As it was, we’d driven up the quiet country road leading from San Domenico to the main Castel Frentano – Guardiagrele route in southern Abruzzo along which the 7th stage of the Giro d’Italia was due to pass; left the car about 40m from the road junction; and joined about a hundred other people standing around chatting and waiting for the big moment.

And this being Italy, where there’s either massive regimentation or none at all, the one seemingly ‘official’ steward in charge of this stretch of road was more concerned with ensuring that nobody got flattened by the big vans stuffed with Giro merchandise that screeched up every few minutes, rather than watching that everyone kept an orderly and respectful distance from the route.

The chance of seeing a couple of genuine Brit sports superstars like Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish had proved an irresistible lure for many of the local Abruzzo expats. The resulting oasis of Union Jacks was too-good-to-miss for the Sky photographer, who lined us up and snapped away at us flying the flags.

“Can’t promise to us these,” he warned, “but if I do, they’ll be on the Sky Cycling website.”

They weren’t. I ended-up on the cutting room floor. Again.

Like any big cycle race, the Giro d’Italia isn’t just about a bunch of blokes on bikes swishing by wearing startling pastel-coloured cycling kits. (Aside from the black-clad Team Sky, who look like a squad of hired assassins).

There are many sponsors and consequently many sponsors’ vehicles, all tricked out to look like wedges of cheese or bottles of wine.

This cavalcade screamed past, horns blaring, drivers and hordes of sales promotion girls all waving cheerily.

Then the official ‘Radio Giro’ mobile studio. More waves. More girls.

Then the local police, cars specially washed’n'waxed for the big day. Blue lights flashing, sirens at top volume. They crawled by, ostentatiously waving people back to the side of the road.

Dutifully, we all dropped back and then resumed out original positions as soon as they’d disappeared round the next corner.

Suddenly, the first bit of genuine excitement – the commentary car, announcing the imminent arrival of a breakaway group of six riders, with the main field about four minutes adrift.

We could see the TV helicopter hovering over the road about half-a-km away, edging towards us – and then a small gasp of excitement as the leading riders swept into view about a hundred metres away.

Surrounded by a little posse of TV and photo-camera motorbikes, they were past in a rainbow-coloured flash, to a ripple of polite applause.

And here was the main peloton ! Tried to coordinate waving the flag; taking photos; and cheering.

“GO BRAD!!” I boomed. “C’MON CAV!!”. But from the watching Italians came just another gentle waft of applause.

Now I can’t claim to be too well-up on cycling spectator etiquette, but having watched fans on TV reduced to gibbering excitement as some poor gasping bloke grinds his way up a vertical gradient on a mountain stage, I’d have expected…well…just a touch more vocal enthusiasm.

Not that my encouragement did much good though. Sir Bradley fell off his bike and Mark Cavendish decided this wasn’t the day to unleash one of his rocket-fuelled sprints and instead nipped into a bar for a swift pint and a packet of crisps.

Actually he didn’t. But he might’ve got more TV time if he had.

We went home and watched the end of the stage on TV. Which was nowhere near as exciting as being alongside the real thing.

Next year, I’m bringing an airhorn. That’ll get them going.

Unlike the golden eagles, buzzards and red kites that glide down from the Majella to patrol the skies above us in search of prey; or the amazingly agile Alpine Swifts that treat our swimming pool as their own private watering hole, the Hoopoe is a bird you might not see that often as it rummages around at ground level in search of food – but it’s one you can’t fail to hear.

The call is unmistakable. An oop oop oop that cuts through other bird chatter. I’ve actually struck up conversations with a Hoopoe, oop oop oop’ing back until it decides that I’m not up to its intellectual level; know nothing about worms or anything else remotely interesting and cuts the discussion short.

And aside from the call, there can’t be too many birds that are as instantly recognisable. About the size of a pigeon with a long, curved beak perfect for probing around for grubs and bugs; a front-half the colour of milky coffee and an incongruously zebra-striped rear end, the Hoopoe’s literal crowning glory is a wild, punky crest that’s flicked up-and-down like some manic birdy semaphore.

