The Several Veils of Colle di Compito

In the Ufizzi Gallery last week we saw a striking painting by Alonso Berruguete of Salome holding a platter bearing the head of John The Baptist.  It turns out, according to Matthew 14, that the demise of JTB occurred at the time of Salome’s famous dance which has become known as the dance of the seven veils.  
Without even knowing any of that, I had begun to think of this village we are staying in as a place which shrouds its charms in veils.  In our pre-trip planning, and on our arrival, all we could see was a series of narrow, cobbled laneways and plenty of stone buildings of several centuries in age.  There was no obvious commercial centre of the village.  No piazza or obvious community gathering space.  There were no obvious outlets for groceries, meat or any other commodity.  No pubs.  Nor any general store.
What we now know - and I suspect we are only scratching the surface of local knowledge - is that the local bread shop contains the most delicious breads, sweet loaves and pastries, and that they are baked in a commercial bakery hidden in a stone building immediately over the street.  Every morning the bread shop is a hub of community chatter - a community water-cooler, if you like - and the locals love to assist the clumsy non-Italian speakers ordering their bread.  I have become besotted with the Buccelato di Lucca, a raisin and anise flavoured sweet bread which smells like panettone.  Local legend, as explained by the Ladies of the Bakery says: Chi viene a Lucca e non mangia il buccellato è come non ci fosse mai stato (Anyone who comes to Lucca and doesn’t eat buccellato is as if they’ve never been here.)
Roberta, the matriarch of one of the two local butcher shops, produces a smile like a split melon and a welcoming stream of Italian whenever you go into the cunningly disguised shop, which looks like every other doorway in the village except for the red and white insect curtain over the entrance (and, we have discovered, the inscription Macelleria above the door).  I’ve not been in there yet when she has not sliced open a cured sausage and thrust some at me insisting that I try it immediately.
Rosetta, the local grocer has a store in the village so cunningly hidden that I have not found it yet.  But we know Rosetta quite well by now because on Tuesdays and Thursdays she drives her tiny flat tray truck around the village, stops outside our gate and calls out in a sing-song manner to let you know that she is ready to do business.
We have been to four local trattoria, all of which have delightful food and service.  Bar Alma, which is down on the main road near the bus stop, is a very active social hub and the car park is full every morning that we go down there to catch the bus.
Most evenings, there are informal gatherings in the neighbourhood back yards, and the sounds of chatter and laughter carry up to our bedroom window of a night time - mixed with the sounds of Vespas, geese, dogs (particularly Pepe and Brad), roosters and asthmatic donkeys.
Hidden behind the several veils of Colle di Compito is a village which, I suspect, has all the drawbacks of any tiny village anywhere in the world.  But there is no doubt that it is an active and vibrant community and I feel that we have been welcomed into it.