This one was in Trumpington, a village that used to be outside Cambridge, but is now part of the outskirts. Look at the bottom right corner of the sign.


This one is repeated all along the platforms at Camridge railway station.

Some pictures taken near the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.


That's one of Henry Moore's reclining women.


Closer up.


Bodies of water in this part of the country (Norfolk) are called broads and this is a view of the University of East Anglia Broad.


Looking out over the cafeteria at the Sainsbury Centre. Henry Moore in the background again. I liked this one: despite probably weighing tons it managed to look as if he had caught the woman in the action of getting up. Can't recall who did the standing sculpture.

 
By the way our bus passed the Centre for Climate Change where there was that brouhaha about the emails and the alleged scientific fraud a couple of years ago. The scientists were eventually vindicated and fortunately their employer supported them throughout.

As mentioned yesterday, the town has a number of wonky half-timbered buildings.





I don't know if they were built that way or what happened.

I read three of these while in England as they were handy on the shelf in my room and highly recommended by the owner of the house (a medievalist). The author is P.F. Chisholm, the nom de plume of Patricia Finney (and why would you publish a book under one name while simultaneously identifying your real name?). They are all set in 1592 and are based on the real person of Carey who was the son of Queen Elizabeth's illegitimate half-brother and therefore a nephew of the Queen. The first one, A Season of Knives, set in Carlisle on the Scottish border was pretty swashbuckling, the next two, A Plague of Angels and A Murder of Crows, were set in London and full of political conspiracies and overcomplicated plotting. All of them had interesting details about Elizabethan daily life - especially for people (not me) who understand Elizabethan words like 'kirtle' or 'veney'.

I have a bunch of other half-read books I need to finish soon.

Some of the teaching models. These are fungi that cause diseases in plants.


Some early microscopes (for microbie).



An orrery.

I came back from the UK last night, where I was for about 10 days. I stayed in Cambridge with an old friend. The schedule went something like this:
Saturday 5 May: Stayed in Naples the previous night and caught the 1020 flight to Stansted. Arrived Cambridge around 2 pm and spent the afternoon sitting around the house catching up on things.
Sunday: free concert at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Beethoven Tempest Sonata and some short pieces by Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Debussy, played by Emilie Capulet, followed by a wander around the rest of the museum.
Monday: Albert Nobbs, the movie starring Glenn Close as a woman who spent 35 years masquerading as a man in order to be able to have a decent job in a Dublin hotel. A tragic story, very well done with a nicely building tension.
Tuesday: A couple of things I'd never got around to, although I lived in Cambridge for 5 years. First we climbed to the top of the castle mound in order to look at the view over the city. Then we went to Kettle's Yard which comprises some old cottages joined together and a more modern extension built to house the collection of Jim Ede, a former curator of the Tate. The part the Ede's lived in was quite beautiful, with loads of natural light, not too many paintings and sculptures and some whimsical arrangements of pebbles, shells and fossil stones. The extension was a bit cluttered. Ede bought the entire studio contents of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who had been killed in WW1, so there's a huge amount of his work in the house, plus a handful of Brancusi. The best known painter in the collection is Ben Nicholson and I don't recall seeing any non-British painters.
Wednesday: The Duchess of Malfi at the Old Vic. This is one of those classic plays I've always wanted to see, but never got around to before, and this production was excellent. On one interpretation it's a play about so-called 'honour killing'. We had tapas at a nearby pub beforehand and dinner at the newly renovated St Pancras after.
Thursday: a train trip to Norwich to see the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia. I was impressed by the campus which is leafy and pleasant (although some ugly 60s buildings) and the collection is an interesting one that juxtaposes modern stuff with some extremely ancient masks and sculptures from Africa and South/Central America. There was also an interesting temporary exhibition on the development of modernism via Art Nouveau - from early 'natural' forms to geometrical.
Friday: back to London. I spent some time at Waterstones, a four-storey bookshop in Gower St, trying with moderate success to resist temptation (I only bought 4 books, but made a note of many more). Then I had a very English lunch of sausages and mashed potato with peas at a nearby pub and went to meet my friend for a tour of the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican. This exhibition was quite vast and took us several hours to get around. I didn't know a lot about Bauhaus beforehand and was really surprised at how incredibly influential it has been. There were things made there in the early 1920s that have just become commonplace elements of design today. Their role in the development of marketing is not to be discounted either.
Saturday: We visited Hitchin to meet a friend of my friend who lives there. I've been past Hitchin on the train many times, as it's half way to London, and always thought it looked like a suburban nightmare. But in fact it has a very old town centre with lots of half-timbered houses, all slanting every which way. We had dinner with a professor of Mathematical Physics and her mathematician husband.
Sunday: Another thing I'd never done was the walk to Grantchester. This is a kind of Cambridge institution on account of the poet Rupert Brooke who wrote a poem about it before dying in WW1. The village is about 2 km from Newnham on the outskirts of the city on a path following the river. Unfortunately the path is rather narrow and full of bicycles, but nonetheless it's a pleasant walk through meadows full of flowers and brown cows, and the village is very pretty. We had lunch there at an old pub that has been renamed the Rupert Brooke. My roast beef and yorkshire pudding in red wine 'jus' was excellent. Then we walked through the village to a small nature reserve on a stretch of the river known as Byron's Pool because the poet used to swim there while he was at Cambridge (he is also alleged to have kept a bear in his rooms at Trinity). I think the reserve is a recent establishment and we didn't see much wildlife - a nesting pair of swans, some ducks and a hive of bees in a hollow log. Then we walked the rest of the way to Trumpington and caught a bus back to town.
Monday: I did some shopping and we visited the Whipple Museum of Science in Free School Lane next to the former Cavendish Laboratories (where Rutherford worked and also Thomson who discovered electrons in 1897). They had some early clocks (e.g. one made in 1337 for the bell tower at St Albans which struck midnight while we were there - I'm not sure if it's a sign of inaccuracy or of failure to set it) and microscopes as well as a lot of strange objects that were used in early science teaching (plaster models of flowers, moulds, caterpillars, human ears and what-have-you). There was a working orrery - you can put a pound in the slot and all the planets and moons will rotate and revolve for a few seconds. At the time it was made Saturn was the outermost planet known. Upstairs there was a mock-up Victorian living room with several early infotainment objects like bioscopes. Unfortunately most of the collection has no information attached and you have to look up the accession number on a computer to see when and where it was made and what it was used for - which would be fine if you had a portable device handy. Had dinner with E.A. who'd been the previous night to see 3 full-length plays by Shakespeare - 3 parts of Henry VI, the first done in Serbian, the second in Albanian and the third in Macedonian - at the Globe. She thought the Serbian one was really outstanding - very imaginatively done with a shortened text and quasi-modern costume that enabled the drawing of parallels with other, more contemporary civil wars. (She doesn't speak any of the three languages.) The Globe is apparently doing a series of all the plays in different languages. It's not clear how different countries were assigned the various plays, but Henry VI obviously went well with the Balkans.
Tuesday: Flew back to Naples. Arrived in Sorrento in time to be picked up for dinner.