Rounding off this delightful package is the Hoopoe’s species name.

Upupa Epops.

Seriously, you’d need a heart of granite not to be charmed by anything called Upupa Epops – but especially a bird so endearing that if it didn’t already exist, Disney would have to invent it.

I could add that the Hoopoe is the National Bird of Israel; was considered sacred in Ancient Egypt; and – oddly – regarded as a harbinger of war and death in Scandinavia. Thank you Wikipedia.

In this corner of Abruzzo though, oop oop oop means nothing more profound than reminding you summer’s just around the corner.

Works for me…

Just appearing now are the first bunches of fat new season asparagus. And in tandem with this most blissful of treats come purple-and-green baby artichokes – carciofini – just a little bigger than a golfball and the key ingredient for my absolute favourite springtime treat.

Talking of which, there’s not much that can beat steamed asparagus piled onto thickly-buttered toast, topped with a poached egg and a few shavings of parmesan. But for me, an artichoke omelette wins hands-down.

With only two principal ingredients – a couple of eggs and about half-a-dozen carciofini – this is one of those rare and delicious dishes in which the taste of the end product far exceeds its sum of parts.

Start by preparing the artichokes. Trim the bases; cut off the top third; and pull-off and discard the outer few layer of leaves. Cut the artichokes in half and drop them into boiling water.

You’ll need to work quickly because artichokes start discolouring the instant they’re cut

Some of these carciofini might have a few inches of stalk still attached. If they’re about little finger thickness, peel them and use them too. They’re good. But if they’re bigger – bin them.

Simmer the artichokes for 10-15 minutes until tender, then drain and roughly chop them. The big deal here is that because they’re still small, young and dainty, they won’t have developed the tiresome hairy ‘choke’ that makes preparing (and eating) full-grown artichokes such a chore.

Now make an omelette. Whole blogs have been devoted (though not by me) to making an omelette. Books have been written on the subject. Don’t be inhibited. You can make an omelette. Yes you can. Lightly-beaten eggs. Pan. Butter. There – wasn’t that easy ?

One thing. Keep it loosely-set in the middle. What the French – who have a word for every culinary term in existence – call baveuse.

As your omelette starts to set, add the chopped artichokes and just a scant dessertspoon of finely-grated parmesan. Not too much. You want the hint of cheese lurking in the background rather than swamping the whole dish.

A pinch or two of salt and a grind or two of black pepper completes the process.

Gently fold the omelette out onto a hot plate and eat right away. Don’t bother with salads, spuds or other accompanying veggies that might get in the way of this taste experience. In truth, just a chunk of good, fresh, crusty bread is really all you need.

And probably a large glass of Abruzzo Cerasuolo – the blush pink wine made from Montepulciano grapes.

Instead of parmesan, you could try a few slivers of either Taleggio or Fontina cheese. And strike a happy balance with the amount of butter you use in your pan. Not so much that you end up with an oily mess; not so little that you don’t capture that luscious mouthful of buttery omelette, artichoke and cheese.

Best of all is that the season for these little treasures is so short, (perhaps reappearing briefly in the autumn if you’re really lucky), you don’t get the chance to become tired of them.

Even if you had an omelette every day. Which actually doesn’t seem such a bad idea…

If you can only get away for a few days this summer, our Abruzzo Holiday Bargain Offers could be just the answer – so if you’re looking for a quick Abruzzo holiday at a bargain price, you’ve come to the right place !

We’ve currently got just one special offer available in July. And when it’s gone – it’s gone.

Bookmark this page and come back often, because throughout the year, we’ll regularly add more special holiday bargain offers.

Current Bargain Offers

6 nights. Fri 10 May – Thu 16 May. Villa Acquaviva. €425. Gone !

6 nights. Fri 28 Jun – Thu 4 Jul. Villa La Majelletta. €495. Gone !

5 nights. Sun 9 Jun – Fri 14 Jun. Villa La Majelletta. €365. Gone !

