There everything made sense and had meaning, so the house lived a life of its own, parallel to the months, to the torrid sun and the deafening cicadas, and then the shade, the cool rain or springwater, the sip from the quartara, a terracotta bottle, and then again in the cold, the rain, the wind and also the snow, as even that was extraordinarily present at the time!
Even if it didn’t belong to the Spirits, that house decided on everything there was to do: today the oven is abbruciato a puntino - fired up perfectly! and tomorrow, bread and freshly pressed olive oil, green and dense, that’s a true delicacy! And for Easter and Christmas, sweets that fill you with just their smell, the perfume of sugar and flour, really mature fruit or wild and sour, rendered edible with honey.
Between those walls, ancient, traditional objects would gather, objects which belonged to the house and the work of the farmer, collected by that Pied Piper, that Icarus, owner of the house, who placed them, almost by virtue and their own effort, in the right places, and once there, they reclaimed their ancient life.
That is what happened to terracotta figurines and lamps, vases and lanterns, nativity scenes and jars, coloured prints of poor saints and frazzate and cuttunine, the textiles of rustic dowries: through these objects the ancient life which inhabited them was restored and the whole house breathed in harmony with it.