We will have no olive harvest this year. All up and down the coast, the crop has been devastated. There was the blazing summer heat with no water and then the rains so hard that they were almost floods. And then the flies arrived to lay eggs in the green olives so that now every single olive in our grove has a worm hole in it where the fly larvae have been.

Valerio says his whole crop is gone, but he thinks there may be a few groves somewhere around that, because the wild terrain makes so many micro-climates, might have been less hard hit. Gilda says her grove has some surviving olives -- not all are lost -- but everyone else sits silently on the terrace of the pub and looks at their shoes when the subject of the harvest comes up. Times are hard.

But Alice brings Celeste to work with her these days and she is a sweet baby who doesn't cry much, but sleeps in her stroller under a mosquito net in the shade or looks around her with dark curious eyes to see what everyone is doing.

"She is growing," Alice says and we are all happy to hear this.