6 nights. Sat 27 Jul – Fri 2 Aug. Villa La Majelletta. €525. Click here to book

Looking For A Longer Stay at a Bargain Price ?

25 Oct 13 – 4 Apl 14. €90 off all holidays of 7 nights or more. Click here to book

As you can see from the picture, they’d been piled up in a corner and basically just been left sitting there getting filthier in the 30-odd years the house had been left abandoned.

Some were broken – but most weren’t. They cleaned-up beautifully and are now back in everyday use.

But aside from how they’d come to be there, the really intriguing question concerned the maker’s marks the plates carried.

We got as far as establishing that SC Richard was a Milan-based porcelain factory and hesitantly dating the plates as early/mid-20th century.

And that was about it. Until a week ago, when Tim Naylor in Perth, Western Australia posted this comment:

SC Richards was a Milanese ceramics company that merged with Ginori in 1896.  The merger created the company Ginori Richard, which I believe was Italy’s most productive and prestigious ceramics company until their unfortunate close in 2012.

The fact that your plates has the SC Richard back-stamp, without any reference at all to Ginori, dates your pieces to pre-1896 when this backstamp was discontinued.  The back-stamp itself is of a Griffin with the Milanese flag and the shield that has a Biscione (man eating serpent) on it.

I believe the incised numbers indicate that the plates were produced as a part of a larger single consignment.  The numbers are usually produced incrementally, with the number of the last digit changing for the number produced and the first digit / letters indicating the pattern/shape of the piece.

They are lovely plates, and quite rare.  It’s a great find, and I hope you will keep them with the property as an example of its history.

And as if that wasn’t exciting enough, a little more research revealed that Richard Ginori wasn’t just a ‘prestigious’ porcelain maker – it came to be known as ‘the Ferrari of Italian porcelain makers’.

The absolute best.

But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – and answered questions raised others. Not least, how had valuable, Milan-made chinaware ended up abandoned for over 30 years in an Abruzzo ruin ? And how had it got there in the first place ?

Maybe not quite as good as a Da Vinci in the attic, but a special and delightful find. And somehow all the more personal knowing that on the most special occasions over who knows how many years, this china would have been proudly used, loved and admired.

We’re privileged our house presented us with this heirloom.

All good knockabout stuff. 

But bearing in mind that nowadays a review posted on a website or blog with a large following can rattle round the world in the blink of an eye – and remembering too that a great many travellers rely heavily on reviews when deciding where to eat – I wonder how much thought critics give to the fact that in writing their barbed comments, they can be effectively crippling their victims’ businesses ?

Well, so what ? If a place serves substandard food, it deserves to be named and shamed. But then again, who has the right to set themselves up as the arbiter of what’s ‘substandard’ ?

Dissecting the review this critic had written, it quickly became clear that what was eaten simply hadn’t been to her taste; hadn’t matched her opinion of how it should’ve been cooked and what it should’ve tasted like.

Scant reason for rubbishing the restaurant, especially as you and me might’ve eaten the same meal, in the same place, on the same day and thought, “Yum !”

But we aren’t all influential food critics or bloggers. Our opinions aren’t often seen or heard. So it just seems way out of balance that on the basis of just one opinion that is, lasting damage can be done.

Aside from an ability to chew and string a sentence together, what other attributes are needed to become a food critic and the judge of whether a chef’s a champ or a chump ?

Unlike other branches of journalism, there are no courses to take or exams to pass that qualify you to declare whether a meal’s good. bad or indifferent.

And telling me to give a restaurant a miss because basically you didn’t like it, is highly questionable.

Sure, if you’re a food critic who also happens to be a qualified chef, that might lend weight to your opinions. It might also help you appreciate that your fellow-chefs, like everyone else, can have the occasional bad day at the office when things don’t turn out like they should.

An instant snapshot judgement based on a single meal is scant reason for a highly-personalised rant.

How much better it’d be if restaurant reviews were based on a series of visits. Probably impractical – but a lot more valid.

