Maria called me

Maria called me to see if I could give her a lift up to the cemetery. This is the big weekend for ancestor-honouring and she always takes flowers up to her parents' graves. This year, she confided to me in the car, she decided to get in a day early to avoid the crowds.

A cold front is coming in on a north-east wind and the clouds are gathering behind the mountains but at 3.30 there was still enough sunlight slanting across the fields to make it look pretty. I've never been inside an Italian cemetery before. This is a tiny one on the edge of the village. It consists of a walled, well-kempt, grassy space with at one end of it a high wall of — tombs? Gravestones set into the wall, essentially — but what's behind them? A space containing the ashes of the deceased, or are they just name-stones? I didn't like to ask Maria because she was busily refreshing the flowers and grappling with the on/off switch of battery-operated Padre Pio votive light (luckily I was able to help her with that).

Down one side of the cemetery were several little mausoleum-type buildings each containing six or eight tombs (or whatever they are) of what must be the richer families. And there were four English-style graves in the ground, relatively recent, in swanky polished black granite, which got Maria all emotional as she explained to me who they were. (Three were two brothers and their mother who all died within 17 months of one another.) And then the Sunday-best photographs, one affixed to each stone — all those strong, staunch Italian peasant faces from years ago, staring out from the past.