In Another Place, someone recently asked for advice about buying an above-ground swimming pool. I suggested that, if he'd never owned a pool before, he might get a better idea of the work involved in maintaining a swimming pool as well as the posi
...and we're very content. We have never considered living in a town, not even when the snow has covered our driveway half a metre deep and we’re running the fridge and the lights on a generator because the electricity went off in the middle of the blizzard and it’s been out for eight hours. Making sure that you have food and fuel to keep you going for a week or so in such circumstances is not all that difficult. Getting used to not having lots of other people around you all the time is probably much harder for some. If you're one of those, by all means get a place in an Italian town; given the noise level of such places, you'll never worry for a moment that there's not someone else nearby! I do agree that farmland can't be left to sort itself out. It's a man-made environment, and so just leaving it alone will result in lots of weeds and self-seeded trees that will be a definite fire-hazard until it reaches a sort of ecological equilibrium and becomes a proper forest in a few decades. In the meantime, the "dirty" fields will be making you very unpopular with the owners of adjacent land. If you buy a house with attached land you either have to farm it (which, as Penny rightly says) is a lot of work and involves equipment rarely seen in your average British suburban garden shed, or you need to get someone else to farm it. We've got a contract with a neighbour who pays us a nominal sum every year and, in return, farms our 7 hectares and gets whatever profit he can from his toil. For the most part, the arrangement is working out well. As far as the comments in the original post are concerned, our experience is that land does lie bare for a while after they grind over it in a caterpillar tractor hauling ploughs. After a month or two have passed and the rain has broken down the huge clay clods a bit, they clatter over it again with a harrow and then once more to plant next year's crop. The worst part of the process is the clanking, squealing, diesel-rumble noise that the tractors make. Living where we do, on the top of a hill with views about 270° all around, it seems like it's a rare day when we can't hear the noise of a farmer working a field somewhere within a five kilometre radius. But, like the sound of incessantly baying dogs, that's something you do get used to quite quickly, just so long as you don't let yourself get obsessed with the intrusion of reality into how you imagined your perfect Italian country idyll would be. It's a matter of personal taste, of course, but the bare fields never seemed to me to be intrinsically unattractive. It's not -- at least in our part of Abruzzo -- the case that what you have at certain times of the year is nothing but bare earth everywhere you look. There's always plenty of green to be seen and the bare soil is just another hue in the patchwork of the countryside. The change of brown to green and back again is just another measure of the turning of the seasons. Expecting that you could buy a farm in Italy and then turn the fields into the equivalent of a low-maintenance lawn is, I’d suggest, a little unrealistic. Al
I'm sure it felt like it was taking forever, but not a record. The rogito for our place involved the notary and his assistant and a translator working with them, the agent, his business partner/girlfriend and his assistant/translator, the seller, his wife, the farmer who had a contract to farm the land, me and a friend who speaks Italian. All told, eleven people in a stuffy room on a hot September afternoon for, if memory serves, about six hours. This in spite of the fact that the agent, my friend and I had spent a couple hours with the notaio a few days before when we'd gone through the paper work and the notary had assured us that it should all be very straight-forward. On the day, one of the main problems was that the seller lived in Germany and didn't have an Italian bank account any more, while I had a BancaPosta account, cheques from which (at that time anyway) would not be accepted by the Italian banking system if received from a foreign bank. The agent, in spite of him receiving a substantial fee for his services and in spite of being told months before that he should investigate whether there would be problems on the money transfer side due to how the established Italian banks were doing all they could to obstruct BancaPosta, only realised a couple of days before the rogito that there would be difficulties. Therefore, the day started out with me and friend visiting Post Office to talk to the banking manager who, it transpired, had walked across town the previous day to another bank and arranged for me to receive cheques from them rather than BancaPosta. When we got to that bank, we were given a sheaf of cheques rather than just one: 13 for €20,000 and one for €10,000. (I still have no idea why it was done this way.) However, during the rogito, the seller