Genzano is now a red zone

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Today the town of Genzano the lucania looks a different town. Because of the corona-virus pandemic, this town looks like a ghost town

This church is one of the main church of this town, but there is nobody to be seen. 

The ancient fountain la Cavallina is just the same there is nobody to be seen. 

Genzano is a red zone

Genzano di Lucania zona rossa

Today Genzano di Lucania was mentioned in the national news, this small town is becoming important for the wrong reasons. You see, it has happened something that I cannot believe could ever happen. So, instead of posting articles from my life story as usual, we are posting what is happening in Genzano now, because Genzano di Lucania has become a red zone, due to the corona-virus positive cases. I am concerned for the people that are living there, but anyhow, let me see what I can write in this blog and if I can say something helpful. Anyhow, I am trying to paste some photos that I found on the internet, to show you what I mean.  

This photo here is the center of the town, there are always people around in normal times, but not today. The photo below is the same main street, we call is the corso, where most people use to walk about and chat to their friends at normal times. 

 

Looking at the photos in Facebook with no people around scares me, because Genzano looks like a ghost town. 

The army has come to Genzano to stop people moving around, the photo above are their vehicles, and two photos below are the signs and this huge thing to bloc the road. 

The people are protesting by attaching these signs on the villa boundary, but will they help, nobody knows. Photo below is the other side of the villa, and again nobody is around.   

Having seen all this one must reflect, and and pray God this pandemic will soon be over and fade in the past, so, it can be only a story to tell, for the people that have lived through this pandemic times. We hope and pray god that it will be over soon. That is all I can say, see you next time when I write another blog. 

But is Australia still the land of opportunity

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This is a blog of a fellow from Genzano that migrated to Australia a long time ago. 

Today we are telling our life story, so, we are writing this blogs to tell our story, we hope that somebody will find it interesting enough to read it

Anyhow, let us talk if Australia is still the land of opportunities.

If I use my personal experience as a standard, then I can say that today in Australia work opportunities are not as good as they used to be. But then not everything is as it seems to me, because my judgment is that of a single person and therefore, I might be wrong.

So, let us try to see what has changed since I came to Australia. There are many things that have changed since then, because of the progress humanity has made and continues to make; therefore, working opportunities have changed, so, today it is a lot harder to find a manual job; this is due to the fact that we do not need as many hands to do a job as we used to in the past, because the hard labour is being done from machines, therefore, people that have no skills and rely on their physical strength to work are not required. For this reason, there are less jobs available, but if people have a trade or have studied there are working opportunities for them.

Now that we have explained how we see today working opportunities, allow me to go back to the days when I came to Australia, so that I can tell you what opportunities existed then. In order to understand what we are saying next; it is important to know that opportunities for jobs have high and lows of their own, therefore, this affects everybody around that are looking for work. 

Now let me tell you my experience when I came to Australia, because this is the way that we can compare the work opportunity situation.

Today this sounds an impossible achievement, but there have been times in Australia when everybody had a job, so, there was no unemployment at all, from stories that I have been told from people that were already here when I came, there have been times that the employers had not enough employees and they would go down to the wharfs when the ships arrived and select a few people that seemed good enough for them to do their jobs, therefore, in those days there were no unemployed people, but unfortunately those times do not last long, as I said working opportunities go up and down.

Now to compare those times with today’s’ opportunities, we are going to describe part of my own life story, therefore, what I found easy or hard to cope with when I came here, and how I was able to cope with the hardship of those times, until those things became solved, this is the way that I know how to compare and see, whether Australia is still the land of opportunities, so, let us see what opportunities were available then.

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What sort of opportunities were available in Australia?

What opportunities were available in Australia in the sixties?

When I arrived in Australia in March 1961 my relative and friends were all working, at the same time they were telling me that there were not many job vacancies available, so, I had to be patient until a job was available. But what sort of work I could do they were not sure just we had to wait and see, what I knew about working for other people was that if a job was offered to me I had to work hard, since in my country when we hired workers to work in our family farm, we expected them to work hard so that they would earn their pay, therefore, I was in my right frame of mind to go out and work hard, whatever job was offered would do me just fine. I have said this, because it is necessary to understand that whoever attempts to migrate to another country, he/she must be ready to work hard if they want to succeed, and it all boils down to this that you need to do a fair work day for fair daily pay.