Photos to follow.

I've done Monday's walk around the headland between Cantone and Recommone a few times over the past couple of months. It's only about 1 km each way and not too steep, though at the midway point you are quite high above sea level. The photos are from early and late March.


View of Li Galli - group of rocky islands around an old crater. Nureyev's house is on the middle one. On a clear day you can also see the mountains behind Salerno.


Another one of the Norman-Arab watchtowers and a view of Isca, also known locally as de Filippo after a Neapolitan writer of comedies who owned it or lived on it (we're not sure).


Turning into the small bay of Recommone. The cliffs are full of grottoes that are big enough to enter. All of them have names too, though I cannot remember them. The village at the top is Torca.


Looking down at Recommone. On previous walks we've stopped here because the descent to the beach is very steep. This was taken a month ago - what a contrast to yesterday!


Coming back to Cantone - early March. Way fewer wildflowers than yesterday.




These little lizards are everywhere. They're pretty fast movers so I'm pleased to have got such a clear shot.


One of the restaurants (the one under the church) at Cantone before 'the Season'.

We travel into Sorrento quite often for one reason or another (usually related to shopping needs or else the fantastic playground where N can burn up quite a lot of energy). On one of these occasions, after a couple of hours at the playground, we decided to have lunch at the Marina Grande. There is also a Marina Piccolo which is actually considerably larger than the Marina Grande and is the departure point for the ferry to Naples, but who knows how these names came into being.

Just before you reach the port, you pass a shipbuilding workshop that, according to the man we spoke to, has been a family business for 5 generations.


Down at the harbour front.


We had lunch at a place by the edge of this beach. The sand is black and not too full of garbage, considering that it's a working fishing port, and the water is crystal clear. There are also a lot of pebbles, bits of sea-worn tiles and glass, etc. While we waited for our food N was able to play around in the sand. I collected a pocketful of interesting stones!


