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
My understanding is that it used to be the case in Italy that traffic on a roundabout always had to give way to traffic entering it.However, the law now is that traffic on the roundabout has right of way and traffic entering it must yield.In other words, the rule was changed from something akin to the absurd system that used to be in place in France where traffic on a high-speed inter-city route had to yield to a tractor coming on to the road at a junction with a farm track on the right, to something more in line with the law in Britain.The complicating factors are that, first, a lot of Italians still on the road learned to drive when the law was different and so some still seem to believe that they should be allowed to enter a roundabout without pause. Second, some roundabouts have road markings which mean traffic on the roundabout must yield to that entering. Third, road markings in Italy often wear thin to the point of invisibility before they're repainted. And fourth, some Italians don't pay much attention to road markings, signs or other cars on the road.Al
But, having read your post for the fifth time or so, I finally realised what was making me think that you were giving daft advice that would make people unnecessarily concerned about the state of their electrics.You said:"Look for the test button on the salva vita and press it. The power should automatically go off.If this is the case then close all the circuit breakers and turn the salva vita back on, then reinstate the circuit breakers one at a time.If the power does not automatically turn off then the unit is faulty and should be replaced by a competent registered electrician."I read this as you saying that the ELCB should trip when the circuit breakers were turned on again. I now see that what you mean is that if the ELCB did not trip when the Test button was pushed, then the unit is faulty and needs to be replaced.If you had placed the second sentence above immediately after your instructions to press the Test button on the ELCB, I would have had no issues with your post.However, the comment about how the ELCB should trip immediately follows directions to turn on the circuit-breakers. Therefore it could be read as applying to that instruction.My point about the definition of "close" stands. Your directions in the first sentence above are that the circuit breaker should be turned on and then turned on. Any English dictionary will tell you that a switch is "open" when it is Off and "closed" when it is On. Clearly, to "reinstate" a switch which is normally On, one turns it On.In any case, using "open" and "closed" when talking about switches is semi-jargon. If you want to use non-technical language, far better to use "On" and "Off" when talking to laypeople: those are the labels on the switch and so unambiguous. However, if you are going to talk about a switch being "closed", at least apply that term to the correct state.Al
Sparky, you say:"Look for the test button on the salva vita and press it. The power should automatically go off."Fine. No problem. That's what the test button on an Earth Leakage Circuit Breaker is for and that's exactly what should happen."If this is the case then close all the circuit breakers and turn the salva vita back on, then reinstate the circuit breakers one at a time.If the power does not automatically turn off then the unit is faulty and should be replaced by a competent registered electrician."Say what?First, in the context of electrical stuff in English, "to close" means "to switch 'On'". (That's because what happens inside the switch is that the contacts "close" or come into contact with each other.)Therefore, what you seem to be saying is that you should switch all the normal circuit breakers On and then "reinstate" -- or switch them On -- again. Which is clearly nonsense.Therefore, what you must mean is that you're supposed to switch the normal circuit breakers OFF while the ELCB is tripped (in an Off state), then turn the normal circuit breakers ON one by one.However, you then assert that the ELCB is supposed to trip each time a circuit breaker is switched On. You go on to say that, if the ELCB does not trip, it is faulty and a registered electrician needs to be called in to replace it.I'm not a qualified electrician, but this makes absolutely no sense to me.Why should the ELCB trip (i.e. detect a fault) when current is applied to it? Surely, if the ELCB trips in this situation, it means exactly what it means every other time this happens: that the current on the Live and Neutral lines is not in balance. In other words, that there is a fault in the electrical system downstream from the ELCB.In our house, there are three circuit breaker boxes, each with an ELCB and normal circuit breakers. None of them are older than five years. One is less than two years old (I know because I installed it – it’s not brain surgery, it’s a matter of switching off at the meter, disconnecting two wires from the old, suspect, ELCB, putting them in a new ELCB, screwing down the contacts and sticking it back in the box).None of the ELCBs work as you say they should.Are you seriously suggesting that, even though the Test button works as it should on each of the ELCBs and they trip at the slightest provocation (like a lamp blowing when switched on) the fact that they don't trip when power is first applied to the circuit means the ELCBs in this house have suffered a 100% failure rate and they all need to be replaced by an electrician like you?AlPS: Are we ever going to get a proper "quote" function here like they have on real internet forums?
