It's also one of these great Italian recipes which has no 'right' or 'wrong' recipe. The two staple ingredients are tomatoes and Cannellini beans – but aside from those, you can pretty much ring the changes to suite your taste. This is what you'll need:

– a 400g tin of Cannellini beans
– a 400g of chopped tomatoes (ideally, Italian)
– 1 or 2 cloves of garlic – a dried hot red chilli pepper
– 500ml vegetable or chicken stock. A good quality cube is fine
– a small red onion
– 50g dry weight of pasta
– pinch of sugar
– 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
– olive oil
– one or two parmesan rinds

Before cooking starts, let's make it clear that you can of course use dried Cannellini beans, (which you've pre-soaked) and fresh tomatoes, (which you've skinned and seeded). Personally, for the sake of speed and convenience, I'd rather use good quality tinned beans and tomatoes. And if you've used tinned Italian tomatoes, the taste will be delicious. Your call basically.

Here's what you do:
Warm a tablespoon or two of oil in a large saucepan. To this add the chopped red onion; the peeled and chopped garlic; and as much chopped chilli pepper to suit your taste. Cook gently over a medium heat until the onion's softened, but don't allow this, or the garlic, to go brown.

Drain and rinse the tinned Cannellini beans and add these. Let them to warm through for a few minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes; the stock; a pinch of sugar; and the red wine vinegar.

At this point, you can – if you like – blitz the soup for a few seconds with a hand blender to give a slightly thicker texture. Your choice.

Reduce the heat to its lowest setting and gently simmer the soup for 20 minutes. Don't add salt yet as it can toughen the Cannellini beans.

If you have them, now add one or two old rinds of Parmesan cheese. Save these in a plastic bag in the freezer when you've grated-off all the usable cheese. They enrichen and make a fantastic addition to most Italian soups. (And you don't need to defrost them before using).

While the soup's simmering away, cook the 50 grams of pasta. You can buy pasta specially-made to go into soups, but I find it it easier to simply break-up a few lengths of spaghetti or linguine into inch-long pieces. Cook these in a separate pan. If you try and cook them in the soup, you'll end up with a stodgy, starchy result. When the pasta's cooked, drain it, and add it to the soup.

An especially good extra ingredient – if you can get your hands on them – are proper Italian sausages. These are made from 100% meat, unlike English sausage which have a proportion of rusk added. My Italian favorites are sausages from Puglia, which are small – about 2 inches – and have fennel seeds added to the meat, which gives a gorgeous sweet, slightly aniseed taste to the sausage. Just brown the sausages in a frying pan and then add them to the soup for the last 10 minutes or so of cooking time. Again, this will enrich the final result and add another delicious layer of flavour.

When the soup's ready, add salt/pepper to your taste; remove and discard the Parmesan cheese rinds. Ladle the soup into bowls, add a sausage or two if you're using them, and drizzle a little of your very best olive oil over the soup.

As an alternative to sausage – and to make this soup even heartier – just before serving, toast a slice of country bread. Rub this with garlic; drizzle it with oil; put a slice in each person's bowl and ladle the soup over.

Some grated Parmesan; good bread and red wine are the only other accompaniments you'll need. This recipe will serve two people as a main meal – or four as a starter. Enjoy !

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La Bottega dei Miracoli. Piazza Garibaldi 14, Sulmona. 0864 212055
Sulmona is a lovely old town a couple of hours to the south-west of us, reached by a drive through some of Abruzzo's most spectacular scenery. La Bottega's a great place for a lazy summer lunch, sitting outside under a big shady umbrella with great views out onto the Piazza Garibaldi and Sulmona's encircling mountains. It's one of the very nicest places we know where to eat outdoors. Service is friendly; pasta and meat dishes a distinct cut-above regular trattoria fare; and prices reasonable. About €55

Villa Maiella. Via Sette Dolore, Guardiagrele. 0871 809319. Closed Monday. Must book
This is where you go locally for that special meal – especially for lunch in summer, when you can sit outside on their lovely shady terrace with views of the Majella National Park. Rather elegant and smart – but friendly too, as you're greeted with a glass of Prosecco on the house. The food here is a modern take on traditional Abruzzo cooking – and delicious. The lamb prepared in five different ways was to die for. Wine list has some stratospheric prices – but many good, fairly-priced bottles too. About €90