After lunch, which was excellent in parts and so-so in other parts, we went for a stroll along the beach. We noticed a fisherman feeding the seagulls with fish heads and guts.


So we went to have a closer look. L commented that Australian seagulls are more aggressive than these. These just sat on the water and waited. Sydney seagulls would be surrounding you and trying to get stuff out of your hands. (The Australian ones are a different species or variety - so maybe that accounts for it).

Back in mid-March N went to a birthday party of 3 year-olds in Massa Lubrense, one of the towns nearby. So I went in the car with him and L and while they were fishing with magnets and eating pizza, I walked down the hill to the little port.

The road was extremely steep, but very pretty as it goes through lemon gardens and olive groves surrounded by very old walls.



The local lemons seem to me to be particularly yellow. And they're not as sour as the ones we have in Australia.


Entrance to a villa.


One of the side tracks leading through the lemon gardens. I was worried about time as I'd promised to be back in an hour, otherwise I'd have taken a wander down this path.


About two thirds of the way down there is a convent or monastery (I forget). Many of the churches around here have these tiled domes. I suspect Arab architectural influence.


At the bottom of the hill is the fishing village of Marina della Lobra. Also very pretty. Too steep for cars. There's another way for them to get down, but it's nice to walk through streets without cars for a change!



Inevitably, when you get down to sea level, there's a 'snack bar' with tables and chairs out in the sun.


View of the port.




There's a flat path you can walk along by the seaside. This is a view looking back towards the port.


Then came the business of the climb back up. As I mentioned in the last post, I'm not a good climber. This path was much steeper than the Punta Campanella one and I was worried about the time (I needn't have). So I went a bit too fast and had to sit down to rest half way up. I felt really sick! Fortunately, I found a candy in my bag and the extra bit of sugar helped a lot.

Looking back down the road.


I was a bit late getting back to the birthday party, but it was still in full swing so we agreed to meet at the bar up in the main piazza when they'd finished.

View of the piazza outside the bar in Massa.

The weather here continues drab. Today the cloud ceiling has varied between somewhere below the house and somewhere slightly above it (we are about 350 m above SL). That means it's chilly, damp and gloomy.

I hope the good weather we had in March comes back soon. Here's a reminder, from a walk I took to Punta Campanella at the end of the Sorrento Peninsula – in glorious sunshine, even if the wind during the first part of the walk was a bit Arctic.

My friends’ house is at the lower end of the village and the road continues on past the house and the dreadful neighbours. After about 1 km a big sign says no more cars, but in fact the track continues to be motorable and is used by local farmers with their Ape (three-wheeled trucks). All the way down one passes through fields of lemons, vegetables (in mid-March mostly gone-to-seed broccoli) and olives, olives and more olives. One of the olive groves along the track belongs to a Michelin 3-star restaurant in St Agata - so says the sign on the gate. The restaurant is called Don Alfonso 1890 and you will probably pay in the vicinity of 200 euro per person to eat there. Rumour says they got the stars on the basis of their recipe for pasta with tomato and basil - which would be an impressive achievement indeed!




After a certain point, maybe 2/3 of the way down, the soil becomes too rocky to support olives and the path consequently deteriorates. The vegetation turns into macchia Mediterranea. Around here it is dominated by a bush with greeny-yellow flowers that lots of people grow in their gardens back in Sydney.


Looking down at the Fosse Papa on the seaward side of the track...


… and back towards one of the Norman-Arab watchtowers that are dotted around the coast at suitable signalling intervals. North side of the Bay of Naples in the background.


In mid-March not a lot of wildflowers were in bloom, but these were two of them:




I failed to get to the point, where there is a modern light beacon and another Norman-Arab tower. I was worried about getting home before dark, particularly because the track was 100% uphill on the return journey – and getting slightly steeper the further I went down. I am not a good climber, I’d set out rather late and was aiming to allow myself double the time I’d taken to go down to get back up. Here’s where I turned around, which I figure was only about 2-300 metres from the point. Another time, now that I know, I’ll take a picnic and go all the way!


In fact, by pacing myself carefully, I was able to get back up the hill in the same time it took me to get down. I even had time to sit down for a bit and admire the view of Capri.

April has not been a great month weatherwise. Last week we had huge winds and thunderstorms and our internet was down for 2 days. Then it just rained a lot. Today the wind is up again, though not as badly as before.

In a lull we went down to walk along the beach at Cantone. Usually the sea there is as flat as a board. Instead, that day you could almost surf.