Cilla10 mentioned bringing low sodium salt substitute to Italy.We have seen this in a few supermarkets, again generally near the spices, vinegar and oil.It comes in smaller containers than the normal 1kg box and will be called something like sale dietetico.The 400g container I'm looking at says each 100g of contents contains 24.9g potassium, 13.5g sodium, 1.1g magnesium and 0.6g calcium.It has been some time since we bought it, so I can't say how much it cost. Recollection is that it was a bit pricey, but then I recall the same applied to salt substitute in Britain.Al
What possible malicious motivation could make The Powers That Be tell people to go back to bed when they knew there was going to be a big earthquake in a few hours? Even if you buy into the lazily cynical view that politicians all over the world are all corrupt and self-serving, what do they possibly gain by having a few hundred people killed in an earthquake? Even if you think that every Italian politician is wilfully wicked and insatiably greedy, what do they gain by doing this?One thing the Internet is wonderful at is enabling the propagation of conspiracy theories. And, frankly, this all sounds to me rather similar to the stories going around after 9/11 that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers. This, too, was supposedly a "fact" that powerful people and agencies worked tirelessly to conceal.People will always want to understand why something happened. That's human nature. The need to understand and place blame becomes even more pressing when one has lost a family member or a house.Unfortunately, the simple fact is that nobody can predict earthquakes. Even if Italian politicians were evil enough to figure out a way to profit more if an earthquake killed 500 people than they would if it killed nobody, they could not have arranged for that to happen.Even assuming that 70,000 people could have been evacuated from the city in a couple hours without there being any panic (and possibly deaths due to that), the simple, unfortunate fact is it was impossible to know that there was going to soon be another, larger earthquake. I assume the calculation of those in charge was that it was likely that an evacuation would have achieved nothing other than causing huge amounts of ill-feeling, and probably worse than that if there had been deaths during the process. Moving a few civil defence functionaries from one building to another is an entirely different matter. Has anybody asked how often that has been done in the past?In any case, where exactly were those 70,000 people supposed to go in the middle of the night? Or do those who suggest this should have happened also believe that the PC should have set up and manned their blue tent cities long before the earthquake? And of course an evacuation would not have involved just 70,000 people of all ages and all degrees of mobility, it would have been 70,000 people desperate to bring along their pets, their cars and absolutely everything in their house which they considered to have significant monetary or sentimental value.What I'd still like to know is why so many people were living in buildings that collapsed during what was, in global terms, only a middling sort of earthquake. I seem to recall hearing something about how all inhabited buildings in Italy are supposed to meet some sort of seismic standard. As well as the question of how it was possible for very modern buildings to suffer major damage or collapse, how was it possible that people were living in ancient houses that apparently had not had seismic work carried out and so collapsed into a heap of stone and tiles when shaken about a bit for 30 seconds?If I knew when I bought it that this house had not had seismic strengthening work done on it but I chose to buy it and live here in spite of that and it then suffered major damage during the earthquake, the difficult fact to face is that I would be mainly responsible for any harm suffered by myself or my family. That would be a hard burden to bear and I'd be less than human if I didn't look around for someone else to share the blame.I think it would be an entirely different story if the work had supposedly been done and signed off by someone from the comune, but the house then collapsed in a heap in a minor tremor.If people are looking for officials to hang out to dry after the L'Aquila earthquake, it seems to me that it should be any architects, engineers, builders and inspectors who said everything was up to standard on a building when events proved that was just not so. As far as the disaster response folk are concerned, I think it's valid to press them to make sure they learn lessons on how to respond better next time (and there inevitably will be a next time), but it seems to me unreasonable to be wise after the event and blame them for not having psychic powers which would have allowed them to predict the earthquake, its severity and how it would affect many buildings which were supposedly up to standard.Al(Editted to sort out the paragraph spacing which someone here has changed. It would be nice if this site worked somewhat similar to the rest of the internet.)
