When we arrived in Umbria to live, we groped
our way right down from Turin through a dense yellow fog and from that day on
were forced to revise our expectations about the weather. The Umbria area of
Italy, possessing no coastline at all, has a continental climate of extremes.
Winter is winter. Summer is truly summer. Umbria is not the place for someone
who likes their whole year to pass in a blur of comfortable uniformity.
We had heard of fortunate ex-pats sunbathing on
their Umbrian terraces on Christmas day; this I am prepared to believe. Direct
sunlight in Umbria, while giving an extraordinary clarity to everything it
touches, is also extremely warm at any time of year. While it lasts. But every
other sort of weather is very fully represented in Umbria.
We live on a hill aptly named Windy Hill. There
are two prevailing winds. The ‘Tramontana’ from the North is a searingly fierce
cold wind; the traditional ‘lazy’ wind that blows through you rather than going
round you. The ‘Scirocco’ from the South is warm but just as unwelcome because
it usually brings rain, and since Italian houses are constructed in the belief
that it never rains and indeed that water does not really exist, the rain gets
in everywhere – under the doors, round the windows, through the basement walls.
And can it rain! Thunderstorms are frequent in
this mountainous area of Umbria. They can be heard approaching across the
valley, booming and echoing, attended by great fissures of light splitting the
darkness (they usually happen at night). These days we take the precaution of
unplugging the telephone and the laptop because once a bolt of lightning hit the
television aerial of our semi-detached neighbours, causing a noise that sounded
like every pane of glass in the house imploding, plunging us into darkness and
projecting a piece of our lamp switch and some vital innards of our phone
several feet into the air.
The best thing of all about the winter in
Umbria is the wonderfully uplifting sight of the snow on the mountains. I never
get tired of looking at its pure white creaminess. Cars come down from the
mountains to the snowless valleys with a coating of snow several inches thick.
But sometimes it snows lower down as well. In our first winter we were involved
in the construction of a snowman, which lasted until our golden retriever
knocked it down in his efforts to seize the carrot nose. Snow chains are
compulsory equipment on some roads in Umbria. Fortunately I’ve never yet had to
fit them in anger.
After the snow on the mountains, the most
visually rewarding weather phenomenon is mist. From our house, we have a view of
something like seven hundred square miles of valley, bordered at its furthest
side by mountain ranges and punctuated by minor hills and ridges. More often
than not we are above the level of the mist which lies in the vast concavity
like the waters of some mysterious Scottish loch, pricked here and there by
dreamy blue islands with the great shoulders of the high mountains rising
beyond.
But nothing beats the warm days, particularly
those of early summer before the appearance of the troublesome little flies
which supplement their staple diet of grape juice with human sweat. The summer
is when Italian houses come into their own with their terraces and balconies,
split levels and other subtle ways of blurring the boundaries between indoors
and out. No-one need try to get brown in Italy – it just happens.
My favourite place to be on a warm day in
Umbria would be the Piano Grande, a dried-up lake bed high in the Sybilline
Mountains where wild flowers carpet the meadows with every hue imaginable. I
have been there when the crickets were singing from the grass and the larks were
singing in the sky and the whole atmosphere seemed to be vibrating to some
ecstatic cosmic rhythm. These moments should be kept as antidotes –
breastplates, if you like – against the days when you think that you might as
well have stayed in a country that at least doesn’t claim not to be cold.