ROME LETTER:Every four or five years, the trees on the Via Settevene Palo are savaged
SPRING, IF not to say summer, is most definitely in the Trevignano air. After a long, extremely wet winter, spring is in full growth and summer beckons.
Oh yes, it rains here too. Splendidly useless item of information No 1 relates that Rome experiences the same quantity of rain as London except, of course, that it is all concentrated in a few miserable winter months. Never was that more true than this winter – and you lot thought you had the rain all to yourselves.
Evidence of the changing season tends to fall, quite literally, on your correspondent’s head. You see, there is this splendid old family heirloom cum wisteria plant which entwines its way around the Agnew “outhouse” – that infamous converted garage which serves as the quartier général of The Irish Times in Rome. So there he is, your correspondent, bristling with ideas, stories and notions for your delectation as he pulls open the shutters of his HQ, and what happens? These days, the shutters collide with the blooming wisteria, sending a cascade of petals, pollen and other unidentified objects right on to a chap’s head.
This might not sound like a serious matter to you but, particularly for the benefit of younger readers, let me remind you that, since Lord Reith times, a dinner jacket has been regulation attire for an Irish Times foreign correspondent.
None of us would dare put finger to keyboard without the old smoking jacket, such is the esteem in which we hold you, dear reader.
This is all very well, of course, but wisteria rubbish does bad things to the smoking jacket. The dry-cleaning bills tend to go up at this time of year. Which reminds me, I had better send a little memo about this to the Foreign Editor. Perhaps, in the style of certain British foreign office luminaries, I could include a few suggestions for next year’s proposed visit to Ireland by Queen Elizabeth – a tour of the Famine Museum in Strokestown, an afternoon at Kilmainham Gaol and her participation in a master- class in bodhrán playing would all go down nicely, would they not?
Seriously, folks, spring is bursting forth all around us. This is that magical moment when all plant life, shortly to develop a sunburnt, thirsty look, looks lush and verdant. This is also that less-than-magical moment when local authorities set about a sort of communal spring cleaning.
For us, this means that the tree-lined Via Settevene Palo, which connects the village with the fast-flowing dual carriageway into Rome, currently looks like Flanders 1917. Every four or five years, the “commune” appears to savage the trees, effecting a most severe potatura (family gardening experts tell me the word in English is pollarding).
The first time I saw the effect of this pollarding, I thought the intention was clearly to kill off the trees, so severe did it seem. However, I was wrong. The trees (they are mainly plane trees) are hardy boys and spring back to life, more abundant than ever.
Mind you, one is entitled to at least a momentary worry, given that the trees are not much liked by many Trevignanesi. Cars and motorbikes have crashed into the trees, especially at night, with fatal consequences. So much so that, after another fatality a couple of years ago, some of the villagers went out one night armed with chainsaws and cut down hundreds of the trees.
The point, of course, is that the road in question used to serve a rather different purpose than that of handling modern commuter traffic. This is a road that used to witness the transumanza: the annual migration of thousands of sheep, brought down from the Abruzzo mountains in the winter to graze along the Maremma (Lazio/Tuscany coastline) coastlands, before heading back up to the Abruzzo for the summer.
The presence of the trees was essentially to afford a welcome respite from the sun as the weary shepherds and their flocks made their slow progress along the track.
In earlier times, these routes were not roads at all but rather broad grassy paths, for the use of which the shepherd would have to pay a toll. Indeed, local authorities in Lazio, Campania and elsewhere built a thriving little economy around the transumanza, charging road fees, providing food and taverns, and organising sheep fares.
The transumanza is largely a thing of the past, even though you still see huge flocks of sheep grazing in and around the village, always guarded by a shepherd and his dogs.
For us, we will just have to trust that the trees will burst back into life once again. As indeed, we will have to hope that the revamp of the village lungolago (lakeside walk) ends up fine and dandy. As one sits in La Vela bar these days, looking out on the lake, there is the disturbing sight of pavements being uprooted and trees (admittedly only a small number) being chopped down.
Ah well, at least Jollo has started up the ice-cream counter again, another sure seasonal indicator.