latoca said: "The good news is that salt is cheaper and better than in theUK!" (So where's the quote feature in this marvelous new set up?) I am intrigued by the idea that the sodium chloride (NaCl) sold in Italy is somehow tastier or better quality than the NaCl sold in Britian. (Brings to mind someone who once told me with utter conviction that Italian gold is much better than British gold. But I think she meant Italian jewellery design is better than British jewellery.) Al
Since I'm being blocked from editting my earlier comment for some reason (What's my name again? Sally?), I'll waste everyone's time by saying that the last sentence in my previous was supposed to go: "...we tend to come back from visits to northern Europe with boxes of things which I suspect many of our neighbours would consider outlandish if not obviously completely inedible since their mother never used the stuff in her cooking." Leaving out the "never" makes the comment even more silly than some will doubtless already consider it to be. Al
Yes, the range of herbs and spices is limited in Italian shops. You may well decide to go "all out Italian", and more power to you if you stick to it and enjoy it. It's certainly the course of least resistance when living in Italy. But I think many of us expats with a more cosmopolitan experience of eating than most Italians (some of whom consider sausage made in the next village along the road to be barbarous foreign food) tend to find constant Italian food a little monotonous after a while. While there are those who have gone completely native and apparently believe that nobody living in Italy should be allowed to eat a single meal which does not contain some tomatoes, basil and an Italian cheese of some sort, in this house Italian food takes it's place along with Indian, Indonesian, Mexican, Chinese and British dishes, and we refuse to feel guilty about being non-provincial. Finding the ingredients for that sort of cooking isn't always easy, so we tend to come back from visits to northern Europe with boxes of things which I suspect many of our neighbours would consider outlandish if not obviously completely inedible since their mother used the stuff in her cooking. Al
We've never had any problem finding salt in a supermarket. It's generally around the spices. Perhaps you're looking a bit too high on the shelves. In my experience, most supermarkets have a large stack of kilo boxes of the stuff (in fine and coarse varieties) on a pallet on the floor. I assume it's sold in large quantites because so many families use a lot of the stuff for their home-preserving. Al
Surely not! That would be contrary to all the stereotypes of easy-going Italians! But of course there are feuds. The nastiness of politics at Westminster, Rome or Washington DC is nothing compared to the viciousness of politics in a village, whatever country it happens to be in. In such places, it's all very personal and no slight is ever forgotten, basically because there's not much else going on! The problems we've had with "our" farmer have been minimal niggles, really: The combine harvester contractor he brought in last year chopped off the top of an olive sapling and he ran over our artichokes earlier in the summer when he was mowing the field for hay. I'm sure that, from his perspective, we were to blame for both those things since the olive tree was largely obscured by tall grass growing around it, as were the artichokes. If we were proper Italian farmers, he would have been able to see the tree and artichokes because we would have been out there sweating away making sure that the grass around the sapling was kept short and the soil around the artichokes kept cultivated. Unfortunately, our priorities lie elsewhere (although I'll allow that it might be that we're just lazy -- we certainly are when compared to your average Italian farmer, one of whom was clanking away somewhere near here on his tractor last night until after 2 am). This year, prior to harvest we made sure that all the olive and cypress saplings planted along the boundary of the field with wheat were conspicuous by tying a couple meters of that red and white stripped plastic tape around each one. It looked a bit funny, actually. While we haven't spoken to him about it, hopefully he realised that we did it to be amusing as well as for practical reasons. The other, more serious, issue is that he allows flocks of sheep to come on the land after harvest. The sheep themselves are not a problem, but the dogs that accompany them are. Both last year and this, the dogs suddenly appeared wandering around outside the house, even though the shepherds are supposed to not allow that. Given that this particular lot has a bad reputation due to having killed a dog which belonged to a farm adjacent to an area they were grazing last year and given that we have a dog of our own, several cats and a young child who we want to be able to play outside unsupervised in a few years, we're not happy about this arrangement. The