It’s pretty quiet here at present while I work on the next book, so here’s a look back to Italy when I was in Abruzzo and wrote Mezza Italiana. The day I hung the freshly-washed sheets out on the old pulley clothesline at the house in Fossa. It’s such an iconic image in Italy, a busty woman suspended half out a window, hanging her sheets on these pulley lines. However, any romantic notions were quickly quashed!
Being so short, I struggled just to reach out the wide, stone windowsill with the heavy, wet sheets (while I stood balancing on two stacks of bricks on the floor beneath the sill). A knot in the rope kept jamming the pulley, my arms ached, I was sweating, (a bit like writing!😉😄) but I got there in the end. Even if the lovely breeze wafting up the alley flapped the clean sheets against the house wall, marring them with filthy marks.
Still, it’s still a lovely memory, and while I wasn’t overjoyed to find out at the time that Roger, who’d been at the shop, secretly took a photo from the down the street, in a way I’m glad now to have it as a reminder. (And who’d have thought it would end up on the cover of Mezza!) The ‘everyday life’ I got to experience in Italy was just exquisite really, the beautiful, the mundane, the noisy, the quiet…
Buona giornata! 💛🌠
Zoë Boccabella 