Chickens Eat Pasta by Clare Pedrick - Book Blitz + Giveaway
Chickens Eat Pasta: Escape to Umbria
Not just another romance, but a story of escapism, coincidences, friendship, luck and most of all... love.
Chickens Eat Pasta is the tale of how a young Englishwoman starts a new life after watching a video showing a chicken eating spaghetti in a mediaeval hill village in central Italy.
“Here I was, 26 years old, alone and numb with boredom at the prospect of a future which until recently had seemed to be just what I wanted.”
Unlike some recent bestsellers, this is not simply an account of a foreigner’s move to Italy, but a love story written from the unusual perspective of both within and outside of the story. As events unfold, the strong storyline carries with it a rich portrayal of Italian life from the inside, with a supporting cast of memorable characters. Along the way, the book explores and captures the warmth and colour of Italy, as well as some of the cultural differences – between England and Italy, but also between regional Italian lifestyles and behaviour. It is a story with a happy ending. The author and her husband are still married, with three children, who love the old house on the hill (now much restored) almost as much as she does.
Chickens Eat Pasta is Clare’s autobiography, and ultimately a love story – with the house itself and with the man that Clare met there and went on to marry. If you yearn for a happy ending, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a story that proves anything is possible if you only try.
Chickens Eat Pasta is the tale of how a young Englishwoman starts a new life after watching a video showing a chicken eating spaghetti in a mediaeval hill village in central Italy.
“Here I was, 26 years old, alone and numb with boredom at the prospect of a future which until recently had seemed to be just what I wanted.”
Unlike some recent bestsellers, this is not simply an account of a foreigner’s move to Italy, but a love story written from the unusual perspective of both within and outside of the story. As events unfold, the strong storyline carries with it a rich portrayal of Italian life from the inside, with a supporting cast of memorable characters. Along the way, the book explores and captures the warmth and colour of Italy, as well as some of the cultural differences – between England and Italy, but also between regional Italian lifestyles and behaviour. It is a story with a happy ending. The author and her husband are still married, with three children, who love the old house on the hill (now much restored) almost as much as she does.
Chickens Eat Pasta is Clare’s autobiography, and ultimately a love story – with the house itself and with the man that Clare met there and went on to marry. If you yearn for a happy ending, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a story that proves anything is possible if you only try.
Purchase Links
UK Audiobook - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chickens-Eat-Pasta/dp/B07BYLZX3X
US Audiobook - https://www.amazon.com/Chickens-Eat-Pasta/dp/B07CBJRG9C
Excerpt
Excerpt
The place Mirella wanted to show me was in
need of some
repair, she said, but it had something
rather special about it.
Driving along the winding roads which
seemed to stretch
forever, she chatted about some of the
people who lived in the
village, breaking into Italian when her
patience ran out with her
English. It was a struggle to follow what
she was saying in either
language, with the views of the countryside
vying for my
attention and often winning the battle.
Blue-hazed hills rolled
in every direction, with a few small stone
villages clutching onto
the sides at impossible angles.
Mirella drove around the last bend on a
small road that
seemed to lead nowhere, and revved her Fiat
Uno up a steep
sloping drive. I gasped. Suddenly, I saw
exactly what she meant
by special. The house – or what was left of
it – towered
imposingly from its position on a knoll
overlooking an endless
vista of hills and valleys. It was built of
a warm yellow coloured
stone that was gradually being bathed in
pink in the glow of the
late afternoon sun. If you craned your neck
you could just make
out the rooftops of the miniscule village
of San Massano a short
distance away. This was the oldest
inhabited settlement in
Umbria. Mirella led the way up the rest of
the pot-holed drive.
About half-way up, the Fiat had made it
clear it would go no
further.
“The village’s history goes back at least
to the 10th century,
and probably a great deal further,” said
Mirella, who had long
switched back into Italian. “As for the
house, no one knows
really. For generations, it belonged to the
same family. But then
there was some kind of a quarrel, and the
house was divided into
two parts.” She paused to disentangle
herself from the brambles
which had wound themselves around one of
her legs, making a
rip in her dark blue tights.
“Porco dio!”
The house was indeed in need of repair,
with gaping holes
in the terracotta-tiled roof and the
outside stone walls badly
crumbling. In some places they had completely
collapsed.
Inside, some sections of the uneven floors
were missing, with
dizzying drops down to the space below.
“Careful where you put your feet,” said
Mirella. She tugged
at my arm to stop me from wandering into a
cavernous room
with hardly any floor at all. A large rat
darted out between us.
It was hard to say how many rooms there
were, or how
many there might one day be. The building
was huge and
rambling, but there were no bedrooms that
could be identified
as such and certainly no bathroom. There
was nothing that
looked remotely like a kitchen and there
appeared to be no
electricity. The only source of water was
from a conical-shaped
stone construction to one side of the main
building. Leaning
over to look down into the well, I could
just make out the shape
of a dead fox floating in the water, its
body bloated but its brush
still intact. Incredibly, one part of the
property was still inhabited,
by an old man who peered out of a small
broken window as we
passed by.
Half an hour later we were seated in a
village bar with a
spectacular view of a tiny, shimmering
lake. I touched my glass
of prosecco to Mirella’s Crodino. “It’s the
most beautiful place
I’ve ever seen. I’ll take it!”
Even Mirella looked a little taken aback.
“Don’t you want to talk it over, with your
parents or
someone?”
“No, it’s just what I want, really. I think
it’s perfect.”
When the news got out, it would be
difficult to say who was the
more surprised. My two brothers, who were
the only close
relatives I now had, did little to hide
their concern about what
they said was an almost certainly unwise
decision.
“So what does your surveyor say about the
place?” asked
Charles, the older of the two, when I
excitedly told him over a
crackly phone line about the beautiful old
house I had bought
in the Umbrian hills. I admitted that I had
not consulted a
surveyor. It hadn’t crossed my mind.
“Well what about your lawyer?” pursued
Charles sensibly. I
had to confess that I had not sought any
legal advice at all.
“Well, never mind. We’re still in time to
stop this going
through,” he said, in a tone that was meant
to be reassuring. I
told him that it was way too late. I had
already paid for the house,
writing out a cheque in Mirella’s office
the previous day. It
wasn’t any great sum, though it was for me,
representing a
sizeable chunk of the money that my parents
had left me. The
price I paid would not have been enough for
a deposit on a flat
back in Brighton.
As for the villagers, they could not begin
to understand what a
young woman was doing on her own, so far
from home.
“Don’t you have a mother or a father?”
asked a small white-haired
man when Mirella introduced me to him the
following
day. We had driven back to take another
look at the property I
had just bought, so that I could take some
photographs. The
man, who looked to be in his fifties, was
wandering around the
village piazza, about five hundred yards
from my house. He
wore a white buttoned overall, with a thick
brown jumper
showing underneath.
“What about a husband? You don’t want to
end up like me.”
Mirella had already given me a run-down on
Tito the village
shopkeeper, and on several of the forty two
people who lived in
San Massano.
“Forty three counting you,” she said.
About Clare Pedrick
Clare Pedrick is a British journalist who studied Italian at Cambridge University before becoming a reporter. She went on to work as the Rome correspondent for the Washington Post and as European Editor of an international features agency. She still lives in Italy with her husband, whom she met in the village where she bought her house.
You can follow Clare on her Facebook Book Page, her own Facebook page and on Twitter.
Read her blog about life in Umbria here
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