La Lumaca. Via delle Caserme 51, Pescara. 085 451 0880. Closed Sunday
'La Lumaca' means 'the snail' – a good name for a restaurant that's a member of Italy's renowned 'Slow Food' movement, formed in the mid-1980's as a reaction to the ever-growing trend for 'fast food'. Smart interior; food good – esp the cheese-tasting platter – and a really entertaining setting, in the last surviving fragment of Pescara's old town, which positively hums each evening. About €70

Locanda La Quercia. Via Quercia del Santissimi 16, Piane d'Arche. 0872 898468. Closed Tuesday
One of the better local agriturismi, with the tried-and-trusted agri fare of plentiful antipasti; good pasta; and char-grilled meat. As with all agriturismi, everything you eat will be home-produced. In winter, sit by a huge fire in the 'old' part of the restaurant, drink rough red wine and just enjoy the experience. About €40

Dal Ghiottone. Via Passo Lanciano, Piane d'Arche. 0872 896430
How can you fail to love a place to eat called 'The Glutton' ! Just about half-a-mile away from La Quercia, reached across a disused railway line and housed in a former church, this is what every Italian pizzeria should be like. Buzzy atmosphere; checked table-cloths; and a wood-fired oven in a corner of the restaurant turning out the best pizzas in our immediate area. Very good pasta too, should you ever want a change. And have an order of Olive Ascolane to nibble while you choose from the 30-odd pizzas on offer. Exceptional value as well. About €30

Five more recommended Abruzzo restaurants coming soon…

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A summer-long drought had resulted in trees dotted with under-sized olives. And though welcome October rains had caused these to swell a little, the gloomy predictions were that the quantity of this year's harvest would be down; and the quality variable.

Then harvesting our trees became problem-ridden. Within five minutes of starting, the large compressed-air 'hands' that strip the olives from the branches and onto nets spread under the trees had broken.

The rest of the morning was a catalogue of frustration as Rocco and I drove off to get a new part; came back and found we couldn't fit it; which then necessitated yet another hour-long round trip back to find someone who could. Which we did. Eventually.

Having started at 8.00, we should've been finished and rewarding ourselves with a well-earned beer by about noon. As it was, by noon we'd cleared precisely one tree.

We finished a little after three. "Hmmm," said Rocco, surveying eight boxes full of our olives, "these look quite good."
"How much d'you think we've got ?" I asked.
"Hmm. 150-160 kilos ?' he guessed. Ever the optimist.

In fact, our crop weighed-in at 123 kilos. And these yielded 15 litres of oil. So basically, despite all the predictions of doom'n'gloom, pretty much the same as last year.

The oil's a little lighter this time – a glorious light golden colour. And as for the taste ? Pauline and I dunked crusty local bread into this golden puddle and slurped it greedily.

Organic. Unfiltered. And traditionally-made, crushing the olives between two huge granite wheels. It doesn't wring the last tiniest drop of oil from each olive as more modern production methods do. But it tastes much, much better.

I know we're biased, but it really and truly is utterly, utterly delicious.

And it's undeniably satisfying that this is our very own oil from our very own trees, with the entire production process from tree to olive mill and back again all taking place within less than a mile of our Abruzzo home.

Best of all, as last year, this'll be the 'house oil' we supply to all our villa guests.

Incidentally, if you'd like to see how it's all done – take a look at the video I shot last year. Nothing's changed !

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The olive groves, fields and woods around us are home to a small number of cats and back in June, one of these decided that the shrubs outside our kitchen window would be the ideal spot to raise her new litter of three kittens.

They were a sorry little quartet. The mother wasn't much more than a kitten herself. Tiny and in poor condition, very thin; her coat dull and matted; and clearly struggling with the demands placed on her by three kittens who were also not in perfect health.

So we started feeding her – we couldn't not – and that helped her considerably – and her kittens too. But while they were safe enough when still tiny and never straying too far from her, as they got older and grew, they became stronger and more adventurous.

But with this new-found mobility and a kitten's insatiable curiosity, the dangers to them increased. One by one, they simply weren't there anymore.

The little cat would call for her kittens and try to find them. We didn't see her for three or four days after the last of them disappeared. Then one morning she was there again in the usual place we left her food and water. And she's still here. Now sleek, glossy and black. And just a little less wild.

At first, she'd hiss at you and run away if you approached her; waiting until she was sure you'd gone back into the house before she'd risk returning to eat her food.

Eventually, for the sake of convenience, we started to feed her right outside the house, finding a secluded spot for her among the potted plants around our front door.

Every morning now, she's there, sitting on a large stone waiting for her breakfast.

She doesn't run away from us anymore – but neither does she let us get too near. Get inside her comfort zone of about a meter and she'll edge away.