Normally the pier is several feet above the water level.
ic

The skies have been dramatic.


Taken from the terrace in the last couple of days.

After the parade in Tricarico there was a great concert of music from the southern region. The guy playing the tamboura in the first picture was earlier selling the instruments he makes at a stall in the piazza.


Note that the concert included a 7 year-old tambourinist who accompanied all the singers.


Then there was the young girl who danced the Tarantella. She was good, but not as good as the eight year-old and her younger sister who were dancing in the crowd, just near us. The elder of the two was absolutely brilliant. Apparently there's a school in Tricarico where children can learn all this traditional stuff and lots of them are taking it up.

The Mamutzones come from a town called Samugheo in Sardinia. Nobody really knows their origin. One source says it's a local adaptation of a Greek myth, another says it is related to the Arab occupation of southern Italy. I believe the latter mainly because I think the 'Mamut' part of the name is probably Arab. Anyway they were quite unlike any of the other participants in the parade because they marched, in two single files on either side of the road. Their bells rang rhythmically with each step.


If the aim was to appear a bit scary, they succeeded. We had to jump out of the way.


View from behind.


Every now and then they stopped, which was just as well because they moved at such a speed that if they'd kept going they'd have marched right on through to the head of the parade. They really were a bit like an army on the move. During their stops they enacted some kind of drama in the space between the two marching lines. This involved two of them, one wearing a real goat's head, in a head-butting contest. Others picked a girl out of the crowd and 'captured' her - in one case they literally chased her down the street - then brought her back to the centre-stage where goat's-head awaited (in the final scene of the drama he appeared to die, so that was probably a happy ending!).

Other people associated with the Mamutzones went around smudging people's faces with black 'for good luck'. They were impressive, intriguing and a bit disturbing.

I will never be able to keep up. I cannot believe how busy life is when one lives with other people as distinct from spending long evenings alone at home.

While she was still living in Australia, L rented her house in Termini out for 10 days over Easter to some English people. Then she forgot about it until sometime last month - too late to cancel the booking. So we spent a week frantically packing, cleaning, buying a new mattress to replace the one with the hole in it, buying a new TV to replace the one that they threw out, throwing out all kinds of garbage stored in the garage and so on. Then the day the English people were due to arrive we took the train to Napoli, where I had to check into a hotel because L's brother has rearranged his apartment without spare beds. I spent the next four days walking all over the city while L dealt with family matters and work stuff, then we all piled into a train and came up to I's parents' in Cilento.

Easter is a very big deal here, especially today when everybody goes around visiting all their relatives and exchanging gifts (mostly made of chocolate). I've never seen so much chocolate in my life. We started this morning with a hunt for chocolate eggs left for N by the Easter Bunny. I'm pretty sure this is not an Italian tradition, but I. and L thought it was a good idea, so last night we hid them and N had a great time this morning hunting for them with us all shouting 'fuoco' (fire) or 'acqua' (water) according to whether he was getting closer or further away. I's parents had also bought a giant egg, about 18 inches high, which they then decided to hide for me to find, but N thought it would be better if he 'helped' me, so he headed straight for the spot even before they'd finished telling me about the game. Then the 3 of them went out to visit relatives and they keep coming back to drop off more chocolate (one relative also gave them 500 euros!). I went out to buy paint for egg painting later on and met one of I's cousins who invited me to the bar for a coffee with grappa (at 10 in the morning). The bar and the church are both very busy today.

Also we watched The Odd Couple on TV last night, dubbed in Italian so the dialogue was beyond my comprehension, but it was still very funny. I love Jack Lemmon. I expected the TV to be nothing but the Pope (like it tends to be in Oz over Easter), but in fact you could easily avoid him by choosing a different channel.

Anyway the news is much more preoccupied by the fall of Bossi (leader of the fascist Lega Nord) over a corruption scandal and its implications for Italian politics. Some people think it is rather like 1993 when the post-war party system collapsed.. First Berlusconi fell in a civilian coup d'etat, and now Bossi is gone. Nobody seems to have a clue where things are going now, though so far the dictator is popular. Why this is so is somewhat incomprehensible since unemployment is skyrocketing - even if the WSJ and FT are telling us that Monti is no Thatcher. Apparently they'd prefer someone even harder.

At the head of the parade was a bunch of local children dressed in the Tricarico-style costume. We had seen nothing like this handing down of local tradition in Aliano where, instead, the priest and some of the local elite were struggling to revive the thing.


