A very warm welcome to  Lemon House Life a  new blog from Ruth Osborn, you might remember her  Our Lady in Italy.

Well she’s now set up her own blog Lemon House Life to share her thoughts on fresh life and fresh food in northern Tuscany. Ruth moved to Italy with her partner James last year and she’s been enjoying Italian life ever since.

Read her latest blog – where she shares her recipe for beef with spiced wine and roast roots.

It’s pitch black outside, but I’m wide awake. The sound that has woken me is the fragile glass panels on our bedside lights shivering against each other. They used to do this in our house in Essex if a particularly heavy lorry went past.

But we’re deep in the Italian countryside, in the early hours of the morning, and it’s a physical impossibility for such a vehicle to drive down our lane.

The room seems to shift ever so slightly when I turn over in bed. I’ve only experienced this sensation once before (when sober, anyway) – on holiday in San Francisco.

As it dawns on me that we must be experiencing some kind of ‘mild earth tremor’, the lights calm down. The next thing I know it’s broad daylight.

Thinking that perhaps I was dreaming, I Google ‘Italy earthquake’ – and you know very well what I found. We live 170 kilometres from the epicentre of Sunday’s quake but still felt the reverberations.

We were well aware of Italy’s geographical history when we chose to move here. The plans for our house had to pass rigorous inspection by our local earthquake committee.

The lowest floor of the house is built into the hillside and a narrow corridor runs between the outer wall of the building and the hill itself, reinforced with concrete on both sides. The idea is that it will create a barrier should the surrounding land start to shift at any point.

Even knowing that our house is relatively safe should the worst happen, I’m still surprised at myself, that I fell back to sleep so easily.

Talking later to Italian friends, they too, take the threat of earthquakes in their stride. When you rationalise the situation, it’s easier to understand why. Crossing a busy London street is far more risky ….

(Some) relatives in the UK, on the other hand react very differently. ‘You didn’t tell me you have earthquakes there’, said one, due to visit later in the summer.

Fear, after all, often isn’t rational. I may be calm about earthquakes but put me in an aircraft seat and I turn into a squirming wreck. It’s no good telling me how much safer planes are than cars – I know it’s only my willpower keeping that thing in the air.

We love Italy, amongst other reasons, for its stunning landscape and the way its history is embedded in the tiniest villages. But landscape like this has been formed by cataclysmic events and when every town has a wealth of ancient buildings, the impact of such events is bound to be worse. All these things are intertwined.

At the end of the day we all make choices about the risks we are prepared to take, which we think are worthwhile. If the epicentre of the earthquake had been on our doorstep, I’m sure I would be feeling very different right now. But unless or until that day comes, I can be rational enough not to lose any sleep over it.

Pic courtesy of

Before moving to Italy my experience of gardening was limited to a few shrubs around a small lawn, and the odd grow bag of salad leaves.

Now we are the proud owners of around 50 olive trees and around half an acre of land crying out to be turned into the garden of our dreams.

The olive grove is established and relatively easy to care for. Every spring Paolo comes to prune the trees (this is a dark art that we novice olive farmers would not dare undertake for ourselves). In the autumn the olives are picked and we take them to the mill to be turned into oil.

However the garden is a different matter. Our house was built very recently on the site of an old rustic shed, and until a few weeks ago the surrounding land resembled a builder’s yard.

‘Have you got your tomatoes in yet?’ a neighbour asked in March. I admitted guiltily that I hadn’t – there was no way seedlings would survive amidst the rubble and concrete dust.

However it seemed that every other shop front had sprung huge shelving units, stacked with seedlings for every imaginable vegetable, strawberries and melons.

Everybody grows their own round here, and I didn’t want to be left out.

Our first purchase – a lemon tree – didn’t need to wait. Our hillside location means that it has to live in a pot, to come indoors in the very worst weather, so we were able to install it straight away on our patio.

The metre high tree came bearing five or six ripe lemons but the real test is whether it will produce more under our care. I treat it like the most delicate of children – watering only with rain water, spraying the leaves, moving it out of strong winds.

We faced an anxious wait, but two weeks ago flower buds began to appear. Success! We are over the most difficult stage and the flowers will almost definitely generate fruit.

But back to the business of taming the remaining land…I spent a whole day clearing stones from a few square metres, and in the process made my wrist so sore I couldn’t lift anything for a week. James has to work full time. The only way forward was to call in the builders…..

Robbie (so nicknamed because he wants to be Robbie Williams and has the tattoos to prove it) Abdul and Kevi descend on our house for a week. They lift with ease stones that I couldn’t move an inch, lay paths, another terrace, and shift earth.

Now it seems we have a beautiful orto (fruit and vegetable patch) ready for planting in front of our kitchen.

We rush to the nearest agricultural shop with a long shopping list. James has to curb my enthusiasm – ‘Don’t buy more than we can plant at one go,’ he warns.

How right he is to be cautious. Later as we are planting bean seeds and tomatoes, Francesco stops his Land Rover in front of the house; ‘Pomodori, bravo!’ he calls out.

Bella our dog bounces across to see him – and beheads two of the plants.

So it’s back to the drawing board – we cannot plant more until we have made the orto dog proof. We spend the next day dodging showers (yes it’s been raining here too), erecting a low fence.

Finally, we can have the fruit and veg patch of my dreams. We have been back to the shops. The melons, cucumbers and zucchini are all waiting to go in – as soon as the rain stops.