She'll never be a cat you can pick up and stroke – but she's discovered she has a voice. Initially she was virtually silent; now she's quite chatty.

But you have to accept that dealing with a feral cat is always going to be pretty much a one-way relationship. You give. They take. One day, like her kittens, she too might simply not be there anymore.

It's been easy enough to administer some basic care by grinding up worming tablets and mixing these in with her food. But there's a reluctance on our part to interfere too much.

Because she'll never be a 'house cat', we'll never be able to assume the responsibility for her total well-being as we do with our own cats.

I don't think she'll ever lose her wariness of us. And I don't think we'd want her to either. We'd rather she kept the feral cat survival instincts that have served her well so far through her short life.

So our part of the deal is to feed her, (but we know she still hunts); and now the colder, wetter weather's arrived, we've fixed up somewhere under cover for her to sleep; and if she ever got too ill to look after herself, we'd find a way of capturing her and having her treated.

Her part of the deal is letting us do this.

And because she's now our 'outdoor cat'; and because we couldn't go on referring to her as "she"; or "it"; or "the little cat", she now has a name.

Shadow.

It suits her.

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So far this year at Villasfor2, we've had one visitor we really could have done without. A wild boar who decided that our Abruzzo garden – and our neighbour's vegetable patch – were ideal ports of call on its nightly piggy perambulations.

The olive leaves – a by-product of the autumn's olive harvest – we use to thickly mulch our shrubs and roses had been deeply furrowed by the boar's snout as it rooted around for tasty grubs and worms.

Though this was vexing enough to see and time-consuming enough to make good, aside from a couple of snapped-off branches, there was no lasting damage done.

Our neighbour wasn't so lucky. His potato crop disappeared and a patch of wheat became progressively levelled as the boar returned on each of the next four nights.

It's currently outside the hunting season, so taking a pot-shot at piggy wasn't an option, though the local farmers – many of whom reported damage to crops and orchards – argued the toss as to what would happen if a shot fired to scare the porker away instead were to kill it.

The kind of hypothetical discussion point that Italians love nearly as much as football.

My neighbor shrugged stoically as each morning he arrived to survey the night's damage. Boars will be boars, seemed to be the attitude.

I decided to be a little more proactively persuasive in pursuit of repelling this unwelcome porcine attention.

I bought a cheap radio which as dusk fell, I tuned into the worst Europop station I could find, turned the volume to maximum and hung in a tree.

I then illuminated the most-favoured rooting area of our garden with a 500 watt spotlight.

Averting my eyes from the dazzling glare and trying to ignore the awful music carried on the night breeze, I assured our guests that this was pig prevention on a new and innovative scale, rather than some bizarre Abruzzo son e lumiere display.

And guess what ? It worked ! The next morning, not so much as a blade of grass had been touched.

Piggy decided that a floodlit dinner with musical accompaniment wasn't for him (or her) and didn't come back. And with nothing now left worth eating in next door's veg patch, it seems to have left our area.

But I'm still nervously eyeing the sweetcorn crop in our own veggie patch as I'm told that this is the all-time wild boar number one favorite snack product.

It might yet be a race to see who gets to eat it first – him or us.

Incidentally, the picture illustrating this blog is of a wild boar. Not the wild boar. They all look pretty much the same and I knew you wouldn't mind…

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It was nice to see the swimming pool emerge all blue and reasonably pristine from its seven month hibernation under cover.

It's one of life's mysteries as to how come, when the thing's sealed up tighter than a drum, leaves manage to work their way under the cover and into the pool. But they do and have to be tiresomely fished-out before the summer setting-up process begins.

Not that this is especially arduous. A quick scrub of the coping stones to restore them to whiter-than-whiteness; a run-round the top of the pool liner with a sponge; and tipping-in 200 kilos of salt.

Two hundred kilos of salt ? Yes. Our pool uses a saltwater – as opposed to a chlorine-based – purification system.

Why ? With a saltwater pool there are no toxic chemicals to buy, store, or handle; no stinging eyes; no nasty reactions with treated hair or sensitive skin; no horrible chlorine smell; and though a saltwater system's more expensive to install, it's then easier and cheaper to maintain.

That's why Pauline spent a productive afternoon opening 200 boxes of granular sea-salt we'd bought from the supermarket and emptying the contents into the pool.

Q: Isn't that a little…long-winded ? Why not buy salt in bulk ?

