060: Italian Villa Projects

Living Villa Cappelli

In this podcast, we catch you up on the projects we’ve been doing at the villa during our “off time” without guests. From major new interviews to unexpected construction, we’ve had a lot going on.

Topics we cover:

• Paul’s interview on CBS Sunday Morning about olive blight in southern Puglia that is destroying a lot of olive trees

• Here are some excerpts from the written story:

Olive trees don't just dot the landscape in Puglia, Italy; they define it. They are so important here, in the heel of Italy's boot, that locals use words like "patrimony" and "cultural heritage" when describing them. But what is worrying olive growers here is a disease that's killing olive trees by the millions.

Paul Cappelli, who'd been an advertising executive in New York City until a few years ago, left his job and moved to a home on the ancient Appian Way surrounded by olive trees, and entered the oil business. "Not the Texas oil business; I'm in the real oil business!" he said.

It's a dream come true, with a nightmare behind me," he said.

"That's what it feels like, a nightmare?" asked correspondent Seth Doane.

"Yeah. I'm always looking over my shoulder."

Paul Cappelli has tested his trees, and there's no sign of xylella – yet. "It's like the Black Death is coming," he said. "It feels like if I look over my shoulder and I see dark clouds, it's the Bubonic Plague coming towards the town."

• While the story itself is sad, if was a nice bit of PR for us

• How we have been working on making the garden much more organized and pretty

• From a raised bed vegetable garden to new walls and planters

• We are also are building a storage room next to the pool for all the pool equipment

• The new land of olive grooves that we bought that we’d love to do a huge dinner in, like in Out Standing in the Field

• The complete story of our leaky roof and and how we had to redo a whole section of roof that we just put on three years ago

• The discovery of the problem through to the new construction

• How the problem developed in the first place

• What the contractors claimed the brown water was

• Are plans to move the laundry room

• Our big question of whether or not to get a clothes dryer

• We cleaned out our wine cellar

• One side of the wine cellar will still be a rec room from guests, while another side will be a small antiques store for guests at the villa

• The hard water in Italy

• Thus why we put in a water softener, to help with everything from washing dishes to saving appliances

• How the hard water broke down the ice machine twice

• Paul got a good 20-30 lithographs and he is buying up old frames to put them up at the villa

• How the artwork comes from friends up in Parma who had a long connection to Paul’s family, including Paul’s uncle being the chauffeur to a count from Parma

• Paul’s olive tree and olive wood projects