Cosmopolitan rural Italy

Our local village's annual arts in the street festival (Arti Strada) is on again right now. It's brilliant - top class music, dance, magicians, performance art, painting and sculpture, along with the requisite stalls selling perfumed candles, rings, ornaments, and a host of other interesting stuff. Not to mention tarot card and palm readers next to the fortune teller. It's arranged along much the same lines as last year's event, which is chronicled here, so I won't go into it in detail.

But there is one thing about the festival that prompted some reflections about living here. I was standing mesmerised watching a band playing, applauding loudly at the end of a piece when a friend tapped me on the shoulder and said: "That was worth coming here for, wasn't it?"

Indeed it was - a rhythmic, energetic, infectious world beat number played by a band thrown together from immigrants that gather in a piazza in Genova. They're from all over the world - Russia, Brazil, Morocco, China, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Senegal, and - believe it or not - Italy. Here in our little corner of rural Marche, a region that none of the 20-strong band had been to before, a world-class act playing just for the couple of hundred of us swaying enthusiastically with them.

And while they were the top billing, they weren't the only top notch performers from far afield. Uruguay, Australia, Holland, Spain, Chile, Macedonia, Congo, and Honduras were all represented as well. I could have been almost anywhere.

The international flavour of the day didn't end there. The friend watching the band with me is Scottish, an author and illustrator of books on goblins, legends, and spirits from all over the world. And earlier in the day as we sat on the beach, a Venezuelan who used to play baseball for the White Sox in Chicago struck up a conversation with us. He lives not too far from us with his Italian wife.

Who would have thunk that we'd be rubbing shoulders with such an eclectic mix in this place? It's not an isolated occurrence either. While this weekend was perhaps a little more concentrated on the international flavour front, interacting with "foreigners" is a fairly regular occurrence. And that's not including the many English people here, their community on its own offering layers of class, outlook, and soap opera happenings on a daily basis - there are also Australians, Americans, Argentinians, Kosovari, Albanians, Senegalese, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Moroccans, and still others.

Then of course there are also the locals, who provide their own distinct essence in an already rich patchwork. Vitaliano, our contadino neighbour, has likely seldom ventured much further than Macerata, a half-hour away. In contrast, our other neighbour, pensioner Franco, has travelled more than I have, in his days with Italian oil company Agip reaching distant parts of South America, North, Central and South Africa, and the Middle East. He still doesn't speak English, but it didn't stop us spending an Arti Strada night together, sharing travel stories and enjoying the music, him tapping his 70-year-old feet along with the teenagers surrounding us.

It's a veritable surprise of diversity. In a country known for its xenophobia, more pronounced in its rustic reaches than the urban sprawl, it's just another contradiction in the mass of anomalies that somehow hold Italy together.

It's a wonderful thing. As I look out of my office over the rolling hills at the breeze blowing the cotton-wool clouds gently across the cielo azzurro, bringing a welcome coolness to the air, I can only think how lucky I am to be here.