contract I inherited from the previous owner is due to expire next year. Whether he continues or another farmer takes on the land, we're going to specifically prohibit any sheep other than his small flock on the land in future. While there have been little annoyances, our relationship with the farmer and his family is generally extremely good. He always uses his tractor to clear our driveway of snow as soon as that's possible and he responds very quickly to our requests, some of which I'm sure he finds very odd. For example, we mentioned in passing to another friend in the village the day before yesterday that we'd like to get one of those rolls of straw to use as a mulch over potatoes next year. This morning, our farmer appeared with a roll of straw on his tractor. You also asked about dust and pesticides. Dust is always a problem in Italy at this time of year, no matter where you are. We haven't found that it's a huge problem specifically due to the farmer working the land, but then it has to be said that we're not the type to get worked up over a car that looks less than pristine, windows that aren't perfectly clean or furniture with a bit of dust on it. Obviously, ploughing dry earth, harvesting grain and baling straw all create some dust. Whether it's a big problem depends on which way the wind happens to be blowing and your attitude, I guess. Pesticides are definitely not a problem, since our farmer just doesn't use them. In fact, his sort of farming is very low input and he doesn't even use much in the way of fertiliser. I'm not sure if that's a common approach for small farmers in Abruzzo, if that's just because our farmer does it only part time (he considers himself mainly a builder) or if it's because he doesn't have to worry about getting a big return from the crop because he's paying us so little for use of the land (the huge sum of €300 a year for about 6 hectares of arable land). I suspect that in places like Emilia-Romagna where agriculture is as much big business as it is in the south of England, there's probably very good reason to be concerned about pesticide and fungicide drift. Al
Comments posted
My understanding is that it used to be the case in Italy that traffic on a roundabout always had to give way to traffic entering it.However, the law now is that traffic on the roundabout has right of way and traffic entering it must yield.In other words, the rule was changed from something akin to the absurd system that used to be in place in France where traffic on a high-speed inter-city route had to yield to a tractor coming on to the road at a junction with a farm track on the right, to something more in line with the law in Britain.The complicating factors are that, first, a lot of Italians still on the road learned to drive when the law was different and so some still seem to believe that they should be allowed to enter a roundabout without pause. Second, some roundabouts have road markings which mean traffic on the roundabout must yield to that entering. Third, road markings in Italy often wear thin to the point of invisibility before they're repainted. And fourth, some Italians don't pay much attention to road markings, signs or other cars on the road.Al
But, having read your post for the fifth time or so, I finally realised what was making me think that you were giving daft advice that would make people unnecessarily concerned about the state of their electrics.You said:"Look for the test button on the salva vita and press it. The power should automatically go off.If this is the case then close all the circuit breakers and turn the salva vita back on, then reinstate the circuit breakers one at a time.If the power does not automatically turn off then the unit is faulty and should be replaced by a competent registered electrician."I read this as you saying that the ELCB should trip when the circuit breakers were turned on again. I now see that what you mean is that if the ELCB did not trip when the Test button was pushed, then the unit is faulty and needs to be replaced.If you had placed the second sentence above immediately after your instructions to press the Test button on the ELCB, I would have had no issues with your post.However, the comment about how the ELCB should trip immediately follows directions to turn on the circuit-breakers. Therefore it could be read as applying to that instruction.My point about the definition of "close" stands. Your directions in the first sentence above are that the circuit breaker should be turned on and then turned on. Any English dictionary will tell you that a switch is "open" when it is Off and "closed" when it is On. Clearly, to "reinstate" a switch which is normally On, one turns it On.In any case, using "open" and "closed" when talking about switches is semi-jargon. If you want to use non-technical language, far better to use "On" and "Off" when talking to laypeople: those are the labels on the switch and so unambiguous. However, if you are going to talk about a switch being "closed", at least apply that term to the correct state.Al
