While in Italy, well, Riva del Garda to be exact, earlier last year, I spent a lot of time just wandering round the back streets of the town and the peaceful outlying country lanes - well away from the tourist throngs. The rest of the family were doing much more adventurous stuff - mountain biking, wind surfing and grappling up the nearest gigantic rocky outcrops on the via ferrata. I did go up one of these mountains, but only to the cafe and up a very well-trodden path! The views over Lake Garda were incredible and I was sorely tempted to carry on up the mountain but I met a couple of Irish ladies and we got into conversation and slowly ambled our way down the hillside deep in gay chatter!! How the Celts love to gas….. it was good hwyl or craic as the Irish say.
As a keen gardener I am always most interested in plants and plantings and I had great joy in discovering these hidden treasures (tiny though they were mostly) and was surprised at the amount of cacti I came across everywhere there. Somehow it wasn’t quite what I would have expected of everyday Italian gardens – something more operatic and vivid maybe – lavish lush colours, a glorious overabundance and not these crisp rather modern arrangements.
Some of the gardens were mostly cacti and elsewhere they were used as a feature. I imagine in their climate you can leave them out in pots all year round? I did manage to get the odd blossom to appear but my mother-in-law (Valerie) achieved a magnificient 7 blooms on one of her cacti this summer. Amazing. Must have been quite a sight – though one has to be quite observant as each blossom only last a few days, a thing of truly ephemeral beauty.Now the really interesting bit!! An astonishing gadget that we found in the local upmarket supermarket was wine-dispensing pumps - at first glance they looked just like ordinary petrol pumps but surprise, surprise – you just took along your own containers, choose the wine you want to buy and fill up! The machines displayed the quantity you had dispensed, the price per litre and your total costs etc..... bloody marvelous!
Wish we had these in good old GB, save a lot of trips to the local co-op, waitrose, sainsbury....unfortunately for us we had no spare containers to fill up with and so never got to taste the local beverages except in bottled form. That sufficed though !
Where else on earth but Italy would you find wines delivered in such a practical manner – a part of everyday life like petrol ? Their pragmatism has to be admired really. Cheers!