Beside my willingness to work I was also young and fit enough to do any manual job that I was offered, the only problem was that I didn't speak English, I had learned perhaps a few words on the way to Australia while we were sailing, as there was an English teacher on the ship for that purpose. But as we know English is a hard language to learn, especially if one comes from a country that their language is phonetic and once you know some rules, one can read from a book and come close to the sound how those written words are pronounced, but English is not written phonetically, so, to learn English one must be exposed to the English speaking people and slowly learn from them, so, I and other emigrant like me had a lot to learn, before we could speak English well enough to look after ourselves, and to fit in the Australian speaking community.

Anyhow, let us tell you that although I had very little English, things turned out all right in the end, perhaps this is another reason why people think that Australia is still the land of opportunities.

For me when I came to Australia I was still thinking the Italian ways, so, I was thinking that I was on my own and I had to find my own way around, but here I had a pleasant surprise when for the first time some relative took me to see the unemployment office.

In Italy when you go to an Italian office if you want something done quickly you need to know somebody in there, otherwise before your turn comes the office hours are over and you have to come back the day after, so, I was wondering how could we succeed in these Australian offices, since I didn’t speak English and my friend was just a little bit better than me.

Anyhow we waited our turn and soon we were being interviewed from this middle aged man that seemed to have so much patience and understanding of the situation, he slowly worked out what we wanted by asking and repeating what we did not understand, and he noted everything down as he asked me many things to see what sort of job I could do, I remember even now that one of his questions was if I were afraid of heights and I said no, as I was going up some tall trees to prune them, he also asked if I knew anything about building or building maintenance, here again I said yes as we sometimes repair some farm building. I believe that these two things gave me the first job in the building industry, as I was called one day to go to work for the first time in Australia. My first job was that of a bricklayer labour, and we were working on a chimney stack in the brickwork's where bricks are made, which I managed to hold for a couple of weeks, until a bigger gang came and I became a bit confused in the middle of all those people, and I lost my first job for lack of knowledge or lack of understanding English. But anyhow I had my first work experience and I was sure that soon there was going to be another one.

Anyhow, I need to say that Australia is a great country to be in, because people are given their opportunities as they deserve, if you are willing to work hard for it.

And in the unemployment offices the officers are just great people to deal with, or at least they were when I came to Australia in the sixties. Now, I am going to talk about how I ended up working in the Australian building industry for good. 

This blog is already too long, so see you in our next post, Australia building industry. I know that what we are telling you are things that have happened in the past, but even the past has a story to tell. 

See you soon.  

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The town history and heritage

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The town history and heritage

Looking at old history books, we must admit that there is not much written about Genzano di Lucania town history. However the myth says that Genzano is very old and it was named from a legend that tells us that a young guy called Iens (yens) fell in love and eloped with a young princes called San, they went to live in the caves in the chasm, which today are below the town of Genzano, and then, they started to build a small castle, where the old town of Genzano is now, the name is virtually the two name of the lovers put together Iens-san (yensan, or jenzan) I am saying this because I know that in strict dialect of the town even today it is pronounced Yenzan with no G at the beginning and no O at the end. I know I have said this before, but I want to explain it a bit more to make sense.

(For those people that can read Italian, I am going to paste here a couple of links that modern writers have written about the history of Genzano di Lucania: One writer has these two link, here, Arch. Pietrapertosa - Storia e dintorni - Genzano di Lucania, this writer has two links and both are very interesting,

http://ass-gentius.blogspot.it/ , let us hope they work)

Now let us talk about more recent history that a recent write has discovered in the archive of Potenza; this writer is Ettore Lorito and you can find his writings, if you follow the link of (scrittori e poeti, (as shown above)) one of the first times that Genzano is mentioned in the archives is that of two brothers Secondo and Donato who were Christian martyr in the year 258 AD, as they were beheaded in Genzano ordered from council Valeriano, which I guess was a Roman council for that part of Italy. This seems to be the oldest written record found written about Genzano history and not much else; so, let us go back to the Greek chasm story.

Because in this article we want to describe to you the chasm on the other side of Genzano that we call the Greek chasm, we have to say that this chasm starts about fifty meter from the fountain Cavallina, or perhaps I should say that at the beginning of the Greek chasm is where the fountain Cavallina is, then suddenly the chasm becomes very deep and a real chasm that is hard to go into it, and nobody goes there, unless you have to go there and know the way how to get there; anyhow this part of Genzano is called the Greek chasm, so, by this name it is understood that a very long time ago there must have been a colony of Greek people living there.

About the Greek people and whatever happened to them nobody knows today, as there is no trace of them and there are no records to check with. So, we are forced to assume that there was a war, or something like that and they were driven out. Or perhaps they mixed with the rest of the inhabitants of Genzano and nobody remembers, or perhaps, as time went by lots of other things happened that changed the shape of the chasm; so, it became impossible for them to live in the chasm, because of the erosion and other natural factors which slowly changed the shape of the chasm, and the use of the chasm, there might be other factors as well, but let us now talk about the more recent history of this place.