Sparky, you say:"Look for the test button on the salva vita and press it. The power should automatically go off."Fine. No problem. That's what the test button on an Earth Leakage Circuit Breaker is for and that's exactly what should happen."If this is the case then close all the circuit breakers and turn the salva vita back on, then reinstate the circuit breakers one at a time.If the power does not automatically turn off then the unit is faulty and should be replaced by a competent registered electrician."Say what?First, in the context of electrical stuff in English, "to close" means "to switch 'On'". (That's because what happens inside the switch is that the contacts "close" or come into contact with each other.)Therefore, what you seem to be saying is that you should switch all the normal circuit breakers On and then "reinstate" -- or switch them On -- again. Which is clearly nonsense.Therefore, what you must mean is that you're supposed to switch the normal circuit breakers OFF while the ELCB is tripped (in an Off state), then turn the normal circuit breakers ON one by one.However, you then assert that the ELCB is supposed to trip each time a circuit breaker is switched On. You go on to say that, if the ELCB does not trip, it is faulty and a registered electrician needs to be called in to replace it.I'm not a qualified electrician, but this makes absolutely no sense to me.Why should the ELCB trip (i.e. detect a fault) when current is applied to it? Surely, if the ELCB trips in this situation, it means exactly what it means every other time this happens: that the current on the Live and Neutral lines is not in balance. In other words, that there is a fault in the electrical system downstream from the ELCB.In our house, there are three circuit breaker boxes, each with an ELCB and normal circuit breakers. None of them are older than five years. One is less than two years old (I know because I installed it – it’s not brain surgery, it’s a matter of switching off at the meter, disconnecting two wires from the old, suspect, ELCB, putting them in a new ELCB, screwing down the contacts and sticking it back in the box).None of the ELCBs work as you say they should.Are you seriously suggesting that, even though the Test button works as it should on each of the ELCBs and they trip at the slightest provocation (like a lamp blowing when switched on) the fact that they don't trip when power is first applied to the circuit means the ELCBs in this house have suffered a 100% failure rate and they all need to be replaced by an electrician like you?AlPS: Are we ever going to get a proper "quote" function here like they have on real internet forums?
Cilla10 mentioned bringing low sodium salt substitute to Italy.We have seen this in a few supermarkets, again generally near the spices, vinegar and oil.It comes in smaller containers than the normal 1kg box and will be called something like sale dietetico.The 400g container I'm looking at says each 100g of contents contains 24.9g potassium, 13.5g sodium, 1.1g magnesium and 0.6g calcium.It has been some time since we bought it, so I can't say how much it cost. Recollection is that it was a bit pricey, but then I recall the same applied to salt substitute in Britain.Al
What possible malicious motivation could make The Powers That Be tell people to go back to bed when they knew there was going to be a big earthquake in a few hours? Even if you buy into the lazily cynical view that politicians all over the world are all corrupt and self-serving, what do they possibly gain by having a few hundred people killed in an earthquake? Even if you think that every Italian politician is wilfully wicked and insatiably greedy, what do they gain by doing this?One thing the Internet is wonderful at is enabling the propagation of conspiracy theories. And, frankly, this all sounds to me rather similar to the stories going around after 9/11 that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers. This, too, was supposedly a "fact" that powerful people and agencies worked tirelessly to conceal.People will always want to understand why something happened. That's human nature. The need to understand and place blame becomes even more pressing when one has lost a family member or a house.Unfortunately, the simple fact is that nobody can predict earthquakes. Even if Italian politicians were evil enough to figure out a way to profit more if an earthquake killed 500 people than they would if it killed nobody, they could not have arranged for that to happen.Even assuming that 70,000 people could have been evacuated from the city in a couple hours without there being any panic (and possibly deaths due to that), the simple, unfortunate fact is it was impossible to know that there was going to soon be another, larger earthquake. I assume the calculation of those in charge was that it was likely that an evacuation would have achieved nothing other than causing huge amounts of