said that he could not accept the cheques for some reason. Debate and discussion went on for so long that eventually I announced that I was very pissed off with how things were going and at the incompetence of the agent and that, unless things were sorted out in half an hour, I would consider my agreement with the seller void on account of his refusing to accept my money and I'd walk out the door. Perhaps things were already heading toward a solution, but my impression was that my threat seemed to galvanise them. Bizarrely, the solution they reached was for me to endorse the back of each of the 14 cheques to make them payable to the agent's business partner/girlfriend. After the sale document was finally signed, she, the agent and the seller and his wife all trooped off to another bank to sort out getting money from her account to the seller's. I really have no idea what that was all about. It may well have involved avoiding paying taxes to either the Italian or German government, but I don't know. After all the papers were signed, the seller had the cheek to ask if he and his wife could spend the night at the house since it was too late in the day for them to head back for Germany. I suspect that most people have stories to tell about the rogito, and some are far worse then mine. In any case, while the memory of that annoying afternoon some three years ago remains, it all seems ancient history now and it's just another story to tell about life in Italy and The Italian Way. Al
I agree with most of what Sebastiano advises (especially where he talks about the many advantages of young trees), but I dispute the flat statement that "Altitude is another factor over 500 metres don't bother." We're at 550 metres in the foothills below the Gran Sasso, and there are lots of olive groves at our elevation and some even a bit higher. At this height, we do get a fair amount of snow in the average winter, so when pruning the trees you need to give some thought to the stresses imposed by snow, but apart from that factor, growing olives here is much like it is at lower altitudes and nearer the coast. Looking around olive groves near us, it's apparent that cold has periodically killed off or seriously damaged a lot of olive trees at this elevation. There are few of the huge-trunked, ancient, gnarled specimens which you see at lower altitudes just a few kilometres away. But olives are incredibly hardy and vigorous and it's generally the case that even if prolonged cold kills the part of an olive tree above ground, they will rapidly send up new shoots. I'm not suggesting this altitude is optimal for olives. Clearly, even if trees will recover from trunk and crown death, having no production for a few years is a very important factor if you're a commercial grower. But from what I've seen reported on the old forum, the amount of olives we harvested from our trees was pretty average, as was the oil yield. I'd suggest that the best guide to whether or not olives are viable in your locale -- as well as the best source of information on how they should cared for -- is to look around and see what the locals are doing. Al
Why should anyone bother?Frankly, this "community" looks to me like something cooked up by a techie desperate to justify his salary in difficult times.Maybe that's just me being all too cynical as I am wont to be. Or perhaps I'm too dim to recognise a profound new paradigm at work. Or just maybe I have enough of a life outside the confines of the Italy Mag forum... sorry, "community"... to be annoyed that I'm expected to jump through hoops and spend time trying to learn how to use supposedly wonderful new features which are not immediately obvious.What is immediately obvious is that I can't see much discussion going on and some of the "features" are clearly screwed up. For example, has anyone actually tried to position a marker on the map? The best I could manage was positioning my marker somewhere in the middle of the Adriatic on on the outskirts of Zagreb.I've belonged to numerous forums over the years; none of them looked anything like this. Some may well think such novelty is wonderful. I see it as an indicative of someone trying to fix something that was never broke. Whatever the motivations of those behind what we all see here, I see the new modes of accomplishing simple tasks and the new "features" as barriers and I just can't be bothered to try to get over them.Oh, but I've forgotten: this is a COMMUNITY, not merely forum, so obviously it's silly of me to expect it to look like an internet forum and fulfil the useful functions of a normal internet forum. (By the way, I would have used bold and italics there rather than CAPS, but the standard MS shortcuts [alt-b and alt-i] don't work here, there's no convenient button and I can't be arsed to go off and read about BBCode [whatever that is] or click on the link below promising "More information about formatting options")My immediate impression is that this is a techie's dog's dinner – and a half baked one at that. I may come back in a while to see if sanity has prevailed, but given that The Powers That Be are apparently heavily invested in this, I have little hope of that, so I won't be returning any time soon.Bye all.Al