Australia the land of opportunity

WELCOME TO FRANK MENCHISE BLOG OF GENZANO DI LUCANIA, YOU ARE INVITED TO BROWSE AS LONG AS YOU LIKE.
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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, Australia the land of opportunity
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Australia the land of opportunity

Australia, being the last habitable continent discovered by mankind, has given most people the opportunity to emigrate and start a new life.
I took that opportunity myself and migrated to Australia, in the early sixties, where I started a new way of life and from being a farmer, I became involved in building, So, Australia has been good for me in this way, but that was in the early sixties, today it might be different.
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Australia the land of opportunity

Dear readers, this post is the continuation of our last post, how to defend our homes from these pests, we were talking about the damage the white ants do and ways of how we can minimise the damage they do. Of course, these articles that we are posting here, they are articles taken from my life story, which cover a very large range of subjects.

So, having talked about the white ants, today we are changing subject and we are asking ourselves, if Australia is still the land of opportunities, because from my life observations, I believe that when I came to Australia, there were some good opportunities for us to improve ourselves, but today I am not so sure about that. But, as you may know when you start asking this sort of questions other questions arise, this is only natural because we need to compare the present time with the past.

So, let us start by telling you the opportunities that we had in the past when I came to Australia, so that, we would be able to compare the opportunities that we had in the past, to the opportunities that we have today in Australia, and how those opportunities played a part in the lives of those people that migrated to Australia then. Today it might be slightly different, but I suppose that every one of us is a bit different, you see, whether we are emigrant, or we have been born here we have our own story to tell, and we are pretty sure that everyone have a different story to tell and different views of the present and the past, according to our own life experiences and the work that we do or did; but let me tell you my personal story, so that you could see my own life experience the same way as I have seen it and then compare it to today’s opportunities, if you like.

If I were to use only my personal experience in Australia as a standard, we will have to say that Australia opportunities today are not as good as they used to be, because things have changed a lot since I came to Australia. Now if we would like to compare the fewer opportunities that are still available today, with what used to be available in the sixties I am going to write the opportunities of the sixties in my life story right here, just the way I have lived and seen them happen to me personally and to the other people that came to Australia in the early sixties, as well as the Australian people that were born here, and then, my life story opportunities could be compared with what is available today; but first of all let us start with what the majority of people in the world think about Australia today.

Today, everybody in the whole wide world thinks that Australia is still the land of opportunities, and that is the reason why people are still trying hard to migrate to Australia; but, are all those opportunities still there, one may ask? Or is it just a myth now and the opportunities that existed in the past do not exist any longer, or they are a lot less than they used to be especially for those unskilled people that are coming to Australia these days.

Having been a migrant myself a long time ago in the early sixties, and being in a way lucky to find some relative that helped me to settle here in Australia, I know that migrating to another country is not an easy thing to do specially if there is no one waiting for you and help you when you arrive, and it is even harder if you don’t speak the language of the country you are migrating to, but today there is a great movement of people throughout the world that migrate from one country to another, and a lot of people want to come to Australia one way or another, they even risk their lives during their journey, boarding unseaworthy boats that might just break up and disintegrate in the ocean, and most of those people could drown, when there is no help.

Therefore, when I hear or see people migrating today like desperado that want to reach Australia at all cost, I always go back mentally to the times when I legally migrated myself and think what I could and would have done if there had been no one to help me when I arrived in Australia; here I should say that just thinking about it makes me shudder, so, to see these people these days trying to come by boat illegally and knowing that they may not be welcome here make me wonder how desperate they are to try to migrate at all cost; they must be really desperate to try to migrate this way.

But then, there is also this other reason, because of the television and the computer people compare their own standard of living in their countries where they are born, with what they see on TV or say public programs on the computer, like Face-book and others programs, and they compare what they see with way they live in their own country, so, they believe that they would be better off if they would be able to come to Australia, because everybody seems to think that Australia is the land of opportunities.

Looking at what is happening these days we know that the world has got a real problem with people migrating to other countries like Australia, as we all know, here in Australia we are very upset about those people coming in by boats, and we would like to stop them and even send them back where they came from. Now, here I need to say that in Europe is even worse with people coming in from North Africa every day, they are so many that is hard to count them and we might have a guess and say that the same amount of people that migrate illegally to Australia in a year may migrate to Europe in a week or even less than that. But anyhow here we are not going to talk that much about illegal migrants, because we want to talk about if Australia is still the land of opportunities.

