Just sitting at my desk working with the sounds of the first cuckoos drifting up from the valley, plus a lot of other twittering and cooing. The local pigeons have never really forgotten that they used to roost in the rafters of this house when it lay in ruins.

Working is almost a pleasure now I can move seamlessly between Twickenham and Capena with access to the same files on my desktop and laptop thanks to a combination of DropBox and Gmail.

Yesterday I was interested to notice that the new car park below the valley has a fine new sign: Piazza Paraterra.

I passed this information on to Russ, Capena’s unofficial cartographer and website designer extraordinaire, who found the news more than mildly interesting. In fact he informed me that historians agree that the Paraterra, not the Rocca, was the oldest of all Capena’s little parts, at least in terms of where the settlement’s first buildings were erected (as opposed to caves being inhabited) – though whether the car park occupies the actual site is a moot point …