Then came a large group of what I would describe (being an expert and all!!) as fairly conventional Carnevale costumes. These people were from Taranto, which is a pretty big town.


L particularly liked this bunch because they were handing out lollies to all and sundry.


This one has got to be a recent invention. The chaps inside were a happy smiling bunch, but I'm glad for them that it wasn't a windy day.


After that, the costumes got seriously strange. Don't recall where this one came from, but it seemed to be made from old newspapers and plastic table cloths. Obviously, like the Tricarico group, their story has something to do with cows.


This group also had a donkey wearing an umbrella, among other things. It was a very reluctant participant, needing 4 men to urge it along. The surrounding noise was pretty deafening what with all the cowbells clanging and people shouting across the road to their acquaintances.


The next three all come from the same group and heaven knows what the story is about.



Something related to the very high rates of infant mortality in the South prior to the 1950s is suggested here.


Our friends from Aliano.


These are apparently witches. They come from somewhere in northern Puglia or possibly Molise and the story has something to do with deer.


The male and female deer on leashes held by a man in a white magician's costume (i.e. pointy white hat). The guy with the antlers kept lunging wildly towards the crowd, causing people to scatter and kids to screech.

Most spectacular of all were the Mamutzones from Sardegna, but I'm saving them up for the next post. Bring up the rear of the parade with the cows and bulls of Tricarico itself.


They also had some nice ponies - a couple of them with quite junior riders.


I've covered most of the represented villages here, but not all. It was a fun parade to watch, but I wish I knew more about what they were on about. Some of the villages (Aliano, for example) were male-only and we know that their story involves climbing onto balconies and frightening women - hence the ropes they wear as part of their costume. Others had extensive female participation and there was a lot of cross dressing. We developed a rough hypothesis that the more agricultural or urban the theme, the greater the exclusion of women (except as conventionally dressed in female costume) and the more pastoral the theme, the greater the gender equality. But we don't really know.

The Economist ran a story titled Middle-income Trap, in which it shows, by means of a graph developed by the World Bank, that 50 countries classified as middle income in 1960 were still in the same classification half a century later, in 2008. "Only 13 countries escaped this middle-income trap, becoming high-income economies in 2008" (one of them Greece, so it may not be a long-term shift).

What the story doesn't say, but the graph shows, is that 26 countries escaped this so-called middle-income trap by becoming 'low-income'. Moreover, while 4 countries went from low to middle, 5 went from high to middle. So a total of 17 countries moved up a step and 31 went down a step.

In 1960, 19 countries were classified as high-income. In 2008 there were only 27, a net gain of 8 rather than the 13 touted in the story. In 1960 the WB classified 11 countries as 'low-income', but by 2008 there were 35, a net gain of 26.

Of course, even low income could possibly be higher in real terms in 2008 compared with 1960. It could also be lower. It all depends on where you put the cut off between the three classes. The 'high' incomes of the upwardly mobile countries like Greece, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan are nowhere near as high as, say the US, Luxembourg or Norway. But this is merely a nit-picking footnote. The real point of the story is to show how much better off the world is!

Some photos from our second trip to Basilicata back in early March. We went there for the Carnevale 'convention'. This a thing the village of Tricarico has started up in the last two years whereby they do a parade in which villages from all over the region participate. It was held on Saturday, 3 March, so we set out early that afternoon. Along the road we passed a lot of solar fields like this one.

We also passed quite a few wind farms. Apparently Italy gets 35% of its energy from renewables, which is the highest in Europe and pretty remarkable it itself. In Oz we are aimed (somewhat uncommittedly) for 20% by 2020 or thereabouts.

The landscape around Tricarico is extraordinary by comparison with other parts of Basilicata that we had visited. Rolling hills planted with new wheat (the area grows a lot of durum wheat of the type used in pasta). The landscape reminded me a lot of the hills north of my home town (Adelaide), where they also grow a lot of wheat.


Since we booked late, we couldn't stay in Tricarico itself. Instead we found a B&B in an old farmhouse at a hamlet called Calle. This is the turnoff to Calle. The landlady informed us that Calle lies on the former Appian Way of the Romans. Apparently it passed through here on its way to one of the big ports (maybe Taranto, but I forget).