ill-feeling, and probably worse than that if there had been deaths during the process. Moving a few civil defence functionaries from one building to another is an entirely different matter. Has anybody asked how often that has been done in the past?In any case, where exactly were those 70,000 people supposed to go in the middle of the night? Or do those who suggest this should have happened also believe that the PC should have set up and manned their blue tent cities long before the earthquake? And of course an evacuation would not have involved just 70,000 people of all ages and all degrees of mobility, it would have been 70,000 people desperate to bring along their pets, their cars and absolutely everything in their house which they considered to have significant monetary or sentimental value.What I'd still like to know is why so many people were living in buildings that collapsed during what was, in global terms, only a middling sort of earthquake. I seem to recall hearing something about how all inhabited buildings in Italy are supposed to meet some sort of seismic standard. As well as the question of how it was possible for very modern buildings to suffer major damage or collapse, how was it possible that people were living in ancient houses that apparently had not had seismic work carried out and so collapsed into a heap of stone and tiles when shaken about a bit for 30 seconds?If I knew when I bought it that this house had not had seismic strengthening work done on it but I chose to buy it and live here in spite of that and it then suffered major damage during the earthquake, the difficult fact to face is that I would be mainly responsible for any harm suffered by myself or my family. That would be a hard burden to bear and I'd be less than human if I didn't look around for someone else to share the blame.I think it would be an entirely different story if the work had supposedly been done and signed off by someone from the comune, but the house then collapsed in a heap in a minor tremor.If people are looking for officials to hang out to dry after the L'Aquila earthquake, it seems to me that it should be any architects, engineers, builders and inspectors who said everything was up to standard on a building when events proved that was just not so. As far as the disaster response folk are concerned, I think it's valid to press them to make sure they learn lessons on how to respond better next time (and there inevitably will be a next time), but it seems to me unreasonable to be wise after the event and blame them for not having psychic powers which would have allowed them to predict the earthquake, its severity and how it would affect many buildings which were supposedly up to standard.Al(Editted to sort out the paragraph spacing which someone here has changed. It would be nice if this site worked somewhat similar to the rest of the internet.)
latoca said: "The good news is that salt is cheaper and better than in theUK!" (So where's the quote feature in this marvelous new set up?) I am intrigued by the idea that the sodium chloride (NaCl) sold in Italy is somehow tastier or better quality than the NaCl sold in Britian. (Brings to mind someone who once told me with utter conviction that Italian gold is much better than British gold. But I think she meant Italian jewellery design is better than British jewellery.) Al
Since I'm being blocked from editting my earlier comment for some reason (What's my name again? Sally?), I'll waste everyone's time by saying that the last sentence in my previous was supposed to go: "...we tend to come back from visits to northern Europe with boxes of things which I suspect many of our neighbours would consider outlandish if not obviously completely inedible since their mother never used the stuff in her cooking." Leaving out the "never" makes the comment even more silly than some will doubtless already consider it to be. Al
Yes, the range of herbs and spices is limited in Italian shops. You may well decide to go "all out Italian", and more power to you if you stick to it and enjoy it. It's certainly the course of least resistance when living in Italy. But I think many of us expats with a more cosmopolitan experience of eating than most Italians (some of whom consider sausage made in the next village along the road to be barbarous foreign food) tend to find constant Italian food a little monotonous after a while. While there are those who have gone completely native and apparently believe that nobody living in Italy should be allowed to eat a single meal which does not contain some tomatoes, basil and an Italian cheese of some sort, in this house Italian food takes it's place along with Indian, Indonesian, Mexican, Chinese and British dishes, and we refuse to feel guilty about being non-provincial. Finding the ingredients for that sort of cooking isn't always easy, so we tend to come back from visits to northern Europe with boxes of things which I suspect many of our neighbours would consider outlandish if not obviously completely inedible since their mother used the stuff in her cooking. Al