Eating out is one of my favourite things to do. When I’m in England I scan Trip Advisor and press reviews before we visit a new restaurant, wanting to make sure it’s an evening to remember for all the right reasons.

Here in Italy my approach is completely different….in our village (2,000 residents) there are no shops, but five restaurants, between them capable of seating around 1,000 diners at a single sitting.

All the restaurants serve pretty much the same local specialities. But we always receive the warmest welcome at La Gavarina D’Oro – opened more than 20 years ago by my neighbour Francesco and now run by his children and their families.

So deciding where to celebrate James’ birthday last week was easy.

The Gavarina doesn’t have a menu (well there is one somewhere, just in case ‘strangers’ ask for it, but it doesn’t list half the dishes on offer).

The first time we came here, speaking no Italian whatsoever, we were invited to try the local speciality, panigacci. Not wanting to offend, we agreed with trepidation in case it turned out to be some unspeakable part of an animal.

In fact panigacci are a kind of flat bread, cooked over a huge open wood fire in the corner of the restaurant. They are served with sauces, or salami and cheeses, or even nutella. You can have a three course meal based entirely on panigacci – and many people do.

As James’ birthday falls on Easter Monday the restaurant is crammed with 200 guests of literally all ages, mostly seated on family tables of up to 20.

Baskets of panigacci fly around the restaurant. The waiting staff rush in and out of the kitchen with plates of roast meat, steak and pasta, weaving their way around four and five year olds wandering up and down.

Children are clearly more than welcome but there are no special kids’ menus here, no packs of crayons or placemats to colour in. A baby of eight months at the most is fed a plate of chopped up spaghetti bolognaise from the kitchen. Toddlers munch on panigacci with salami and gorgonzola.

As the evening goes on, many of the younger guests fall asleep on their grandparents’ laps. Older children play outside on the restaurant terrace.

(We have been here also on quieter evenings, when one end of the dining room has formed an impromptu goal mouth for Francesco’s four year old great-grandson, Goielle and his friends’ game of football).

A single baby of just a few weeks gets fractious, but nobody minds when his father walks him up and down the restaurant floor – the noise levels are so high that you can’t hear his crying anyway.

Even though the restaurant is packed to the gills, Clara, Francesco’s 73 year old wife, who still runs the kitchen, comes out to say hello, with open arms and a kiss for us both. Their son, Massimo and his wife Sonia chat while we drink a farewell glass of limoncello.

A couple of years ago, the Gavarina received a visit from an English family, with their bodyguards. Francesco was upstairs having a nap at the time and didn’t know anything had happened until two weeks later when his cousin announced she’d read in the paper that Tony Blair had eaten at there.

‘It just goes to show,’ Francesco said with a shrug when he told me about the visit, ‘Everybody likes panigacci.’

Our lady in Italy has embraced the Tuscan countryside, but can she find a decent hairdresser?

All my adult life I’ve dreamed of living in the Italian countryside….

Five months ago I moved from a life where coffee shops, beauty salons and gyms were all within walking distance, to a house on a hillside in rural Tuscany, where the nearest shop of any description is a 15 minute drive.

I knew I could live without the waxing, the gym (I have stunning running routes right outside my front door), Waitrose just round the corner…. And although Italy may be the birthplace of the barrista there’s no ‘just’ nipping out for a café macchiato every morning.

I wasn’t too worried about the serious stuff either. Having experienced Italian A&E with a histrionic seven year old on holiday one year, I felt confident about the healthcare system.

The one thing that did make me fret though – would I be able to find a decent hairdresser.

My untreated hair is an unappealing shade of salt and pepper, and having spent years trying various salons and brands of hair colour I’d finally got it right.

I managed to track down an Aveda salon, conveniently located by the station in our nearest city of La Spezia and embarked on a new hair relationship.

Stefania, the colourist at Redstyle is a fan of all things English, in particular rock music, and is delighted to have a regular client from the UK.

‘Is that Rooot?’ she positively shouts when I ring up to book my appointment.

I’d been worried that my explanations of what I wanted wouldn’t make sense.

Did the dictionary word for highlights – mechies – mean highlights in your hair? My UK hairdresser had written out the colour mix she’d used – would Stefania understand it?

However, with typical Italian positivity, she and husband Danielle who does the cutting, listen patiently to my explanations and we get there in the end.

While my colour is applied we enjoy the usual hairdresser-client chat – the weather, how are the children doing? Stefania already remembers the names and ages of my children and where they work/study.

She’s worried that her own daughter will speak English with an American accent because her teacher is from the US.

Then I’m offered tea/coffee – and a whole array of sweets and biscuits.

Stefania explains to me (in Italian) the flavours of all the chocolates. The last one is chilli – ‘Red Hot Chillee Peppers’ she booms in English.

After an hour reading about the world’s most papparazied women (the Italians have a verb – to paparazzy) Kate and Pippa in the Italian equivalent of Hello, my hair is washed with familiarly scented shampoo and Daniele takes over.

He is much quieter than Stefania, who chats to me about other clients with English relatives while he works. His scissors positively fly and I have no idea how he can tell what he’s doing. But 20 minutes and a blow dry later, it looks – immaculate.

With effusive goodbyes I depart to the station – and breathe a sigh of relief that there will be no bad hair days for the next month.