The house is built into the side of a hill, so it has two storeys to the front over a basement and three to the back with a sun terrace on top overlooking the village. It is painted a rich pink and as it’s on the main street it’s hard to miss.
Gallinaro is more than 1,650ft above sea level and you can see the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas from the top of the mountain. The village has a population of about 800 in winter, but it rises to a couple of thousand in the summer when all the emigrants return home. I’m related to half of them, and I have more cousins than I could easily list.
The house’s entire basement is taken up by a cantina (wine cellar). Every August I help to organise the local wine festival, where more than 30 locals open up their cantinas to the public. I try to visit as often as possible, but make a point never to miss August 13. Visitors pay €5 and are given as much local food and wine as they can eat and drink.
Our cantina can host about 150 people, so it’s one of the focal points. There’s also a built-in spit in the basement, so we can cook a whole pig when the festival is in full swing. It’s now in its 16th year.
Upstairs on the middle floor there’s a large kitchen, sitting room and bedroom, while on the top storey there are another three bedrooms and a sitting room.
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I grew up in England and moved to Ireland in 1968 to study at Trinity College Dublin. During my childhood the family would decamp from Bath to Gallinaro for the entire summer and often for Christmas and Easter, too.
It has always been a home away from home, although I don’t visit as often as I would like now. That’s partly because I’ve insisted on driving for the past 35 years. I love the ritual of choosing the route, which I vary every year, and packing up the car. You can drive the journey in two days, but I usually take between seven and 10 days and stop off to catch up with old friends. You really miss so much when you fly. The real advantage to driving, though, is arriving back with a car laden down with enough wine and olive oil to last a year.
There used to be no tourists in Gallinaro, but today you get the odd adventurous American venturing off the beaten track. I’m partly to blame. After I published my book someone from PBS television in America commissioned me to make a series. Now I bump into two or three groups of Americans every year, clutching a copy of my book, wandering through the streets.
I wrote the book in the first place as an antidote to all the glib travel writing churned out by English journalists who spent three weeks in Italy and thought they knew the place.
Sadly, some of the traditional rural customs that I remember as a child are dying out. Gallinaro has become more of a dormitory town. Many locals now choose to commute to the huge Fiat factory in Cassino rather than harvest grapes, although a lot of people still keep a few vines for themselves.
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Although my parents’ generation have passed away I still feel very much at home in the village, as do my children now. Although Gallinaro has changed, they have been able to experience a similar childhood to my own and they know that the house and their army of Italian cousins will always be there, waiting to greet them.
Interview by Colin Coyle