Comments posted
...and we're very content. We have never considered living in a town, not even when the snow has covered our driveway half a metre deep and we’re running the fridge and the lights on a generator because the electricity went off in the middle of the blizzard and it’s been out for eight hours. Making sure that you have food and fuel to keep you going for a week or so in such circumstances is not all that difficult. Getting used to not having lots of other people around you all the time is probably much harder for some. If you're one of those, by all means get a place in an Italian town; given the noise level of such places, you'll never worry for a moment that there's not someone else nearby! I do agree that farmland can't be left to sort itself out. It's a man-made environment, and so just leaving it alone will result in lots of weeds and self-seeded trees that will be a definite fire-hazard until it reaches a sort of ecological equilibrium and becomes a proper forest in a few decades. In the meantime, the "dirty" fields will be making you very unpopular with the owners of adjacent land. If you buy a house with attached land you either have to farm it (which, as Penny rightly says) is a lot of work and involves equipment rarely seen in your average British suburban garden shed, or you need to get someone else to farm it. We've got a contract with a neighbour who pays us a nominal sum every year and, in return, farms our 7 hectares and gets whatever profit he can from his toil. For the most part, the arrangement is working out well. As far as the comments in the original post are concerned, our experience is that land does lie bare for a while after they grind over it in a caterpillar tractor hauling ploughs. After a month or two have passed and the rain has broken down the huge clay clods a bit, they clatter over it again with a harrow and then once more to plant next year's crop. The worst part of the process is the clanking, squealing, diesel-rumble noise that the tractors make. Living where we do, on the top of a hill with views about 270° all around, it seems like it's a rare day when we can't hear the noise of a farmer working a field somewhere within a five kilometre radius. But, like the sound of incessantly baying dogs, that's something you do get used to quite quickly, just so long as you don't let yourself get obsessed with the intrusion of reality into how you imagined your perfect Italian country idyll would be. It's a matter of personal taste, of course, but the bare fields never seemed to me to be intrinsically unattractive. It's not -- at least in our part of Abruzzo -- the case that what you have at certain times of the year is nothing but bare earth everywhere you look. There's always plenty of green to be seen and the bare soil is just another hue in the patchwork of the countryside. The change of brown to green and back again is just another measure of the turning of the seasons. Expecting that you could buy a farm in Italy and then turn the fields into the equivalent of a low-maintenance lawn is, I’d suggest, a little unrealistic. Al
I'm sure it felt like it was taking forever, but not a record. The rogito for our place involved the notary and his assistant and a translator working with them, the agent, his business partner/girlfriend and his assistant/translator, the seller, his wife, the farmer who had a contract to farm the land, me and a friend who speaks Italian. All told, eleven people in a stuffy room on a hot September afternoon for, if memory serves, about six hours. This in spite of the fact that the agent, my friend and I had spent a couple hours with the notaio a few days before when we'd gone through the paper work and the notary had assured us that it should all be very straight-forward. On the day, one of the main problems was that the seller lived in Germany and didn't have an Italian bank account any more, while I had a BancaPosta account, cheques from which (at that time anyway) would not be accepted by the Italian banking system if received from a foreign bank. The agent, in spite of him receiving a substantial fee for his services and in spite of being told months before that he should investigate whether there would be problems on the money transfer side due to how the established Italian banks were doing all they could to obstruct BancaPosta, only realised a couple of days before the rogito that there would be difficulties. Therefore, the day started out with me and friend visiting Post Office to talk to the banking manager who, it transpired, had walked across town the previous day to another bank and arranged for me to receive cheques from them rather than BancaPosta. When we got to that bank, we were given a sheaf of cheques rather than just one: 13 for €20,000 and one for €10,000. (I still have no idea why it was done this way.) However, during the rogito, the seller said that he could not accept the cheques for some reason. Debate and discussion went on for so long that eventually