It is very easy to feel, up here in our tiny mountain village, that Jonathan and I arrived just at the end of a whole way of life. But maybe that is just the melancholy autumn weather talking. With Nonno gone to the rest home in Serravezza and other losses, there are empty places around the big marble table in the pub these evenings and so many other changes coming, even here.

Last night I went to an organizing talk for a protest planned against the big corporate marble extractors. They remove over 5 million tons of marble every year and then crush it into marble dust to put into things like whitening toothpaste and exfoliating soap. The mines have been purchased by the international uber-wealthy (including the bin Laden family) and they have been destroying the mountains at an astonishing rate and polluting all the water so that people whose families have lived in these mountains for literally millennia are being forced out. The slogan for the protest is "The Mountains Don't Re-Grow" ("Le Montagne Non Ricrescono"). People left the meeting with tears in their eyes, but it seems there is little that anyone can do. Not really.

So a down-hearted day. But I try to write down an honest account of our life here as it is now, while it lasts.