second well is Frank's), the villagers are even more mystified. How could two apparently sensible women (sensible within the limits that their foreignness imposes, at least) know so little about...well...everything? About olives, food, drink, life, how to look after themselves? Why can't they identifym, pick and cook wild asparagas, tell good mushrooms from bad, know how to get decent olive oil from the few dozen trees they now own?

It may be coincidence, or just plain old good fortune, that the time between the start of "Extra Virgin" (1983) and its tantalising end charts the economic fall and rise of the olive groves of Liguria. From a lifestyle in apparently terminal decline, to seeing the sons and daughters of the land return to it, their own broods in tow.

Local habits, customs and remedies are carefully recorded in a light-hearted, engaging manner - although most of the remedies seem to involve the miraculous cure-all, powdered lime. Prevetatives, too, are covered - which seem to revolve not doing whatever you are doing or were about to do:

"To go swimming in seawater outside the month of
July and August is even worse for your health than drinking cappuccino after 12 noon!"

The tale covers more than just life in the olive groves, despite the title. There's the ever-present yet undefined animosity between San Pietro and its richer, more upmarket and coastal neighbour Diano Marina, used to consorting with foreigners and their bizarre ways - the place a hotbed of intrigue and goings-on according to inhabitants of San Pietro. There's the growing, if limited, concern for the environment with the demise of the living, stinking tip just over the brow of the hill above the sisters' house. There's life, and death too, the fall and rise of the rural economy, bureaucracy vs common sense, but more than anything else, over-arching all the other themes, are two things: the Family, and Food and Drink.

Annie and Lucy are, eventually, adopted by various groups of locals. The younger group are intent on ensuring they have a good time, taking them down to Diano Marina's "English pub" - the only pub the group can inhabit without being accosted by their extended family and submitted to a grilling on what they thought they were doing, were they keeping out of draughts, only drinking vino d'uvo (grape wine, a local term for the home-made stuff, since nobody knows what gets put in the commercial variety), how was their cousin Francesca, etc etc.

Domenico becomes a father figure to the girls, he continually helps them out, explaining or demonstrating what to do with bramble-filled vines, unpruned olive trees, and what appears to be an overgrown garden, rather than Dirt.

There is far more that I could say about this book, but I'll leave it at this: it is, I think, a fantastic read, gentle, warm, tender-hearted, affectionate and amusing. Well worth a few hours of your time.


Don't forget the vino d'uvo though!

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