Believe that this post is becoming too long, so we will continue with our next article talking about Australia in our next post called; But is Australia still the land of opportunity?

See you soon.

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Genzano it story
Australia the land of opportunity
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, but is Australia the land of opportunity

How to defend our homes from these pests

WELCOME TO FRANK MENCHISE BLOG OF GENZANO DI LUCANIA, YOU ARE INVITED TO BROWSE AS LONG AS YOU LIKE.
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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, how to defend our homes from these pests
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How to defend our homes from these pests
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Timber house on wooden stumps, this picture shows you the ants-capping on the stump, which would prevent the ants and most crawling pests to enter you house, it is also the barrier that stops the white ants to enter the house from inside the stump itself, since the white ants cannot eat away the steel ant capping. 

How to defend our homes from these pests

The white ant problem

How to defend our homes from these pests

Dear readers, this post is the continuation of our last post, these wooden houses need some care, where we were telling you my life story and about these wooden houses that we found in Australia. We were saying that there are pests that destroys the houses, and we were asking ourselves what could be done. There are a few things that we can do to prevent these pests destroy our homes; the first thing that one has to do is to check that there is a barrier that stops the white ants to enter your building, for instance if your house is a high-set house on stumps, check that at the top of the stumps there is a metallic ant-capping; this metallic ant capping is usually a large galvanized round dish or square of metal and it is bent down at the edges so that any crawling insect will find it difficult to enter your house that way; we hope you can see the picture? The ant capping prevents also the white ants to enter through the timber stump itself, if the stump has been infested with white ants, because when they reach the top of the stump they cannot eat through the metal capping and so they are stopped entering that way, of course there are a lot of different buildings and a lot of different ways to set a barrier; but sometimes the white ants find their way around.

Now there are ways that one should be looking for if there are white ants; here the first thing that we have to keep in mind is that white ants eat everything from inside and they don’t like to be exposed outside for long, so, the first thing one can do is to tap on anything that is made of wood; if the wood sounds hollow then the white ants might have eaten the inside, so, a complete check is needed to see what is the cause; another way to look for white ants signs is that if they are forced to go outside to move from one place to another, they will construct a tunnel, so that they can go up and down without being seen, so, one has to look for these signs anywhere under the building: Now some expert has told me that what happens here is that the white ants need moisture, so, they have to travel to the ground to get the moisture and then they go up again their tunnel to eat the timber; now if the building is solid and there is no other way for the ants to go up they will construct their tunnel from the ground up, so, we should be looking for signs to see if there are ants tunnel constructed, and if there are tunnels, it means that there are white ants also, therefore you need a pest control expert to poison these pests, and you need him fast.

Some natural enemies of the white ants

White ants have very few enemies because they live and hide inside the timber, but there are some natural enemies of course in their natural habitat, a couple of which are pictured here. As I said before, one needs to learn the signs how to spot the white ants presence, and do something if you find that they are there, otherwise they could eat your house away pretty quickly.

Here under we have pasted two links about termites that other Huber’s have written for you to check them out.

How to Control Termites Naturally

Termite Control

Good luck to all houses owner!

Dear readers, our intention here is that we are going to write several hubs and talk about houses, how to own them, how to maintain them and how to build them, because that is what I have done during my life; so, even though in our next hub will be talking about: is Australia the land of opportunities, we will be talking about the opportunities that I had in the house building industry, when I came to Australia.

So, see you soon in our next hub.

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Genzano it story
How to defend our homes from white ants
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, Australia the land of opportunity
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These houses need some care

WELCOME TO FRANK MENCHISE BLOG OF GENZANO DI LUCANIA, YOU ARE INVITED TO BROWSE AS LONG AS YOU LIKE.
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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, these wooden houses need some care
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These wooden houses need some care
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This is a typical worker cottage, which is a smaller and a cheaper version of the Queenslander, but they both need some care, they need to be painted outside to keep the timber from rotting.











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These wooden houses need some care

Dear readers, this post is the continuation of our last post, the Queenslander house, which is a large wooden house, built for the deeds that we have here in Queensland. Now let me explain their maintenance needs. You see, just as most of us thought, when we saw the first time these wooden houses, they need some maintenance and care.

For those people that have not own or lived in timber houses before, they should ask questions about them, before they get involved in owning one of these houses; perhaps the first question that would come to their mind is: are these houses safe to live in, and how long these houses can last? And then, what sort of maintenance they require? You see, they have a right to know that, so, let me try to explain this timber housing situation.