And why this polemic ? Well, I’ve been revising and updating the list of local restaurants we recommend to Villasfor2 guests and it got me thinking how a food critic would react to a typical Abruzzese restaurant.

With only a very few exceptions most of the places round here are what Americans call ‘Mom and Pop’ operations – family-run places in which the food on offer invariably owes less to catering college and more to tradition, and to watching and learning in the kitchen.

Sure, techniques can be a little wobbly and presentation might not earn too many stars for artistic merit, but if we’re judging purely on taste, isn’t that really the only issue ?

Some things may not be to your taste; or certain dishes may be prepared in a different way, or in your view not as well, as those you’ve eaten elsewhere.

But that’s not a reason to write-off your meal as a monument to incompetence and consign the restaurant’s reputation to the garbage bin.

Do we advise you to steer clear of anywhere round here ? Yes we do – solely for reasons of price. But the belief that some restaurant-owners have that good food = expensive food is thankfully in a tiny minority here.

And of the places we do wholeheartedly recommend on the basis of the meals we’ve regularly eaten there, the yardstick we’ve adopted is to imagine that we have a couple is staying with us for a fortnight who want to eat out every single night.

Can we honestly send them to fourteen different places where the food’s definitely been to our tastes and hopefully will also be to theirs ?

Yes we can. Take a look.

In all of them, you’ll eat well and pay a fraction of what you would back home. You’ll rub shoulders with the locals and you’ll be warmly welcomed everywhere.

And there won’t be a food critic in sight !

All that remains now is for you to turn up and try them.

Let me introduce the winners…

Red. Montepulciano D’Abruzzo DOC. ‘Donna Mira’ 2010. Cantina Ortona

As with all our previous house reds, Donna Mira – named after the sister of the first President of Cantina Ortona back in the 1960′s – is made from 100% Montepulciano D’Abruzzo grapes. The red wine grape of Abruzzo.

But the similarity ends there.

For the past three years, we’ve chosen lighter, first-release Montepulciano reds to take advantage of the freshness and fruit of young wine.

Our new red is different. In comparison to 2012, when we were drinking wine from the 2011 vintage, our new Montepulciano is from the 2010 vintage and owes its extra age to time spent maturing in oak barrels before bottling.

The result is a rounder, smoother, classier wine – still packed with delicious bramble fruit, but with a subtle hint of cinnamon spiciness too and a long finish.

It’s a wine that’ll drink well with most pasta and meat dishes – and for reflective sipping and setting the world to rights as you sit outside your villa watching the shadows lengthen on a warm evening.

Our supplier, Cantina Ortona, is the largest co-op in the town of Ortona, about thirty miles north of us on the coast.

Their vineyards are some of the best in southern Abruzzo, on slopes overlooking the Adriatic.

White. Trebbiano D’Abruzzo DOC 2011. Cantina San Zefferino

Our new house white is a radical change from our house whites of the past three years. Those have all been made from the Pecorino grape, an ancient Abruzzo heritage variety rescued from the brink of extinction in the mid-1990′s.

Now we’ve gone for a wine made 100% from the Trebbiano grape which, in contrast to Pecorino, is Abruzzo’s most widely-grown white wine variety.

We came across this bottle by chance, as we’d visited Cantina San Zefferino to audition their Montepulciano D’Abruzzo – but it was the tasting of their Trebbiano that completely won us over.

The Trebbiano grape is a bit of a conundrum. It’s a grape from which it’s easy to produce good everyday wine. But it’s a lot harder to produce a wine that’s outstanding – and Cantina San Zefferino have achieved this.

Here’s about as perfect a summer white as you’re ever going to find. Fermented in stainless steel vats after pressing to capture the maximum fruit and freshness of the Trebbiano grape, this wine is a pale straw colour; fresh and dry; with the lightest fragrance of elderflowers and just a little refreshing green apple acidity.

It’s by far and away the best Trebbiano we’ve tasted during our time in Abruzzo – a white wine of real character that’s succeeded in prising us away from our much-loved Pecorino.