A: Strangely, it's nearly 80% cheaper to buy 200 little boxes from a supermarket than a few big bags from the pool company. Which gives you an idea of their mark-up.

Q: Didn't you get a few funny looks when you arrived at the check-out with 200 boxes of salt ?

A: Oddly enough – no. Italian check-out girls are way too cool.

So, the pool's clean and freshly-salted. Now it's all down to the weather. 80,000 litres of water gets a little chilly over winter and takes its own sweet time to warm-up again.

Predictably, after two weeks blazing sunshine, it started drizzling as soon as the cover came off, but another couple of weeks of slowly rising temperatures should do the trick in good time for your Abruzzo holiday.

Now we just need to remember where we stored the sunbeds…

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It was only when the builders were gone and tranquility had been restored to the olive groves and vineyards around our Abruzzo villas that we began to fully appreciate how rich the area was in wildlife.

We'd experienced the twinkling magic of the fireflies that appear on warm, still evenings in May; and the profusion of lightning-fast lizards, brilliant emerald green during the early summer mating season, fading to grey-brown by the time they start their autumn hibernation

We'd watched golden eagles, red kites and buzzards from the Majella National Park soaring effortlessly above us and been charmed by far tinier mountain birdlife – the Alpine Swifts that from June to August use our pool as their own personal watering hole at dawn and dusk each day.

But we hadn't been prepared for some of the rather closer encounters we've had.

Guests sitting in their villa one early summer evening happened to glance up and see a hare gazing through their door. Maybe the same one I snapped by our car.

Last summer, a litter of baby hares was successfully raised in our garden.

(We only discovered this by accident when we found one hiding under a pumpkin leaf !)

Luckily the leverets escaped the attention of a buzzard which decided to perch for a while on top of our pile of olive leaf mulch one morning.

Highly unusual behavior for a bird that normally only lands to catch something.

A new visitor over the winter has been a highly confident young fox.

In truth, he – or she – been a real nuisance at times, gnawing away at our pool cover and defying all efforts to discourage him.

Part of the problem is that Bruno, the big, white Abruzzo sheepdog who dog-sits one of our neighbour's farms when it's empty  – and who'd have seen off our foxy friend in a trice – has been away for the winter.

We're looking forward to his return !

We're also looking forward to the return of the spectacular butterflies to the buddleja which we've dotted around our acre of Abruzzo.

Better-known – and appropriately so – as the Butterfly Bush, their big purple flower racemes were a real butterfly magnet throughout last summer, attracting species like Swallowtails we'd never seen in England.

Add to all these, the dwarf Abruzzo Owls, who nest around us; a grey heron that solemnly paid us a visit a few weeks back; crickets who provide a sound-track to summer nights; and tiny, fat field mice who appreciate being left a couple of ears of corn in our veggie patch to nibble, the gardens round our Abruzzo villas are  fast becoming our own little nature reserve !

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Back in May, I wrote about our vegetable plot. Now, belatedly, it's time to run the rule over the orchard.

The Italian word for orchard is frutetto. Nicer I think. The frutetto is about 250 square meters and like the veggie plot – or orto – faces due south.

English varieties predominate. Are they suited to a central Italian climate ? Only one way to find out…

Apples
Italian apples look great and taste of nothing. Modern hybrids engineered to provide huge yields capable of sitting on a supermarket shelf for weeks on end.

I'm growing four English heritage varieties: Laxton's Epicure; Egremont Russet; Blenheim Orange; and Ribston's Pippin. The plan is that these'll provide a continuous supply of apples from August through until about March.

Have absolutely no idea how they'll all stand up to the rigors of an Abruzzo summer – but so far so good.

Greengage Early Transparent and Damson Farleigh
I've grown both before. Again, both are heritage varieties. The Gage is a lovely translucent yellow-green and tastes wonderful; the Damson's for turning into jam and crumbles.

Because I can be a ham-fisted idiot, I recently split the trunk of the Gage while spreading out its branches. So I've screwed it back together. Should work. I once Duck-taped a wind-split trunk on a Cercis Canadensis 'Forest Pansy' and that bonded together just fine.

Redcurrant Laxton's No1
Produced four currants in its first season this year ! Next year – summer puddings and jars of redcurrant jelly !

Figs
One named variety – Brown Turkey – plus five others growing away merrily from cuttings I took from unnamed trees growing outside the rental property where we spent our first 18 months in Italy while Villasfor2 was being built. These produced excellent black and green fruit. Pruning these as bushes rather than letting grow into unmanageable trees.

