THE HOUSE OF THE TRUMPET VINE

This is the much talked about old door, photographed for the third time today. The two previous times I was distracted by a more immediate subject. It is not an elegant door, not even a pretty ruinous one. The house is tumbling down although it is not in as bad a condition as ours was when we bought it.

The trumpet vine climbing up one side and over the roof has a thick and gnarled stem which, judging by a similar vine I have, must be at least 70 years old. The "strangler vine," wild clematis, is not making much headway at the other side of the house because it cannot get a grip.

When I first photographed this house last week, there was a peeling notice stuck to it, flapping in the wind and making focusing difficult. Today, it was pinned back. On closer inspection it was a new one. It is a funeral notice. The previous one was for a man. This one is for Viviana Rugani of the Tomei family. Her funeral was on 10th July. She was 87 years old.

Nobody I know in the village knows much about the house. One man, in his 60s, remembers playing in the empty house when he was a boy. The narrow bricks, just visible under the peeling plaster on the right, would indicate it is really quite an old house.

Curtains still hang in the upstairs windows. One is just visible. The house, quite a nice one, is probably the victim of Italy's Napoleonic inheritance laws. The laws seem fair at first glance. Real estate must be divided equally between children and grandchildren right down the line. This means that a house such as this can be owned by hundreds of people, some scattered around the world, who don't even know they own a few square feet of it. If no agreement is reached, then the property falls to ruin.

The wild clematis with its vague vanilla scent is in flower now. It is a persistent plant, ever ready to climb and claim another victim. Whole abandoned olive groves can be covered in it forming a mass of green hummocks.

A far cry from montana, jackmanii and the hundreds of clematis cultivars, the wild clematis is rampant here. You can, of course, buy wild clematis in which case, it isn't very wild any longer. Wild clematis