Good enough too to enjoy on its own – and in keeping with summer drinking, this’ll be a great accompaniment to cold foods and salads as well as lighter pasta dishes.

And I can’t think of a nicer wine to go with a lazy afternoon under a sun-umbrella by our pool !

San Zefferino is another Ortonese cantina; these Trebbiano grapes come from vineyards that are a little more inland and slightly higher than those producing our Montepulciano, benefitting from cooler growing conditions.

The best news of all is that you’ll find one of these wines waiting for you with our compliments when you arrive for your Villasfor2 holiday.

The bad news is you have to choose between them !

In the winter of 1943/4, advancing Allied forces liberated the little Abruzzo village of Sant’Eusanio del Sangro. Which is how Lola Lorentini came to meet Charlie Isaacs.

Lola was 23 at the time and because she was already engaged to a local boy, it created no little friction when she started going out with Charlie. Her Mother kicked her out of the family home and Lola had to go and live with an Aunt.

Not that this especially worried Lola. She’d already decided that she was going to marry Charlie, and having successfully lived through the Nazi occupation of Sant’Eusanio, a little maternal displeasure wasn’t going to stop her.

Besides, Charlie wanted to marry Lola too. But life’s rarely that easy. Especially in wartime – and it wasn’t until well into 1945 that Charlie was able to return to Sant’Eusanio.

And did he and Lola get married and live happily ever after ? Yes they did. But it wasn’t quite that easy.

In 1945, even with the war now over, a British soldier had to seek official permission to marry an Italian girl, and in Charlie’s case, that permission had to be given by perhaps Britain’s most renowned wartime soldier, Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

You can imagine what went through Charlie’s mind. Hoping his request would catch the Field-Marshal on a good day; afraid it might not. But one thing’s certain. He won’t have been expecting Monty’s response:
“Yes, you can get married – but only on the condition you invite me to the wedding.”

Which is how perhaps the unlikeliest – and certainly one of the most memorable – of Italian wedding photographs came to be taken. Lola and Charlie occupying pride of place, with Field-Marshal Montgomery standing right behind Lola.

Not a start to married life you’d easily forget.

Charlie returned to England with Lola and for 56 years, they lived in Cambridgeshire until Charlie died in 2001.

Eventually, Lola returned to her Italian family Sant’Eusanio. And not long after our own arrival in Abruzzo in 2007, we came into the story.

Sitting on Lola’s right in the wedding photograph is her brother – the father of our good friend Paolo, owner of Lu Piccione in Sant’Eusanio – our favorite local restaurant.
“I’d like you to meet my Zia (Auntie) Lola,” he told us one evening, before telling us her story.

Seemed that the problem was that although she was enjoying being back in her home village, after 56 years in England, Zia Lola really missed having someone to have a chat with in English. Would we mind ?

That’s how our friendship began. Zia Lola’s now 90. Sharp as a pin with a wicked sense of humour and sixty year-old memories of wartime as startlingly bright as if they’d happened yesterday.

Villasfor2 guests eating at Lu Piccione have met Lola too, and on return trips have brought her English favourites – unobtainable in Italy – like bacon and that love-it-or-hate-it English condiment, Daddies Sauce.

“You know what I really miss about England ?” she said to us rather wistfully one day last summer. “Fish and chips.”

Ever tried finding a piece of cod in Italy to dip in batter and deep-fry ? We managed. So Zia Lola came to lunch and ate every last mouthful.

Washed down with her favorite drink. A small shandy.

This Christmas, we made her mince pies. Every last member of the family seems to have tasted this example of English culinary eccentricity.

She loves music. Opera and all the old favourites of the forties and fifties. And she reads. And Paolo and his kids; and the grandchildren; and countless little grand-nieces and grand-nephews who nibbled on the mince pies constantly keep her company.

Strange how strands of a story can come together in the unlikeliest of ways. A wartime wedding; a famous military commander; our favourite local restaurant; a good Italian friend; us and Zia Lola.

An unforgettable character in our Italian adventure.

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