Grape Italia
A muscat type being trained using the splendidly-named 'Four-Arm Knipf' system. Should get a bunch or two in 2011.

Apricot Reale di Imola
Good crop of a about a dozen large fruit this year. Sensational taste and texture.

Yellow Peach Flavor Crest; White Peach Maria Delizia
The yellow peach, cloaked in a deep red velvet skin, is of unsurpassable sweetness and lusciousness. There are about 18 fast-ripening fruit which I should've thinned a bit more but, being greedy, didn't.

The white peach seems to be a white nectarine. Hmmm… Then again it suffered badly from Peach Leaf Curl this spring so maybe the fruit went bald. About six rock-hard little fruit stubbornly hang from its branches. We'll see what develops.

Rhubarb Timperley Early
Bit of a challenge this as the dormant crown promptly broke into three pieces as I unpacked it. Our soil is too heavy and claggy even for rhubarb, so it's spending its first summer in multi-purpose compost in a 12" pot. Took ages to get going, but  it's developing nicely and in the autumn I'll transfer it into an 18" pot with some good soil and hopefully it'll produce a few usable sticks next year.

The one fruit I'd like to grow in our Abruzzo garden, but won't even bother to try, are raspberries. It's just too hot. Everything else I wanted is here.

The peaches, apricot and grape were sourced from specialist fruit-growers local to us in Abruzzo; the Apples, Currant, Rhubarb, Gage and Damson were shipped from Deacons Nursery on the Isle of Wight in England, arriving in very good shape and happily spending most of the winter heeled-in in a big bucket of peat.

Next: The Flower Garden  

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Our life in Abruzzo is taking a tasty turn with a selection delicious crops growing in our Abruzzo vegetable garden !

A chunk – quite a large chunk – of our acre of Abruzzo is given over to the vegetable garden and the orchard.

Another chunk – quite a large chunk – of our life in Abruzzo is given over to looking after them.

Our Abruzzo vegetable garden – or orto, to give it its more succint and evocative Italian name, is about 100 square metres. It's on an open, unshaded slope facing due south and the soil is heavy clay.

I probably should've already done a soil test to discover the ph balance, but I haven't. Mea culpa.

The planning, which pleasurably occupied most of last summer when the plot was a weed-infested tangle, was to grow vegetables that a) we like to eat (obviously); and b) weren't readily available in our local shops.

Runner Beans. Variety: White Lady

We actually grew these last year. It took a while for Abruzzo bees to cotton-on to the fact that they were the key element in pollinating the flowers, but once they'd grasped this, we had the start of a promising crop. Then it was August and the heat turned all our beans into wood. A smaller crop in the comparative cool of September and October was delicious.

This year, I started early. The beans are already planted, twining up their poles and flowering and the plan is to get the crop over and done with by late July. When I'll already have planted the seeds for a second flush in the autumn.

Brussels Sprouts. Variety: Seven Hills

You can get imported Dutch sprouts, but they're not especially nice. This is a robust old-fashioned variety with a proper sprout taste. Love or hate. Pauline hates, so one plant will be more than enough. But I've put in two. Just in case…

Purple Sprouting Broccoli. Variety: Rudolph

Now of course this is a hugely popular autumn vegetable here, but what you see in the shops always looks…limp. Freshly picked just has to taste better. Gently steamed and finished with a drizzle of oil; a hint of garlic; and a fleck or two of dried chilli.

Celeriac. Variety: Diamant

I'd actually planted the seeds before realizing that celeriac was available throughout winter from our our local fruit'n'veg emporium. But I'm growing a few anyway – just to see if I can.

Sweet Corn. Variety: Indian Summer

This is an award-winning American variety with multicolored cobs and a wonderful sweetness, which is accentuated by cooking it on the barbecue or a cast-iron griddle. My twenty plants should provide 20-30 cobs – plenty for eating fresh and freezing.

Potato. Variety: Maris Piper

Italian spuds are terrific. Sweet and flavorsome. They make good mash; bake well; and if you can find ones that are young enough and small enough, they boil nicely too. But they disintegrate if you try and make 'proper' roast potatoes. It was toss-up between Maris Piper and King Edward as the two very best traditional English maincrop spuds. The former's a bit more disease-resistant and my two small rows, which should yield about 15-20lbs, look encouragingly good so far.

Tomato. Varieties: Golden Cherry; Brandywine Red; Costoluto Fiorentino; and 'unknown'.