Timber houses need more maintenance that masonry houses; because first of all, you need to paint them for the timber to last longer, otherwise the timber on the outside walls will slowly rot away, but then, there are also some advantages because, you see if you want to change something, it can be done easily and cheaper than if you have a masonry house, therefore, it is a lot cheaper also to do some alterations, so, it can work well after all.

Having said that we need also to say, that these wooden houses have some problems of their own, apart that they need to be painted for the external timber to last longer, they also have some vermin problems, which are the enemies everywhere in the houses, because the timber is more vermin friendly than masonry and bricks and cement, but the normal vermin are not a big problem for the house structure itself.

The greatest enemy of these wooden houses are the termites, or white ants, as some of us calls them; The white ants, can really destroy entire buildings by eating the wood from the inside, a lot of times, people don’t even know, that the white ants are there eating their houses away, while they are living in them; you see, unless you know what you are looking for, it is hard to see any sign of them from the outside. So, one day suddenly, one can find out by toughing or putting some pressure on a spot, where the white ants have eaten the wood from inside, and here one can have a great shock to see this happen, as everything starts collapsing inward and where there was a wall now there is a big hole.

Therefore, it would be worthwhile to learn how to recognize the signs, if there are white ants; and call an expert to check the building if you are going to buy it.

I think I have said enough in this post, so, see you with our next post, how to defend our homes from white ants.

See you soon.  

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Genzano it story
These wooden houses need some care
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, how to defend our homes from white ants.

The Queenslander House

WELCOME TO FRANK MENCHISE BLOG OF GENZANO DI LUCANIA, YOU ARE INVITED TO BROWSE AS LONG AS YOU LIKE.
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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, The Queenslander house 

This post has been taken is from my Hub Pages articles, to see more click on the link below. 

Australian houses in Brisbane
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A large Queen-slander, note the pretty design, all the open space on the verandas and also all the open space under the house, which could be used in very hot summer days to catch the breeze and stay in the shade.
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Some fret works that can be found in and outside those old houses, if we think about it, these decorations are nice to have in your house, at least I like them.

The Queenslander House

Dear readers, this post is the continuation of our last post, Australia wooden houses. So, in this post we will continue to talk about wooden houses, but the house we are going to talk about is the queen of all wooden house. So, the name that has been given to this house, it is because it has been built in Queensland, but it could have the same name, if it was built somewhere else because of its size and other things, hence it is the queen of all other wooden houses.

So, let me explain, the Queenslander house is a large timber house; some of them are pretty too, and they serve the inhabitant very well, as they have been built to take the advantage of the hot climate, in Brisbane and north Queensland regions, which are humid and hot. Now since I have been working in these houses to maintain them, let me describe them to you a bit more in details. As anyone can guess there are a few different types of these houses, but here to make it easier we are talking about the large real Queenslander and the workers cottage, which is a small and cheaper version of the real Queenslander.

As we have already said above in this post, when the first settlers arrived here, there were plenty of trees around to make timber, a lot of this timber is called hardwood, which as the name suggests is hard and very strong, some of this timber are even stronger and longer lasting than the European oak or other strong European woods. So, the houses were strong and secure, the only natural real enemy of these houses were the white ants (termites), which are able to eat through the wood and destroy the houses. The termites are native to Australia and if one goes up north in Australia one could see strange ground made mounts of earth springing up from the ground, these is how the white ants live, they eat wood from the inside and they make these mounts of earth.

So as you can see this was another reason why the houses were built on stumps. The stumps were made of whole sections of trees that are very resistant to rot; of course the white ants could still be able to eat those stumps, but they were treated with some paints and at the top they all had a capping of metal that would make a barrier to the white ants if they came from the inside the stump and also a barrier to the other ants or crawling insect from the outside.

We have to say that some of these timber houses have been made also pretty, because timber can be cut to different shapes easily, so, they were somehow pretty compared to the house made of masonry, which would be very expensive to decorate them with masonry, so, the houses are usually square boxes with a roof at the top.

Decorative fretwork was easy to make with timber, so, a lot of these houses had some decorations in them, in one way or the other. Now I can go on, and on telling you how these houses were made, but that would be hard to do, so, I am going to search the Internet for photos that could show you what I mean, about fretwork and other timber names, anyhow there are a lot of names given to these pieces of timber that would be hard for me to name, and for the readers to understand what is meant by that name. So, I am going to leave it to your imagination, once you see some photos of the houses and the fretwork in them.

I believe I have said enough in this post, so, see you in our next post, these wooden houses need some care.

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Genzano it story
The Queenslander house
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, these wooden house need some care