The B&B was 3 stories. On the ground floor was a bar and restaurant, on the middle floor a chapel and on the top floor the rooms for rent. The Tricarico area is famous for a young mayor, Rocco Scotellaro, who organized a land reform in the early 1950s. Scotellaro was befriended by Carlo Levy, but they were very different characters - the former coming from a poor peasant background. It seems that he became the inspiration for a whole school of thought on rural development at the University of Naples. Sadly, he died at the age of 33. Our landlady's family had benefited by a grant of 7 ha - a medium-sized farm by local standards - so they had basically been lifted into moderate prosperity. This is a view from the terrace on the top floor of the farmhouse.


From there we managed to find our way by a series of complicated country lanes to Tricarico itself. It is described in the tourist books as a Saracen village, but apparently this means the architecture is Norman, dating from the 8th or 9th centuries. There was, at some stage, a Norman-Saracen alliance which accounts for this, to me, confusing nomenclature.

First view in late winter sunlight.


I didn't know it at the time or I'd have taken a better photo, but just outside the Norman walls are terraced fields dating from the same period and still in use. The ones that were still in cultivation had olive and some kind of deciduous fruit trees.


Unlike Aliano the village was packed for the Carnevale so we had to park at the bottom and walk up. Also unlike Aliano, the village has grown in recent decades. This picture is taken from the parade route in the new part of town looking towards the old village with its Norman/Saracen tower.

More on the actual parade later.

Yesterday we went shopping in what is so far the only shopping mall I've seen anywhere in the country. Fittingly, it's in Pompei.

By shopping mall standards it was quite small. We bought a TV and some potted plants for the terrace, as well as a wireless range extender so that I can get internet in my room downstairs.

Then we went to look at a car in Torre Annunziata, just a few minutes away. Not for the first time I was struck by the similarities with Hanoi in the Neapolitan urban agglomeration. A bit less traffic here, but the little shop spilling on to the street, the laundry hanging out, etc...


Then we went hunting for a mattress - ending up in Piano di Sorrento. This process is very different from Australia where furniture shops take up acres of space, plus parking. Here they have adapted to the architecture by putting different departments in different shops. If you walk into one place, there is likely to be nobody there, so you have to call them and someone will come running from another shop. Then they will take you to the place where you can see mattresses (or whatever). If they don't have what you want they will bring it from yet another place. The same system also operates in Hanoi for most goods - small shops in the same street, sell the same goods and are likely to be owned by members of a single family. So if one doesn't have what you want, the owner will shout to her neighbour or go running off up the street to bring it back from somewhere else.

Parking was also an issue. I found a small supermarket, while my friends were chasing around after mattresses, and stocked up on a few items. I took this photo across the road where an old guy was tending his grocery shop. The footpath consisted only of some faded white lines on the road. In some places it didn't exist at all, but pedestrians nonetheless have to struggle along through the cars and motorbikes. People also park (illegally) on this so-called footpath, so pedestrians have to get around the parked cars by walking out into the stream of cars. I found it somewhat nerve-wracking.

On Wednesday I had my second driving experience. This time I drove all the way to the University of Salerno campus at Fisciano for a seminar. I don't know how far it was, but it took an hour and a half, half of it on the freeway. Going was fine as there wasn't a lot of traffic, but coming back at 7 pm the freeway was full of fast traffic. This was a scary experience because Italian freeways aren't exactly comfortable driving. The entry and exit ramps are too short and also hidden from view by barriers and frequently without any warning signage. Cars suddenly appear at your side and you have to decide in a flash who will give way (normally I'd move into the left lane, but that was so full already that I couldn't). Also the road widens and narrows all the time, so you think you're fine in your lane, but it suddenly disappears. There are many poorly lit tunnels. A lot of drivers think that having their wheels on either side of the line is the way to go, although they will usually move aside if you flash your high beam at them. It reminds me very much of a faster-moving version of Hanoi traffic, so I don't feel totally overwhelmed. Nonetheless, by the time we got home I was whacked

Yesterday we went to Napoli for another seminar. I'm glad I didn't have to drive on that trip because the traffic was even worse. Many people are completely suicidal.

We have endeavoured to find out what the fight was about the other day. Our downstairs neighbour told us it was a father v. son dispute. However, she tries to stay away from that household as there is a woman there from one of the main Camorra clans. She told us the story of how this woman was hanging out her washing one day while a local farmer was burning off. She instructed him to put out his fire because it would dirty her laundry, whereupon he went and fetched an axe, which he waved at her. Her husband then came out of the house waving a pistol. The farmer wet his pants and the woman's daughter had a panic attack and had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance. By the time the carabinieri arrived, they had all cooked up a story that the daughter had been frightened by the dog (a very old and friendly dog). Nice neighbourhood!