We've never had any problem finding salt in a supermarket. It's generally around the spices. Perhaps you're looking a bit too high on the shelves. In my experience, most supermarkets have a large stack of kilo boxes of the stuff (in fine and coarse varieties) on a pallet on the floor. I assume it's sold in large quantites because so many families use a lot of the stuff for their home-preserving. Al
Surely not! That would be contrary to all the stereotypes of easy-going Italians! But of course there are feuds. The nastiness of politics at Westminster, Rome or Washington DC is nothing compared to the viciousness of politics in a village, whatever country it happens to be in. In such places, it's all very personal and no slight is ever forgotten, basically because there's not much else going on! The problems we've had with "our" farmer have been minimal niggles, really: The combine harvester contractor he brought in last year chopped off the top of an olive sapling and he ran over our artichokes earlier in the summer when he was mowing the field for hay. I'm sure that, from his perspective, we were to blame for both those things since the olive tree was largely obscured by tall grass growing around it, as were the artichokes. If we were proper Italian farmers, he would have been able to see the tree and artichokes because we would have been out there sweating away making sure that the grass around the sapling was kept short and the soil around the artichokes kept cultivated. Unfortunately, our priorities lie elsewhere (although I'll allow that it might be that we're just lazy -- we certainly are when compared to your average Italian farmer, one of whom was clanking away somewhere near here on his tractor last night until after 2 am). This year, prior to harvest we made sure that all the olive and cypress saplings planted along the boundary of the field with wheat were conspicuous by tying a couple meters of that red and white stripped plastic tape around each one. It looked a bit funny, actually. While we haven't spoken to him about it, hopefully he realised that we did it to be amusing as well as for practical reasons. The other, more serious, issue is that he allows flocks of sheep to come on the land after harvest. The sheep themselves are not a problem, but the dogs that accompany them are. Both last year and this, the dogs suddenly appeared wandering around outside the house, even though the shepherds are supposed to not allow that. Given that this particular lot has a bad reputation due to having killed a dog which belonged to a farm adjacent to an area they were grazing last year and given that we have a dog of our own, several cats and a young child who we want to be able to play outside unsupervised in a few years, we're not happy about this arrangement. The contract I inherited from the previous owner is due to expire next year. Whether he continues or another farmer takes on the land, we're going to specifically prohibit any sheep other than his small flock on the land in future. While there have been little annoyances, our relationship with the farmer and his family is generally extremely good. He always uses his tractor to clear our driveway of snow as soon as that's possible and he responds very quickly to our requests, some of which I'm sure he finds very odd. For example, we mentioned in passing to another friend in the village the day before yesterday that we'd like to get one of those rolls of straw to use as a mulch over potatoes next year. This morning, our farmer appeared with a roll of straw on his tractor. You also asked about dust and pesticides. Dust is always a problem in Italy at this time of year, no matter where you are. We haven't found that it's a huge problem specifically due to the farmer working the land, but then it has to be said that we're not the type to get worked up over a car that looks less than pristine, windows that aren't perfectly clean or furniture with a bit of dust on it. Obviously, ploughing dry earth, harvesting grain and baling straw all create some dust. Whether it's a big problem depends on which way the wind happens to be blowing and your attitude, I guess. Pesticides are definitely not a problem, since our farmer just doesn't use them. In fact, his sort of farming is very low input and he doesn't even use much in the way of fertiliser. I'm not sure if that's a common approach for small farmers in Abruzzo, if that's just because our farmer does it only part time (he considers himself mainly a builder) or if it's because he doesn't have to worry about getting a big return from the crop because he's paying us so little for use of the land (the huge sum of €300 a year for about 6 hectares of arable land). I suspect that in places like Emilia-Romagna where agriculture is as much big business as it is in the south of England, there's probably very good reason to be concerned about pesticide and fungicide drift. Al