San Giovanni a Piro, Campánia was one of those towns you see in the travel brochures.
See what I mean? It was on the side of Monte Bulgheria and overlooked the Gulfo di Policastro and the western coast of Italy.
Our station was placed at a public park where there was a large grassy area, what looked like a small stage, and a punti panoramici (panoramic/scenic point).
More accurately the station was inside the toilet of the public park. It looked like it had not been used for a few years and all of the fixtures had been removed. The recorder and the power box were placed below an opening to the outside, so a piece of plastic was placed over the equipment to keep the rain off of it. The site was set up to use commercial power -- the outlet is on the right in the picture above -- but we had to wait for the municipality folks to come out and turn the power on. It took about four weeks. The site ran on batteries in the meantime.
Above is the the view from the park down the western coast of Italy. On the day the station was installed it was a perfectly clear day. Of course that was the one day that I was not there. This was as good as it got between the two times that I was there. The group of mountains near the middle are part of the Parco Nazionale Del Pollino with the mountains further down part of the Catena Costiera (Coastal Range).
Contact was made with the owners of one of the houses in the picture above to see if a better place could be found before the station was installed, but the owner was less than cordial. He thought that putting the station on his land would only attract trouble. Knowing us he was probably right.
On our second trip there we stopped in a little store in the town of Scario, which was down the hill from San Giovannini a Piro and on the coast. We bought a few things for lunch before going up to the station. As we were checking out Nano struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter. His name was Ralph. He ran the store. He was born in New York. Small planet.
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and us was not quite enough. This was one of the local wines and it was quite good.
We added some cheese, salami, olives and a Fanta for a nice lunch on the grass. There was never a shortage of good things to eat in Italy, and while there was usually a pasta course, a meat course, a desert course, a wine course, a coffee course and some form of three meals a day I actually lost weight on the trip. It had to be the combination of the chemicals of the different foods that made everything each other cancel out.
After about three weeks in Italy, Nano left to take a small vacation. He was our driver and our interpreter as well as being one of the lead scientists for the project. We hired a Grottaminarda local guy, Salvatore Esposito, who was a college student home for the Christmas holidays from Nápoli to be our driver. He spoke pretty good English and did his best to keep us out of trouble. Above is a picture I took of him at San Giovanni a Piro.
2018-03-05