More than any other vegetable, the tomato is an Italian obsession. But with the exception of the Italian heritage 'beefsteak' variety Costoluto Fiorentino, my crop, however bountiful and however delicious, will be be treated with suspicion and disdain because it's a known fact here that only Italian tomatoes of the type grown since the dawn of time are worth the effort.

Golden Cherry is Japanese (I think) and the essential ingredient of our own 'house pasta' – try the recipe ! Brandywine is an American Amish heritage 'beefsteak' of great reputation. Have never tried it before. The 'unknown' tomato came from our friend Ruth last year – yes, from an Italian market – and was simply the very best I'd ever tasted. The few seeds I kept last autumn obligingly came up like mustard-and-cress this spring and have grown into vigorous, good-looking plants. But I hope they've come true…

Pumpkin. Variety: Potimarron

In the autumn you'll find huge chunks of appetising-looking pumpkin on sale everywhere. All I've tried so far have been watery, fibrous and tasteless. More in hope than anything else, I planted a few old seeds of the variety Sunshine last year and was rewarded with a dozen or so scrumptious fruit.

I'm trialling a French variety this year which allegedly has a sweeter, denser, nuttier flesh with hints of chestnut. (Hence the name Potimarron – an amalgam of potiron – pumpkin; and marron – chestnut). Three plants should provide another dozen fruit.

Melon. Variety: Charentais-type

Too early to say yet as the seedlings are still being nurtured. A demanding plant to grow, but like celeriac, trying it to see if I can…

Shallot. Variety: French 'long' type

Can you buy shallot sets here ? No. So these were supermarket-bought and the smaller ones planted out. Two rows of 10 have sat and sulked for three weeks with just one boasting a rather half-hearted green topknot. Failure could be looming here…

Parsnip. Variety: Guernsey Half Long

It came as something of a surprise to discover that Italians – or at least Abruzzese – regard most root veggies like parsnips as animal fodder. If you want parsnips – grow them yourself. Our clay soil is way too heavy and impenetrable for impressionable young roots, so I'm growing these in a big tub of multi-purpose compost and will sow the seeds just as soon as it brightens up a bit.

Into every life, a little rain must fall. Even life in Abruzzo…

I'm also toying with Swedes. (Now there's an image…)

But I rather think there's enough already happening in our Abruzzo vegetable garden for this year.

Next – news from the orchard…

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It's a trade-off. When it snows, it's scenic. But it doesn't do too much for the garden – especially when the apricot and peaches had been lulled into a sense of false security by temperatures in the mid-60s last week and started flowering.

And of course sod's law dictated that while snow flurries whirled merrily up the drive, the last-but-one consignment of mail-order plants arrived.

It's a strange thing with some Italian delivery drivers. Give them clear skies and warm sunshine and they'll find endless excuses for ignoring you. But the first flake of snow inspires a kind of mass Pony Express mentality that sees them battling through the elements to bring you a package that's been sitting in the back of their van for a week.

It snowed. Then the sun came out and melted it. Then it snowed again and the cycle's been going on like this for about a week, while I've been dashing out in the sunny intervals to finish off the garden.

The picture on the left was taken at about 7 in the morning. By noon, the snow had gone. Down at the bottom of the garden, the pool's still under wraps (and will remain so until the end of next month).

The trees in the foreground are a couple of our new magnolias, which in the summer have fragrant white flowers the size of dinner plates.

The garden's now about 90% finished and all it has to do now is grow. We'll finish the remaining 10% in the autumn.

Last job to be done now is to sow the grass seed, which'll be done sometime in April. Putting the cart before the horse, I've already bought the mower.

All the autumn and winter tree, shrub and rose plantings seem to have come safely through. But we've had one casualty.

Or rather two, because the bouganvilleas that grew outside Villa La Majelletta and our own front door decided that 1200 feet up was rather beyond their tolerance.

Faintly surprising, because just down the hill, bouganvilleas grow with exhuberance. And having planted them last spring – and had a wonderful display all last summer – we thought they'd come through what until now's been an exceptionally mild winter.

We're auditioning replacements.

Maybe I should head up into the Majella National Park and see what grows in the villages there.

On the left of the picture – is how the natural feature known as il anfiteatro – the amphitheatre – looked like from the top of our drive last weekend.

At the far right of the picture, peering over the top of neighbouring mountains, is the snow-capped summit of Monte Acquaviva – one of the three Majella National Park peaks after which we've named our our Abruzzo villas for two.

Snow cover on the heights of the Majella persists until late May/early June – but these are also the best months for mountain walking. Fantastic scenery and banks of alpine flowers.

ps. Sun's out again !

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