Our return from holidays last month was marred by the sad, if not unexpected, news of the death of Bruno Paris, an old friend whom we had often half-jokingly dubbed "the last Etruscan man". Diminutive Bruno, village-born and -bred, was at one and the same time a builder, fisherman, farmer, herb collector, traveller and inveterate gossip.
The first time I recall noticing Bruno at work was on the occasion of a village funeral. The deceased was a relative of his and it fell to him to "wall in" the coffin, i.e. literally closing off the coffin's cemetery wall slot with bricks and cement at the end of the funeral service and with most of the family mourners still present. Such was the speed and accuracy of his work that we immediately vowed that if ever we needed any building done, then we would look no further.
Given the expansive building projects of the Baroness (herself) in recent years, we had plenty of opportunity to get to know Bruno better. We often joked that if ever we were to be stranded on a desert island, then Bruno would be the ideal companion.
He was very much in tune with his North Lazio environment. He was so intimately familiar with the winds and movement of sun, moon and clouds that his weather forecasts had to be taken very seriously. He was such a good vegetable gardener that, from a half-acre plot, he was able to meet much of the fruit and vegetable requirements of the restaurant run by his wife, Mirella.
He knew where and when to go looking in the woods above the village for gastronomic treats such as wild fennel, wild asparagus, snails or wild mushrooms. He also knew where to go looking for Etruscan tombs, at one point becoming a regular night-time "tomb raider" dealing in "recovered" Etruscan artifacts, most of which he gave away as wedding presents. He abandoned this (illegal) activity when a local policeman tipped him off, remarking how busy Bruno was, having to work "by day and by night".
He was intimately familiar with the Lago di Bracciano, following its currents closely and knowing where and when to fish. Once when we asked him how much he had paid for some splendid ancient Roman steps that he had "acquired", he told us that the price had been 300,000 old lira, plus 20 fish. Only a month before his death, he had spent his last two mornings before his final hospitalisation out fishing at 5 a.m.
At his bedside in hospital, one neighbour recalled her incredulity at his apparently sudden and terminal ill-health. Unable to sleep, she had woken early a few mornings previously and gone for a walk. From out in the middle of the lake, she had heard Bruno and another fisherman singing bits of an old local song at one another from their respective boats.
From that seemingly absurd vision of bucolic bliss, he declined quickly, killed by cancer that had first struck him nearly two years ago.
Such was his general well-being, physical strength and ingenuous optimism (although he was in a cancer ward, he long refused to believe he had cancer) that one foolishly believed he would be one of those capable of defeating the great killer of our times.
Born into the poverty of post-war rural Lazio (he was 62 when he died), Bruno had an instinctive curiosity that prompted him to travel to some exotic destinations in later years. He used to say he was the first person in the village to get a passport, claiming that when he went to the village carabinieri to find out how to get one, they looked at him in bemusement, not knowing what it was.
Brazil, China, Germany and Poland were just some of the places he visited, returning from China to make an indelible impression on our (then) small daughter Roisin, by recounting how he had eaten eggs boiled in horse urine.
Naturally thrifty and hardworking like many of his generation, Bruno was someone totally uninterested in the consumer icons of designer-label crazy, conformist modern Italy. He was more than happy driving around in his old Fiat Panda.
A superb craftsman, an incurable gossip and storyteller, an enthusiastic drinker (in his atypical way he preferred beer to wine) and a lifelong communist, Bruno will be sadly missed.