This is where I have been spending the last week - not specifically on this tarmac road - in the deep south of Italy, in the region of the National Park of Cilento in Campania, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. A place of blue seas, dry heat, lizards and cicadas, olive groves, rosemary thickets, fresh figs and the world's primary producer of mozzarella di bufala. The resort is very pleasant but it borders onto another, and this is the road that divides the two.
On the one side, the macchia meditarranea - a natural vegetation of centennial olive trees, fichi d'India (in the name a clue - these are prickly pears), cacti, carob bean trees, pitosphorus, rosemary - sturdy thickets and bushes and plants that require next to little water.
On the other, the following.
Happy holidays everyone.
Freshly mowed lawn - LAWN??? With a swimming pool. A swimming pool?? With the warm sea just a stone's throw away?
Fresh water fountains spilling onto the grass. Irrigation systems providing tourists with the feeling they are in luscious vegetation... as green as a Wimbledon court. And...
...brick and glass structures - in this climate, the only way to keep your brain from frying in one of these is to have enough aircon to cool the entire regione of Campania. The traditional way, the sustainable way, the environmentally friendly way, of keeping cool in these climates is to slow down and ventilate using the land's own thermal currents. That, and sleeping in the heat of the afternoon - it will be 39 degrees Celsius tomorrow. The resort I am staying in ventilates its communal areas such as restaurants etc with the use of ancient things (called open windows) that create a breeze within the spaces.
Olive trees all around provide a speckled but dense shade and the most wonderful smell.
Happy holidays everyone. 
No comments:
Post a Comment