And still the enticing letters from friends and relatives who are living it up abroad. One pair writes from Limone, a remote village tucked in under the cliffs on the west shore of Lake Garda in Northern Italy. They have resolved a long debated problem: how does the caper grow? That is, the caper you know in cooking; caper sauce or as an element with black olives in some spread over biscuits. Anyway, our friends told us that the local guidebook writes: "Caper plants hang from the walls, proof of the mildness of Limone's climate." But although our friends walked along a fair stretch of coastline, not a single caper did they see. Finally they realised that what they thought of as the passionfruit flowers that they admired were in fact, caper flowers, or rather buds (capparis spinosa). One of the visitors gingerly tried the flower bud and, yes, it tasted distinctly of caper. Next question: can one eat the caper fruit, which looks like an elongated passion fruit?
On the walk, the many fruit laden olive trees were much admired. Slung from the roofs of the tunnels that honeycomb the cliffs are 40-foot ladders used to harvest the olives. But, unlike ordinary ladders, these consist of a single pole, pierced every foot by a rung protruding on either side. Ordinary ladders could not be inserted between the olive branches without causing damage, so the design was modified for the task in hand.
Mind you, the single-pole ladder requires considerable skill and agility, particularly when stretching out for that cluster of juicy olives just beyond reach. But no causalities noted.
The hotel at which this pair was staying is built into the cliffs. "Our room must be about 100 feet above the lake. From the bed, we seem to jut out over the lake, so all we see is lake, mountain and sky. But it's a busy stretch of water - pleasure boats, yachts and ferries and wind-surfers. As darkness falls, hundreds of lighted candles in multi-coloured containers are released onto the lake, prelude to a fireworks display and dancing on the quays." Now that's a place to be.