I announced that I was very pissed off with how things were going and at the incompetence of the agent and that, unless things were sorted out in half an hour, I would consider my agreement with the seller void on account of his refusing to accept my money and I'd walk out the door. Perhaps things were already heading toward a solution, but my impression was that my threat seemed to galvanise them. Bizarrely, the solution they reached was for me to endorse the back of each of the 14 cheques to make them payable to the agent's business partner/girlfriend. After the sale document was finally signed, she, the agent and the seller and his wife all trooped off to another bank to sort out getting money from her account to the seller's. I really have no idea what that was all about. It may well have involved avoiding paying taxes to either the Italian or German government, but I don't know. After all the papers were signed, the seller had the cheek to ask if he and his wife could spend the night at the house since it was too late in the day for them to head back for Germany. I suspect that most people have stories to tell about the rogito, and some are far worse then mine. In any case, while the memory of that annoying afternoon some three years ago remains, it all seems ancient history now and it's just another story to tell about life in Italy and The Italian Way. Al
I agree with most of what Sebastiano advises (especially where he talks about the many advantages of young trees), but I dispute the flat statement that "Altitude is another factor over 500 metres don't bother." We're at 550 metres in the foothills below the Gran Sasso, and there are lots of olive groves at our elevation and some even a bit higher. At this height, we do get a fair amount of snow in the average winter, so when pruning the trees you need to give some thought to the stresses imposed by snow, but apart from that factor, growing olives here is much like it is at lower altitudes and nearer the coast. Looking around olive groves near us, it's apparent that cold has periodically killed off or seriously damaged a lot of olive trees at this elevation. There are few of the huge-trunked, ancient, gnarled specimens which you see at lower altitudes just a few kilometres away. But olives are incredibly hardy and vigorous and it's generally the case that even if prolonged cold kills the part of an olive tree above ground, they will rapidly send up new shoots. I'm not suggesting this altitude is optimal for olives. Clearly, even if trees will recover from trunk and crown death, having no production for a few years is a very important factor if you're a commercial grower. But from what I've seen reported on the old forum, the amount of olives we harvested from our trees was pretty average, as was the oil yield. I'd suggest that the best guide to whether or not olives are viable in your locale -- as well as the best source of information on how they should cared for -- is to look around and see what the locals are doing. Al
Why should anyone bother?Frankly, this "community" looks to me like something cooked up by a techie desperate to justify his salary in difficult times.Maybe that's just me being all too cynical as I am wont to be. Or perhaps I'm too dim to recognise a profound new paradigm at work. Or just maybe I have enough of a life outside the confines of the Italy Mag forum... sorry, "community"... to be annoyed that I'm expected to jump through hoops and spend time trying to learn how to use supposedly wonderful new features which are not immediately obvious.What is immediately obvious is that I can't see much discussion going on and some of the "features" are clearly screwed up. For example, has anyone actually tried to position a marker on the map? The best I could manage was positioning my marker somewhere in the middle of the Adriatic on on the outskirts of Zagreb.I've belonged to numerous forums over the years; none of them looked anything like this. Some may well think such novelty is wonderful. I see it as an indicative of someone trying to fix something that was never broke. Whatever the motivations of those behind what we all see here, I see the new modes of accomplishing simple tasks and the new "features" as barriers and I just can't be bothered to try to get over them.Oh, but I've forgotten: this is a COMMUNITY, not merely forum, so obviously it's silly of me to expect it to look like an internet forum and fulfil the useful functions of a normal internet forum. (By the way, I would have used bold and italics there rather than CAPS, but the standard MS shortcuts [alt-b and alt-i] don't work here, there's no convenient button and I can't be arsed to go off and read about BBCode [whatever that is] or click on the link below promising "More information about formatting options")My immediate impression is that this is a techie's dog's dinner – and a half baked one at that. I may come back in a while to see if sanity has prevailed, but given that The Powers That Be are apparently heavily invested in this, I have little hope of that, so I won't be returning any time soon.Bye all.Al